Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [172]
It was a bold move. The demon was too big and strong for her to simply drive over it. But she reacted to the situation, and it probably saved her. The demon could have stood its ground, but the maneuver surprised it. It saw the big machine tearing toward it and instinctively leapt out of the way. Before it realized that it had made a mistake, Angel was past it and tearing down the highway at full speed.
The demon gave chase at once. It came bounding out of the trees after the Mercury, enraged. Angel opened the throttle a notch further. But she could not risk going any faster because this highway, like all the others in the world, was littered with debris. If she hit a big enough obstacle, she would flip the bike and go over and that would be the end of her.
“Faster, Angel!” Ailie cried in her ear, pressing close.
She gritted her teeth, bent low over the handlebars, and ratcheted the throttle up another notch, eyes on the road. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she glanced back at their pursuer. It was farther away now and fading, unable to keep up the pace.
But still coming, still giving chase.
The last she saw of it before it receded into the distance was the gleam of its yellow eyes in the mix of woodland shadows and light.
Chapter TWENTY-NINE
HAWK DIDN’T KNOW what he was supposed to do. Even after Logan Tom was gone and he was alone in his prison and could think about it at length, he still didn’t know. Oh, he understood the nature of his reaction to the finger bones; that much of it was clear. Taking the bones from Logan Tom, closing them into his fist, and, most especially, feeling the press of them against the flesh of his palm had triggered a very unexpected awakening inside him. Where before he had not believed himself to be anything of what Logan Tom thought him, suddenly he discovered that he was all of it and much more.
His awakening came in the form of visions so sharp and hard-edged that he did not even think to question that they were real. They exploded in his mind like fireworks; they came to life in star-bursts.
The first was of a woman, tall and slender and athletic, her face instantly familiar. She had his green eyes, his build and angular features. He knew her instinctively, without having to be told, without a word having been spoken.
Nest Freemark. His mother.
The knowledge of it, the certainty, ripped through his doubts and left him breathless with realization. In his vision, she spoke to him of their shared relationship, of who he was and how he had come to be. He saw himself a boy in the company of another Knight of the Word, a man called John Ross. He was still the gypsy morph then, still transitioning out of the magic that had birthed him, still searching for his identity.
Then he was inside her, her unborn child, his magic mingling with hers to begin the forming of a new life.
And after he was born, he lived with her until he was old enough to leave, and then . . .
Then everything grew very vague and uncertain. She was there and then she wasn’t, alive and then gone back into the earth, the ether, and the shadows. He was alone again, perhaps for a long time, and the world in which he existed was another form of shadows . . .
You were made safe, she said to him. You were kept in a place where your enemies couldn’t reach you.
He didn’t understand, and perhaps he wasn’t meant to. He looked into his mother’s eyes as she spoke to him, explaining, revealing, and investing him with the knowledge of his identity.
Then he saw himself coming into the city of Seattle and into the lives of the Ghosts, and