As soon as I kick Captain Creepy out of my car and into the nearby ditch, I speed off down the road, burning rubber and everything like a badass. 

"Kiss my ass, Death Bringer!" I lean out and shout at Felix from my window as I roll past, cackling while he looks on in shock in his dumb pink blazer. 

The Maury-style confrontation I had imagined when I drove up to McDonald's and started screaming at Ender to pay child support would never happen if Felix found out that I was looking for the same person he was. Ender had basically knocked me up, minus the actual fetus. I felt like I had the right to be pissed at this point.

Then my car starts to sputter and shake about two minutes into my drive back down the road until it completely craps out mid-way and comes to a wheezing halt. 

"No," I moan, and I jiggle the key in the ignition and slam my hand against the horn a couple of times, several frantic bleats escaping my car as if it were a dying sheep in the middle of a field. "No! This can't be happening right now!" I scream, "You could have at least made it onto the highway, you fucking piece of shit car!"

There's a light tap on my window, and I recoil in my seat and scream this time out of terror until I realize that it's Felix again and that he'd run down the road when he saw my car break down.

"Hey!" He tells me, "Are you okay? I heard you screaming!"

I roll down my window with a frantic squeak, and it takes at least a whole minute because my car is dead and I had to manually roll it down using the crank by my knee, so I finally give up once it's a few inches down enough for me to talk to Felix through the window.

"Bitch! Do I fucking look okay?" I snap at him, all sweaty and panting at this point. "I'm supposed to be halfway to New York by now after blowing you off. This wasn't part of the plan!"

"Oh," Felix replies, but it's the kind of "Oh" reserved for disappointed parents when they find out that their kid had flunked out of art school and joined a cult instead of actually doing something with their lives. "It's partially my fault," he admits. 

"Hold on. Did you do something to my car?" I demand through the crack in the window, my breath fogging up the glass. "You know that's borderline psychotic, right?"

Felix smiles a small smile, his pink-lip gloss-stained lips forming a thin line. "I'm a Death Bringer," he informs me sweetly. "In Japan, they call us Kami. We're basically the equivalent of lantern fish luring people to their deaths."

Oh, fuck.

"Look, man," I tell him. "If you messed with my car just so you could kill me, then go ahead and do it. I should have died last night when the world was supposed to end, but I smothered the Harbinger with a pillow and basically saved the world. The thing is, nobody tells you how creepy it is to wake up like you're Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I'm literally traumatized right now."

"You could just ask me to start up your car again," Felix points out. 

I give him a quick sidelong glance, not sure what this guy was up to or what he was planning.

"I'm going to have to ride with you to New York, though. The car won't go unless I'm in it." The little sparkly shit adds in quickly.

There was nothing else I could do, so I finally agreed to let him ride with me, this time in the front seat, in case he decided to slit my throat from the back seat. At least I would know what was coming before it happened.

"Get in," I growl at Felix, and I reach over to pop open the door. "And don't touch me."

Felix hops into the seat beside me and hums a happy little tune under his breath as he buckles up, which seemed irrelevant considering he was death incarnate. Then he glances up at me and smiles even wider until I gesture to the dashboard with one open hand and open my eyes wide.

"Oh!" He jolts forward a little, "The car! Right!"

I watch as he stretches out a hand and touches the front part of my dash, his eyes closing. A second later, the car begins to rumble and groan without me even touching the key or pressing the gas, and I freeze for a second, wondering how this is real.

 I finally grab the key and give it a twist, and sure enough, the car rumbles to a start. It shakes like crazy, but it starts rolling forward as soon as I press down on the gas. 

"See?" Felix smiles over at me and says, "Didn't I tell you? I wasn't lying."

It felt good for a moment to know that I was going to at least make it to the city, but I didn't trust him worth a damn, and I sure as hell wasn't going to drag him all the way to New York with me, even though I'd promised that I'd take him there. Because if this guy really was a Death Bringer or Kami, or whatever he had called himself, I couldn't afford to have something like that hanging around if I found Ender, the only guy in the world who could usher in the apocalypse. 

"Can we listen to Disney songs on the way there?" Felix asks me cheerfully, and he pulls out his phone to start scrolling through his playlist. "I feel like it's a Hercules kind of day, don't you?"

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.