“Aggggh!” I screamed. “I hate ironic reversal!”

The Za Lord’s Guard had been escorting us along the way, but I hadn’t said anything about staying on the job once we reached our destination. Given the distance I’d had them covering today, they’d probably dropped down exhausted the second I’d set the parking brake.

The thunder rolled closer, my unthinking panic rose, and my wounded leg felt like it might burst into flames.

My leg.

My eyes widened with horror of my own. The Redcap had killed me at that ambush, and I was only now realizing it. The trickle of blood flowing steadily from that tiny wound would leave a powerful olfactory and psychic trail behind me. Tracking me would be easier than whistling.

I could run, but I couldn’t hide.

Thunder roared, and I saw a cluster of dim forms descend from the cloud cover overhead and into the city light of Chicago. I could run, but the Hunt was moving at highway speeds. I wouldn’t even be able to significantly delay the inevitable. Shadowy hounds rushed down at me from the north, along the shoreline, and behind them came a blurry cluster of dark figures on horseback, carrying bows and spears and long blades of every description.

I couldn’t beat the Hunt. Not even with Mab’s ’roids in my system.

But maybe . . .

Then there was another roar—this time not of thunder, but of a hundred and forty horses, American-made.

Karrin Murphy’s motorcycle slid to a stop close enough to me to throw gravel over my shoes, and I turned to find her revving the engine.

“Karrin! What the hell are you doing?”

“Get on the bike, bitch!” she called over the next horn blast. “Let’s make them work for it!”

She smiled, a fierce, bright smile, and I found my own face following her example.

“Fuck, yeah,” I said, and threw myself onto the back of the Harley as darkness, death, and fire closed in around my city.

Chapter

Forty-one

I dropped the cartridge belt for the Winchester over one shoulder and hurried to rake in the tail of my new duster before the motorcycle’s rear wheel snagged it and killed me. I damn near fell off as Karrin accelerated, but managed to cling to her waist with the arm holding the rifle.

Karrin scowled at me, grabbed the rifle from my hand, and slipped it down into a little section on the side of the Harley that fit the short rifle suspiciously well. I held on to her with a free hand, and with the other made sure my coat wouldn’t get me killed.

“Which way?” she shouted back at me.

“South! Fast as you can!”

She stomped one of her feet onto something, twisted a wrist, and the Harley, which had been doing around fifty, leapt forward as if it hadn’t been moving at all.

I shot a quick glance over my shoulder, and saw the nearest elements of the Hunt begin to slowly fade back. I guess maybe the Wild Hunt hadn’t ever heard about Harley-Davidson.

But she couldn’t maintain the speed, not even on a wide Chicago street in chilly, rainy weather. There were just too many other people around, forcing her to weave between traffic, and she had to slow down to keep from splattering us all over some family’s sedan. Indignant car horns began to blare as she slipped in and out of lanes, adding an abrasive harmony to the horns of the Wild Hunt.

“How we doing?” she called.

I looked back. The Wild Hunt was less than a hundred yards away—and they didn’t have to contend with traffic. The jerks were racing along fifty feet off the freaking ground, up in the dark and the rain, unseen by the vast majority of people going about their everyday business. “They’re cheating! Go faster! Head for the Bush!”

Karrin turned her head enough to catch me in the edge of her vision. “Is there a plan?”

“It isn’t a very good plan!” I shouted. “But I need a big open area for it to work, away from people!”

“In Chicago?” she shouted. Then her eyes widened. “The mills?”

“Go!” I shouted. Karrin blitzed a red light, narrowly avoiding a left-turning car, and continued her furious rush down Lake Shore Drive.

Chicago is a city of terrific demands. Demand for a military presence helped establish the early Colonial-era forts, which in turn provided security for white settlers, traders, and missionaries. They built houses, churches, and businesses, which accreted over time into a town, then a city. Chicago’s position as the great crossroads of the emerging American nation meant that more and more people arrived, building more homes, businesses, and, eventually, heavy-duty industry.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Chicago was a booming industrial city—and its steel mills were nearly legendary. U.S. Steel, Youngstown Steel, Wisconsin Steel, Republic Steel, all thriving and growing on the shore of Lake Michigan, down by Calumet City. The lakefront in that entire area was sculpted to accommodate the steel works, and much of the steel that would fuel the Allied efforts in two world wars was produced in that relatively tiny portion of the city.

But all things wither away eventually. The American steel industry began to falter and fade, and by the end of the twentieth century, all that remained of an ironmongery epicenter was a long stretch of industrial-strength wasteland and crumbling buildings on Lake Michigan’s shore. A decade later, the city started trying to clean the place up, knocking down most of the buildings and structures—but here and there, stone and concrete ruins remained, like the bones of some vast beast that had been picked clean by scavengers. Nothing much grew there as the city around it thrived—just weeds and property values.

That portion of the waterfront was slated for renewal, but it hadn’t happened yet, and right now it was blasted heath, a flat, dark, empty, and desolate stretch of level land dotted with lonely reminders of former greatness. There was no shelter from rain or cold there, and on a miserable night like this, there shouldn’t be anyone hanging around.

All we had to do was make it that far.

We flew by the Museum of Science and Industry on our right, then flashed over the bridge above the Fifty-ninth Street Yacht Harbor, moving into a section of road that had a little distance between itself and the nearest buildings and a decided lack of foot traffic on a cold autumn evening.

As if they’d been waiting for an opening away from so many prying eyes, the Wild Hunt swept down on us like a falcon diving onto a rabbit.

But they were not attacking a rabbit. They were attacking a wabbit. A wascally wabbit. A wascally wabbit with a Winchester.

Something that looked like a great, gaunt hound made of smoke and cinders, with glowing coals for eyes, hit the ground just behind the Harley and began sprinting, keeping pace with us. It came rushing in, dark jaws spread to seize the back tire, the same motion it might have used had it been attempting to hamstring a fleeing deer. Mindless animal panic raged inside my head, but I kept it away from the core of my thoughts, forcing myself to focus, think, act.

I saw Karrin’s eyes snap over to her rearview mirror as it closed, and felt her body tensing against mine as she prepared to evade to the left. I gathered my will but waited to unleash it, and as the charhound closed to within inches of the tire, Karrin leaned and took the Harley left. The charhound’s jaws clashed closed on exhaust fumes, and I unleashed my will from the palm of my outstretched right hand with a snarl of “Forzare!”