Chapter 41
Hitting the Mobstacle Course
“I don’t suppose you could just use your magic to vanish them?” Cha asked Azul, waving a hand at the line of warriors.
“I actually could,” he answered, “but there would be repercussions.”
Well, things were looking up. “What kind of repercussions?”
“Unpleasant repercussions.”
“More specific, please.”
“War between Amethyst and Obsidian, with the other realms taking one side or the other.”
That didn’t sound so bad to her.
“Worse than the war that originally fractured the veil between the fae realms and the human ones,” Azul added in a philosophical tone.
“Likely with enough wild magic to completely destroy all mortal life.” He smiled placidly when she gave him a sour look.
“But I’d do it for you, darling. Allow me to sweep this minor obstacle from your path and let’s not worry about the fate of the world. All that matters is our love.”
“You’re not funny,” she told him with a scowl, covering up the stupid stutter of her heart at the mention of love, which wasn’t possible, as they’d barely met and were as meant for each other as a fish and a bird.
“How about a solution somewhere between us dying here or destroying creation in an effort to avoid death?”
“Your wish, my command,” he replied easily, uncoiling with inhuman grace from the passenger seat and leaping nimbly from the carriage, deftly avoiding the ley line and strolling toward the line of Obsidian warriors as if out for a walk.
Cha marveled that she’d ever thought him less than fully fae.
Even with the glamour, he radiated a charismatic light all his own.
“Bandit,” Dy said through the path-box, “what is he doing?”
“I don’t know but let’s hope it works.” Cha eased Katu forward in Azul’s wake, drawing the Cinnabar sword and keeping it ready, in case he needed back up.
Azul posed there, hipshot, looking unbearably sexy—Cha even imagined a shadow of violet wings in the air around him—waving his hands as he spun some story.
Or perhaps sang a song? The Obsidian warriors sagged, their spears drooping, then one by one crumpled to the ground, apparently asleep.
Azul dragged a couple of the big men off the ley line as if they weighed nothing, then gestured Cha forward. He leapt in as she pulled up.
“What did you do?” she asked right as Dy asked the same question via the path-box.
“Sang them a lullaby,” he answered calmly. “It won’t last long now that I’ve stopped singing, so we should go.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Cha fired Katu ahead, Big Betty right behind. The depot sparkled with promise, bustling with business. “Not much farther to go. We should be in the clear.”
For the second time, she jinxed herself with her big mouth. A flood of law-hounds poured out of the depot, headed their way on newly laid ley lines. “Fuck me,” she commented.
“It’s almost like you should stop saying stuff like that,” Azul said.
“Amen, Prince Charming,” Dy put in.
“Don’t you two tag-team me,” Cha bit out, understanding a bit more how Dy felt on the rare occasions Cha and Phinny agreed. “Dy, make yourself useful and put on the lightning.”
“We can’t outrun them,” Dy protested.
“You don’t have to. That’s why you have me.” She grinned at Azul. “Ready to make yourself useful?”
“I thought I already did.”
“You did and you will. Don’t glamour us until I say so. Hiding the dirty pics, Goldi.”
Dy’s sigh came through audibly, but she also swept into Cha’s mind, potent and poised to act.
“Time to go cross-country, boy-o,” Cha told Azul. “This is when it gets interesting.”
He sighed dramatically. “Every time you say that I—seven hells!”
Katu pitched over a gully, nearly expelling the unprepared prince, Dy’s impromptu ley line uncoiling bare arm’s lengths ahead of them.
It was fast, but rickety-fragile, being spun up so fast on unfriendly ground.
Cha whooped, drawing attention as they emerged from Dy’s protective illusion.
“Can you pied-piper them?” she called over the wind of their passage.
“Can I what?”
“Don’t you know any human tales?”
“Why would I?”
He had a point, but she growled in frustration. “Use your magic song thingy to get them to follow us instead of Big Betty.”
“I think that’s not a problem,” he replied, craning his neck. “They’re following us—and gaining fast. Why does this feel oddly familiar?”
“Just like old times,” she agreed. An unexpected surge of nostalgia hit her that she and Azul already had old times together. “Only I doubt there’s a convenient sudden canyon down to an Obsidian mine nearby.”
“My heart breaks.”
She laughed at his dry humor, knowing better what it was now. Also that gave her an idea. “Hey Goldilocks—you know Santa’s Village?”
“You want a shortcut to it?”
“Please and thank you.”
The ley line shifted, careening abruptly to the right, and she followed it, Katu bouncing over the magical equivalent of potholes in the hastily constructed ley line.
The ground beneath, salted to prevent exactly this kind of thing, resisted Dy’s sorcery in fits and starts, sending Katu flying into the air to jounce down again. “I hate your world,” Azul gritted out.
“Technically this is your world, not mine,” Cha replied, though privately she agreed with the major level of suckage at the moment. It was too jolting to even be exciting.
“Obsidian is no more my world than yours,” Azul said with a sneer she didn’t need to see.
The tourist village rushed toward them, in all its fanciful gingerbreading and tinkling music, the narrow, rainbow-cobblestoned streets thronged with tourists. “This will be a treat,” Cha noted.
Dy’s ley line threaded them straight for the main street, the law-hounds doing their best to crawl up Katu’s ass, shouting orders and sending up sparkly flares.
Fortunately, the show alerted the people—human families and fae shopkeepers and performers alike—of their high-speed arrival.
The music squealed up to a glass-shattering pitch of alarm, then cut off, replaced by the screams of scattering people.
Katu shot past colorful stalls selling ribbons, horns, wings and assorted other souvenirs.
“Need anything—new wings, maybe?” she asked Azul, sparing him a sly sideways grin.
“Cute,” he answered huffily. “My own are much better.”
“I’ll say.”
Behind them, the fae law-hounds slowed—not because they cared about not hitting the people, but because the ley line was breaking up—and one skidded sideways abruptly as one end of the carriage hit a null spot while the other had a hold of a bit of ley line still.
The carriage careened into a stall full of false wings, sending up a cloud of rainbow glitter along with an Obsidian fae rider, then abruptly popped into lion form.
The lion shook herself, roared her displeasure, and promptly took off chasing a screaming human.
“Oops,” Cha said to the rear-view. Couldn’t be helped though.
Katu was mostly going on momentum at this point, Cha basically bouncing him from one point of ley magic to the next, like a rock skipping over a pond.
She aimed for the shortest cut through to the parking ley, hoping they could make it.
“Once we’re past the crowd, drop the cloak,” she told Azul.
“Got it.”
“Here we go.” Urging Katu into a last skip through the decaying ley line, Cha pushed him up and over a magic slide in the kiddie playland, taking advantage of the extra boost to send him flying through the air to land with a bang on the parking ley.
Slow black is slow, but at least it was steady, unlike the patchy shit that was all that remained of Dy’s impromptu ley line.
With any luck, Dy had made it around the depot and even now cruised down the Black Thirteen to the border.
Navigating the molasses-slow parking ley, Cha kept one eye out for kids popping out from behind parked cars—something that happened with unnerving frequency—and popped on their private Amethyst channel. “Shook the tail in fantasyland,” she reported. “You clear?”
“Free and clear, sailing down the noir one-three to the BX,” Dy replied. “I’ve got some extra juice so I’m leaving some white behind. Quite the party here.”
“Excellent. Catching up.”
“Translation, please?” Azul inquired on a drawl.
“Dy is adding Moonstone white to the Black Thirteen ley line to speed things up. Other ley riders are jumping on the free speed boost. That’s a good thing,” she added with a glance at him.
So pretty, with his hair disarrayed by the ruffling breeze, golden late morning light dancing over him.
“If everyone is exceeding the standard ley speed, then it makes it harder for the law hounds to pick out any one violator.”
“Then we’re on the ideal side of the equation?”
“Not quite yet, but getting there.”
As she tore her gaze away, Cha contemplated that “ideal” was the last word she’d use to describe how this had all played out. Translation: shitty situation normal for her.