Lia’s car came barreling out of the Yard’s gravel parking lot, scattering the three henchmen who’d gathered at the gate after the earthquake. They must not’ve been watching carefully; they hadn’t seen anybody get into the Mazda. They hurried to pursue it in three of the four black cars they had remaining after the high-speed defections of the terrified pair who’d resigned without notice after encountering Lia. That put the score at three dead, two fled, and three more hopelessly distracted.
A second after the cars all squealed away, Graves’ stolen fancyass number blew out of the lot and skidded around the corner. It headed west, unlike the Mazda, which had gone east, toward Burbank.
The last three men covering the Yard’s other possible exits ran for the front gate after seeing the shiny new BMW shoot past them, but it was moving as fast as its expensive engineering allowed, and they were already too late to keep up with it.
Lia’s battered gray Mazda zoomed east on Sheldon Street, turned right onto San Fernando, and shot down toward the Burbank Airport with three V-8 predators closing in behind it.
The little car dodged around a lumbering lunch truck, pulled briefly ahead of the pursuit, and then skidded off the main drag, into an alley marked with a ‘NO OUTLET’ sign that was tucked in between an apartment complex and a liquor store, just past Ensign Street.
Game over, the nearest pursuer thought. That should’ve been it.
Which was exactly the impression Tom and Lia had planned to convey.
The nearest of the large black cars followed the Mazda right down the alley’s narrow corridor. The other two stopped to block the alley’s mouth. Lia’s little sedan skidded all the way around at the far end of the passage and stopped there, rocking on its springs.
There was nobody in it, either behind the wheel or in the passenger seats.
Some distance back, the approaching black car also squealed to a smoking stop. Its driver frowned, realizing that the little gray car up ahead really was empty. His eyes weren’t playing tricks.
“What the…?” he muttered, as Black Tom (who was invisible to the norms but grinning ear-to-ear nonetheless) threw Lia’s car into gear and stomped the accelerator. The tires screamed against the pavement.
Hardface’s man saw the empty Mazda coming at him at an already dangerous and still-increasing rate of speed. He threw his own car into reverse and mashed a blue plastic recycling bin against the side of the alley in his haste to back the fuck up.
The black car slammed ass-first into the blockade comprised of Hardface’s other two vehicles, both of which failed to get out of the way in time. A second later Lia’s car crashed with considerable force into the trapped sedan’s front end, driving it back hard. Both cars’ radiators blew simultaneous jets of steam.
The three shaken henchmen got out of their respective vehicles and peered with disbelief into the unoccupied wreck that had taken them out of commission.
This would not be easy to explain.
Black Tom lingered on for a moment, perfectly invisible, enjoying their looks of astonishment and dread before pulling his awareness back down to the Yard.
He found the only three of Hardface’s henchmen remaining on-site easily enough (without bothering to reclaim the catbody he’d stowed under a bush before driving off in Lia’s car). They were sidling up and trying to come to terms with the sight of Lady Lyssa, who’d somehow been spiked through her helmeted head with a living, rooted tree. Tom gave his girl high marks for style.
“Now how in the hell does that happen?” one of the men in the cheap suits asked rhetorically, eyeing the new sapling.
They all shouted and scattered when the presumed corpse at its base answered. “Which girl was the witchgirl was something we should’ve learned much sooner, is how this happens,” Lyssa said. “Hello? Wolves?”
There was, by then, nobody but invisible Tom around to hear, but still she asked:
“Will one of you please find an axe?”