Vision Quest (The Demon's Apprentice Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

grab the handle of my backpack. “Good boy,” I said, and he let go.
    “What are you doing?” Gage demanded. He had his phone out and was busy running his finger over the surface of it. “We need to set a ward and call for help!”
    “Yeah, you have fun with that,” I said as I dropped the pack into his lap. “And once you figure out you don’t have signal, open that up and grab my Ariakon.” The car coasted to a stop, and I opened the door.
    “Your what?” he asked.
    “The big pistol-looking thing in the holster-looking thing,” I said as I got out of the car and reached into my front pocket. The smooth, flat surface of my touchstone slid beneath my finger as I fished for what I wanted, finding the rounded surface of the stone Dr. C had given me. I pulled it out and held it in the palm of my open hand. This was different magick than I usually did, mostly because I was asking someone else to do all the heavy lifting. “Little brother, I need roots that go deep and hold strong.” The stone suddenly grew heavy in my hand, and my skin tingled as something out in the darkness turned a powerful and horrible attention on me. The taint of true darkness had a different feel from what we were in the middle of. This was shadow, easily lit. We’d passed under the shadow of a cloud right before this had started, so I was guessing whatever was behind this wasn’t looking to get a tan. And that could work for me. All I needed to do was ground the shadow.
    “I found it!” Gage called out, his voice high-pitched and bordering on panic. “Get in the car!”
    I stepped away from the Mustang and straddled the yellow line in the middle of the gray asphalt. My left side seemed to tingle more than my right, so I turned my head to face that way.
    “I feel you out there,” I said to whatever it was. “I drop a rock on your shadow.” My hand turned slowly, and the rock slid across my palm and fell toward the ground. It seemed to drop forever, and when it hit I could feel a surge of power pulse by me. The world seemed to ripple at my feet for a moment, then it was past, and I heard the otherworldly screech of something Infernal and pissed-off.
    “What did you just do?” Gage demanded as I slid back behind the steering wheel.
    “Dropped an anchor on something’s foot,” I said, and then floored it. The Mustang fishtailed for a moment, then leaped forward with a roar of eight-cylinder glory, and I power-shifted through all four gears as I tried to catch up to Lucas. Over the engine’s full-throated rumble, I heard something snarl, a sound like reality splitting down the middle. Then the smell hit. Not even Junkyard’s worst emissions could compete with the stench of brimstone. People had compared it to Sulphur once, but it wasn’t even close.
    “What is that smell?” Gage managed to gasp.
    “Brimstone,” I said. “Makes rotten eggs smell kinda like Pine Fresh, doesn’t it? What color is the tape on the top of the paintball gun?”
    “Red, I think,” Gage said. Incendiary pellets were marked with red. It would do for the moment, but I needed something a little more potent.
    “Let me have it. Look in the backpack for one with white tape on it.”
    “What do you have it loaded with now?” he asked as he rummaged in the pack.
    “Flaming hot sauce,” I said as I looked out my window.
    “And the white-marked hoppers?”
    “Holy water and garlic,” I said. Something big was moving alongside the road, keeping pace with us.
    “A much better option,” he answered. I pushed the gas pedal down a little further and watched as the speedometer climbed up past eighty, then ninety. Up ahead, I could see Lucas’s tail lights getting brighter. As we got within a hundred yards of him, he swerved and a shadowy shape narrowly missed his back fender. I had only a second or two to maneuver before I was right on top of it, but I just straightened my arms against the wheel and ran it down. There was a screech at the moment of