The spotlight illuminated the way in front of them as they picked up speed and the nose of the boat lifted from the water. Jeremy unlocked Sean’s phone. He furrowed his brow, then took a deep breath and tried to dial Caleb’s number from muscle memory. It worked.
“Yo, man.” Caleb shouted, “It’s a relief to hear from you.”
“Sean and I washed up on the roof of a building,” Jeremy shouted back to be heard over the boat’s motor. Caleb’s end sounded loud as well, crashing and splashing and whatever else was going on around them.
“That’s good!” Caleb yelled, “I’ve got Moira and Richard and Atticus. The only person missing then is Aiden.”
“Richard and Aiden?”
“Sean’s like…bodyguards or whatever.”
“Right, okay,” Jeremy rubbed his forehead, “Are you still at the tree?”
“Yeah.” Caleb cursed and it sounded like the phone banged into something. Jeremy winced and held Sean’s phone away from his ear.
“Sorry.” Caleb said, “Yeah, we are still at the tree. Seems to be relatively safe. Relatively.”
“Alright, some of Sean’s people picked us up. We’re heading your way to grab you soon.”
“I’d hurry up or not come at all.” Caleb warned, “Shit’s getting really crazy here.”
Jeremy swallowed. He could not really imagine what might be crazier than the whole river getting dumped on the city, but he was sure he was about to find out.
They dropped Sean, Leon and Zanie off at the truck. Zanie tried to insist that Jeremy come to the hospital with them. He had almost drowned after all. But he insisted he was fine and the bloodstains on his back were so bad because of all the water making the blood get everywhere, not because he actually bled that much. He had no idea, but his chest felt like a hot air balloon, ready to pop, pumped up by gnawing anxiety that would not stop until he knew that Caleb, Moira, and Atticus were all okay.
He and Juan puttered their way back down the street toward the looming dryad tree. Most of the buildings immediately surrounding it had been leveled. Now that it stood alone for several blocks, it seemed even more massive than when he first saw it rising out of the intersection. Its top branches disappeared into the shadowy night, making it difficult to estimate exactly how far they stretched.
They approached cautiously at first, but the dryad and kelpie did not appear to be near. The surface of the water was calm. Juan steered the boat closer to the tree, and Jeremy started shouting. Caleb hollered back almost immediately. The boat pulled under the bough that they clung to. Moira looked passed out where she was draped across the limb but opened an eye when they approached. One of the goons, Richard, sat on her other side.
“Hurry, hurry.” Caleb urged, “They are under the water right now. We’ve got to get out of here.”
He tugged Atticus off the tree. It was like tearing apart Velcro. Atticus yowled and stretched as her claws clung to the tree bark. Finally, Caleb yanked her free with a shower of bark bits and tossed her at Jeremy. He stowed her under one of the seats on the boat. Juan said something in Spanish to Richard, who just rolled his eyes in response.
“Why the hell is she out of the carrier?” Jeremy yelled. Caleb glared at him from where he was helping Moira sit up.
“You try hanging onto that maniac cat while she’s doing her best to get out of the carrier.” He grumbled, “She almost got knocked off so many times. But when I let her out, she hung onto the branch. She’s a smart cat. She can take care of herself.”
“Well, where’s the carrier now?” Jeremy held up his arms to grab Moira around the waist and make sure she got into the boat okay. Caleb glanced around and shrugged. Jeremy shook his head.
“You okay?” he asked Moira as she settled onto the seat over top of Atticus.
“Tired.” She said blandly, “Sorry I dropped us. I guess there is a time limit for how long I can change.”
“Well.” Jeremy shuffled out of the way to make room for Caleb and Richard, “We know that now.”
The boat rocked dangerously as Caleb and Richard settled. Jeremy turned to tell them to settle down a bit but stopped short when he saw they were not moving. The boat was being rocked by the movement of the water beneath them. Caleb started humming the Jaws tune.
“Oh my god,” Moira pronounced each word slowly and filled with rage. “Will you please stop?”
Jeremy could imagine that Caleb had been a little shit non-stop. That’s just how he was when he was anxious. He probably spent the entire fight narrating it like a WWE announcer. As tired as Moira was, her nerves had to be pretty raw. Caleb scowled at her, apparently also a little more frazzled than usual.
“We should get out of here,” Richard said with the thready exhaustion of a mother who just braved the grocery store with her two hungry, tired, bickering toddlers. Juan offered him a smoke, then steered the boat away from the tree.
The water around them heaved, not like it was being churned up by the wind, but as if they were in a boiling pot. Jeremy got a terrible feeling, the tips of his toes and fingers buzzing as adrenaline flooded his veins. Atticus yowled. Moira glared at her.
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Then, the water to their right exploded skyward in a violent eruption. It showered over the boat. Jeremy had been slowly drying out, but now he was soaked again. They all stared up at the huge tree that burst through the water and rapidly grew above their heads. Everyone except Juan, who cursed and stuck his cigarette between his lips so he could use both hands to steer the boat around all the trees that were suddenly popping out of the water.
They were not as large as the dryad tree. Its crown was expansive, like a tree that had flourished in the middle of a field before the rest of the forest grew up around it. The other trees were thinner and grew taller. Their trunks and boughs creaked as they expanded upward, sending waves in all directions and rocking their little boat terribly.
But Juan was on his game. He furrowed his brow and muttered around his cigarette as he navigated through the trunks and over the waves. They broke away from the sudden forest, back onto the narrow, flooded street where buildings still stood on either side. Behind them, an entire forest reached skyward, breaking apart further buildings and leafing out into verdant green.
“Let’s never do that again,” Moira muttered as she clung white-knuckled to the edge of the boat. Juan poured on the speed, and they bopped down the street toward the edge of the flooded area. When they got there, the National Guard had arrived.
They were setting up medical tents at what they thought was a safe distance away from where the water finally gave way to the roads again. People ran around with urgent expressions, directing supplies and roadblocks to where they needed to be. Shallow boats on trailers were being backed up to the water. In some cases, they were being carried by groups of soldiers.
Juan and Richard hauled their boat onto dry land. Jeremy cradled a damp and angry Atticus to his chest, flanked on either side by Moira and Caleb. They watched as Juan stopped one of the groups carrying a boat to the water.
“Command center?” he asked, pointing to the tent. Floodlights were being set up around it. A helicopter chuffed by above them, sweeping spotlights over the buildings. The soldier nodded to Juan.
“I’m going to go get us a ride,” Juan told their group.
The ground vibrated beneath their feet, sending water splashing against the asphalt and knocking several of the metal floodlights over. Juan stumbled on the way to the command tent. The soldiers carrying the boat cursed and lost their footing, dropping the boat to keep their balance.
“First all this flooding,” One of them muttered, “And now an earthquake?”
A loud crashing noise drew everyone’s attention to one of the taller high rises behind where the command center was set up. The minimal lighting on the street was enough to illuminate a glittering cascade of shattered glass. The windows were shaking out of their frames as the vibrations rippled up the building.
“Shit.” Richard cursed. He shoved them toward the nearest building. The four of them crowded under the cover of a doorway while glass shattered to the ground nearby, crunching into cars and ripping through the command center’s tent. The soldiers who had been carrying the boat quickly lifted it over their heads and crowded beneath it.
“I think you boys set up a little too close,” Richard shouted at them. They looked over with wide, shocked eyes.
“I bet they are miserable right now.” He said under his breath, “Chain of command probably has no idea how to deal with the scope of any of this. And they are the ones getting fucked over.”
“I think everyone’s getting fucked over.” Caleb said.
By the time the tinkling of glass finally tapered off, Juan returned with his jacket held over his head. His boots crunched through the little shards of glass on the ground. Most of it had fallen closer to the building, down the street from where they were huddled, but it also ricocheted off the pavement and cars to spray much further.
Juan let his jacket fall back down and brushed off his shoulders. “They’re going to take you to the hospital. That black truck over there. I’m staying to keep pulling people out. Maybe Aiden will turn up.”
He pointed to a black SUV beyond the roadblock. There was a guy standing beside it, using one of those brushes for shoving snow off cars to push the glass off his windshield. Jeremy realized that he could see the guy's overlay. In all the glittery reflections of the floodlights off the glass, he had missed the moment when he could see all the magic around him again.
“I’m fine,” Jeremy said, eyeing the black truck warily. It looked a whole lot like the official government vehicles that would take people away for them to never be seen again. “I don’t need to go to the hospital.”
Besides, the hospital was probably busy enough and about to get a lot worse. He was fully conscious, and his symptoms were already clearing up. His head still felt a little like it was padded with cotton, but he was sure that would go away eventually.
“You can meet up with Leon there,” Juan said, “He’s still got all your stuff.”
“Maybe we can get someone to check out your back while we are there.” Moira pointed out, “It’s never going to heal at this rate, so maybe they can fix it with a healing spell.”
That was right. The first thing on Jeremy’s ‘list of magic to start learning seriously instead of just running around panicked and disorderly’ was healing magic. The best place to learn about that was probably the hospital. A couple of days ago, Abel had told him that his wife worked at the hospital and was learning quickly how to cast healing spells. He nodded.
“I’ll stay and help you.” Richard said, “Best not to go alone.”
“Okay. You have Sean’s phone, right?” Juan looked at Jeremy, who nodded. “Then you have Leon’s number, so you’ll find him alright.”
He and Richard went back over to the boat. They started tutting angrily about all the glass shards, tipping the boat and trying to shake and brush them away.
“Well.” Caleb said, “Shall we?”
The man trying to sweep the glass from the SUV looked up as they approached. He glanced over them critically, then tossed the brush aside in favor of grabbing a handful of towels from an entire bin full of them in a nearby tent. They stood by and watched as he spread them over the seats.
“Sorry.” He said over his shoulder, “Just didn’t realize they’d be using this vehicle for transporting people to the hospital. If I mess up the seats, my boss will have my head.”
Jeremy thought about his crushed car, all the accidents he’d seen, Sean’s car, which had been flung into the side of a building. He thought about how meticulously the man had been scraping glass off the car, trying not to scratch the paint any more than it already had been. He smiled to himself and shook his head.
They climbed into the car, careful to keep the towels in place. Jeremy got a face-full of air conditioning as soon as the engine started. Out in the muggy summer night, his damp clothes had just felt like another layer of sticky humidity. But now they were chilled against his skin, raising a cascade of goosebumps all over him. He hugged Atticus closer to his chest.
“Can you turn down the A/C?” Moira groused. She shivered beside him. The man looked at them through the rear-view mirror. He wiped a bead of sweat from his temple. The suit he was wearing looked horribly stuffy. Jeremy wondered what the hell he was doing responding to the scene in a suit with a vehicle he was not supposed to get dirty. It seemed a little strange, but his head was all stuffy, and while he was glad he could see the overlays again, they were giving him an actual headache. He rested his head back against the seat and stared out the window, making a note of every street and turn they drove through. Just in case.