She really hoped he wouldn’t go Hollywood on her. If Tagen promised to let this bad guy go just to let her live, she was going to slap him silly. Yes, she knew E’Var was probably going to kill her, and yes, she knew it was probably going to be a very bad way to die. But if he was going to do it anyway, she wished he’d do it fast and open himself up to Tagen’s fire.

Gosh, she was taking this well. And to think, last month she’d had a full-out panic attack when Troy had tried to cop a feel on her in the kitchen. Now she was the rope in an alien tug-of-war, peacefully contemplating her impending horribly painful death. Life was funny.

Then, without warning, E’Var cut her open with one pass of one claw—a long cut on her forearm, but not a deep one. She tried to shout, choked on the barrel of the gun in her mouth, and grabbed at the wound instead. Oddly enough, there seemed no malice in E’Var’s face when he’d hurt her and he was again ignoring her as he spoke to Tagen. But it wasn’t long before the conversation was over. E’Var cocked the gun and said just one thing more, his eyes narrowing.

Silence then. The whole woods were waiting.

And when it was done, E’Var smiled thinly.

‘Tagen,’ she thought, sighing. ‘You idiot.’

“Start walking, ichuta’a,” E’Var said, and gave her a little nudge to the back of her throat.

Oh hell, no. This was not going to end this way. Daria had been a lot of things in her life of which she was miserably ashamed, but she refused to be the girl in the movies that everybody in the audience rolls their eyes at and just hates for making the good guy give up, especially since out here in the real world, there were no script-writers standing by ready to draw up a highly-implausible happy ending.

She had just one instant to act. So she acted.

She raised her fists at once and socked him in both eyes. Not a wise thing to do by any means with a gun in her mouth, but to her utter astonishment, not only did E’Var not stop her (all his attention was fixed on Tagen) but he didn’t shoot her, either. E’Var’s reaction to getting hit was as instinctive and unreasoning to him as her panic attack had once been for her. He yanked the gun out of her mouth and walloped her with it, knocking her to the ground so fast, she was seeing the bells of impact even before she was aware she’d landed.

There was a split-second of perfect stillness during which E’Var actually gaped down at her as he realized he’d just thrown his own hostage and only shield out of the way. And then the whole world went to war.

E’Var was blasting away, Tagen was blasting back, and every bird for a five mile radius suddenly took off at once, screaming blue hell and a British invasion. White fire was spitting from the muzzle of the handgun, answered by bolts of brilliant blue from Tagen; both of them were running for cover and neither of them seemed to notice that she was lying there directly under their feet. Suddenly, two hands came out of nowhere, seized Daria’s feet, and yanked her into the bushes.

Roots and rocks scraped up her back, momentarily eclipsing all her other senses (even the holy agony that was the inside of her mouth, ripped to hell when E’Var had pulled the gun out), and when her eyes stopped tearing, she was looking at a girl.

She’d clearly come out the worst of all of them in the car wreck. Her shirt was gone, tied around her knee in a bloody make-shift bandage, and the chest this exposed to open air was badly bruised. She was gripping her side, breathing with what looked like a lot of strain, but she still managed to look more frightened than hurt, and that had to be promising. The face was instantly recognizable, despite the fact that Daria had never seen it before. A smooth little heart-shaped face, with rings of gold above the eyebrows and locks of white hair fringing out a fall of eggplant-purple. Her head was bloody, her face swollen in an airbag rash, and that took out a lot of the cute-factor that ordinarily would have stuck to her, but not all of it. Some girls could be cute no matter what.

“Raven, I presume,” Daria said.

The girl raised a finger to her lips and shhh’d, her eyes owl-wide. In a sketchy whisper, she said, “He’ll hear you. He can hear everything.” The girl’s lip quivered and she bent violently over, her hands covering her face and her shoulders shaking with the force of silent sobs.

Daria sat up. She started to reach for Raven and ended up grabbing her own swimming head instead. E’Var had really cracked her a good one. She peered back through the bushes, struggling to see past her headache, and what she saw on the other side chilled her.

Tagen had caught a bullet in his arm, maybe the last bullet, since E’Var was now using the handgun as a club. The sound of it thudding into Tagen’s body was very nearly the only thing she could hear. They weren’t shouting. They weren’t even snarling. They fought as Titans must have fought before the age of gods, slashing and grappling and stomping and all of it in near-total silence.

There was no walking away from this one, Daria realized. Someone was going to win. And someone was going to die.

The thought kept striking, like a hammer on a bell, sounding starker and starker with each repetition until Daria was physically flinching at the reality of it. And with the final silent tolling of its gruesome truth, she saw Tagen’s foot slip and he fell.

*

Raven came out of the dark in patches. First, sight-black lace over blue, dazzles of light like mental explosions. Then, sound—Kane’s voice in his language. She found herself dazedly trying to spell his words.

Another voice, same language. Who—?

Raven sat up, both hands pressed to her head as if to hold it on. Her eyes went first to the pack nestled at her side. The strap was wound around her wrist, but it still took her several groping efforts before she could catch on to it. Once it was securely in her grip, she felt much better, anchored back in the real world and ready to move on.

Where was she? She was in the woods. Lying on the ground in the woods. The car. Where was the car? It must have crashed. Had she been thrown all this way? The other car had bumped them. Bumped them, going ninety on that road! What kind of crazy goddamn driver…?

Raven rolled over, meaning to crawl onto her knees, and instantly, she collapsed on her belly biting both wrists to keep from screaming. Her sight trickled away from her, losing color first, and then clarity, until all the world was a fuzzy palette of grays. When it came back to her, she looked down and saw her leg.

‘I fell off my swing,’ she thought distractedly, and then gave her head a hard shake. ‘That’s broken,’ she thought next, more alertly. There was no bone showing through or anything nasty, but nothing could bleed that much and hurt that much unless it was broken. But it was broken below the knee, and that meant that, from a strictly physical standpoint, she could crawl.

Raven pushed herself up onto her palms first, then her good knee, and finally—

…jesus…

—to all fours. She took several ragged breaths, tasting dirt and heat and grease and blood, and began to crawl toward Kane’s voice, dragging the pack behind her. He wasn’t too far. She settled against a stump and peered through some bushes at the Mexican standoff he was forming.

Kane had his gun in some lady’s mouth and was speaking past her to another alien. V’kai, Kane had called him, and if Raven had ever needed to know for sure that word really meant ‘cop’, she only had to look at him. Uniform and everything.

As she watched, the cop bent and put the ugly flashlight-looking thing he’d been holding on the ground, so Raven guessed negotiations were well and underway. She leaned back against the rotting support of her stump and closed her eyes, exhausted and sweaty and shivering, to listen to the sounds of their voices and wait for it to be done. After a while, she heard Kane say, “Start walking, ichuta’a,” and that, figured Raven, was it. All over but the shooting.