The alleyway was too narrow for the SUV to squeeze through, but Ruben, wide as he was, would have no problem. Kitty got to her feet yet again, woozy and slow. She heard the SUV screech to a halt, then the driver’s door clunk open. Ruben’s voice followed, pumped on adrenaline, gasping into his cell.

“Found the bitch. On Rowes Street, in an alley beside Tuf-Go Clothing . . .”

Talking to Johan, or maybe Xander. Kitty got moving, limping, leaning against the wall. She stumbled over her skateboard and picked it up, but didn’t have the strength to ride it. To propel her bodyweight on wheels felt akin to dragging a tree trunk uphill.

Ruben: “No, but I’m on her ass. She won’t get far. Rowes backs onto Three Horse Salvage. You can cut her off there.”

The alleyway was capped by an apron of dirty cement crowded with garbage bags and flat-packed boxes. A ten-foot fence topped with razor wire—a goddamn prison fence—stood between Kitty and the salvage yard. She smeared the blood from her eye and looked between the chain-links at a sprawl of vehicles and appliances picked to their bones.

Ruben started into the alleyway behind her, using the flashlight on his cell phone to light the way. Kitty turned back to the fence. There was no getting over it, but she noticed a section at the bottom that had peeled away from the cement floor, with just enough clearance to crawl under. Dropping to her knees was easy. She sent her skateboard through, then lowered herself to her belly and followed. The wiry ends of the chain-link snagged her bra strap and she backed up—be damned if she was going to lose her bra, too—then inched lower, squirming from the alley to the salvage yard.

Ruben’s flashlight bobbed closer. He couldn’t follow—no way he could wriggle his two-sixty under the fence—but the son of a bitch had a gun. Kitty was too drained and injured to keep running. She could only hide. And pray.

She hobbled, tucked herself behind the pale shell of a school bus, then crept deeper into the yard. The flashlight faded behind her. Ruben rattled the fence but it held him. Kitty picked her way between the stripped vehicles and came across a carousel that looked both tragic and magical. Its shimmer was long gone, its drop rods dull and matted with cobwebs. Exhausted, Kitty sagged against one of the horses—not a horse at all, in fact, but a winged unicorn.

An alicorn, she thought, pulling this from somewhere—one of the many middle-grade fantasy novels she had read as a child, perhaps. A unicorn with wings is called an alicorn.