“You can’t be serious,” he started in again, his eyes pinched as he held the door open. “They want to kill you!”

“Maybe I’m trying sugar instead of vinegar,” I grunted as I scooted backward into my mom’s car, hitting my elbow as I pulled Vivian in after me. Ivy wrestled with her feet as Trent stood behind her and watched, his toiletry bag in one hand, the ice in the other. He looked totally different in his black clothes, his hair slicked back, his expression worried.

“You should be tucking her away in that hotel room you rented,” he said, “and throwing her keys into the desert. She’d never find us then.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it would just tick her off,” I said as I tossed my bag to the front seat and tugged Vivian farther in. My back hit the far door, and puffing, I opened it and backed out. Exhaling, I looked at him across the roof, tired. “I’m not leaving her unconscious in a hotel room a hundred miles from civilization to maybe wake up as someone’s desert-bunker wife. You put a zip strip on her, and she goes from coven to incapable. But frankly, the real reason she’s coming with us is that I’d rather have her tell the coven all our secrets than have a twenty-four-hour gap that they can use to invent stuff.” Seeing Vivian laid out on the seat, I carefully shut the door and looked out over the desert. “I’m driving. Who has the keys?”

Ivy opened the driver’s-side door. “I’ll drive, you work the amulet,” she said, and I just looked at her, my heart pounding and adrenaline surging through me like a sugar high.

Her eyes dilated at the fear I was giving off, and smiling wryly, she tugged the keys out of her pocket and dangled them for me. “Okay, you drive,” she said. “I’ll sit with my head hanging out the window like a golden retriever.”

“Thanks,” I said, shaky as I came around to her side, got in, and adjusted everything. Ivy slipped into the front passenger seat as I cranked the engine over, tossing her overnight bag with her dirty clothes in it over the seat at Trent. He barely got his hands up in time, having been trying to arrange Vivian in a somewhat upright position.

“You want to wait a minute so I can move some of this to the trunk?” he said, dropping the ice bag on the bump just now starting to rise on Vivian’s forehead.

“No.” Everyone’s arms and legs were inside the vehicle, and I put the car in reverse, hitting the gas hard.

Ivy already had her hand on the dash, but Trent went flying as the car jerked backward. Teeth clenched, I hit the brakes hard, and he was flung into the backseat where he belonged. His door, which had been open, bounced shut from the quick stop, and I jammed the gearshift into drive while ignoring Trent yelling at me.