Mabel gave us all of the care instructions and a supply of food for the bearded dragon, whose name Isabel immediately decided was Spike. Spike was tame enough to ride home sitting on Isabel’s lap in the sun, dozing happily with his head resting on her palm.

Luis, however, kept casting it, and me, nervous looks. “This wasn’t just a shopping trip,” he said. Ibby had also succumbed to the warmth of the sun, and was asleep with her head tipped against my arm. She showed no sign of hearing.

“I had to show her something,” I said. “I had to convince her. It seemed the only way.”

“Scared straight?”

I considered the phrase. “Perhaps,” I said. “And perhaps I just introduced her to a future ally, in which case we will have much more to think about later on. But for now I think Ibby will go to the school without a fight.”

“Good,” he said. “I just got another call from Bearheart, and she’s not kidding about the deadline. How you want to do this? I’m not too keen on putting her in an airplane, and Marion says it’s too late to meet at the rendezvous at Area 51.”

“Driving is better,” I agreed. “Besides, I doubt they would allow Spike on the plane.”

The school that Warden Bearheart had established was in Normandie, Wyoming. That was as close to effectively the middle of nowhere as it seemed possible to be in modern-day terms. The drive was long and tiring, not the least because I could not possibly take my attention off the world around us for long; our enemies were still shadows in the night, but they stalked us, and there would be only split seconds between life and death for all of us if our vigilance failed.

Despite all that, I found that there was little I loved more than being on the Victory, with the road disappearing beneath the wheels. Wind battered me, sun broiled me, we were visited by torrential rains that drove us to shelter for almost a full day, and yet something inside of me found this vagabond life fiercely beautiful. The snow came next, falling in steady white curtains and veiling everything in thick drifts.

I suspect Luis and Isabel, in the truck, found the long trip merely very tiring.

When we finally arrived in Wyoming, I thought it a beautiful place, stark and lovely as only the most deadly things can be. Thick with snow, it seemed especially ancient, and implied that humanity was a recent, not very welcome visitor. I liked its character. It suited me well.

Outside of Cheyenne, Luis received a phone call; I saw him drop back and flash his lights, which was the signal to pull over to the side of the road. That wasn’t difficult, despite the banked snow; we saw very little in the way of traffic on this road. I braced the motorcycle on its kickstand and walked back toward Luis’s truck, watching the shadows around us for any hint of hostile action. Nothing more menacing than a rabbit was nearby—not that I would underestimate the rabbit.

Luis rolled down the truck’s window as I approached; he covered the speaker of the phone and said, “FBI.” I nodded, because that spoke volumes in the three simple letters. The FBI had been working with the Wardens to try to take down several of Pearl’s compounds across the country, but we’d heard little in the past few days about any success—or failure. Luis mostly listened, but from time to time he would look to me, or Ibby (who was again sleeping, with Spike’s plastic case on her lap to get full benefit of the heater), and I was not feeling overly confident based on what I saw in his eyes. He finally said, “Yeah, sorry about that, but we’re traveling. Nowhere near Albuquerque right now. Won’t be back for at least a few more days.” He paused to listen, and smiled grimly. “Well, you can try to trace us if you want, but you’re tracking Earth Wardens. Whatever that GPS chip shows you, we ain’t there, man. And I’m not telling you where we’re going. I’ll call you when we’re headed back. Best I can do. Okay. I’ll hit you back.”

He shut down the call and tossed the phone on the dashboard of the truck.

“Let me guess,” I said. “The FBI agents would like us to inform them of our every movement.”

“Preferably they’d like us to not move at all. But, yeah, failing that, they want us on a leash. Very sad for them. Maybe we should send them a gift basket.” He drummed his fingernails on the steering wheel, looking out at the road ahead. “Thing is, they wanted us back bad for something in particular.”

“What?”

“Don’t know, and I don’t like it. They’re pretty damn cagey about details on the phone. They want a face-to-face briefing—now, they say, but since that ain’t gonna happen, as soon as we get back.”

What he didn’t say was this was bound to not be a good thing; the FBI turned to us only when problems became far too bad for their agents to handle alone. It meant the situation was already messy, and would probably only get worse the longer we delayed.

“We could split up,” I said. “I could go to the FBI. You could go on to the school.”

He shook his head even before I’d finished. “Not a chance. We stay together.”

I smiled a little, and held my hair back from my face as the icy wind thrashed it around in a pink-tinted storm. “Jealous?” I asked.

“As hell. You bet. I’m not letting any filthy feds get their hands all over your ... assets.” He grinned outright. “And we don’t break up the team. Clara?”

“Clara,” I said. “We go on, then.”

“All night if we have to, but according to the GPS, we don’t have more than a couple more hours to go,” Luis said. “You good for that?”

“Always.” I turned to walk back to the motorcycle. Luis leaned out the window and gave me a sharp whistle. I looked over my shoulder.

“We should have dinner later,” he called. “Something hot. And in my room, while she’s asleep.”

“Maybe,” I said, although that wasn’t what I felt rushing through my body at that moment. No, that was definitely a yes.

I put my helmet back on and kicked the engine to life and got us back on the road.

Warden Bearheart’s patrols picked us up almost a hundred miles outside of the location of the school; I first became aware of them as a disturbance in the aetheric, and when I checked I saw a vivid glow on that plane of existence that could only be a first-class Warden at the height of his powers. Male, most certainly, and by the signature of those powers, he was gifted with Weather. There were two others with him, in the traditional Warden triad of Earth and Fire, though neither could match him for strength.

They challenged us outright, on the road, by slamming a wall of air and snow into our faces and forcing us to slow down, then stop. Luis could drive through the gale-force winds, but not easily; on a motorcycle, I was much more vulnerable. If I’d sensed it as a threat, I would have fought, and fought hard, but we had both expected the Wardens to have perimeter security.

Just not quite so far out from their actual location. I approved of the security initiative.

I parked the bike and dismounted, walking over to Luis as he climbed down from the truck. Ibby was awake, and climbing curiously around the cab of the vehicle to look at the view. She rolled down the window and said, “Tío Luis, be careful!” I noticed she left me out of her warning.

Luis turned his head, shoulder-length hair streaming like a black flag in the freezing wind, and said, “Stay inside the truck, Ib. I mean it.” He’d put on a thick parka, and now jerked the fur-lined hood up over his head.

She nodded and rolled up the window, small face gone very serious. She clutched Spike’s plastic container to her chest in anxiety.

I looked ahead of us to see three Wardens emerging from thin air. One of them, probably the Earth Warden, had a respectable cloaking technique. They stood motionless in a group, seeming very competent indeed; the man in the middle was the young Weather Warden, and he seemed hardly old enough to shave. The other two were women, one only a little older than he was, the other a grandmotherly gray-haired elder who wielded Earth.