HE'S A MAGIC MAN

We stepped outside at the same time, two vampires facing down a magical mystery man on a dark Iowa night. It wasn't exactly how I preferred to spend an evening, but what other option did I have?

Tate's eyes darted to Ethan, widening in surprise. "I didn't expect to see you here."

"As you orchestrated my death, no, I imagine you didn't."

Tate roled his eyes. "I orchestrated nothing."

"You set the wheels in motion," Ethan said. "You put Merit in a room with a drugged vampire who hated her. You had to know I'd look for her and that Celina would react. Since it was her stake that hit me, I think 'orchestrated' is rather accurate."

"We'l have to agree to disagree, Sulivan." Tate smiled drowsily at me. "Lovely to see you again, Balerina."

I'd danced when I was younger, and Tate had filed that information away. "I can't say the feeling is mutual."

"Oh, come now. What's a little reunion between friends?"

"You aren't a friend," I said, and I wasn't in the mood for a reunion. "How did you get Mayor Kowalcyzk to release you?"

"Easily, as it turns out. There's no evidence against me."

That was a lie. They'd found Tate's fingerprints on the drugs, and his favorite minion, a guy named Paulie, had spiled the rest of the details to the Chicago Police Department.

"Did you tel her your arrest was part of a supernatural conspiracy?" I asked. "Woo her with your tales of oppression by vampires?"

"I've found Diane to be a woman who appreciates a reasonable argument."

"Diane Kowalcyzk couldn't pick a reasonable argument out of a lineup," I countered. "What do you want?"

"What do you think I want?" he asked. "I want the book."

Ethan crossed his arms. "Why?"

"Because our girl made it sound so interesting." His smile was oily. "Didn't you?"

"I'm not your girl, and I didn't tel you about the Maleficium."

"So my memory isn't perfect. But I can only assume you enjoyed our visits, or you wouldn't have visited me twice."

Beside me, Ethan growled possessively.

"Quit baiting him," I demanded. "I visited you to get information, which is the only thing I want now. Why do you want the Maleficium?"

"I told you already," Tate nonchalantly said. "I told you when we sat together in my prison of human making, when I advised you the division of evil and good was unnatural, that 'evil' was a human construct. Holding it captive in the Maleficium is unnatural. I have an opportunity to right that wrong, to release it. And I don't plan to let that chance pass me by."

There was an intent gleam in his eyes and a shock of chiling magic in the air. There was little doubt he didn't plan to let us stand in his way.

"We don't have it," Ethan told him.

"Given the direction you're traveling, that's obvious. But I also assume you're on your way to retrieve it, perhaps before Ms.Carmichael does something drastic?"

A sickening feeling blossomed in my stomach. "Stay away from her."

"You know that's not possible. Not when we're al racing for the same prize. And besides, she might come in handy."

I felt the rising tide of magic lift further as my own fury contributed to the swel. "Stay. Away. From her," I gritted out, "or you wil answer to me."

Tate roled his eyes. "I could finish you in a minute." Then he looked at me askance, which was even more frightening. Like he was studying me. "I bet it hurts, doesn't it, to feel like your best friend has betrayed you? She isn't so unlike your father in that respect, is she?"

Tate had told me - only moments before Ethan's death - that my father had offered Ethan money to make me a vampire. But that hadn't been the entire truth.

"Ethan didn't take the money, and you know it."

"But he knew, didn't he? Ethan knew your father was asking around, and he did nothing."

"You are a son of a bitch," Ethan said. Before I could stop him, he strode forward, struck out with a mean right hook, and punched Seth Tate in the mouth.

"Ethan!" I screamed out, equal parts horrified that he'd just punched someone in the face...and proud he'd done it. Ethan punched him. Maybe it wasn't a great decision under the circumstances, but that didn't mean Tate didn't deserve it and I didn't enjoy it.

Tate's head snapped back, but he didn't otherwise move except to raise his knuckles to the lip Ethan had split. He glanced down at the blood there before slowly lifting his gaze to Ethan.

Magic poured across us as Tate's anger rose.

"You'l regret that, Sulivan."

Ethan's lip curled, and his gaze narrowed. "Only that I didn't have a chance to do it sooner. Consider it a down payment on what you're owed for arranging the deaths of two Master vampires and putting a third vampire through two months of hel."

Tate shifted his gaze to me. "At least I was able to keep company with you, Balerina, in his absence."

Another burst of magic pulsed from Ethan's direction, and he bared his teeth maliciously. I put a hand flat against Ethan's chest to keep him from rushing Tate again.

"Stop it," I gritted out.

They growled at each other like animals.

"If you think you can land another punch," Tate said, "I invite you to try."

"I won't have to try," Ethan gritted out, taking a step forward.

But before he could lash out again, I wrapped an arm around him and hauled him back.

"Ethan! We have enough trouble right now."

Tate was already in rare form; the last thing we needed was for Ethan to rile him up further - or for Ethan to get riled up any further.

Ethan freed himself from my arms, then straightened his shirt.

The pause didn't diminish Tate's indignation. His magic deepened and strengthened. A thick fog began to seep across the freeway toward us, covering the ground like roling smoke. It took me a second to realize this wasn't just fog. Filaments of bright blue shot through it, each spark punctuating the air with a sharp, irritating tingle.

Ethan's gaze didn't waver. "We won't let you destroy the world."

"No one is going to destroy the world. If anything, it wil be made better - stronger - by a return to the natural order and the rule of natural laws. To that which existed before."

The air warmed, and the wind began to swirl around us. Tate stared at me, his body frozen, the energy stil growing. Smal blue sparks hopped across the fog, like electricity beginning to build toward something big.

This wasn't weather. It was magic.

Goose bumps peppered my arms, and I glanced back over my shoulder. Behind us, the fog of magic began to rise, one foot at a time, into a shimmering wal of sparks. My hair stood on end.

I looked back at Tate, whose arms were crossed as he glared at me. He stared back at me with unconcealed malice.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"What needs to be done. What must be done. You seek to interrupt that which should happen - and should have happened long ago. The emptying of the Maleficium. Sorcerers split magic asunder, Merit, and it's time to bring the pieces back together. I won't alow you to stop that. I cannot alow you to stop it."

Whoever Tate had been before - reformer, politician, romancer of women - he'd changed. He meant to stop us, whatever it took.

"Get in the car, Merit."

My gaze was glued to Tate's, so it took a moment for my brain to register what Ethan was saying. I looked back at him.

"What?"

"Get in the car. Now." Ethan stil had the keys, so he pushed me toward the passenger side as he ran for the driver's.

We both yanked open the doors and hustled inside, and he started the car and punched the accelerator, zooming around Tate and farther away from the wal of magic behind us.

Whatever Tate's origin, he must have been pouring his power into the magical cloud; I assumed that was the only reason he wasn't controling the car again.

I yanked on my seat belt as the speedometer climbed. Sixty miles an hour. Seventy. Eighty. We were gaining speed, but when I turned around to check the back window, the wal - now shimmering with blue filaments - was moving ever closer. It was gaining speed even faster than we did, its acceleration exponentialy faster than ours.

And that wasn't even the worst part. It was growing.

It spread left to right across the median and both strips of the freeway, and it didn't spare anything it touched. The asphalt buckled and split like crushed-up crackers, chunks of debris flying through the air. Trees split and fel with thunderous cracks.

A reflective green mileage sign folded in half as if made of construction paper instead of construction-grade steel.

And the distance between us and the wal of destruction kept shrinking.

"It's going to catch us," I yeled out over the howling wind.

"We'l make it," Ethan said, knuckles white on the wheel as he worked to keep the car on the road. Another sign flew past us, barely missing the Mercedes and skittering across the road and into a field on the other side.

The back of the car began to rattle as the wal grew closer, and the world outside went white as fog and mist surrounded us.

"Oh, God," I muttered, grabbing the door handle with one hand and the shoulder strap of my seat belt with the other.

Immortal or not, life felt suddenly fragile.

The wheel jerked to the right, and Ethan swore out a curse as he tried to maintain control. "I can't hold it, Merit. Brace yourself."

He'd only gotten out the words when we ran out of time. It felt like we'd been nailed from behind by a locomotive - in this case, a completely impossible, out-of-nowhere magical storm of a locomotive driven by a would-be book thief with no apparent qualms about kiling those who got in his way.

The back of the car lifted and sent us into a spin, passenger side first, toward the road's shoulder - and the guardrail that separated the car from the shalow ditch below.

"Guardrail!" I yeled out.

"I'm trying!" Ethan yeled out. He puled the wheel back to the left, but his effort was for naught. Winds swirling around us, the car made a complete circle as it skidded across the road.

We hit the metal guardrail with a head-thudding jolt, but not even steel could stop the momentum of a Mercedes pushed along by magic. The car screeched along the rail with al the subtlety of nails on a chalkboard, before another burst of wind or magic or both tipped the driver's side into the air.

I screamed. Ethan grabbed my hand, and over we went, the car roling sideways over the guardrail and down the hil, somersaulting into the guley that separated the road from the neighboring land.

Our fal couldn't have taken more than three or four seconds, but I remembered a lifetime, from childhood with my parents to colege to the night Ethan made me a vampire, and from his death to his rebirth....Had I gotten him back again only to lose him again at Tate's hand?

With a final bounce, we landed upside down in the guley.

The car rocked ominously on its hood, the metal creaking, both of us hanging from our seat belts.

There was a moment of silence, folowed by the hiss of steam from the engine and the slow squeak of a spinning tire.

"Merit, are you okay?" His voice was frantic. He put a hand on my face, pushing my hair back, checking my eyes.

It took me a moment to answer. I was alive but completely disoriented. I waited until the roaring in my ears subsided and I could feel the parts of my body again. There was an ache in my side and scrapes along my arms, but everything seemed to be in place.

"I'm okay," I finaly said. "But I realy hate that guy."

He closed his eyes in obvious relief, but blood from a cut on his forehead seeped into his eye.

"The feeling is entirely mutual," he said. "I'm going to get out; then I'l come help you. Stay there."

I wasn't in much of a position to argue.

Ethan braced himself and unclipped his seat belt, then scampered out. A second later, his hand appeared at my window. I unclipped my belt, and he helped me climb out of the car and onto the ground, then wrapped me in his arms.

"Thank God," he said. "I thought that might be the end of both of us."

I nodded and put my head on his shoulder. The grass was wet, and mud seeped through the knees of my jeans, but I was grateful to be on solid ground again. I sat there for a moment, waiting for my stomach and head to stop spinning. But my panic only swirled faster. Tate apparently wanted us dead. What if he was stil up there?

"We have to get out of here," I told Ethan. "He could come back."

Ethan wiped the blood from his head and cast a glance up toward the road, body tensed like an animal scouting his territory. "I don't feel any magic. I think he's gone."

"Why go to the trouble of pushing us off the road without checking to make sure he'd realy done us in?"

"He's in a hurry to get to the book," Ethan said. "Maybe he only wanted to get there before we did."

He offered me a hand. I stood up and looked back at the car, covering my mouth with a hand. Ethan's car - his beautiful, sleek Mercedes - was a wreck. It lay upside down in the ditch, two of its wheels stil turning impotently. It was undeniably totaled.

"Oh, Ethan. Your car..."

"Just thank God it's November and we had the top on," he said. "We'd be in a world of trouble otherwise. Come here. Let's see if we can get our things out of the trunk."

The trunk had popped halfway open in the fal, so we maneuvered and tugged until we could wedge our bags and swords out of it.

"You didn't hear me," he suddenly said.

"Didn't hear what?"

"Before he threw us off the road, I caled you. You didn't hear me?"

I shook my head. Vampires had the ability to communicate telepathicaly, that power usualy, but not always, limited to Masters and the vampires they'd made. Ethan and I had talked silently since he'd officialy Commended me into Cadogan House as its Sentinel.

"I didn't hear you," I said. "Maybe that's a side effect of your coming back? Because Malory's spel got interrupted?"

"Perhaps," he said.

We'd only just puled our swords out when a shout echoed down from the road. We looked up. A woman in a fluffy down coat waved at us. "I saw that twister throw you off the road.

Came out of nowhere, didn't it? Are you okay? Do you need help?"

"We're fine," Ethan said, not correcting her about the twister comment, but casting one final glance back at his former pride and joy. "But I think we're going to need a ride."

Her name was Audrey McLarety. She was a retired legal secretary from Omaha with a brood of four children and thirteen grandchildren scattered across Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Al the grandchildren were in soccer, dance class, or peewee basebal, and Audrey was on her way back to town after watching a dance recital for three of the girls near Des Moines. Late as it was, it hadn't occurred to her to spend the night with her children afterward.

"They have their families to attend to," she said, "and I have mine." She meant her husband, Howard, and their four terriers.

As much as we appreciated the ride, Audrey was a talker.

We drove toward Omaha through pitch-black darkness, past more empty fields and the occasional factory, its lights and steam pulsing across the flat plains like a sleeping monster of metal and concrete.

As we neared the city, the horizon began to grow orange from the glow of streetlights. Fortunately, Audrey had grown up near Eliott and agreed to drive us al the way to the farmhouse.

Doubly fortunate, actualy, because the sun would be rising soon, and we needed a place to bed down.

We crossed the Missouri River and drove north through Omaha's compact downtown, passing a pedestrian-heavy plaza with a lot of old brick buildings and a hily string of skyscrapers before popping back into a residential neighborhood. Older houses and fast-food joints eventualy gave way to flat fields and farmland, and we ended up on a long, bone white stretch of gravel road.

The road was long and straight, and it divided fields now stripped of their crops as winter approached. Dust rose in our wake, and in the darkness I couldn't see much behind us. That made me nervous. Tate could be hiding there, waiting for us.

Ready to strike again, ready to throw us off the road - and on his second try, we might not be so lucky. And we'd have dragged an innocent human into it.

We passed farms that al folowed the same form - a main house and a few outbuildings behind a wal of trees, which I assumed was protection against the wind. The houses glowed under the shine of bright floodlights, and I wondered how their inhabitants slept with the glare...or how they slept at al.

Something about the idea of sleeping under the flood of a spotlight in the middle of an otherwise dark plain made me nervous. I'd feel too vulnerable, like I was on display.

After fifteen minutes of driving, we reached the address Catcher had given us, large steel numbers hammered into a post that stood sentinel at the end of a long gravel driveway. A farmhouse much like the others sat at the end of it, a few hundred yards back from the road, glowing under its security light. Its wooden clapboards were dark red, and it was accessorized with white awnings and wooden gingerbread in the corners of the smal front porch. It had a pitched roof, with one gable over a large picture window. I had a Little House on the Prairie - esque image of a girl in a gingham dress sitting behind that glass, spending long winter days staring out at endless winter snow.

Audrey puled to a stop, and we grabbed our swords and bags, offered prolific thank-yous, and watched the cloud of dust whisk her back toward Omaha.

"She'l be fine," Ethan said.

I nodded, and we walked down the driveway, the world silent except for our footsteps and an owl that hooted from the windbreak. I had a sudden mental image of great, black wings swooping down to pluck me up off the driveway and deposit me in the hayloft of an ancient barn. I shivered and walked a little faster.

"Not much of a farm girl?"

"I don't mind being in the country. And I love woods - lots of places to hide."

"It appeals to the predator in you?"

"Precisely. But out here, I don't know. It's a weird mix of being isolated and completely on display. It's not my bag. Give me a high-rise in the city, please."

"Even with parking permits?"

I smiled. "And the 90 bumper-to-bumper during rush hour." I looked around. Beyond the halo of the floodlight, the world was dark, and I wondered what might be hunkering around out there.

Watching.

Waiting.

The owl hooted again, sending goose bumps up my arms.

"This place gives me the creeps. Let's get inside."

"I don't think owls feed on vampires, Sentinel."

"I'm not in the mood to take chances," I said. "And we're not long for sunrise." I gave Ethan a gentle push toward the house.

"Let's go in, sunshine."