~Prologue~
Nothing Like Fae Jail for Exploring Regrets
Life can goto the seven hells faster than you can blink.
You can write that down.Maybe draw some kind of wisdom from it.
Cha wished she could claim to have learned a lesson from how quickly things had gone from excellent to sub-shitty in just a couple of days, but—let’s face it—she’d never been a quick study.Besides which, her life had been far from that great to start.The past just looked that way, all shiny in the rear-view mirror, in comparison to her current situation: stuck in an egg-shaped, bastard-daddy-of-pearl Moonstone fae jail, a short future of torture, inquisition, and execution ahead of her.
It should’ve been a simple job.She sighed, adjusting her battered body into an equally uncomfortable curve of the cell wall, wishing she had a silver coin for every smuggler who’d said the same—right before telling how it had all gone bad.These were the criminal versions of fishing stories.The job that got away.The easy coin that had been anything but.Cha had listened to those tales, even paid for the ale of the sorry teller of them, and pretended to sympathize, all the while feeling smug that she’d never be so stupid, or careless, or short-sighted.
Or fall for the pretty, sweet-voiced bit of man-candy everyone could tell spelled trouble.
Right on schedule, as had happened every three minutes since she’d awakened in this opalescent prison, she thought of him.Azul.Those indigo-blue eyes and hair, those lips, his scent like sun-ripened blueberries, that devastating kiss that had rocked her world and tossed her into an abyss of unrequited lust.
And they’d said it couldn’t happen to her.Not the infamous Bandit, with a stud in every town, and more lined up to volunteer for the opportunity.Falling hard for a guy, especially an unattainable one like the prince he claimed to be, just wasn’t Cha’s style.She’d barely stubbed a toe over a pretty bit of candy in the past.Now she’d broken something deeper than the ribs that hurt with every breath.
Azul was gone, never to be seen again.Her partner, Dy, was hopefully gone, too, and safe.And Cha was alone in fae jail, just as her mother had often predicted during Cha’s admittedly troubled youth.
She should never have listened to Otto’s proposition…
~1~
The Bandit
The jaguar snarledas it tore up the ley line, sparkling white pixie dust billowing in its wake, making a glittering vortex like a phoenix’s blazing tail.Cha mentally tapped into the enchantment stabilizing the line in the current race configuration and used her ley-rider senses to guide the jag as he traveled the floating boundary between the sleek carriage and the track.Looking ahead to the next obstacle in the course, she narrowed her keen eyes at what loomed in the near distance.
That was the key to winning: stay alert and present in the moment, ready to respond to changes fast, but keep an eye on the immediate future.
If she didn’t miss her guess, the final challenge would be… Yep, there it was.The shine of sunlight and magic on a sizeable body of water.Cha was leading the pack for the moment—very few ley riders could compete with her, or her powerful jaguar carriage, Katu—but she didn’t take that lead for granted.Another of her principles for winning: never assume you’ve got it made.Cha liked to win and did her best to ensure it happened as often as possible.
Speaking of not taking the lead for granted, look there: a ley rider she recognized surged up beside her and leapt to the fore.He was driving a sleek cheetah carriage, great for bursts of speed, but not the endurance of a full steeplechase.That bit of inexperienced bravado would cost him.Cha restrained Katu’s territorial instinct to pour on more speed.The water obstacle she’d spied in the distance would require deft navigation.They might be on a smooth straightway for the moment, but this race was a marathon, not a sprint.Something a young, brash ley rider like the cheetah-driver, Garaile, didn’t yet understand, even if he did have an expensive sponsor, probably one of the wealthy fae lords or ladies.Let him give full rein to his new cheetah carriage.Cha could be patient.
The crowd in the stadium roared, urging her on, shouting the handle she’d had since her smuggling days.Bandit!Bandit!Bandit!Everyone loves a champion and Cha had obliged them by being their favorite during her few years on the quasi-legal race circuit.Winning was always a thrill.Not quite as much as smuggling contraband, but it came close.Sex and winning races was all Cha got these days in the way of thrills, ever since her partner had bailed on her for a legit job.
The water hazard loomed into view and Cha studied it, trusting the jag to stay the course on the straightaway.That was another edge they had on the competition: Cha and Katu had been together since he was a kitten, newly enchanted, which was why he would always be her Katu, which meant kitten.They were a seamless team, Katu often anticipating Cha’s intentions, able to follow without explicit instructions, a distinct advantage in situations like this, allowing her to concentrate on sussing out the potential traps ahead.
This one was a doozy.The arena owner had gone all out for this tournament, as Cha had figured he would—gotta keep the crowds entertained—and hired a hydromancer to create a floating lake.
She had only seconds to assess it as they hurtled toward the apparently placid lake.The cheetah put on even more speed, Garaile clearly planning to take the big ramp straight ahead, conveniently positioned for a ley rider to jump the body of water entirely.Tooconvenient.Besides, that was no ordinary lake.The water shimmered with pale yellow magic, promising something else lay beneath.
Cha shook her head to herself, easing Katu back a hair more.No way that ramp would lead to a simple jump.As she slowed, a thoroughbred racehorse carriage shot past her, looking to overtake the cheetah, and the crowds roared their disappointment, shouting her name to urge her on.Bandit!Bandit!Bandit!
They should know to trust her by now.
The racetrack ley line branched just ahead.To most people, the racetrack looked as mundane as the roads they traveled.Anyone could get in an enchanted carriage and use the ley-line roads to get from here to there.But ley riders weren’t most people.If you had a touch of the right magic—which meant one of your human ancestors went and got seduced by a fae, somewhere back in the bloodline—you could be a ley rider.Cha was fully human, humbly so, but she’d come into the world with a good dollop of the right magic.The ley lines lit up for her in brilliant clarity, like rivers of color, allowing her to sense their potency and stability.
At the looming fork, the most robust ley line led to that deceptively promising ramp.Several smaller tracks branched in other directions, offering less-enticing options.Two lines on either side of the ramp would shoot any carriage that missed the ramp straight into the water, a bog-standard penalty for any obstacle on a course like this.One more line, this one decently stabilized, led off to go the long way around the lake, an option for those ley riders whose vehicles couldn’t make the jump.You wouldn’t win taking that route, but you upped your odds of at least finishing, since you also wouldn’t risk a devastating crash.
A fourth, spindly ley line, barely stabilized, coursed directly over the surface of the lake, barely discernible to any but the most experienced eye.But Cha had been ferreting out and riding barely-there ley lines since she hopped into her first kid’s carriage, one enchanted from the faithful family hound, a plodding and gentle creature.
Yep, that ley line sitting on the water surface looked unpromising at best and treacherous at worst, but the racecourse mages who built the ever-changing tracks didn’t leave loose ends.Sure, vanishing or dead-end roads were a regular feature—or a bug—of the rural countryside, where ley lines stabilized by ancient sorcerers rotted away in genteel splendor, used only by the impoverished or desperate.(Cha had been both.) But to deliberately create one on this course that would be soon disassembled was expensive in both time and magic.
Flyboys like Garaile—or that newbie riding the racehorse carriage—wouldn’t know that, but Cha did.She processed all of that information in the time it took her to wink at the crowd as Katu hurtled toward the ramp.After a token battle, Cha allowed the racehorse carriage to jostle past her, the crowds howling disappointment as she dropped into third place.Katu didn’t like it either.He loved to win as much as Cha did.But he went with her direction—and she made sure it looked like she was shooting for the main ramp, like everyone else.
Garaile’s cheetah hit the ramp at full speed.Cha watched him, wincing in anticipation of the surely shocking outcome of that clueless choice.The cheetah carriage hurtled off the end of the ramp, catching air, with plenty of velocity to soar over the small lake to the finish line.Garaile’s premature victory yodel echoed out—then cut off as a virulent yellow tentacle erupted from the lake, snatched them in midair, and yanked them into the water.
On their heels, the racehorse carriage balked at the sight and shied—failing to take the ramp and instead barreling down the boggy ley line to the right.A surprise twist of magic whipped them in a circle, bringing them under the ramp and sending them on a collision course toward the rest of the pack.A greyhound carriage nosing up beside Cha lost control as its rider tried to avoid the crash, unfortunately losing its purchase on the ley line and flipping.Cha grimaced for the rider who, catapulted from the carriage, went spinning across the active line.The protective suits and goggles could do only so much against the potency of direct contact with the high-test Moonstone pixie dust, and the unfortunate rider convulsed in a spastic fit as the mainlined magic scrambled their brains.
