Lori looked at him.

“What?”

“Don’t you hear that?”

At first she had no idea what he was talking about, but then she realized the wordless voices on the radio, which she’d gotten so used to that she didn’t pay attention to them anymore, sounded different. They were louder, faster, higher pitched. They sounded distressed, alarmed.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“That someone’s coming – for us.”

An instant later, light shone in the rearview mirror. She turned around to look out of the back window and saw a pair of headlights off in the distance.

“And there they are,” Edgar said.

“It could just be someone else traveling the Nightway,” Lori said.

“Could be,” Edgar said. “But it isn’t. Forget about them and keep looking for an exit. We’re going to need one sooner rather than later, I think.”

A lone beetle emerged from the corner of his mouth, as if it was concerned about what was happening and had decided to emerge and check on the situation on behalf of the others. Edgar swept it up with his tongue, brought it back into his mouth, and sealed his lips tight to keep the little bastard where it belonged. The sight nauseated Lori, and she started to thrust it from her mind, but then she stopped. She didn’t want to forget things anymore, wanted to deal with them head-on, no matter how unpleasant they might be. She owed it to Aashrita.

She did her best to focus her attention on the road ahead of them and keep watch for the rippling in the air that Edgar had said marked an exit. She couldn’t help taking a look backward now and then, and each time she did, she saw the headlights of the vehicle behind them were closer.

“Can you go any faster?” she asked Edgar, worried. “Like, even a little?”

The van’s engine was already rumbling loudly, and the vehicle shook and bounced as it flew down the Nightway.

“This is all she’s got. It’s an extermination van, not a goddamn race car!”

Edgar held the steering wheel tight, and despite his earlier advice for Lori to keep looking for an exit, his gaze kept flicking toward the rearview mirror to check how close the vehicle pursuing them had come. And it was pursuing them, she believed that now. The radio voices were practically screaming with urgency.

She turned around to look through the rear window once more. It was hard to judge distances on the Nightway, given the darkness and lack of visible landmarks. The vehicle was close, though. A couple of hundred feet, maybe closer. She couldn’t make out the shape of the vehicle yet, but the headlights were set low and far apart. A car, she thought. A big one. And who did she know traveled the Nightway in a large vehicle, one resembling a midnight-black Cadillac? It had to be the Driver. How had the eyeless fucker found them? Edgar had said the Cabal had a more difficult time locating people on the Nightway than they did in the real world. Maybe the Driver had gotten lucky, or maybe they’d stayed at the Garden of Anguish long enough for the Cabal to get a fix on them. Or maybe the Cabal had guessed where she’d go in search of the answers she needed, and the Driver hadn’t managed to reach the Garden before they departed. It didn’t matter how the Driver had found them, though. It only mattered that he had.

“There!” Edgar shouted.

Lori whipped around to face the front, expecting to see another pair of headlights barreling toward them. Instead she saw a shimmering curtain of distortion ahead, on the left side of the road. They’d found an exit. Edgar yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, and the van’s tires squealed. Lori could feel the van tilt to the right, and for an instant she thought Edgar had turned too sharply and the vehicle would tip over.

And that’s exactly what it did.

The passenger-side window’s glass shattered as the van hit the ground. The side of Lori’s head smacked the remains of the window, and she felt sharp pain from the impact, as well as from glass cutting her skin. Canisters of pesticide clanged as they bounced around in the back, striking one another. What would happen if the chemicals were released? Would she and Edgar be poisoned? Could they die?

The van slid along the slick surface of the Nightway for a dozen feet before coming to a stop. The engine died, and the voices on the radio – which were shrieking now – cut off. Lori and Edgar were both belted into their seats, a fact for which Lori was grateful; otherwise Edgar would’ve landed on her. Edgar tried his seat belt release and found it jammed.

“Get us out of here!” he said.

Lori thought he was speaking to her, but then his beetles surged forth from his mouth. Half of them scuttled onto his seat belt and began furiously chewing at the tough fabric. The other half crawled down toward her and began working on her belt. She hadn’t tried her release yet, but as fast as the beetles worked, she knew she’d be free within seconds. While the beetles chewed, Edgar tried to open the driver’s-side door, but he couldn’t get any leverage and was unsuccessful. He hit the window control, and luckily, it still worked. The window went down, and he grabbed hold of the doorframe just as the beetles finished chewing through his seat belt. He dropped some, but his grip held. Grunting with effort, he maneuvered his body around until he was able to pull himself through the open window and out onto the side of the van, which, Lori supposed, now counted as the vehicle’s roof.

The beetles working on her seat belt finished, and then they all took to the air, flying up and out of the open window, presumably to join their master. A second later, Edgar reached down for her.

“Take my hand!”

As Lori contorted herself into a position where she could do as Edgar wanted, light flooded the van’s interior. The Driver had arrived.

Lori popped open the glove box and grabbed hold of the Gravedigger Special. Then she took Edgar’s hand, and the man pulled her up. She used her feet to help propel herself upward, and a few seconds later she was outside, crouching on top of the van next to Edgar, gun held tight. She hadn’t been able to grab hold of the blanket as she exited the vehicle, and she was naked and cold. She hadn’t grabbed her purse either, which meant it – and her phone – were still somewhere in the van. She didn’t remember seeing her purse as she climbed out, and even if she had, retrieving it hadn’t been her first priority. Getting the fuck out of the van had.

The beetles hadn’t re-entered Edgar’s body. Instead they buzzed angrily around his head, as if ready for battle. Lori thought that if she survived this, she might actually grow to like the carnivorous little fuckers.

She saw the car that had pulled up close to them was indeed the Driver’s vehicle. He got out, leaving his engine running and the headlights on, and he walked toward them. He wore his crimson robe – Must be a pain in the ass to drive in, Lori thought – with the hood back. He had on a pair of sunglasses, but he removed them and tucked them into a pocket, revealing the smooth, pulsating patches of flesh that covered his eye sockets.

“Thanks for making it easy for me to catch up,” the Driver said, smiling. He looked at Edgar and his smile widened. “Hello, old friend. I’m surprised to find you in Ms. Palumbo’s company. Helping her was a mistake, you know. You might have thought you’ve been evading us all these years, but we’ve always known where you were. We could’ve reclaimed you whenever we wished. We hoped that giving you a long leash might help you discover what you did to upset the Balance and how to correct it. It appears that hope was in vain, though. Pity.”

Edgar pointed at the Driver and shouted, “Eat him down to the fucking bone!”

The beetles surged toward the Driver in a large black cloud.

The Driver’s smile didn’t falter as the beetles came at him. He then did something Lori hadn’t thought possible – he opened his eyes. The patches of skin stretched tight and split apart, blood running down his cheeks like red tears. The Driver had no eyeballs in his sockets, only twin pools of darkness. The ebon substance blasted forth from the Driver’s head to engulf the beetles, and they disappeared inside it, the buzzing of their wings suddenly muffled, as if the insects still flew, only now they were very far away. The darkness rushed back inside the Driver’s head, curling into his sockets like sentient smoke. When it was back where it belonged, the skin patches resealed, became smooth and unbroken, but the blood that had fallen onto his cheeks remained there.

The beetles were gone.

Edgar stared at the Driver in shocked disbelief.

“You motherfucker!” he shouted.

Before he could react any further, another pair of headlights appeared in the distance. This vehicle, however, had flashing red-and-blue lights on top.

Rauch, Lori thought.

She heard the rumble of a motorcycle engine then, and she turned to look in the other direction and saw a single headlight approaching. Goat-Eyes, she guessed. Who else would it be?

Did the Cabal have a way to contact each other, some kind of telepathy or simply a Nightway version of cell phones? Whichever the case, she felt certain the Driver had informed his fellow mystics of their location, and they were hauling ass here as fast as they could. How many had been traveling the Nightway in search of them? Just these three? More? Would the entire fucking Cabal converge on them in the next few minutes?

Lori thrust the Gravedigger Special toward Edgar, but he didn’t take it, didn’t even seem to notice she was offering it to him. He jumped off the van, clearly intending to confront the Driver, but when he hit the ground, he cried out in pain and his right prosthesis snapped. Lori didn’t know if it broke or became unattached, but either way, Edgar fell onto his side with an oompf.

“Graceful,” the Driver said, amused.

Anger flared bright in Lori, and she raised the Gravedigger Special, pointed it at the Driver, and fired. The weapon roared and bucked in her hand, and she thought for sure that the round had gone wild. But the tooth-bullet struck the Driver on the left shoulder. He staggered backward, letting out a cry of pain that Lori found deeply satisfying.

“Son of a bitch, that hurts!”

A dark stain appeared on the shoulder of the Driver’s robe, and Lori wanted to cheer. Whatever kind of being the Driver was, he bled just like anything else when he was hurt.

She was going to take another shot – hopefully this time she’d get the bastard in the heart – but before she could squeeze the trigger, Rauch came racing toward her in his police cruiser, lights flashing and siren blaring. She realized he intended to hit the van, and she had no choice but to jump. She threw herself into the air and was on the way down when the cruiser slammed into Edgar’s van, sending both vehicles spinning.

She landed on her feet, her bad knee screaming in agony, and then she hit the ground and rolled. She came to a stop lying on her side, her hands empty. She’d lost her grip on the Gravedigger Special when she landed, and she didn’t see the weapon in her immediate vicinity. It was then that she remembered Edgar. He’d been lying on the ground too, in front of the van, when Rauch—

She pushed herself up into a sitting position, ignored the pain blazing in her knee, and frantically searched for Edgar. She feared she’d see his broken body lying near the two wrecked vehicles, but he was on his feet and very much alive. Well, on his foot. His damaged prosthesis hung from his knee at an odd angle, forcing him to hop on his other one.

He was heading for the Driver. The mystic had pressed his left hand to his shoulder wound in an attempt to slow the bleeding, but the dark stain was still spreading. His teeth were gritted, features contorted in pain, and she remembered what Edgar had told her about the Gravedigger Special’s ammunition.