“Now what?”He sounded almost despairing.
“We didn’t lose the tail.There they are and closing fast.”
“I thought that was a good thing…”
“Yes and no.We drew them off Big Betty: Good.Can’t turn around on an unknown rural ley in Obsidian: not so great.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
She realized it was true—she was grinning ear to ear.“Cuz this will be fun!”
He groaned and thumped his head back against the seat.“I’m starting to hate it when you say that.”
~24~
Suddenly: a Canyon
Cha’s grin solidifiedinto a determined grimace.She’d drawn plenty of law hounds off Big Betty’s tail over the years—exploiting the back leys to do it—but not on the wrong side of the Obsidian border.Guiding Katu on an unfamiliar ley line in foreign territory with an unmarked carriage carrying aggressive Obsidian fae trying to crawl up her ass, she fully and suddenly comprehended the extreme audacity of this gig they were attempting.
On the human side of the border, Cha had a feel for the rural leys.A true inborn instinct.Even the ones far from where she’d grown up had a familiar pattern to them, dictated in part by how people used them and how the human mageineers designed them.You could count on certain consistent elements—like that they wouldn’t go through someone’s house or barnyard or grain silo, for example.Or that no one would build a road through a frozen lava flow so inhospitable and saturated with background magic that the ley line kept vanishing into the surrounding rock, even to her keen senses for such things.Or, even more prosaically human, that the road went from here to there with some purpose.
She was beginning to worry that this one did not.Even worse, up ahead the ley line forked, one side going nowhere visible and the other going to the exact same nowhere.
“Which way?”she asked, tapping the map, which spun in an unhelpful and dizzying blur of black snowflakes.Snarling in frustration, she raised her voice.“Left or right?”
“You’re asking me?”Azul replied, clearly startled.
“Only you and me here, buddy.Pick one.”
“But I don’t know what—”
“Pick!”she barked, the junction roaring up on them with daunting speed.
“Right!”he shouted back, grunting as she swung hard to the left, flinging him against the side panel.“Why did you even ask me to pick if you were going to do the opposite,” he demanded, not posing it as a question.
She lifted a shoulder and let it fall.“Intuition.Sometimes I don’t know what I should do until I hear the answer that sounds wrong.”
“You are the most contrary person I’ve ever met.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“Says you.”They coursed over the twisting landscape of unrelenting black, going ever farther from the Black Thirteen and closer to absolutely nowhere at all.“Why is this ley line even here?”she muttered to herself.
“Do you want an answer?”Azul inquired with just a tinge of haughtiness.“Or am I to leave that to one of your other personalities?”
“Cute.You get more charming all the time, my pretty princeling.If you know the answer, that would be convenient, and—before you get snarky with me—by that I mean, yes, please.”
“Mining.”He pointed ahead and she squinted.
“I don’t see anything but more of this lava field.”
“Obsidian field,” he corrected, then sighed at her puzzled frown.“Whatdidthey teach at that academy of yours?Obsidian is volcanic glass.The Obsidian fae mine it.Up ahead, obviously, is a mining refinery.”
She shook her head.“I still don’t see it.”
He pointed again.“Right there.Towering on the horizon?”
