"Hey, Bro..." Mosh croaked, "...could use a hand."

My brother was dangling over the edge of the overpa.s.s, Bia's claws encircling his throat. Mosh was holding onto her wrist with both hands, arms bulging, legs kicking futilely as vehicles screamed by below. The oni smiled, her sharp white teeth a brilliant contrast to her leather skin. She was standing on the raised concrete barrier to keep cars from driving off the side. If the drop didn't kill him, a pa.s.sing car would.

Bia dipped her head in greeting. "Greetings, Hunter."

"Let him go," I ordered.

She ignored me and continued speaking. My brother had to weigh at least 250, but she didn't seem to even notice his struggling weight. Her focus was entirely on me. "I should have pulled you out of there instead of this one, but you humans all smell the same when stinking with fear."

Grant's voice sounded in my earpiece. "We're south of you. What's that purple thing?"

I keyed my radio as discreetly as possible. "Snipe her," I whispered, hoping that the throat mike would pick it up.

The oni didn't seem to hear me. "The old G.o.ds have smiled upon us tonight. I was afraid we would have to harm you. The Shadow Lord's contract specified that our payment would be halved if you were injured. Luckily, the foolishness of humans knows no bounds when their blood kin are threatened. When the Shadow Lord's minion reported that you had left in such haste to come to your brother's aid, I knew we would surely capture you tonight."

That staggered me. There is a spy. There is a spy. I had a clean shot at her eyes, but I was terrified she'd drop Mosh. "I don't care about your contract, just my brother." I had a clean shot at her eyes, but I was terrified she'd drop Mosh. "I don't care about your contract, just my brother."

Bia cackled. The unnatural sound caused the hair on my arms to stand up. "The contract is everything. Would you break a contract, my fellow Hunter?"

"Fellow Hunter?" I snorted, never letting the muzzle of my gun waver. "I don't think so."

"Oh, we're very much the same, we are. My brother and I deal in the same trade as you, only we're not picky who we work for." She reached with her free hand into her gray cloak and pulled out a tangle of rope. She tossed it at my feet. "Just like you, we have contracts to fulfill, and now I must fulfill mine."

It was just a small bundle of hemp rope. Then suddenly, it twitched. I took a step back. The rope moved on its own, uncoiling into a memorized circle. As the ends met, there was a flash of fire, and the cement inside the radius disappeared into nothingness. It was like there was a black hole in the floor of the overpa.s.s.

"The portal will take you to the Shadow Lord. You will step into it willingly."

"Fat chance of that."

"Or I drop your blood kin to his certain death." She shook Mosh painfully. His eyes were shut tight as he yelped in pain. "Then I will make make you get in the portal. If I cannot, then my brother will be here in a moment. You would much rather do it my way than his. Cratos will simply pull your limbs off and toss you in. I would rather not lose our bonus. Either way, you will be at the feet of the Shadow Lord before this night is through." you get in the portal. If I cannot, then my brother will be here in a moment. You would much rather do it my way than his. Cratos will simply pull your limbs off and toss you in. I would rather not lose our bonus. Either way, you will be at the feet of the Shadow Lord before this night is through."

"Violence..." The ragged voice came from slightly behind me. I turned.

Franks! He was alive, barely. Blood was running freely from a dozen lacerations. His suit had been reduced to rags. He must have lost his gun, because now all he had in his right hand was a folding fighting knife. He limped right past me, one foot dragging on the pavement. He was alive, barely. Blood was running freely from a dozen lacerations. His suit had been reduced to rags. He must have lost his gun, because now all he had in his right hand was a folding fighting knife. He limped right past me, one foot dragging on the pavement.

He was seething.

"We have no quarrel with your kind," Bia said. "This is not your concern."

"Bulls.h.i.t," Franks muttered, closing, as he left a splatter trail behind.

Bia was distracted by Franks. "Grant, you got a fifty?"

"Yeah. I've got my McMillan."

He'd been working on precision shooting with the Newbies today. I could only pray that he had a good zero. There was no wind. "Head shot. Don't miss. Wait for my signal,"

"I'm three hundred yards away," he protested.

"It's a big head, a.s.shole," I hissed.

Bia shook my brother again. Mosh was struggling to hold onto her arm, slipping. "I only want the Hunter."

"You can't have him," Franks said slowly, still drawing closer to his target. I had to do something before he got close enough to attack, because I knew he wouldn't care if Mosh was splattered into road kill.

"Have you grown so weak, so jealous, that you would live as a slave?" She extended one huge hand toward Franks, pleading. "The Shadow Lord understands the fallen. He can grant you true freedom. Join us." Bia said something else in a strange, almost musical language.

Franks stopped, turning his head slightly, as if thinking about her offer, whatever the h.e.l.l all that weirdness meant. There was a bellowing cry in the distance. Car horns were blowing. Cratos was almost here.

"Ready," Grant said in my ear. "Hostage is blocking the shot."

"Hey, Bia!" I shouted. She turned her attention back to me. I was way too far to make a grab for Mosh. "I'd go with you to save my family. Your shadow guy was right about that. But you've got one problem..."

"Yes?" Her red eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"That's not my brother. You grabbed the drummer by mistake."

Curling her ma.s.sive arm, she pulled Mosh closer for examination. Purple lips pulled back, puzzled, over those deadly sharp teeth. Mosh was suspended over the concrete now.

Grant was calm. "Clear."

"Send it."

The impact made a distinctive sound, like a watermelon being struck by a bat. The boom of the.50 BMG sniper rifle arrived a split second later. The bullet missed her vulnerable eyes but pierced directly through her ear hole.

Bia's head jerked violently to the side. Mosh was thrown against the concrete, landing hard on his shoulder and rolling away. A terrible whistle emanated from the oni as something unnatural ruptured. Her hands clenched spasmodically over her ears, trying to staunch the energy screaming from her collapsing skull. The inner creature had been ruptured. There was a vortex of white light and vapor shooting from her ears, eyes, and mouth, spinning, flashing upward under the halogen lights.

Franks covered the last few feet, stopped, and glared up at the monster as Bia added her inhuman shriek to the noise. "You always did talk too much," he said simply. Then he put one hand on her chest and shoved the oni over the side.

It was a twenty-foot drop to the freeway, but I couldn't tell if she actually hit the ground before the speeding 18-wheeler's grill struck her. The entire engine block of the semi instantly collapsed around her, driving steel through Bia's animated body. The truck turned brutally to the side, trailer jackknifing as the truck's weight slammed the oni solidly into the base of the overpa.s.s. The truck shuddered to a smoking-rubber halt. Suddenly a shockwave expanded outward from the impact point. Brilliant white light turned night temporarily into day. The wave pa.s.sed and there were ghostly figures, literally hundreds of shapes, men and monsters, intelligences and lives that had been captive for thousands of years, now freed, leaping into the sky. They were gone in an instant.

"All those people..." I muttered as I walked to my brother's side, trying to comprehend the sheer horror of the creature we had just ended.

"What people?" Mosh asked hysterically, surely waiting for something else to try to kill him. "Where?" He hadn't seen them.

Franks regarded me suspiciously, shook his head, then stepped forward and peered over the edge. The truck was crushed below us. The trailer-a giant, stainless-steel tube-was sideways directly underneath the overpa.s.s, blocking two full lanes. It was tall enough that I probably could have just jumped down to the trailer and been fine.

Franks still had his radio. "We're on the overpa.s.s." I was far enough away that I couldn't hear the response. "Good. Evacuate the road." The southbound traffic was stopped by the wreck. The Feds must have blocked the northbound route, because nothing was coming from that direction either.

The orcs materialized, Edward balanced between his brother and sister-in-law. I checked Mosh. He was shaken, confused, but seemed okay. It was when I stood up that I noticed how badly Franks was injured. His left arm had been ripped apart from hitting the road, flesh shredded and hanging in strips, splintered bone shards visible through the welling blood. His clip-on tie had been applied as a tourniquet around the top of his bicep.

He caught my shocked expression. "Just a flesh wound," he said nonchalantly.

"BIA!".

The cry was so loud that the halogen lights overhead exploded. All of us flinched. Gla.s.s rained from the sky.

"SISTER!" Cratos was crashing down the freeway, colliding with the stopped cars. His gray cloak was flapping behind, rendering him visible to all. People ditched their cars and fled screaming from the red nightmare giant. "Filthy souls! Filthy souls must die! Kill! Killed SISTER! NOOO!"

"Oh, man. We've made him mad," I said.

Franks scowled, doing the math. The oni was a few hundred yards away and closing quickly. "Go," he ordered without looking. He limped to a nearby construction vehicle and retrieved a length of heavy cable from the back with his good arm.

I didn't know what Franks was planning, but anything involving staying and fighting was suicide. "Come on!" I shouted at him as I ran to one of the Alabama DOT trucks. Of course, there were no keys in it. I swore.

"Primary mission, protect Pitt from the Condition," Franks stated as he pulled out the cable. His injured arm was leaking everywhere, but he still managed to use his left hand to open the steel clip on the end to fashion a loop. Franks tugged out the other end of the cable, pulled it over to the bus and crawled under. He started wrapping the cable around the frame.

"Pitt! We're below you," Grant screamed in my ear. A horn honked on the freeway just south of the wrecked truck. "There's a big red thing coming this way, and I think I just killed its sister or something."

Franks was going to sacrifice himself to slow down Cratos. He looked up from his work long enough to glare at me. "I've never never failed a mission." failed a mission."

In other words, it was time to go.

The fastest way down to Lee and Grant was to go right over the edge. Skippy was way ahead of me. He climbed over the concrete ledge and jumped down to the top of the trailer. His boots bounced, and he fell, but managed not to go over the side. He stood and gestured for his wife. Gretchen was much more nimble and she had somebody to help catch her. Ed, weaving badly, but still managing more dexterity than I would ever have, went over next. I helped Mosh to his feet and we wobbled to the side. "You've got to be s.h.i.ttin' me," he said when he looked at what was still a pretty darn scary leap down to a narrow, stainless-steel catwalk. Cratos roared again, much closer now. "Point taken." He jumped, landing awkwardly. I waited for Skippy to help him before I went over.

The yellow sign said that this was a 20-foot overpa.s.s. It felt like ten times that when I stepped into s.p.a.ce. My boots. .h.i.t the trailer just as the smell hit my nose. Gasoline. Gasoline. Pain surged up through my ankle, still tender from Mexico. Strong hands grabbed my arm. Mosh shoved me toward the ladder. "Gas truck!" he shouted. Pain surged up through my ankle, still tender from Mexico. Strong hands grabbed my arm. Mosh shoved me toward the ladder. "Gas truck!" he shouted.

I slid down the ladder, past a bevy of red signs saying danger/peligro and flammable, and landed with a splash. I was standing in gasoline. The tanker had ruptured on impact. My brother was down a second after me. Lee laid on the horn. "Come on!" But then Mosh was running in the wrong direction. "d.a.m.n it!" I shouted as I followed. He was running toward where Bia had died. Didn't he realize we had to get out of here, either before this thing caught on fire or before Cratos got here? Stupid idiot Stupid idiot.

Then I felt like the idiot as Mosh scrambled his way up to the wrecked truck. He was trying to get the driver. The engine block was completely smashed into the wall and fragments had been hurled a hundred feet but the trucker could still be alive. Mosh jerked on the door but it was crumpled tight. I reached him just as he crawled, headfirst, through the broken window.

"Hurry, man. We've got to go," I insisted.

"Working on it," came the m.u.f.fled reply.

"KILL! KILL!" Cratos screamed.

I saw Agent Franks standing at the top of the overpa.s.s, perched in the exact spot that Bia had been in only a minute before. He held the thick loop of cable in his hands, noose ready. Was he going to actually try to la.s.so the thing? The rear of the tanker shook as Cratos slammed into it, pushing past, splashing into the gasoline. He was so absurdly tall that his head terminated nearly three quarters of the way to the overpa.s.s above. He saw me.

"FILTHY HUNTER DIE!".

Franks waited patiently for the monster to step into view.

Force roared. The sound began as a rumble, but then rose in intensity, until it was a primal scream of pure hate. He lowered his head and charged.

Franks tossed the makeshift noose. The oni's head pa.s.sed right through and he made it three more steps before the cable jerked tight. The bus was jerked several feet. His beady eyes bulged as the cable tightened around his throat. Too enraged to stop, he kept tugging inexorably toward me, dragging the bus with him.

The ground was littered with wreckage, gasoline quickly spreading and washing over it. I realized with a shock that much of the debris was actually what was left of Bia. The purple bits looked like dried clay. "Grab my feet and pull!" Mosh shouted. I grabbed him, glad that he was wearing those giant lineman boots that laced all the way up to his knees, and yanked as hard as I could. The adrenaline was surging through my system and I pulled my brother back out the window. Mosh saw Cratos struggling less than a hundred feet away but he was a man on a mission. "Help me with this guy."

We both reached through the window. I found an armpit, and we pulled, lifting the unconscious man through the gap. Of course, he had to be a big, heavyset guy, too. No No, it would have been too much to ask to have to carry a pet.i.te person out of a probably soon-to-be-exploding truck with an angry giant thing thing trying to eat your soul. No, Owen Z. Pitt, trying to eat your soul. No, Owen Z. Pitt, you you get a three-hundred-pounder. It took two strong and desperate men to pull him through the window. I slung the trucker over my back in a fireman carry and ran for our lives. get a three-hundred-pounder. It took two strong and desperate men to pull him through the window. I slung the trucker over my back in a fireman carry and ran for our lives.

Cratos was trying to scream, but the sound was choked off by the cable. The harder he pulled, the tighter it got, but he was still getting closer. Driven by supernatural strength, he had dragged the tour bus partway over the cracking ledge. If that thing went over it was bound to spark and blow us all to kingdom come.

Then I heard the choppers. The MCB's Apache gunships were coming in, low and fast, from the west side of the island. Their mission was to put some hurting on this monster.

And they didn't know about the fuel tanker.

What Franks did next absolutely stunned me. With his knife held in his good hand, he leapt over the edge, not to the trailer top, but rather, straight to the ground, directly behind Cratos. Franks landed on his feet, automatically rolling to absorb the impact, but still surely breaking his legs. He tumbled through the gas, coming up in a petrochemical splash, right beneath the oni's leg. Franks slashed the knife brutally, chopping through whatever served as the unnatural beast's ligaments, hamstringing it. Cratos collapsed to one knee, the cable pulling even tighter.

The beast swung, tearing one mighty fist at Franks, but hitting only gas and pavement, as Franks had rolled behind the other leg, and struck deep there as well. This time Franks wasn't fast enough, and a backhand landed hard enough to tear a cloud through six feet of road. Franks was flung into the darkness, disappearing into the trees along the river.

Now, with both legs damaged, the oni toppled, hanging itself entirely. It struggled, twisting, legs flopping, as it swung back under the overpa.s.s.

The gasoline was everywhere, soaking my legs, as I lumbered up to the MHI van. Grant was holding the back door open. "Toss him to me!" he shouted. I shoved the injured trucker in before clambering up behind. Grant and Mosh were in a second later, and Lee had us moving before we could even get the rear door closed. An angry dragonfly shape pa.s.sed overhead as the first Apache took aim.

"Gun it, Lee!"

"Going as fast as I can," the little man stated calmly, as he put all of his weight and will on the gas pedal. The MHI vans were all supercharged V8s, and that was a good thing.

"Go! Go! Go!" Grant shouted.

Behind us, Cratos raged and fought. The millennium-old killer was hanging, thrashing, tiny eyes bulging with hate, when the chopper fired. The 30mm cannon struck him in the torso, depleted uranium sh.e.l.ls exploding out his back in a shower of fragments and white light. Rocket pods launched, lancing fury under the overpa.s.s. The gasoline caught, flames tearing across the freeway, leaping back up into the emptying trailer, igniting the ma.s.sive amount of fumes in a conflagration that was probably visible in Cazador.

A wall of heat and pressure rocked the van, blowing the rear windows out in a spray of hot gla.s.s. I covered my head. A killing wind smashed through the interior, super hot and stinging. The exterior paint caught on fire.

But we made it.

A roiling red-and-black mushroom cloud rose behind us, hundreds of feet into the air. Somehow I alone could see through the conflagration to see the ancient oni's final moments. Through the curtains of fire and smoke and howling wind, the beast hung by a fraying cable, false flesh boiling away, energy fleeing, until finally in a flash, he was consumed. The container was destroyed, freeing thousands of trapped souls as his body exploded into clay dust that was sucked upward into the flaming vortex.

"You okay?" I asked softly.

My brother had spent the last fifteen minutes doing CPR on the trucker. The two of us and the rapidly cooling body were the only ones left in the van. He had done his best, and his chest heaved from the stress and exertion. He smelled like evaporating gasoline.

After we had stopped the van, Gretchen had examined the man for only a few seconds, shook her head sadly, then walked away. If Gretchen had said nothing could be done, then truly, it was over. Mosh didn't know what I knew about her healing powers and had continued trying to resuscitate, pumping the man's chest over and over, stubbornly trying to work a heart that was just plain done, then filling the lungs with air and trying again.

The back of the van was bare. It made a decent work s.p.a.ce for first aid. Mosh leaned back against the wall and rubbed a filthy hand over his face.

"You okay?" I repeated, a little louder this time.

The trucker was a big old boy with a Charlie Daniel's beard, with those kind of thick arms that bordered on fat but were amazingly strong, and he had LOVE tattooed on one set of knuckles and HATE tattooed on the other. It was cheesy, but it didn't matter now, because he was dead, and it was my fault. College kids in Mexico, who knows how many innocents tonight, my family put in danger, and it wasn't going to stop...All because of me.

Mosh gave a sad little laugh. It was a pathetic sound. "h.e.l.l of a night."

"Yeah...Listen, dude, I can explain everything."

He just shook his head. "Shut up."

"No, really. Everything you saw, I can explain."

Mosh lowered his hand. His face was bloodstained and scratched. "Just leave me alone right now, okay?" His eyes got a dangerous squint to them and just for a second I could see that family resemblance that everybody always told me about.

I nodded. I could understand. There was a helicopter landing outside. This particular talk could wait. The back doors of the van were pulled open. Grant was standing there in his perfect black armor. "Feds are here," he stated, though it was pretty obvious with the black helicopter settling on the freeway a hundred feet away.

"Hey, Grant."

"Yeah?"

I clapped him on the shoulder. It was kind of awkward. "Good shot back there."