The shot popped off.

“Did it hit?” Bern asked.

“It did.”

At that distance and at the relatively low speed, .40 caliber ammo would punch through the tire and likely exit on the other side. The tire would gradually deflate.

Seconds ticked by.

The tire went flat. The black truck slowed slightly.

“I have eyes on the black truck,” Bug said. “The children are in it. I repeat, the children are in it.”

Another burst of red magic flared in the truck bed. Zeus wasn’t done yet.

Mason Road exit. He didn’t take that one either.

“The chopper is coming,” Bug said.

“ETA?” I asked.

“At least four minutes.”

A hell of a lot could happen in the next four minutes. It would only take a second for the black truck to hit something and roll over that concrete barrier to the ground far below. The image of a crushed, overturned truck flashed before me. We couldn’t let it happen.

Sergeant Teddy growled low.

“If we go any faster, we’ll wreck,” I told him. “Or he’ll wreck.”

“Do you understand what he says?”

“No, but I can guess. We have to keep the kids safe. We just need to follow him.”

Frontage Road exit flashed by. An electronic sign offered words glowing with orange. EXIT CLOSED AHEAD. An orange sign followed. RIGHT LANE CLOSED AHEAD.

Crap.

ROAD WORK AHEAD.

TRAFFIC FINES DOUBLE.

A white and orange roadwork barrier went flying ahead. The black truck tore through the flimsy plastic barricades and shot onto the overpass exit to the Grand Parkway. What the hell was Vincent doing?

Ahead the black truck turned right sharply and screeched to a stop, blocking the lane, the passenger side toward us.

A man jumped out of the truck, holding Matilda with one hand and a gun in the other. She was still clutching her white cat.

Bern slammed on the brakes. The Ford Explorer slid to a stop. I jumped out of the car before it even stopped moving and aimed my gun. “Don’t move!”

“I’ll blow her fucking head off!” The man aimed the gun at Matilda’s head.

Matilda dropped the cat. The white beast yowled and lunged at the man’s legs, clawing his way up. The gunman cried out and spun, trying to shake the little cat free. Matilda fell to the ground. The cat ripped at him in a feral frenzy, writhing too fast to give me a clear shot. Zeus leaped out of the truck bed and crushed the man beneath his bulk. The huge maw gaped open and the saber teeth sank deep into the side of the man’s neck. His feet drummed the ground and went limp.

Zeus spun toward us, his muzzle bloody.

Sergeant Teddy charged past us, heading toward the truck.

Zeus snarled, grabbed Matilda by her sweater as if she were a kitten, and sprinted past us, back the way we came. The white cat chased them.

I ran to the truck. Bern and I reached it at the same time. Behind us the thumping noise of the helicopter rocked the air.

Magic punched me, a terrifying avalanche of power. I struggled to draw a breath and couldn’t. Bern and I gasped at the same time.

I craned my neck and looked around the truck’s rear. Sergeant Teddy was backing up toward me one foot at a time, snarling. In front of him Vincent stood in the middle of an amplification circle, clutching Kyle to him. Behind them the overpass split, one exit going to North Grand Parkway, the other to the South. Construction vehicles and concrete barriers blocked both. The only way out was on foot.

Above Vincent an angry darkness churned, shot through with purple lightning, growing larger. It flashed with bright purple and tore. A giant spilled into existence. Upright, vaguely humanoid, and completely hairless, it towered above us, its cloven feet bigger than the black truck. Its skin, the color of duct tape, stretched too tightly across its frame and formed what looked like rocky outcroppings on its shoulders and the top of its round head. Black, three-foot-long claws tipped its paw-hands. The creature had no nose, only a wide gash of a mouth, filled with long slender teeth and two slanted red eyes, glowing as if lit by fire from within.

It had to be seventy feet tall.

The huge hand reached down. The claws caught the corpse of the dead kidnapper, pulled it up, and the creature tossed it into its mouth. Bones crunched. It looked down onto the sea of cars and took an enormous step. The overpass shook.

It was heading down to the traffic below and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I glanced back. People were running between the cars. The creature focused on them. Its mouth gaped open, and an eerie, high-pitched shriek rang out.

Rogan’s chopper hovered above the abandoned vehicles. The quick staccato of a machine gun echoed. The bullets ripped into the creature. It didn’t even notice.

There was nothing for Rogan to throw at it. Chucking cars at it would be like throwing pebbles at a bull.

Rogan’s chopper swung to the side, where an empty field and the big rectangular building of a Cinemark theater bordered the highway.

The creature took another massive step, crushing several cars that had been waiting to merge into the middle lane, and shrieked again.

“Nevada!” Bern screamed at me. “What do we do?”

I don’t know.

“Nevada!”

I never felt so helpless in my whole life.

Something fell from Rogan’s chopper, a dark flash that plummeted to the earth and exploded into a colossal shaggy shape. Oh no. No . . .

A monster landed by Cinemark. Stocky, huge, covered with long strands of jet-black fur, with muscled arms armed with talons, and a blunt head, shielded by a bone carapace. Two thick horns shielded the sides of its head, curving forward as if someone had taken two enormous ram horns and turned them sideways. Thick meat-eater’s fangs filled its mouth. Its two round eyes glowed with yellow.

“Fuck!” Bern spat.

People stopped running and gaped. Everyone had seen the footage. Everyone recognized this.

The Beast of Cologne that was my sister roared a deafening challenge, lunged at the grey creature, and jerked it off the overpass into the field. The creature fell. An earthquake shudder shook the overpass. The red C in Cinemark fell off and crashed down.

The grey thing clawed at Arabella, trying to fight back. She landed on top of it, a huge, muscled, shaggy nightmare filled with rage, and ripped at it in a frenzy, punching, smashing, clawing, throwing wet chunks of it wherever they would land. The terrible temper volcano that powered Arabella had erupted and there was no stopping it.

Mom would kill us. Mom would kill all of us. We could never go home.

The grey thing screeched again, desperate now. My sister squatted on it, clamped its head with one arm, its right shoulder with another, and bit its neck. I didn’t want to see, but I couldn’t look away. She gnawed at it, severing muscle and tendon. The grey giant flailed, kicking feebly, weaker and weaker. My sister bit one last time, jerked the head she had chewed off into the air, tossed it behind her, and roared.

And dozens of people recorded it on cell phones.

Arabella rocked back, sat on her butt, stuck her claws into her mouth, and pulled a long fleshy strand out. She spat it, her mouth wrinkling, spat again, her muzzle twisted as if she’d just bitten into slimy fruit.

Under control. Everything was under control. She hadn’t gone crazy. I turned. A few feet away Vincent stood frozen, his mouth hanging open.

I raised the gun. He saw me and jerked Kyle in front of him. He was holding an enormous handgun, so big it looked like a movie prop. The barrel had to be ten inches long.

He pointed the gun at me and began backing up.

The concrete barriers behind him slid together, cutting off the narrow space the workers used as a clear path. A heavy construction vehicle scraped across the pavement, joining the barriers. I didn’t have to look to know Rogan was walking up the overpass behind me.

Vincent turned pale and chanced a quick glance behind him. Yes, you’re trapped.

Rogan loomed next to me, a handful of coins hanging in the air in front of him. I’d seen him launch these before at a near-bullet speed.

The coins didn’t move. He’d come to the same conclusion I did. If we had any chance at all against Sturm, we’d need Vincent alive.

“Stay where you are,” Vincent called out.

“It’s over,” Rogan said. “Put down the gun.”