Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [170]
It was nearing midnight when she gave it up. She had reached a creek and followed it for almost a mile before finding the Knight’s trail again, and her patience was exhausted. She shut the Harley down, climbed off, and stared into the darkness. Her choices were clear. She could stop for the night and see if the Harley would do better in daylight, when she could see the trail better and choose easier terrain to travel, or she could abandon it and proceed on foot.
She could track the woman like an animal.
She smiled at the idea, at the sudden rush of excitement that it generated, and her teeth gleamed. She might actually do better that way. She was mostly animal herself by now, able to go down on all fours, to sniff out the scent of her quarry, to see the impression of her prints. She was lean and quick and much, much stronger than the creature she hunted. How much difference would not having the use of the ATV make to her efforts to catch up to the other? Not that much, she thought. Not that much at all.
She stripped off her clothing and stood naked in the moonlight, all scales and claws and muscle. Exhilarated, she wanted to howl like a wolf. But no, not yet. Not until she was close enough for the female to know she was coming. Not until the sound of it would make clear that there was no escape.
She stretched and preened. Then she went down on all fours and began to run.
“ANGEL! WAKE UP!”
The words surfaced through a deep fog of sleep and dreams, vague and disembodied. She tried to make sense of them and failed. Her consciousness lifted momentarily, and then fell back again, adrift.
“Angel, please! You have to wake up!”
A child’s voice. A little girl’s. She blinked this time, the dreams and sleep fading. Her eyes opened. It was dark still, but the sunrise was a silvery brightening of the eastern sky. She remembered where she was. She had crossed out of the woods and reached another paved road sometime after midnight, then followed it to an old roadside shelter. She had hidden the ATV in the trees, left Ailie— who apparently didn’t need sleep—on watch, and gone right to sleep.
“Angel, say something!”
Ailie. The tatterdemalion was bent over her, practically shouting in her ear.
“What is it?” she murmured, sleep-fogged and vaguely irritated.
“It’s found us! The demon!”
She sat up quickly then, shock galvanizing lethargic muscles and numbed responses into action. She rolled quickly into a sitting position, reaching for the black staff, her eyes sweeping the darkness of the surrounding woods. She listened to the silence. No distant roar of an ATV. No sounds of any kind at all.
“I don’t hear anything,” she whispered.
“It’s not coming that way!” Ailie’s face was back in front of her own, blue hair wild, eyes bright with fear. “It’s coming on foot!”
On foot? Angel rose quickly, grasping the staff in both hands now, taking a defensive position, her body reacting automatically, out of habit, even though her thinking remained clouded and sluggish. On foot? The words didn’t make any sense. Even a demon couldn’t have caught them on foot, and besides why would it...
A blur of white and blue flashed in front of her as Ailie rushed past, sweeping aside deliberation and confusion in a moment’s time. “Angel, it’s here!”
In the next instant something big and dark burst from the forest, bounding into the clearing in a terrifying rush, down on all fours and grunting and huffing like some monstrous wild animal. Angel barely had time to bring up the staff, the magic surging through it in response to her needs, quicker than thought. She went down on one knee, one end of the staff pointed out like a lance, catching her attacker in the chest as it leapt for her, pinning it in midair. The force of the attack threw her backward, and the staff vaulted the demon right over her head and sent it tumbling away.
She came back