I fired, each stroke of the trigger filling our SUV with thunder that probably would have hurt my eardrums if my system hadn’t been flooded with adrenaline. I aimed carefully, painting the driver with a double-tap to the chest, then switching targets to the passenger as our car jerked back into motion. With the strength of Wolfe coursing through me, helping to hold my weapon steady, I could barely even feel the .45’s recoil.
I felt our return to acceleration as I was thrust against my seat. I was twisted at the waist to fire backward, and as the sound of my last shot faded, I realized Kat was screaming next to me. I glanced at her, and saw flecks of blood on her face. “J.J.?” I asked, leaning over Kat to get a look at the computer geek.
He was huddled, bent double at the waist, with his arms wrapped around his backpack, head shaking and his eyes clenched shut. It reminded me a little of a child in total fear, because the motion made him look so … small. “J.J!” I yelled again. “Are you all right?”
His right eye cracked open a sliver and he saw me leaning over Kat. “Nothing a fresh change of underwear won’t fix.”
“Kat!” I shifted my attention to her, grasping her by the shoulders and shaking her once. She blinked. “Are you all right?”
She swallowed visibly. “No.” She was more than a little pale.
Klementina … Gavrikov’s voice in my head whispered. He would have been more than a little pale and shaking, too, if he’d been corporeal.
“Where are you hit?” I asked, tearing at her jacket, trying to find where the blood splatter had come from.
“Look out!” Reed shouted from the front seat, and I ducked hard, forcing Kat down along with me then reaching over to yank J.J. down as well. I folded all three of us at the waist, knocking J.J.’s backpack out of his lap.
Bullets whipped into the space above us. I hadn’t even noticed the side windows shattering, probably in the seconds before the crash. Or during the crash. Hell, it was all a jumble.
I thrust my Sig out the window and fired blindly twice along the direct axis outside our window. The sharp whistling of bullets over my head was unmistakable, a frightening sound even to me. I may have picked up Wolfe’s adaptability when I had him front of mind where I could use his power, but it’s not like I could think about him all day, every day.
And even if I could, my skin hadn’t gotten as tough as his had. Not yet. There were only so many bullet wounds my body could handle before dying. In the case of a head shot, it might only be one. It’d be tough to focus on Wolfe and his power with most of my brain splattered outside my body.
I realized with relief that the side panels of the SUV must have been armor plated. The volume of fire from either side of us was simply astounding, submachine guns roaring at full auto into our vehicle. I didn’t dare lift my head to check on Reed’s driving (I knew he was doing it blind anyway). The sound of a pistol discharging out the passenger window in front of me told me that Li was still in the fight, too.
I heard something land with a thunk, followed by J.J.’s dull proclamation of, “Ow,” and I nearly broke Kat’s neck clawing for the object I knew had to be in the floorboard beneath one of them. By sheer luck and I tossed the object—an ovoid piece of rippled metal—out the window next to me.
I heard the grenade detonate with a low WHUMP half a second after I got it out of the SUV, and the SUV rocked to the left. Reed was struggling for control of the vehicle, driving with his head down as he was, sneaking the occasional glance at the road in front of us from his hunched over position.
It was a formula for one of the gunners in the van to put a bullet in his head any second. A good sniping shot would send us into a certain wreck. It might not kill us all, but it’d probably kill J.J. and Li, and put a desperate hurting on myself, Reed and—
KLEMENTINA!
The voice was like someone sent a bolt of lightning through my head, filled with fear and desperation of a sort I’d only felt a few times in my life.
It was the fear of a man who knew he was seconds away from losing someone he loved.
Help her! Gavrikov said, and his voice was so utterly different from the Aleksandr who had been in my head this last year and a half. I’d heard him proud, whiny, defiant and even indifferent.
Now, he was half a heartbeat from losing his shit.
“I’m kind of limited in what I can do, Aleksandr,” I muttered as I fired my pistol out the window over J.J.’s head, thanking the heavens above for the ten-round magazine. I used Kat’s back to steady my hands to fire, and she stayed down for it. I painted one of the gunmen with a headshot, and watched him go boneless as he toppled out of the side door of his van. Another replaced him and forced me to duck again as he sprayed the space I’d just been occupying with a hailstorm of lead. “I’m not invincible, you know, and I can’t exactly move from this spot. Not with the car roaring down the freeway.”