Chapter 3
Kitchen Table Conversations
Phinny brandished a wooden spoon a finger-length away from Cha’s nose. “This,” she hissed, “is why I didn’t want to let you back into our lives.”
“Phin,” Dy said placatingly.
“Not another word from you,” Phin said to her wife without looking her direction. She drilled into Cha’s gaze with her furious one. “You are like a natural disaster, Arantxa Evermore. You bring destruction with you. I’ve never known another human who could bring so much trouble.”
“I know,” Cha said with sincere regret. Hadn’t her mother told her the exact same thing her whole life? “I’m cursed.”
“You are a curse,” Phinny insisted.
Cha considered that. Could it be? She supposed curses took all forms and that would explain a great deal. “I am sorry, Phin,” she said. “And I told Dy not to come with me.”
Phinny tightened her grip on the spoon, then hurled it across the kitchen, where it clattered against the wall and fell to the floor, startling them all.
The kids had long since gone to bed. They’d eaten Phinny’s excellent supper and now the three of them sat around the kitchen table, drinking ale and trying to talk themselves through the impossible challenge.
Sighing wearily, Phinny sat back in the chair and rubbed her very pregnant belly. “What if I give you my unborn child, you she-devil?” she asked with deceptive casualness. “Will you cease to plague us then?”
“That’s unfair, Phinny,” Dy protested, going around to rub her wife’s shoulders. “Besides, our firstborn is Phin, Jr. He’s the one she should take. And he’s the one with all the talent in being evil, anyway.”
Phinny chuckled despite herself. “You have a point there. That child is practically a demon.”
“Looks like an angel,” Dy sighed.
“Looks like you,” Phinny corrected.
“Like I said.”
They laughed together, Dy bending to lay her cheek against Phinny’s.
Their comfortable intimacy, the quiet, steady bond that allowed them to flow easily from furious with each other to lovingly happy gave Cha a stab somewhere in her mid-ribs.
Not that she’d ever had a yen to settle down and have a passel of kids—even if someone else did all the work of pregnancy and labor—but she discovered a new and unpleasant envy for the easy connection between Dy and her wife.
Phinny hadn’t supplanted Cha in her bestie’s heart.
She truly believed that she and Dy would always have their friendship, but Phinny had become someone who gave her that family connection she’d lost when she’d cut ties with her horrible mother.
They’d both cut off their terrible mothers, something they’d bonded over early and often, but Dy had eventually found happiness and love, whereas Cha…
well, she had Katu and would cherish the big kitten forever.
She didn’t kid herself that, even if she found and rescued Azul, and even if by some miracle he’d found a way to lie when he called her “no one” and “nothing more than a ride,” they’d ever have more than a fling.
A searingly hot fling. World-collapsing orgasms and brain-melting intensity.
A lover that had actually managed to deplete her usually limitless store of sexual energy.
Azul had managed to wring her dry, leaving her boneless and thoughtless for the first time in her fraught lifetime.
More than that, he’d felt like someone she truly connected to. Her person.
But they would never have a cottage and cozy in-jokes.
That was okay, she told herself, as she wasn’t the settle-down-in-a-cottage type.
She was the cruising-the-ley-lines, fighting-the-fae-authorities type.
Still, she missed Azul. Like that annoying feeling of having forgotten something very important.
She’d never needed anyone and she still didn’t.
She could live her life happily and just fine without the fae prince and his snarky ways.
What kind of ate away at her was that she didn’t want to live without him.
And wasn’t that a fine kettle of rotten fish?
While Dy and Phin billed and cooed at each other, making up from their fighting, Cha weighed how much of her determination to rescue Azul came from the sneaky desire—no way would she call it a need—to see him just one more time.
Yes, she owed him her life and a rescue, but in her heart of hearts, and sparkle of pussy sparkles, she had to admit that it all felt like an excuse to see him.
An incredibly dangerous, life-threatening excuse that would likely end in disaster, but…
One more chance to see those incredible amethyst blue eyes and…
“Cha, are you even listening to me?” Dy demanded.
“Yes,” Cha lied, searching her brain to replay whatever Dy had said to her. “You really think loading up Big Betty with agnicurna from Lucky Ducky and Nerd Girl is a viable plan?”
Dy gave her an irritated glare that made it clear she knew very well Cha hadn’t been listening. “Stop daydreaming about your pussy sparkle and Prince Charming’s blue eyes and pay attention. We need big bribes, Lenorae said.”
“And you lost my box of jewels on your last boondoggle,” Phin added pointedly.
“I didn’t lose them,” Cha replied defensively. “I was abducted by Moonstone fae and thrown in jail. They confiscated everything not an integral part of Katu. I’m lucky I even got him back.”
And that was entirely thanks to Azul. Cha owed him for that as much as everything else put together.
He’d saved her baby cat, knowing how much the jaguar meant to her.
The memory made her newly soft heart feel even mushier.
This was going to have to stop. After this.
Once she’d rescued the wayward prince—and how in the hell had he managed to get himself held prisoner in the palace in Citrine anyway?
—they would have to say goodbye forever. She would move on her with her life.
“Agnicurna is the logical bribe,” Dy pointed out. “It’s cheap for us, the fae all want it desperately, and the Moonstone fae entirely missed it when it was combined with Obsidian black dust. Remember? Nerd Girl said the fae can’t tell the two apart, like they look and feel magically the same.”
“Black dust is not cheap for us,” Cha replied.
Dy gave Cha’s pocket a significant look. “You have a platinum coin now.”
She tried not to wince, fighting the instinctive need to clamp a possessive hand over her pocket.
This was a Very Bad Sign that she wanted to argue that the coin meant more to her than its face value.
The day had come when the Bandit cared about sentimentality more than cold, hard coin and it was a sad and sorry day, indeed.
“Right,” she agreed on a sigh. “So, we go into Obsidian and buy black dust, ostensibly to bring it back here to sell at a profit?”
Dy nodded and Phin tapped blunt fingers on the table. “You say you’ve gone legit after that last bad run,” Phin suggested, thinking it through. At least planning the heist had distracted her from what a terrible idea all of this was.
“That will ruin our rep,” Cha argued.
Phin gave her a look dry enough to suck the moisture out of the ocean. “Everyone knows what a disaster that gig was,” Phinny explained slowly, like she was talking to one of the little kids. “You have no reputation now.”
“Not true,” Cha defended. “We have a shitty reputation for being epic fuckups. That’s not nothing, Mama Bear.”
“Yeah,” Dy chimed in. “Plus, everyone thinks we’re stupid for trusting Otto in the first place.”
“And that we’re a disgrace to smugglers everywhere for coming back with an entire cargo hold of black pixie dust with no coin to show for it,” Cha agreed, slamming her fist on the table.
“That’s right!” Dy pumped her fist in the air. “No other team has taken so much risk for so little return. We are the biggest laughingstock of the criminal world and that’s nothing to sneer at.”
Cha bumped fists with Dy, sharing in the triumph.
Phin looked between them. “Sometimes I really worry about you two.”
“The best part of this plan,” Cha said, ignoring Phinny, “is that we’ll look even more like idiots.
We’ll go into Obsidian, give up a platinum coin to buy all the black dust we can, then take it deeper into the fae realms, where it will lose value exponentially with every border we cross, with the plan to just leave it there and come back empty handed. ”
“They will write epic poems to our idiocy,” Dy hooted with enthusiasm.
Phinny just shook her head, looking pained. “Please don’t wake Inigo. I just got him down.”
“Sorry,” Dy said in a much lower voice. None of them wanted to wake the toddler.
“Can’t you at least try to bring back some yellow dust?
” Phin asked plaintively. “Otto’s down payment covered a lot, but we could use some financial cushion, especially since you quit your day job for the last disastrous gig, and with that shitty rep you two are having so much fun joking about, you won’t be getting any smuggling jobs anytime soon. ”
Dy sobered, looking thoughtful. “Not easy to transport yellow dust.”
“That shit is unstable as the human government,” Cha replied.
“But valuable. Very expensive,” Phin put in. “You wouldn’t have to fill Big Betty. A crate or two would bring in some very nice coin.”
“Could you move it?” Cha asked her.
Phin looked indignant. “I might be Mama Bear now, but I haven’t forgotten everything I knew. Fiery Wench might be retired as a handle, but I’ll wager I’m still far better a fencer than you two are smugglers.”
“I’m sure you are,” Dy told her with obvious affection. Dy had fallen in love with Phinny when she was Fiery Wench, their fan girl and the best fence in the business.
“We’d have to have some way to disguise the yellow dust,” Cha mused. “The Citrine border agents won’t want us to get across with the stuff.”
“The Moonstone agents will want to confiscate it,” Dy said.
“And same on the Moonstone/Obsidian border,” Cha replied.
“Then again crossing from Obsidian back into the human realms.”
“So, even if we can get ahold of yellow dust—”
“Which the Citrine fae won’t want to sell to us. They’re more likely to squash us like the bugs they think we are.”
“We’ll still have three border crossings and five inspections to navigate.”
“I suppose we could set aside some vials of yellow dust to use as bribes for the last four inspections.”
“We still have to figure out how to find, purchase—”
“Or steal,” Cha corrected her.
“Or steal the yellow dust,” Dy acknowledged. “Then we have to disguise it somehow.”
“Maybe Nerd Girl will have ideas,” Cha suggested.
“Good thinking.”
Phin had been watching the exchange like a spectator at a sporting event. “I’m confused—won’t Prince Charming be helpful? He’s Amethyst fae. He should be able to out-magic all of these issues.”
Dy gave Cha a sympathetic look. She understood.
“I highly doubt Prince Charming will be with us,” Cha explained, doing her best to sound insouciant rather than forlorn. “I expect we’ll spring him from whatever plush, luxury accommodations count as genteel captivity in the Citrine Palace and he’ll blow us a kiss and be on his way.”
Phinny gave her an odd look and opened her mouth, but Dy shook her head slightly.
“Oh, stop it, both of you,” Cha directed, tipping her chair back on two legs. “I’m no fragile flower weeping and waiting for some boy. This is a favor for an old friend. Tit for tat. I don’t expect anything from him and he won’t expect anything from me.”
“Except for this ‘rescue,’” Phin pointed out. “Have you wondered what he thinks a human can do that he or his family cannot?”
Politically tricky. “Sometimes, my friend,” Cha said, folding her hands behind her head, “it’s the blundering idiot who breaks into the jail and evades the police.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s just in stories,” Dy said drily.
“And an epic story this will be,” Cha agreed.
“Make it a short story,” Phinny suggested, scowling at Dy. “Because if you’re not back before I go into labor, I’m calling up that cute brunette to hold my hand.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Dy said meekly.
Phin held out her hand and Dy took it. “It’s a good thing I love you so much,” Phinny said, shaking her head in disgust.
“Yes,” Dy agreed fervently, lifting her wife’s hand to kiss it. “A very good thing.”