Chapter 40
A Perfect World
Cha sighed with relief when they burst through the big Moonstone wall and into sunny Obsidian daylight. She shook her head, refocusing her eyes. “It truly isn’t nighttime here. How does that even work?”
Azul shrugged. “I’ve tried to explain this to you already.”
“Yeah, yeah—time moves differently, blah blah blah.” Still, it sucked that it seemed to be well into the morning here in Obsidian, the golden light more like her normal world, the sound of birdsong more comforting than she’d have guessed.
Never would she have predicted that the surreal, twisted landscape of Obsidian would feel familiar.
Almost like coming home. A sign of trauma right there, when a fae realm seemed like home.
But then—she glanced over at Azul, who was fiddling thoughtfully with the Moonruby wand, caught her looking, and gave her a warm smile—when your boyfriend was fae, maybe that wasn’t such a long shot.
She caught herself, tripping on the thought.
Azul is decidedly not your boyfriend, she told herself firmly.
You had a great interlude, but that’s it.
You’re both moving on, so no matter how bone-melting he is in bed, he’s still just a guy who was a lover, past tense emphasized.
She was excused from wrestling herself further by their arrival at the designated rendezvous, basically a wide spot on a side ley, surrounded by trees.
It looked empty, but that should be Dy shrouding them in illusion.
Still, she wanted to proceed cautiously.
“I don’t see them,” she confided to Azul quietly, “but—”
“But they’re right there,” he interrupted, pointing.
“How can you see through my illusion?” Dy demanded.
Actually, it looked to Cha like a bush asked the question in Dy’s voice, but it quickly morphed into the petite blonde.
Big Betty shimmered into view behind her, giving a muted trumpet of greeting, while Warg spilled halfway and haphazardly out the window of the cab, warbling happily, a single line of drool spilling from his jaw to the ground.
Azul squared off with Dy, looking slightly taller to Cha’s eye than he had a moment ago. “Your sorcery is very good,” he told her in his usual nonchalant style, which meant he sounded arrogant as a…well, as a fae prince. “It is not, however, better than mine.”
Dy’s corkscrew curls practically unscrewed themselves as she puffed up in righteous fury, poking Azul in the chest. “Listen, you. I don’t know who in the seven hells you are, but I do know you’ve been a nearly fatal distraction for my best friend and if you think you can just seduce her, ruin our gig, and stiff her the coin you owe, then—”
“Dymphna,” Cha said, interrupting and interposing her body between them. Azul took the opportunity to surreptitiously palm her ass, so she elbowed him in the ribs, eliciting a satisfying grunt from him. “He saved my life.”
Azul made a tsking sound and Dy’s eyes widened into pale blue halos around suspicious black pits. “You shouldn’t say that aloud, Cha.”
“No, she shouldn’t,” Azul agreed. They exchanged a look of surprise, reminding Cha of her unexpected synchrony with Phinny.
Dy soon returned her furious scrutiny to Cha. “And this outfit? It positively reeks of Amethyst magic. Do I even want to know where these clothes came from and what happened to your old ones?”
Cha barely resisted looking at Azul. “It really is such a long story and I promise to tell you all of it when we are safe. Let me just say that I spent some time in Moonstone jail.”
“What?” Dy’s sweet face whitened to a mask of tight horror. “Oh Cha. No. Did you go after Monat then? What did you—”
“Monat is dead,” she told Dy without preamble, figuring it was best to rip the bandage off. “I’m sorry, but she died in Moonstone. I found evidence.”
“What evidence?” Dy asked in that even tone she used when she was fighting not to melt down, her big blue eyes swimming with tears that Cha viciously hoped Dy wouldn’t shed. If Dy started crying, then she would, too, and that would wreak at least a first hell on her badass reputation.
Cha fished out the nose ring and laid it in Dy’s palm. “I found this in the washroom for humans. You know she’d have only removed it for one reason.”
“To leave a clue,” Dy said, wrapping her fingers around the ring, her voice watery. “How did she die?”
“You don’t want to know. No,” Cha said firmly when Dy opened her mouth to argue. “I will not tell you, but it nearly happened to me. Would have if Az—” At his hiss of warning, she hastily corrected, “if Prince Charming here hadn’t gotten me out.”
Dy closed her mouth. Nodded to Azul. “Fine.”
“Fine,” he echoed grinning at her cheekily.
She turned back to Cha, visibly gathering her poise. “What happened at the Moonstone meet? You were right behind me and—”
“Do we have time?” Cha asked. “No, we don’t,” she said firmly when Dy looked mutinous. “I promise to tell you everything later. On the porch at your place, over ale and Phin’s rosemary twists.”
“Fine,” Dy agreed, then added, not too grudgingly, to Azul. “You’re invited, too.”
The fae prince looked puzzled and taken aback. Cha had half expected him to refuse with his characteristic hauteur. She had to admit, she really couldn’t picture the elegant man chilling his ass on Dy and Phin’s rustic porch, the kids screaming and flinging mud and fish slime.
“I would like that,” he said slowly, as if the words felt strange in his mouth. The truth, of course, as he couldn’t say anything else, but flavored with the regret of knowing it would never happen. He met Cha’s gaze over Dy’s head and nodded minutely in mutual understanding.
She was the first to look away, clapping her hands together briskly. “Let’s get the parade moving. Were you able to juice up?” she asked Dy, tipping her head at Big Betty.
“Yes, but have you?”
Unable to repress a smile at how very well she and Katu had both been replenished, she nodded, catching the pleased glitter in Azul’s eyes.
Dy made a sound of exasperation. “It’s like being caught in a heat ray standing between you two. Were Phin and I this bad?”
Cha nearly answered yes, then realized Dy’s implication. “Not the same thing at all,” she answered crisply, wrenching her gaze from Azul’s compelling one. “Ready to do the thing?”
“Ready,” Dy said, looking between them with a quiet somberness Cha didn’t care to explore. Dy fastened her gaze on Azul. “Since your sorcery is so much better than mine, Prince Charming, can you assist with hiding us if I falter?”
He bent in a sweeping bow that gave Cha an absurd wave of pleasure, including a surge of pussy sparkle that would never again be satisfied, curse it. “I would be honored, Goldilocks.”
“For coin, glory, and thrills!” Cha pumped her fist in the air, wishing she felt it more.
“Let’s haul ass and get home already,” Dy agreed, with a similar air of deflated resolve.
It wasn’t quite their old rallying cry, but it came close. Rest in peace, Monat.
*
“What happens now?” Azul asked as they slid into their seats in Katu.
“Ideally, in a perfect world, Dy will easily establish her workaround ley, we’ll hop on it, loop around the depot undetected, come out the other side and blend with the normal import/export traffic.
Then we cross the border back into Gypsum with no trouble, hightail it to whatever fence Phinny will find for us, hand off the Obsidian dust and the astra inside, which you still haven’t told me what it is… ” She trailed off hopefully.
“It’s better off in the human realms is what it is,” he replied in clipped tone.
“So you’re not going to tell me—or is this a geas thing?”
He gave her a long, serious look. “I don’t actually know what the astra is. That’s a generic term for something quite politically tricky within the fae realms and you are better off knowing less than more. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Well, if that’s your way of warning me off, it won’t work. I’m going to have to find out what it is to sell it.”
He smiled thinly, unhappily. “Just…go carefully, Arantxa. Don’t mix with things beyond your ken.”
“I’m a pro,” she assured him breezily. “This is totally my ken.”
“Keep my words in mind. Promise me you will.”
“You know promises aren’t binding to humans.”
“They are to you. Promise me anyway.”
“Fine, fine. I promise I’ll bear in mind that this is all politically tricky and my ken isn’t up to snuff for comprehending it all.”
He smiled. “That works.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “once we identify the astra thing, we’ll sell it, and it won’t be our problem anymore. We’ll take our big pile of coin and head to Dy and Phin’s cottage for ale and rosemary twists. Peasant food,” she added with a sly smile for him, “but delicious.”
“No doubt.” He set a hand on her thigh and caressed the inner curve. “I’ve discovered a recently developed taste for all things human and peasant.”
“All?” she countered archly.
“A select few,” he allowed, then pulled his hand away, alas. “You know I can’t go.”
To Dy and Phin’s cottage for ale and rosemary twists.
Yeah, she knew that. Dy had laid down the beginning of the work-around ley line, so Cha sent Katu down it.
It prickled the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades to be doing this in broad daylight, but she trusted Dy—and Azul—to keep them hidden.
The ley line felt good, maybe a little too good, not nearly as fragile as the one Dy had created on their way in.
Likely the sorceress had abandoned using a thin line to keep attention away and was relying on her and Azul’s ability to glamour to protect them.
The teamwork that included Azul gave her a warm, fuzzy feeling that she resented mightily.
Probably she should enjoy the moment, but the looming future where all this would be gone gnawed at her.
Might as well embrace the disappointment now and get used to it.
Speaking of which… “I assume you want to be dropped off at Lenorae’s family domicile of doom? ”
He considered. “How close can you get me?”
“Well, as I don’t know the exact location, I can’t answer that with authority, but I can get back to the spot where I picked you up.”
“I can guide you from there, unless you’d rather not get too close.”
“Hey, door-to-door service is all part of what we provide here at Bandit Express.” Besides, she really wanted a good look at Azul’s future bride.
How else would she torment herself at night imagining him with her, wrapping the bitch in his glorious wings and doing to her what…
Yeah, self-destructive was Cha’s middle name and she was at peace with that.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of a way to resume semi-normal conversation after that exchange.
Mostly the demand to know why he had to go back to that unsavory situation battered at the backs of her teeth.
He couldn’t answer and, even if he could, she wouldn’t like what he had to say and it would change nothing, so she clamped her jaws down hard to keep any whining and clinging from escaping.
Azul sensed her mood. Or felt the same. Whatever, because he was quiet for a while, the silence stretching uncomfortably. “It’s never a perfect world,” he finally said.
At first Cha thought he meant their inevitable parting and his even more certain dismal unhappiness at Lenorae’s hands.
Was it so wrong to hope Azul would be miserable with his ideal bride?
A better woman would be able to wish him happy, but Mrs. Evermore’s little troublemaker had never been destined to be a better person.
Cha viciously hoped Azul would pine away for her, forever regretting that he didn’t stay with her and…
and what? Live a cozy cottage life with her like Dy and Phin?
Have half-fae/half-human babies and send the sulky, criminally minded critters off to Miss Mulry’s?
No no no. She shuddered at the image. No amount of rosemary twists could make her want that life.
“Not even a close to perfect world,” she agreed. “It’s all right. I know you have to go get married to Lenorae.” She didn’t quite spit the woman’s name and was proud of herself.
He gave her a quizzical glance. “I meant your list of all that needs to go correctly in the next little while.”
Oh. Well, fuck her life and her stupid heart blabbing out nonsense.
“That’s why they pay us the big bucks—this isn’t a corporate cargo run.
This is dangerous living and we’re the best.” The depot loomed nearby, not nearly as sparkly as at night, but still glittering like a bedazzled starfish in the morning light.
“Besides, we nearly have the first bit done.”
She really shouldn’t have jinxed them like that because right then, Dy’s sorcery flickered through the ley line, slowing them. “Bandit,” she said on the amethyst channel. “We’ve got a problem.”
“I’ve got a solution,” Cha replied. “Give me a slingshot.”
“Won’t help. Take a gander.”
Cha stood in the driver’s seat and shaded her eyes. An Obsidian blockade sat across Dy’s ley line, a row of winged Obsidian fae holding spears leveled right at them.
“Fuck me,” she said, on a sigh. It really never was a perfect world.