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so much useless baggage.
    Headlights jarred her out of her introspection an instant before she tripped over the curb. A cargo truck bore down with breakneck speed, its angry horn screeching through her head and vibrating like drums in her chest.
    Instinct exploded into movement. Unable to bite back her breathy scream, she lurched back out of the thoroughfare and away from the vehicles that whipped by her with careless indifference. She hit the corner of a cobbled building, an old brownstone, and clung to it. Water splashed over her legs as cars drove through the runoff pooling along the side of the tilted carousel road.
    “Maniac!” she shouted, knowing it wouldn’t help.
    Shivering, she straightened from her half crouch. Here and now. She had to focus. She couldn’t afford to be anywhere else but the present.
    What she needed was to hit the stairs across the eight-lane highway, climb six levels down, head east to the tenements, and keep to the shadows. If she could lose herself in the squalor of the lower edges, it’d be a done deal.
    And now she had a lead on Caleb, if what Silas had told her was true. She didn’t need anybody else’s help to find her brother. How hard would it be to find a coven? “Because that’s the dumbest move ever,” she sighed, blowing her soggy hair away from her mouth. She eyed the steady rush of traffic, gauged her moment, and darted across the first lane when the vehicles thinned out enough to let her through.
    She heard him call her name two lanes in.
    Arms windmilling, she spared a look over her shoulder to see Silas leaving the alley behind her, murder in his scowl. “What the hell are you doing?” he roared.
    Jessie gritted her teeth and leaped through a gap between cars. Before she could get her balance, another gap opened, and she chanced it.
    An angry horn blared as the side mirror of a rusted old boxcar tagged her shoulder, spun her wildly. She flailed, staggered into the lights of an oncoming speeder, and swore her life turned into a sudden cliché as it flashed in front of her eyes.
    There should have been more to it, she thought, and braced for pain.
    Solid arms banded around her chest, jerked her backward. Jessie’s legs spun out. She yelped as she caught tread off the gold trim of the speeding sports car. Silas’s voice growled something in her ear as he wrenched her back with monumental effort, muscles taut against her back, wrapped like iron around her ribs. Somehow, the world whirling in a blur of limbs, metal, and asphalt, he launched them both into the same alley she’d just vacated. Headlights twisted into shadow, the wind slammed out of her lungs, and then there was only broken cement at her back.
    Shock filtered through her muscles, turned them to icy liquid as she stared into Silas’s taut, furious face. Dimly she realized that headlights of passing cars grazed over them at too-fast intervals. That the smell of rain-stirred muck and exhaust turned the air to something hard to breathe. Somewhere in the back of her head, a dire warning urged her to get up. Get away.
    But her senses were full of his hands anchored on either side of her head, of her heart pounding a staccato rhythm inside the cage of her ribs.
    “What,” Silas gritted out, his eyes burning into hers, “the hell ?”
    She licked her lips, tasted salt and the faint traces of acid from the rain. “I thought—”
    “Don’t,” he said roughly, and hauled her up by the front of her jacket. He wasn’t gentle as he set her jarringly back on her feet.
    Jessie sucked in a breath. “Don’t what?” Anger and adrenaline-scored fear fueled her, made her reckless as she shoved at his rock-solid chest. “Don’t think? Don’t try to escape from some crazy guy who— Damn it, let me go!” Jessie tipped her face up to his and glared.
    Soaked to the bone, he should have looked comical. Or at least less threatening. His dark hair lay plastered to his head, tendrils dripping into his eyes as his gaze