Chapter 2
Popping the Bubble
Lenorae, as predicted, was not happy. In fact, she was rather epically furious.
The demon had resumed her glamoured form of an astonishingly beautiful human woman with strawberry blonde hair that fell in a straight, gleaming sheet like hammered rose gold nearly to her knees. Her face looked like a flower, dominated by golden eyes.
At the moment, those eyes burned with fiery outrage. “Look, Bridget,” she sneered. “I know humans are stupid, but—”
“What is with everyone calling me stupid lately?” Cha asked Dy.
Dy shrugged. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”
“How dare you interrupt me,” Lenorae nearly howled, clenching her tiny fists by her sides.
Her luscious, artificially perfect figure practically vibrated with rage.
Cha fancied she could see cracks in the glamour—though she didn’t possess that kind of magic, so it was only a happy fantasy—and thought Lenorae’s creamy, flawless skin might start peeling away like old paint, releasing the horrifying monster beneath.
She found it interesting that Lenorae’s vanity led her to using a glamour that made her so lovely to human eyes. Perhaps to fae eyes, as well.
Certainly, she’d created it—or had it created for her—in order to court and seduce Azul. Of course, that meant she or they knew what Azul would find attractive, all the better to sucker him into marrying her.
Strikingly beautiful, was how Azul had described his bride when Cha first picked him up.
Elegant, perfect manners, intelligent, very well educated, witty, excellent conversationalist, impeccable breeding, sweet, gentle, accommodating.
He had gone on rather long with his list of praises.
None of which could really be applied to Cha, except maybe the bit about witty conversation.
Cha knew she was hilarious, even if no one else would admit it.
While Lenorae raged, sputtered, and frothed at the mouth in a decidedly non-gentle, non-sweet and absolutely not-accommodating fashion, Cha considered the conundrum.
If that was what Azul liked—the whole elegant, sweet, and gentle bit, not the raging, sputtering, frothing part—then why had he been into Cha at all?
No one would call her beautiful. Or elegant.
Tall and lean, with her bobbed haircut made famous from her time on the tournament circuit, Cha fell more on the “striking” end of the spectrum.
Most men described her as hot, which had always suited her just fine before this.
Now a treacherous insecure part of her that seemed to be left over from when she was thirteen and crushing hard on the cutest boy in the neighborhood worried that Azul had kicked her to the curb because he just wasn’t all that into her.
She hated feeling that way. Normally she’d say fuck’em if they can’t take a joke, but with Azul…
Cha shook the thoughts away and pointedly looked at the sun. “We’re losing daylight here, Lenny baby sweetheart. Can we wrap up the tantrum and settle into business?”
That shut the fae woman up, her mouth clamping down on her tirade and eyes nearly bulging out of her head. Dy snickered and Lenorae’s head swiveled with uncanny smoothness to fixate a lethal stare on the petite sorceress. “I need Bridget, but I don’t need you, tiny rude human.”
“Whoa there,” Cha inserted. “Goldilocks and I are a package deal. Hurt her and you have nothing.”
“I can defend myself,” Dy snapped at Cha, then pointed at Lenorae. “But… what she said.”
At least Dy hadn’t tested her sorcery against the Ruby fae, as Cha was sure her friend itched to do.
Dy never could resist a challenge. But Ruby was the highest of all the fae realms, which meant they possessed the most potent magic.
Probably Lenorae was minor fae within her realm or she wouldn’t have been relegated to wedding bait and errand girl, but even the lowest, most pitiful Ruby fae outranked and outpowered the most elite of the next realm down, Cinnabar.
Amethyst, Azul’s realm, came after that, followed by Citrine, Moonstone, and finally Obsidian.
Up until this last gig, Dy and Cha, like almost all humans, hadn’t penetrated beyond the depths of the first fae realm of Obsidian.
Frankly, Obsidian was funky enough, but traveling into Moonstone had been…
Cha shuddered internally at the memory. There were no words.
Her human brain could barely comprehend the place, just as her eyes had been unable to handle the glaring white light.
She couldn’t begin to imagine how much stranger Ruby would be.
She really hoped they didn’t have to go there to rescue Azul.
“Your friend sent you to fetch me, right?” Cha asked Lenorae. “We’ve established that.”
“Friendship is a human concept,” Lenorae spat, her disgust twisting her once-pretty lips into something quite ugly. “But yes, I’m to fetch you. You received payment. Now get in the bubble.” She pointed a delicate finger at the conveyance she’d arrived in.
It looked like one of the soap bubbles the kids liked to blow, trying to get them as big as possible before they popped.
This one didn’t pop and wasn’t transparent, instead shimmering with opaque brilliance on Phinny and Dy’s slow-black parking area.
Not incidentally blocking in Katu, who napped in carriage form while Cha visited.
Cha didn’t much like the bubble being so close to her baby cat, but so far it seemed innocuous.
No way, however, was she getting inside that bubble with Lenorae.
“Here’s the deal,” she told Lenorae. “First of all, I did not accept that platinum coin in payment for anything.” She patted the pocket of her pants where she’d safely stowed it. “You gave it to me freely.”
“I did not…” Lenorae’s face reddened further—most reminiscent of her demonic coloring—as she trailed off.
“A mistake, perhaps, but done,” Cha offered with a shrug, but doing a secret, internal dance of joy at outbargaining the fae.
“Now, my partner and I are willing to answer this call from my friend, but our talent is riding the ley lines. He knows that. So, if my friend indeed sent you to find me and added this coin by way of proof of who sent you, then he expects us to ride the leys to get there. You just need to give us directions.”
“Humans can’t ride the leys into Citrine,” she spat.
Cha’s hopes, meager and not terribly buoyant to begin with, sank like unpopped lead bubbles, Dy made a quiet groaning sound.
“Aren’t there ley lines in Citrine?” Cha asked, trying for innocence. “Must be a barbaric place.”
Lenorae glared at her. “Naturally there are, but humans can’t survive a Citrine ley line.”
“Well, duh,” Cha drawled. “Why do you think we invest in these expensive fae-designed animal carriages to ride them? And we’ve coasted yellow pixie dust plenty of times.”
Lenorae had leveled a confused look on Katu, as if she’d never seen an animal carriage before, which Cha knew she had, Katu in particular, as she’d given Azul a ride to the human lands mansion where he’d met up with his former bride to do fae-knows what. Get abducted into Citrine, apparently.
“Pixies have nothing to do with ley lines,” Lenorae informed them with testy loftiness.
“They don’t?” Cha widened her eyes in incredulity. “I thought ley lines were made of ground-up pixies.”
Dy snorted at her sarcasm. Just because humans called the magic substance “pixie dust” didn’t mean anyone actually believed it had to do with pixies, but the same thing that rendered the fae unable to lie gave them a certain literalness and made them dense to humor and metaphor.
Azul had been much the same, at least at first. After a while, however, as he’d thawed and revealed more of the person beneath the icy, regal facade, he’d demonstrated surprising wit and sensitivity.
In fact, he’d seemed so plausibly human even at the beginning that Cha only briefly doubted his cover story.
Yes, he’d used glamour to disguise the fact that he was fully fae as opposed to being a noble human with fae blood cosplaying to look more exotic—a common practice among an elite set of humans.
But most fae, with Lenorae being a prime example, simply couldn’t fake humanity. Azul could and had.
Which made her wonder if he had lied when he said she meant nothing to him.
Wishful thinking, she chided herself. That the fae can’t lie is established fact. You’re just listening to the pussy sparkle and your stupid heart which you should never have lost to him in the first place.
“We’ll worry about safely traveling the ley lines,” Dy was telling Lenorae, admirably keeping on topic. “Your job is to tell us what we need to know. Where are we going and why?”
Lenorae fumed, but didn’t flounce as Cha had half expected her to do.
She’d been braced for the fae demon to tell them to fuck off and leave Azul to whatever dire predicament consumed him.
She seemed invested, however, in Azul’s wellbeing and rescue—if that’s what this mission was—if only because her own agenda rested on wedding him.
Politically tricky, Azul had called the situation.
Boy howdy, as it turned out the Obsidian pixie dust she and Dy had smuggled out of Moonstone had been fully interlaced with agnicurna, an explosive substance that could be used to circumvent fae magic and serve as a devastating weapon in the wars between the fae realms.
Considering it had been one of those ancient wars that shattered the barriers between the fae realms and the human ones, any kind of leveling up in the hostilities between the fae royal families boded no good for humans.
Worst of all, the agnicurna contamination ruined the black pixie dust, rendering it useless—and worthless.
Instead of a huge payday, Dy and Cha had returned broke, without even Phinny’s chest of bribery jewels, and—in Cha’s case—a little broken-hearted.
But they’d escaped with their lives, which had been a narrow thing.
Phinny wasn’t wrong that they were crazy to consider going back.
“The Citrine palace,” Lenorae finally bit out. “My fiancé is trapped and requires your assistance in extracting him.”
“Ruby outranks Citrine,” Dy pointed out, after exchanging a confused look with Cha. “So does Amethyst, for that matter. Why don’t you ‘extract’ your fiancé? Or why doesn’t his family bring leverage at this point?”
“We have our reasons,” Lenorae answered stiffly. And said nothing more.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you do,” Cha drawled. “Anything actually helpful you can tell us?”
Lenorae smiled, and it wasn’t a pleasant look at all. “I suggest you bring bribes. Big ones.”
She sashayed away, seeming to glide just above the lavender-tipped grass, though that was no doubt the glamour. Disappearing into her golden bubble, she rose into the air and was gone.