Blood Reign (Blood Heir #4)

Chapter 4

I t takes us hours of walking to leave the chaotic, violent hell of Atlanta behind us. Caleb leads us—naturally enough. Colin uses his cell phone to monitor the various newsfeeds from around the world. He catches up to walk beside me.

“Here. You may want to see this." He hands me the phone.

It's an article. "Maeve Sparrow, self-styled Once-Mortal Queen, leader of a breakout faction of immortals, arrives in Atlanta, chaos ensues."

“Well that's bullshit," I mutter. "I'm not a self-styled anything, and I'm not a leader of a breakout faction."

He snorts. "No shit. Mortal media has a way of distorting the truth. But the video is good. It shows the whole thing—makes you look great." He blushes. "Um, politically speaking, I mean."

I laugh and elbow him. "What, you don't think I look great?"

He glances at Caleb nervously, and then at me. "No, um, no! I just…Caleb, and Caspian, they—"

I laugh again and touch his arm. "I'm teasing. He's not going to tear your head off for complimenting me. And also, I knew what you meant."

He arches an eyebrow at me. "Shifters are notoriously territorial about their mates, especially a bonded one. That's what makes your relationship so…um, unique."

"Having five mates, you mean?"

He snorts. "Having five mates…none of whom are shifters. It'd be less weird if they were all shifters, but sharing a bonded mate with four vampires? Yeah, that's fucking weird, dude." He glances at me. "Um. Ma'am, I mean."

I laugh. "Dude, relax. You're fine. We're friends, right?"

He glances down at the sparrow symbol emblazoned on his chest. "Yeah…friends."

"Well, friends with layers, then. My point is you can relax around me."

"Oh. Right." He walks beside me, phone in hand swinging at his hip. He glances at me. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure. Shoot."

"The, um…the other two like you. Where are they?"

"Oh, Theris and Aquilia? Aquilia is called an Aeshir, and Theris is a Fomori. Zirae coined the terms, and despite my dislike for him, it doesn’t make sense to create new ones when these are suitable. I shrug. "And I don't know where they are—they spent their lives locked in those cells. So when they got out, I think they just wanted to explore the world and…I dunno. Figure out…life? Themselves? I told them they were welcome to come with us, but they chose to go their own ways. I admit I'd love to have them with us for what's coming in New York. But after everything they went through, I wasn’t about to do anything to infringe upon their freedom."

"Couldn't you have made them?"

I shrug. "I mean, no? I'm coming to believe that true authority works best when people choose to give you that authority. Ruling in fear is wrong. Forcing people to obey you because you're more powerful than they are is wrong. I only want people who choose to follow me. If the Fates have chosen this role for me, so be it, but I'll fill the role my way."

He's quiet awhile. "I respect that, Maeve. I think the Fates chose you for a reason, and the more I get to know you and see the things you do and why you do them, the more I get why they chose you."

I bump him with my shoulder. "Thank you, Colin. It means a lot to hear you say that."

He blushes. After a minute or so, he shoots me another look. "You think the Fates will give me a bonded mate?"

I blow out a breath. "I wish I could answer that. I know very little about the Fates and the immortal world in general." I give him a warm smile. "But what I do know, Colin, is that any woman would be lucky to have you as her mate."

He grins. "You think so?”

"I know so. You're sweet, handsome, smart…yeah. You'll make some woman a hell of a mate. Just…look beyond shifters, Colin. I know what the world has instilled in you, but the world was wrong. I'm only guessing based on my own experiences, which are very limited, but I think if you open your mind and start thinking about fae and vampires not as enemies, but just people , then you open yourself up to a whole new world of possibility." I lower my voice and lean close. "And from what I hear, the sex is even better with someone from one of the other races. I mean, when I thought I was a mortal, things with Cas were really intense. Way more so than with my previous mortal boyfriends. Way, way better."

"For real?" His voice sounds faint.

"Oh yeah. For real. I mean, ask Caleb, sometime. Tell him I told you to ask. All I know for sure is that love is not meant to be limited. Would you refuse to be with someone because her skin was a different color? Or his?"

He widens his eyes. "No! Of course not. And…hers. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, I'm just not." He shakes his head. "No, I….people are just people. We're all the same when it comes down to it. Different cultures, religions, morals, music, whatever, but all that's just… surface stuff. Once you get to know someone, you realize we're all just people."

I smile at him and shove him playfully. "Then how is it any different when it comes to a fae girl or a vampire girl?"

He blinks. "I…we have different needs."

"Sure, but that actually makes things easier, in my experience. Caleb needs mana—it's how he powers his abilities as a shifter. And you know what I don't need? Mana. So he can feed from me and it won't make any difference. But Caspian and me, we’re both vampires, right? Well, he can feed from me and it'll sustain him. Because as a half-fae, I produce my own blood. But I can't feed from him even though I need blood as a vampire. I know—it's almost counterintuitive. I make my own blood as a fae, but as a vampire, I need outside blood. I'm not sure how it works, and I don't think anyone does—my grandfather maybe. But I do know that Caspian feeds from me, and his body uses that blood—if I then drink his blood, I’m getting my own back, stripped of nutrients. See how that works? I need blood that is not my own. And guess who I can get it from without causing any problems?"

"Caleb. Because he doesn’t use blood—not, like, for his magic."

"Exactly." I look at him. "I'm not a shifter, Colin. Am I so bad?"

He frowns at me. "No, of course not. you're amazing."

"Well, thank you. But knowing what you know about me, if I wasn't already mated, would you be able to think about me, in that way? I ask hypothetically, for the sake of the discussion."

He shrugs and nods. "Of course." He thinks about it. "Yes. I could. You're…well," he blushes. "You're beautiful, obviously. But you're a good person. You care about people. You're brave and powerful."

"And there are fae and vampire women out there who are beautiful and good and brave and powerful, Colin. You just have to let yourself see them that way. As women , rather than fae or vampire." I frown. "Well, you have to see them for who they are. Being fae is part of who a fae woman is. She's a woman, and a fae, and part of whatever culture she's from. Being fae is just another part of who she is, but you can't see her as just fae, any more than you can see a person of color as just that—nor can you not see that part of them. Make sense?"

Colin doesn't answer for quite a while—a glance tells me he's thinking deeply so I walk with him in amiable silence.

After a few minutes, he shoots me another look. "How did you know he was your mate?"

I shrug. "I didn't. With Caleb, I mean. Or with Caspian, for that matter. You have to remember, I grew up in the mortal world. Mate bonds don't exist for mortals. All mortals have are emotions—spending time with someone and deciding you like them enough to spend your life with that one person. But it's a flawed system, you might say, not that there's any other option. There’s no way to know —you're trusting that person with your heart, your body, and your life. And you're hoping they love you and are giving themselves to you in the same way. But you don't know . There's no magical bond linking your minds and souls."

"Sounds scary."

I laugh. "I suppose it must be. I was never in love with anyone, before I became immortal—or before my immortal nature came out, I suppose I should say."

"Do you think we have the mate bonds because there are so few of us? Like, to balance out the fertility issues?" He kicks a chunk of concrete, catching up to it and kicking it again.

Around us, the streets are eerily silent. Behind us, the Atlanta skyline is wreathed in a haze of ozone, smog, and tendrils of sick black smoke. We pass a gas station—the windows are boarded up, the glass shattered; a large brownish-red stain mars the concrete beside one of the pumps. The sign advertises premium, mid-grade, and regular unleaded for $4.29, $3.99, and $3.49, respectively, as well as cigarettes and lottery tickets.

"It does make a certain sense when you put it in that context, doesn't it?" I say after a moment. "I suppose the real question you're getting at is what does it feel like to be mate-bonded, right?"

He grins at me. "Yeah, pretty much."

I consider it for a few moments. "It feels…like inevitability."

Colin laughs. "Yeah, no clue what that means."

"I mean…being with that person feels inevitable. Like, even before we were bloodmated, I just… knew where Caspian was. There was no bloodlink, no mate-bond, none of that. But I just knew , down to my toes, that I was meant to be with him. And that was scary as fuck for me at the time because I didn't know vampires were real, I just knew he was really freaking different and really, really frightening, even though I also knew he'd never hurt me. I couldn't not be with him—and he couldn't not be with me—he fucking tried, too."

"So you didn't know he was your mate? You just…knew you had to be with him?"

"Exactly. And because Cas and the others didn't realize what I am—not just an immortal, but a new and different kind—Caspian was hesitant to let anything physical happen. But it reached a point where neither of us could deny what we needed—because by that point, it wasn't desire, it was a real, undeniable, physical need. We had to. And when we finally did, we bloodmated and my immortal nature was revealed, or the glamour hiding my immortal nature was dissolved once and for all, however you want to put it." I look at him, smiling. "I guess all that is to say that when it comes to a mate-bond, the magic is undeniable. It can't be mistaken. If and when you find your mate, bonded or otherwise, you'll know."

Colin laughs self-consciously. "This is a little backward, isn't it? This whole conversation?"

I laugh with him. “Yeah, it kind of is, isn't it? Here you are, two hundred and fifty years old, asking me, not even twenty, about mate-bonds." I glance at him. "Why not ask Caleb?"

He watches Caleb, striding with that confident, powerful swagger. "Yeah, that's not the kind of conversation I’d feel comfortable having with him." He watches his toes for a moment, still kicking that pebble. "Also, I'm only one-ninety. I was, um, illegal. My mother…" he sighs. Starts over. "She was headed west with her mate. Outlaws, bandits, whatever you want to call them, they captured her. Killed my father and took turns raping my mother."

I frown. "How did a group of mortal bandits overpower a pair of shifters?"

"Surprise, I think. And numbers. There were a lot of them. Mom and her mate fought like hell, but they were so outnumbered they didn't really stand a chance. By the time her mate died, Mom was half-dead. So they took turns raping her until they'd had enough, figured she was gonna die, and took off, taking all of her food, ammunition, and supplies. Well, being a shifter, she didn't die. She shifted to her animal form and carried me to term that way. She raised me more animal than human, out in the wilderness west of Tennessee—which, back in 1834 was pretty much just forest inhabited only by the occasional tribe of Indians—Native Americans, sorry. They knew who and what we were and left us alone. Caleb came along when I was sixteen and took me into his pack. Mom went west to California."

“Is she still alive?"

He shakes his head. "Nah." A tip of his head to one side. "Well, I don't know for sure. We made our way to California a few decades later and I looked for her. I talked to people who knew her, but they all said she vanished in the 70s—1870s, I mean. I scoured hundreds of square miles around where I knew she'd been living, but only found traces of old campsites. She probably got lonely and tired and just died of age-sickness, I guess."

"I'm sorry, Colin."

He shrugs. "I never knew her before, obviously, but my whole life she was just sad. Seemed to me like she was only hanging on for my sake. She was relieved when Caleb approached our fire and asked if I wanted to join his pack. I think she only lasted in California as long as she did out of sheer stubbornness."

I hesitate before asking my next question. "The men who attacked…"

He grins at me, a shockingly savage smile on such a boyish face. "Oh, I found them. That was the first thing we did after Caleb bound me to the pack. We hunted them down and killed them, very, very slowly. I knew the one who sired me, too. I scented it on him."

"What did you do to him?" I ask out of morbid curiosity.

"We herded him like a moose. He was in the Hudson Valley area, trapping. We herded him into Iroquois territory—right into their camp. And then we let them have him."

I frown in confusion. "I don't understand."

"Oh. Well, the Iroquois were one of the most feared tribes in North America. They had torture tactics Europeans couldn't even conceive of, and they hated the white trappers. Guys like him, especially. They knew of him and had been looking for him —my mother wasn't the only one he'd done that to. He'd raped and killed several of the tribe’s women. The worst thing we could have done to him was give him to them. They knew we were there and why we'd done that, and they gave us a hell of a show. They made his death last over a week. It was fucking brutal, and no more than a goddamned monster like him deserved." He laughs. "If it had been an option, I'd have hauled his ass down to Apache territory and left him for them. Those dudes were super creative when it came to torture. They'd cover you in honey and stake you over a fire ant hill. Found the remains of a guy they'd done that to, once." He shrugs. "The way white settlers treated them, though? I don't blame them."

"Callahan expressed a similar viewpoint."

"Well, we lived out in the wilderness of the unsettled west before Europeans made it out there. We treated the land and the local tribes with respect—we were living on their land. We respected their ways and their space. They had immortals in their tribes, but they treated them no differently than anyone else. Of course, many of the chiefs were immortal—being the most powerful and whatever, it just made sense, I guess. But they…they accepted us. As long as we were polite and respectful, they left us alone. We'd trade with them once in a while or go on hunts with them." He goes silent for a while. "We took this land at the end of a gun, and it hasn't been for the better, from my perspective. I’d go back to the old ways in a heartbeat."

Ahead, Caleb has paused at the railing of an overpass, watching something on the freeway below. Colin and I jog to catch up.

The expressway is, like all the others we've seen, a jammed, snarled, tangled-up mess. Abandoned cars litter the lanes, making travel so difficult as to be nearly impossible. That doesn’t stop people from trying, of course—mostly desperate mortals.

Caleb is resting his forearms on the railing of the overpass, watching a situation unfold below—a pair of squabbling mortal males. One rear-ended the other, it looks like. The argument is about to turn violent—even as I think it, one mortal slugs the other in the nose, and blood spurts. Even from here, I smell it, and my vampire tries to convince me to jump down there and get a taste. I squash that impulse. Within moments, the two men are duking it out clumsily, getting in awkward hits and clinching, shoving away. Around them, a dozen or so other mortals watch from open car doors, but no one interferes.

Except for one man. Tall and lean, neatly dressed in chinos and a polo, carrying a briefcase as if headed to a business meeting. He sets his briefcase down and approaches the fighting men. He tries to defuse the situation verbally, at first, but the men ignore him. So, he pulls one apart from the other and shoves him backward with surprising strength from such a slender figure. This backfires almost immediately. The one he shoved lunges at him, connecting with a hard punch to his jaw. The other charges into the fray and connects as well, and then somehow the two men who'd been fighting each other are suddenly ganging up together on the well-intentioned stranger.

But something seems off. Or…smells off. I scent the air, but it's faint. Honey?

Oh, shit.

Understanding hits, too late. The man who intervened does something with his fingers, and then gold light swells, and the other two men are flung backward. Bleeding from the nose and mouth, holding his ribs, the male—a fae, clearly—straightens, and wipes his lips and nose with the back of his wrist. Holds out his hands to the two men in warning.

"He’s one of them!" A bystander shouts. "One o' them freaks! He's gonna magic us all to death!"

"Get him!" Another shouts.

And then the crowd of bystanders, none of whom had the courage or fortitude to even try to stop the fight, swarm around the lone fae male. Before he can cast another glamour, several men have him by the wrists and ankles. He thrashes and flails, and I can feel him fighting to make his prana answer without his hands—

Before I have time to even think about it, I'm leaping over the railing and landing on the freeway—the asphalt cracks and splinters as I land.

I fling out a hand, sending a wave of power out. " STOP !"

Everyone freezes, even the fae. I approach the mob of a dozen or so mortals, whose eyes track me with fear. I pry their hands off of the fae, help him to his feet, and guide him away, putting him behind me.

I glance at him. "Are you all right?"

Released from the grip of my glamour, he nods. "I'm fine, thank you." He winces. "I haven't been struck like that in centuries. I'd forgotten how unpleasant it is." He extends his hand to me. "Philemon Argent."

I shake his hand. "Maeve Sparrow."

His brows draw down. "Maeve Sparrow…" and then his eyes widen, and he drops to one knee. "My queen. I'm at your service." He glances up at me with hope and awe. "I've heard you can conjure a mark of fealty."

I produce the mark with a roll of my hand, and he palms it without hesitation. "I pledge my life, my blood, and my abilities in service to your cause and your court from this day to my dying breath."

Light swells and my sparrow mark inks itself on the front of his navy-blue polo. He grins as he rises to his feet. "Saved by the queen herself!" He glances at the men he tried to help. "Ungrateful mortals."

I place my palm on his shoulder. "I'll have a little talk with them. I'm glad to have you." I gesture at the overpass. "The rest of my party is up there. We're headed to New York."

"I was just trying to get out of Atlanta before things got any worse. I would be honored to fight alongside you."

"Well, we do hope to find a path forward without fighting, Philemon."

He sighs and shakes his head. "The way mortals are behaving right now, that seems an unlikely outcome. But one worth pursuing, I suppose. it is the more noble endeavor, certainly."

I nod and turn back to the still-frozen mortals—not frozen as in cold, I should point out—frozen as in temporarily deprived of voluntary movement.

I send a tendril of prana swirling around each of them, using it to rotate them and rearrange them so they're all facing me in a line abreast. "Now. I'm going to let you go, but you will remain as I have arranged you, and you will listen to me."

I pull my prana back to myself, and the mortals slump, gasping, hands on knees, shaking heads, and eyeing me with fear and suspicion.

A tall, overweight, balding man drags a huge handgun from the small of his back and aims it at me. "Arrange this, bitch."

I sheathe myself in prana, turning it into a thick armor of jellied air. I wait calmly as the man pulls the trigger once, twice, three times, four, six…each of the bullets lodges in what to him must look like the air itself, and then drops to the ground with a tinny clatter.

I watch as he looks at his gun as if it's somehow responsible, and then at me. I let him fire the rest of the clip or whatever at me. I drop the sheath of armor and wrap a thread of maya around the weapon, causing it to heat up. It glows orange and then red, and then he drops it with a shocked yowl.

"Are you quite finished?" I ask, arching an eyebrow at him.

Someone, another mortal, has joined my party up on the overpass and is livestreaming the entire event—Caleb allows it, so I allow it as well.

The man who shot at me stares at me. "What satanic black magic is this?"

I laugh. "I'm no Satanist, and it's not black magic. Just plain old magic." I walk up to him—he freezes in place without my help—and touch two fingers to his temple.

Pull prana from him—just a hint, enough to catch a glimpse of his memories—an abusive father, bullied for his weight all his life, a wife he abuses as his father did his mother and him, a secret proclivity for visiting young male prostitutes while spouting homophobic hate all over his social media and in real life.

I wrinkle my nose and withdraw myself from his memories—they feel oily and filmy and disgusting.

"You aren't a very nice person, Geoffrey Allen Liebowitz. Not very nice at all." I hold his eyes. "Secrets have a way of finding the light, you know."

"Y-you—you don't know a thing about me, devil woman!"

"Oh, but I do." I lean closer. "I know your father was a monster, and you have become him. I know you claim in public to hate gays…but in private? Well, Andrew, Isaac, Patel, Hector, Tommy…they all have a different story to tell, don't they? You're the worst kind of hypocrite, Geoffrey. You are what you hate. You hate them because you're too much of a coward and a weakling to hate yourself, much less accept them or yourself and less yet love them and yourself." He opens and closes his mouth, but I speak over him. "Sit down, Geoffrey. And be silent. I can make you, but I’d rather not waste any more time or energy on the likes of you."

He plops heavily to his buttocks, right there on the ground at my feet, looking up at me with horrified confusion.

I look around at the others. They're all watching with a mixture of fear, confusion, suspicion, and awe. "Not that any of you are any better." I point at Philemon, still standing a few feet behind me. “He alone out of all of you had the courage to do something. You all stood there and watched those two—" I gesture at the two men who started the whole business, "fight in the street like feral dogs. And you did nothing. He, someone with more to lose than any of you, as you so clearly demonstrated, stepped forward and tried to stop the violence. And when these two mindless thugs turned on him and he nonviolently defended himself, what did you do? You attacked him."

I feel their shame rise like a miasma.

I let the silence do its work.

I look from face to face. "It is responses like that that's causing that .” I point at the skyline of Atlanta. "You fear what you do not understand. That's human nature. You don't understand us—we are different, and we can do things you can't, things you don't understand."

I conjure a rose and send it floating across the space. One of them, a young woman, reaches for it. I smile as she plucks it from the air, marveling as she spins it between finger and thumb, and then sniffs it.

"It's…it's real?"

I nod. "It is."

"Will it die like…like a real rose?" She asks.

I shrug. "I don't know. I suppose you'll find out. It may just vanish, or it may die, or it may not. I don't know. I've never kept one long enough to find out."

"What else can you do?" A man in the back asks.

I laugh. "Many things."

"That guy," another man says, pointing at the fae. "He called you queen."

"Among the immortals, there are some who believe I am what's called the Once-Mortal Queen—a figure from a prophecy from a long time ago."

"Are you?" he asks.

I shrug. "I do seem to fit, yes."

"So you're…what? Trying to become…fuckin'…queen of America or some shit?" This is another person, an older male with a long gray mullet.

I laugh. “No—gods no. My purpose is to stop this ," I gesture at them, and the area around us, “from happening. To help our world transition to the reality of immortals being real. We’ve always been real, and we're not going anywhere. We don't want to take over, we don't want to rule or anything like that. We just want to live our lives, same as you. We're humans. We’re people. We have friends, we have parents, we have boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives…we're just different than you. We live longer. We age differently. We have abilities you don't, but those abilities come with downsides, just like everything else in life."

"Like what?" The mullet man says.

"Like, we can't have children with people from our own race. A vampire can't have children with a vampire. It's very difficult for us to have children, and that's at the heart of everything to do with the conflict between my people and yours." I pause. "That, and the very idea of there being a your kind and a my kind, when we're all just people living together in the same country."

"But you can do anything you want," mullet man says. "You could turn us all into frogs. Put a curse on us. What can we do? You stopped bullets like it was nothing."

I laugh. "Turn you into frogs? I'm not an evil witch from the Brothers Grimm. Perhaps it’s possible, but I wouldn't know. I've never tried." I point at Philemon. "You were about to kill him with your bare hands. He could have done any number of things to defend himself in ways that would have hurt you, but he didn't, not even when his own life was in jeopardy."

Silence.

"Yes, I can do a lot of things. I can stop bullets. I can freeze you in your tracks. I could have hurt you, but I didn't. We're here, together, talking like rational human beings. Maybe next time you see something you don't understand, try to understand it instead of trying to kill it. Especially when it’s a person.”

"My brother and his friends were killed by a vampire," someone says, voice shaking—I identify the speaker, a young Hispanic woman. "It drank their blood and they died."

“He, or she," I correct. "We are not an it . And yes, there are immortals who aren't good. Who will do bad things. Hurt people just because they can, or because they're afraid."

"What would a vampire be afraid of? They ain't even had a stake or garlic or nothing."

I laugh. "Forget everything you think you know about vampires—ninety-nine percent of it is wrong. A vampire would be afraid of people, especially a big crowd of angry, scared mortals. If you were surrounded by people who wanted to kill you just for existing, what would you do? Defend yourself? Even if in so doing you confirmed their fears of what you are? Or just let them kill you?" I hold my hands out, palms up. "I don't know the circumstances of your brother's death, so I won't try to justify or defend the actions of that vampire. Maybe it was unprovoked. But you mortals do plenty of that to each other, don't you? In fact, you kill each other over nothing at all far more frequently than any mortal has ever been harmed by one of my people. It does happen—of course it does. But by and large, we're just people who want to be left alone to live our lives as we see fit."

You've said your piece, Caleb says to my mind. Time to go.

I turn and glance at him. Nod. Turn back to the small crowd. "I have to go, now. Goodbye."

I leap back up to the overpass and watch the crowd slowly disperse. Most get back into their cars and weave around the abandoned vehicles while others head away on foot. After a few minutes, the area is deserted, except for one mortal.

Caspian wraps his arms around me. "Good speech, babe."

I glance at the mortal who was recording it. “Hello."

She stares at me—a pretty, young Black woman with an enormous duffel bag at her feet. "Are you really a queen?"

I shrug. "To some, yes, I suppose I am. But I'd consider it more of a…position or role than anything. I'm certainly not royalty, like King Charles or whoever."

"Oh." She glances at her phone. "Lotta views already."

She shuffles her feet without looking at me—she wants to ask something.

I move closer to her. "What is it?"

"I got a brother up in Boston. I’m tryin' to get up there to be with him while all this shit is goin' down." She waves in the direction of Atlanta. "But it's scary out here on my own. Flights are shut down, trains ain't runnin', busses ain't runnin', and I don't have a car."

I sweep a look at my people; Caleb nods. Caspian just offers me a shrug and a smile. I look back at the woman. "Well, we're going to New York. You can travel with us for as long as our paths are aligned."

She grins, relieved. "God, that would be amazing." She arches an eyebrow, looking at Caspian in particular—he's nearly unblooded, looking pale and hard-skinned, his eyes laced with black. "Um, not to be, like, ungrateful, but…he ain't gonna eat me, is he?"

Caspian laughs. "I'm a vampire, not a cannibal." He indicates me. "And I get what I need from her. No one here will harm you."

"Long as you don't harm us." This comes from Callahan.

She widens her eyes when she sees him. "Good lord, you're a big one, ain't you?"

Callahan just shrugs. "Yeah."

Saige steps forward with a welcoming smile. "I'm Saige. Don't worry about Callahan. He's just grumpy."

Callahan snorts. "I'm not grumpy."

Colin elbows him. "You are kind of grumpy, dude."

"I'm Sharon," the woman says.

Introductions are made all around, and Caleb starts heading onward.

Channing, however, remains at the railing, staring down at the freeway.

Caleb notices. "Channing? What's up?"

Channing points down at the freeway. "Why couldn’t we, um, borrow a ride from down there?" He shrugs one shoulder. "They've all been abandoned. I don't see anyone coming back for any of them."

Caleb nods. "Not a bad plan. Maeve?"

"Makes sense to me." I scan the immediate area below us and then point. "There—that van. The big white one. The church van?"

Channing hops over the railing and jogs to the van, which is blocked in by half a dozen other abandoned vehicles. He shimmies into the driver's seat—the engine rolls over, catches, and sets off on a rattling hum. "Runs okay and has a half tank of gas."

Caleb hops down. "Everyone, check the other cars for gas cans. If we can find something to siphon with, even better."

Saige and I help Sharon scramble down the embankment to the freeway, and we all spend the next thirty minutes going through trunks and truck beds and back seats. We do find three red gas cans, two empty and one full. Colin finds a coiled-up garden hose in one truck bed, and Channing cuts a section of it off and siphons enough gas from the other cars to fill the two empty cans. It takes several more minutes for the men to shift the cars away so we can get the van out—Sharon watches them shove cars out of the way with an expression somewhere between awe and shock.

Finally, we're able to navigate the van off the freeway, up the ramp, and onto the road we've been traveling along—a more circuitous route, but with the freeway in the condition it’s in, it’s simply not an option.

Even more than not having to walk, I'm grateful for air conditioning. Georgia is hot .