The gun clattered away. Unthinking, I lunged for it. It came up in my hands, feeling heavy and cold.
The vampire flung Fenrir across the hood of the car. The wolf yelped and rage boiled in me.
"Leave him alone," I said.
I held the gun on the trooper. I was not unfamiliar with guns; my father had owned a hunting rifle. I assumed that this followed the same principle. But I had been taught never, never to aim a gun toward a person. Never to cause harm. Always to turn the other cheek. My finger sweated on the trigger. Through all the violence I had committed, this seemed like a strange new method. One that I knew I could master.
The trooper snarled. His hat had been knocked off, and he advanced toward Alex.
"Don't," I said.
I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.
The gun bucked up and over my head, flinging my arms with it. I opened my eyes to see that the bullet had struck the vampire in the shoulder. A black ooze emanated from below his shiny metal epaulets.
He just smiled at me, unfazed. "That's a felony, girlie. Assault on a police officer will put you away for a long time. Maybe even forever."
Fear lanced through me. I didn't know if the vampire cop understood what had happened to him. Was he just fulfilling his pre-death programming of enforcing the law? Or was this part of some sadistic cruelty I didn't understand?
It didn't matter.
I pulled the trigger again.
And again.
The gun bucked in my hands, but I forced it down, kept firing. I think I hit the car; I saw glass break. One of the hot casings struck me in the cheek. I couldn't hear anything else over the roar of the gunshots.
But the vampire kept coming. He had turned away from Alex toward me, his mouth open in a dark leer. The bullets would push him back a step, but he would recover and gain traction.
I wrenched down on the trigger again, flinched, but nothing happened.
I was out of bullets.
The trooper grabbed my arm, hauled me toward the car. I kicked and struggled. The roar had receded in my ears, and I could hear the pounding of my own blood. He slammed me against the back door of the car, lifting me so that my feet didn't touch the ground. I reached into my pocket for my Himmelsbrief. I got the paper half out of the pocket, and the trooper snarled, dropping me.
"Hey, Smokey!"
I heard Alex's voice above the ringing. Alex hauled back the trooper's collar and stuffed a flaming firework down the back of his shirt.
The vampire hissed and dropped me. He reached behind himself, trying to claw the back of his shirt, which was sparkling with an unnatural blue fire.
I ran to the horse. Horace was backing away, ears flattened. Alex grabbed his reins, tossed me up into the saddle. From the corner of my eye, I saw Fenrir slink out from behind the police car. Alex swung clumsily into the saddle behind me.
The trooper clawed at his back, ripping his shirt out of his belt. I turned Horace toward the exit ramp, away. Fenrir loped after us.
The firework exploded in a shower of blue sparks. I heard hissing and growling.
"What was that?" I shouted.
"Blue Victory."
I turned back in the saddle. "Not victorious enough . . ."
The smoldering cop was missing an arm, but he climbed behind the wheel of the cruiser. The car spun out in the lot and turned to pursue.
"We can't outrun him," I said. "We should go off the road . . ."
"No," Alex said. "Go to the bridge."
He pointed ahead of me, away from the freeway. An old covered bridge useless for heavy traffic crossed a river.
"He can still follow us," I protested.
"Cross the bridge!"
I bit my lip and dug my heels into Horace's sides.
The horse ran as fast as he could toward the bridge. Flecks of spittle came back to strike me in the face. Fenrir was a gray blur at the side of the road, struggling to keep up. I flinched, seeing our shadows driven before us by headlights and hearing the rev of an engine. Stray snowflakes shimmered in the darkness.
"Go, Horace," I whispered into the horse's flattened ear. "Go!"
The horse's hooves slammed onto the wood floorboards, and we plunged into the total darkness of the covered bridge. The headlights grew more distant behind us, like stars.
I turned back.
The police car was stopped at the edge of the bridge.
"Why isn't he following?" I shouted.
"I don't think he can."
We thundered across the bridge, onto a dirt road beyond. I pulled Horace up, looked over the black water at the still headlights.
"There's an old myth that vampires can't cross running water," Alex said. "I didn't know if it was true, if it would apply in this case, but . . . it seems to have stopped him."
Fenrir paced to the riverbank, howling softly. It was a high, mournful keening. Whether it was in victory or warning, I couldn't tell.
But no one answered him.
***
We followed the track of the river the rest of the way north. It was slow going, and there frequently was no road.
Fenrir stuck closer to us. He had allowed Alex to touch him after the fight with the trooper. He seemed bruised, nothing broken, as near as we could tell. When Alex and I slept in our tent, we found him curled at our feet in the morning. He didn't look apologetic in the slightest, and even allowed us to pet him. I knew that he liked me, but he had a special bond with Alex. Maybe, to Fenrir's way of thinking, Alex was his pack leader.
Funny to imagine animals working with Gelassenheit, in their fashion.
I could tell we were getting close to Lake Erie when there was a change in the air. It smelled and moved differently. Alex said that was often the way of things around large bodies of water. The wind was sharper, stronger, more cutting, slicing through long strands of plants Alex called "sea oats." We passed over some marshland laced by vacant highway. Herons continued to fish in the gray landscape, the water a mirror to the sky. I saw a pair of white swans swimming. I had never seen swans before. I wasn't sure that Fenrir had, either, but they honked at him before taking flight, leaving him forlorn on the bank.
"They're wild, the farther you go up north," Alex said. I could tell he was homesick, the way his eye kept wandering to the horizon.
We passed by boat docks and mini-storage facilities perched on fingers of the river. I felt uncomfortable being this close to civilization, but there was nowhere else to go to move north. According to Alex's maps, we had to find the turnpike and follow it toward Canada. Maybe many others had tried before us. I wasn't so sure that anyone else had made it.