Chapter 4
Who You Gonna Call?
“You want to buy agnicurna?” Nerd Girl repeated, clearly perplexed.
She tipped down her protective glasses—an unlikely piss-green—and stared at them over the top.
Very short, and with spiky vermillion hair, the scientist/sorceress sat on a high stool at her lab bench, sneakered feet propped on a rung so her bony knees poked up. “Why come to me?”
“Because you already know about our previous, ah, encounter with the stuff,” Cha answered.
“We want to keep this quiet,” Dy added. “And we need your advice.”
“Sounds illegal. What’s in it for me?”
Cha leaned her hip against the lab bench. “You met us because Lucky Ducky hired you.” Lucky Ducky was the fence Phin had called in to handle their haul from Moonstone, such as it was.
Nerd Girl shrugged. “Not saying I won’t do it, just that the price goes up in proportion to the likelihood of me getting stuck in fae jail. I may be short and scrawny, but I like my body the way it is, thank you very much.”
As the fae had a tendency to inflict punishment by way of various mutations—or perhaps it was experimentation—on human inmates, Cha could understand Nerd Girl’s caution. Cha was lucky she’d gotten out of Moonstone jail with only a bit of minor torture and no additional appendages.
“What if we offered you some pure yellow pixie dust, straight from the source?” Dy asked casually.
Nerd Girl almost fell off her stool. “Seriously?” she squeaked. She glanced wildly about the pristine lab space. Grimy windows looked out on one of the seedier sectors of Rockton. “Do you know what I could do with pure yellow?”
Cha followed her gaze, not really comprehending the significance of the various bubbling flasks springing ponytails of tubing and sealed bottles with ominous looking contents. She had no idea what any of that stuff did. “No?”
“Neither do I!” Nerd Girl answered gleefully. “And I want to find out. How much can I have?”
“That depends,” Cha said decisively, cutting off Dy the softhearted, who was frankly a terrible negotiator. “Besides a source for agnicurna and instructions on mixing it with Obsidian dust to disguise it from the fae authorities, we need a method for concealing the Citrine dust on the trip back.”
Nerd Girl goggled. “You’re actually going to Citrine?”
“You don’t need to know that part,” Cha informed her. “You’re better off not knowing that part.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” As it was, the scientist/sorceress swallowed nervously, glancing out the windows as if someone might be looking into the tenth story lab. “Are you two insane?”
“In a word,” Dy put in, “yes. But we plan to come out again and with high grade yellow dust. How much we can put in Big Betty depends on how much we can effectively disguise.”
“Hmm.” Nerd Girl spun idly on her stool as she considered the problem. “You’re leaving the agnicurna behind?”
“Yes,” Dy answered, figuring they’d already trusted their would-be accomplice with plenty of information and a titch more wouldn’t make that much difference. “We figure to load up Big Betty with agnicurna, buy black dust in Obsidian to mix it with, then dispense with it… elsewhere.”
“You think the Citrine fae are going to trade you yellow dust for agnicurna?” Nerd Girl pondered the question. “You have this deal set up?”
Cha simply grinned at her, saying nothing. Wasn’t her problem what conclusions Nerd Girl came to. “Can you help or not?”
“I want a case of yellow dust.”
Cha burst out laughing. “I thought you were a scientist, not a comedian.”
Nerd Girl glared at her. “I can give you a way to hide ten—no, twelve—cases of pure yellow. I think one of them in return for that is a fair deal.”
“And I think that’s highway robbery,” Cha retorted.
Nerd Girl smiled thinly. “That’s your department.”
“Ha ha.”
“That’s my deal. Take it or leave it.” Nerd Girl spun away, adjusted the dials under a bubbling flask and vented some kind of mist that smelled of magic.
“But if you leave it,” she added without looking back, “you’re not going to find anyone else willing to touch this.
You two are box office poison at this point. ”
Dy met Cha’s gaze and shrugged ruefully. “There were extenuating circumstances.”
Nerd Girl snorted indelicately. “Yeah. The Moonstone fae, who you’re going to have to elude more successfully this time if you plan to get all the way through the Moonstone realm to Citrine, where not incidentally, no human has ever gone. At least, and lived to tell about it.”
“Aren’t you just a ray of sunshine,” Cha griped. “We have inside help. And a secret weapon,” she added.
Nerd Girl only shook her head. “I don’t need to know. I don’t want to know. I named my price.”
Cha raised her brows at Dy, who nodded. “How would we do it?” Dy asked Nerd Girl.
The scientist/sorceress spun back to bare her teeth at Dy. “You think I’m giving up my secrets for free, Goldilocks?”
“We can’t pay up until we return regardless,” Cha said with exasperation.
“It’s not like I have a case of pure yellow sitting around.
” Yes, humans used yellow pixie dust. Black was most common and the least powerful; white was better; and yellow was the rarest and most valuable—if you didn’t count purple, cinnabar, and ruby dust, which no human ever saw.
Even so, everyone knew the dust the fae exported to human lands was the low-end shit. The fae kept the best for themselves.
“I’ll need an appropriate deposit then.”
That put up Cha’s deal antennae. Nerd Girl had been playing a little game all along, had she? “What kind of deposit?”
“Your Moonruby wand.”
“Now you’re the insane one,” Cha returned in a sugar sweet tone. “Bless your heart.”
Azul had insisted she keep that wand, even though he could wield it far more effectively, being inherently magical and a sorcerer, while Cha was neither.
He’d told her to keep it, saying that she’d find it useful.
When she’d complained that the thing was kind of a dud—she’d only gotten it to do anything sporadically—he’d actually rolled his eyes at her, heavily implying user error.
At any rate, the wand was special and was their secret weapon, so no way was she giving it to Nerd Girl.
“I only want to examine it,” Nerd Girl retorted in disgust. “Just overnight. You’ll have to come back tomorrow anyway to get the agnicurna, which I will generously mix with enough black dust to hide it from detection, and your decoy shipment.
” She tipped her chin at Dy. “You can decide then if you think it’ll work. ”
Cha didn’t like it. “You want to keep this a surprise. If it doesn’t work, we’re shit out of luck.”
It had already been nearly a full day since Lenorae had shown up with her urgent message, wanting Cha to go with her right then.
Cha had known that, by making the choice to take the ley lines with Dy into the fae realms, they were delaying answering Azul’s call by days.
The preparation was necessary, but that didn’t mean she liked it.
Internally, she chafed at every second of delay.
But she did her best not to show it. She’d agreed to Dy’s terms that they do this smart and in Dy’s mind, that meant meticulously lining up every detail.
And meticulous meant slow to Dy.
Not to Cha. She liked fast. Fast cars. Fast men. And getting Azul rescued fast so she could get to work banishing him from her brain again. Not to mention that Phinny wasn’t getting any less pregnant. They needed to get there and back lest Dy miss the labor and suffer the consequences.
“If I can’t come up with a solution for you, no one can,” Nerd Girl replied solemnly.
“That’s why you came to me. So lend me the wand.
Give me overnight to work and come back in the morning.
I think you’ll be pleased with my solution,” she added to Dy.
“You and Big Betty will get the very best protections I can give you for that precious yellow.”
“And the agnicurna problem?” Cha asked, not wanting that detail to get lost. That was how they were purchasing Azul’s freedom—in trade or as extortion. She wouldn’t mind blowing up the Citrine Palace and she’d never even seen the place.
“That part is easy,” Nerd Girl answered, barely glancing Cha’s way. “I’ll have it for you. You only need to mix ten parts agnicurna to one-part black pixie dust to disguise it.”
“That’s all?” Dy frowned. “Seems like there was a much greater balance of pixie dust to agnicurna in the crates we brought back from Moonstone.”
“There was.” Nerd Girl tipped up her goggles and vented a bit more magic vapor. It made Cha’s nose itch. “They vastly overdid it. Whoever mixed it either didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t care how much black dust they ruined.”
“Probably both,” Cha mused. They’d picked up those crates from Otto’s contact at the trade depot in Obsidian. The fae didn’t care much about their own dust or lower. Probably it was like dirt to them. Dirt they could sell to humans for prices to bleed them dry.
Nerd Girl shrugged. “Their issue, not mine. But I was curious, so I ran tests.” She indicated a grid of glass-faced boxes along one wall.
“Ten to one will do it.” Waggling her brows at Dy, she added.
“I suspected smuggling agnicurna into the fae realms would come up again. It pays to plan ahead. Turns out today is payday!” She transferred a sharp look to Cha, her eyes uncomfortably magnified by the goggles, and held out a hand. “Do we have a deal?”
Reluctantly, Cha unclipped the sheath at her belt.
On the one side, she carried the sword Azul had given her when the Moonstone fae confiscated her other.
Red gold with Cinnabar magic, the sword was hugely more powerful than her old one.
That one had been useful primarily to fight off fake monsters in steeplechase tournaments and spank drunk ley riders during bar fights.
She was still figuring out what all the Cinnabar sword could do, but there was nothing fake or playful about it.
She planned to keep it sheathed and out of sight.
In other words, she wasn’t letting Nerd Girl get a look at it. The wand was bad enough. So, she unthreaded the sheathed wand from her belt and—feeling as if she was giving away a little piece of her heart—she handed the wand over to Nerd Girl, sheath and all.
The scientist/sorceress examined it with raised brows. “As a bonus,” Nerd Girl said, hopping off the stool to lay the sheathed wand on a cleared-off workspace, “I’ll share any insights on how to make it work for you. Free of charge.”
“I’ve made it work.” Cha didn’t like parting with the thing, that was the only reason she felt so cranky.
“Uh huh.”
“Listen, Nerd Girl—” Cha began, bristling.
“—to us saying goodbye,” Dy interrupted, pulling Cha away. “Say goodbye, Bandit.”
She threw Dy a dirty look. “Goodbye, Bandit.”
“I love you, too,” Dy answered with a sunny smile.