“You think you like speed?” Ivy said as I spun the tires and we left a cloud of dust, bouncing wildly until we found the road. “You’ve never seen Rachel drive with purpose.”

Yeah, purpose. If purpose meant scared to death and to hell with everyone else, then I’d be driving with purpose.

The ride smoothed out, and my eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, not to see the restaurant grow smaller in the distance, but to see Jenks’s absence.

I had a chance to find him. A chance. And if he wasn’t okay, I was going to do some serious damage to my already wafer-thin credibility as a good witch, even if I was a black one.

Ten

My grip on the wheel tightened until my knuckles hurt. I was trying to keep my worry from turning into anger, but it was hard. Especially now that Trent was awake. “I don’t care how far we’ve not gotten,” I said tightly, glaring at Trent by way of the rearview mirror. “If we only make three hundred miles today, then we’ll deal with it. They have to stop sometime.”

“I understand you’re concerned about your partner,” he said in that same persuasive voice that was starting to sound patronizing, “but I doubt they’re planning on sacrificing him to their local god. You have a locator amulet. You’ll find him. Slow down. Let them land. They’re running because they know you’re chasing them.”

It was a nice thought, but they weren’t running because of us. They were running to somewhere, their path arrow straight and their pace unflagging. I wasn’t about to slow down, and Ivy didn’t look up from her map, a long white finger touching where our paths might cross again.

Vivian kicked the back of my seat as she tried to find a more comfortable spot. On the other side of the backseat, Trent frowned out the window. Okay, so maybe I was going a little fast, but I’d been driving a huge, frustrating zigzag for the last four hours. I had raced down I-40, then gone south on 602 to get in front of them, as Ivy had suggested. We had, only to see them rise up right over the car and swear at us. We spent another hour on 61, watching them go a rather speedy forty miles an hour, paralleling us until we roared ahead to where 191 crossed their theoretical path. They simply flew higher, shooting arrows at us when I demanded they stop.

From there, we’d taken 191 north in an effort to get back to the interstate. We didn’t know the next time we’d find gas, and Ms. Worries-a-lot in the front seat next to me was getting fidgety. By now, Ivy had enough data points to predict where they’d cross the road next. I was hoping that if we could get far enough ahead of them in time, I could hide behind a rock and simply catch them in a big bubble. Every time they saw the car, they raced out of my reach.