Everything looked so beautiful that it seemed impossible for the snow to be dangerous.It could only be magical.The sun had come out to frostily shine on the landscape, making every crystalline bit sparkle like tiny rainbows.Cha had never witnessed anything so magical in her entire short life thus far and, for the first time, she felt something of that joy in being alive that the stories talked about.
Only when the barn did collapse, and the tree branches began falling with great booms like thunder and lightning combined, did her new sense of happiness also fail.In the long, cold, wet, and miserable days following, as her family and her neighbors dug out from the destruction, dealing with the deaths of livestock and people, she began to understand that something beautiful could also be deadly.
She’d forgotten all about that long ago time—until this moment.Moonstone was exactly that: shrouded in white to the point that only some things had familiar shapes, excruciatingly beautiful with rainbow refraction in every crystalline mote, and clearly lethal, possibly in ways she could never predict.Her frail mortal self cowered in terror.
Taking herself by the metaphorical scruff of the neck, she shook herself out of the astonished stupor.She was no longer a child, helpless in the face of forces of nature.Cha had come a long way since that dismal little farm—with a decent helping of luck but also through her fiercely determined will—and she wouldn’t be cowed now.Fuck Fairyland and its pretty tricks.
As if the thoughts had helped clear her brain of a lovely, but freezing fog, she abruptly regained her focus.Katu cruised along the Moonstone Throughway, seeming unperturbed.Big Betty streamed along behind them, Warg hanging out the passenger window so that his floppy ears blew back in the wind of their passage, leaving a comet tail of shimmering rainbow sparkles.Dy was there, but Cha couldn’t discern her friend’s condition.
Wondering if the path-box magic would even work, Cha opted to try that first.Stopping would be more dangerous than being overheard.Keeping to the marcasite channel, she tapped it open with caution—kind of silly because, what was she afraid of?—that it would blow up in her face?Actually, yes.Everything felt so magically charged that it seemed not at all impossible for ordinary objects to suddenly explode.“Goldilocks, you there?”
Dy took so long to respond that Cha was working out the details of discerning the boundaries of the side leys—if there even were any—and finding a place in the glittering anti-landscape to pull over.
“I’m here,” Dy said, sounding drunk.“Though… whoa.That hit hard.”
“You on the level?”That didn’t mean what most people thought, part of the code they’d worked out long ago when jealous schoolmates or teachers hung up on malicious compliance could listen in.
“I’m as level as can be,” she answered, less slurred this time.“But hungry—both of us.Let’s grab a snack at the first opportunity.”
Uh oh, that wasn’t a good sign.She meant that Big Betty was low on ambrosia, which was not according to plan.Big Betty should’ve had more than enough juice to get to their contact and back again, to fuel up in at least Obsidian, but preferably one of the stations near the border.Most ley riders figured their carriage’s fuel supply through experience, knowing their animal well, and intuition that shaded more or less toward guesswork, depending on their native talents.But Dy’s sorcery gave her better insight than most and she’d never have planned wrong, which meant that the crossing into Moonstone had drained Big Betty far more than expected.
Katu, though he seemed fine, could therefore be running low, too.All bets were off on this side of the usual reality.
Even more concerning, Dy saying she was hungry, too, meant she’d run low on magic.Hopefully they wouldn’t need her to spin ley lines out of whole cloth—not until the return trip anyway—but they would continue to need her illusion cloak.“I don’t know about that opportunity,” Cha said.“We still dressed for company?”
“Barely decent but socially acceptable,” Dy answered wryly.“SOL for a pick me up then?”
“Maybe.”Cha peered around, barely picking out anything recognizable, let alone obviously an ambrosia station.It nearly made her nostalgic for Obsidian with their lack of signage, an annoyance that seemed like a fond memory now.Not to mention the ambrosia station there, and that kiss, with blue sparks fountaining around them and… She banished that thought with a snarl.
“What was that?”
“Katu growling.How far to the party?”
“You don’t know?”
“My moral compass is more on the fritz than usual.”Cha kicked herself for not mentioning her map going wonky to Dy back at the depot.Too much else on her mind, clearly, and of the wrong things entirely.
Dy’s sigh came through like a gust of wind.“I make it no more than fifteen from here.I can take point.”
“You know where to find me if you need to change up.”Cha moved Katu as far to the side as seemed wise, relieved that at least Dy knew where they were going.Fifteen minutes wasn’t too long, and matched up with Otto’s specs.Though it didn’tlooklike nighttime with all that brilliant white, the throughway remained deserted and the clock indicated it was still the wee hours.They needed to get back into Obsidian and past the depot before daybreak there, to use Dy’s discreetly created bypass ley and rejoin traffic like the fine, upstanding, and perfectly legal cargo haulers they pretended to be.
Nighttime in Moonstone meant nighttime in Obsidian, so they were on track for that part of the plan.Among the many things Cha didn’t understand about how the fae realm magic worked that made bigger places fit inside of smaller ones, was how they all had basically the same sun, moon, and stars.Regardless, given how bright Moonstone was at night, she gave thanks they’d escape before sunrise when it would surely become blinding.
Big Betty passed them, blowing up a cloud of radiant white pixie dust, and Cha held her breath.That was the downside of the open coupe design of the jag.It allowed her freedom to battle off various beasties, giving them an advantage over other ley riders, particularly in races, but in circumstances like this, she didn’t want to be inhaling even liberated pixie dust.
Theoretically, once it departed from the ley line or whatever other magical source had grown it, the dust lost its potency—which was why it had to be mined, magically stabilized, and packaged for transport by the fae.Humans couldn’t pop over the borders and fill their pockets.Still, given how charged this pure stuff felt, not to mention the way it had fucked with their magical devices, Cha didn’t want to know how this shit would affect her body.
Come to think of it, maybe the fae didn’t have to apply mutation-punishments to interlopers.They wouldn’t have to put themselves out.They could just allow the ambient pixie dust have at their frail mortal flesh.Great.Now she’d be sprouting moonstone scales or opalescent horns from her forehead or fragile wings like Bartholomew had, only in shimmering white and not detachable at the end of the holiday.
Come to think of it, no wonder Azul had been cranky about the whole “wings are sexy” conversation, aside from her deliberate and accurate poking at his dignity.The idea of having permanent wings attached to herself wasn’t even remotely sexy.What did the faedowith them during sex anyway?She seriously doubted you could lie down on them and you couldn’t have both people on top.Maybe, you could do a standing up thing.Or a sitting up lap-straddle.She supposed doggie style could work, too, which would allow for—
Realizing she’d drifted dreamily into yet another lust-infused daydream about her new favorite unattainable rich, pretty boy—who, by the way was gone forever, never to be seen again, he wasthatunattainable—she shook her head to focus.Good thing, too, as apparently time had flown by and Big Betty was moving to a side ley and thus slowing.Cha squinted suspiciously at the timepiece, not at all convinced time was flowing as it should, sensual daydream or not.
Big Betty, going ponderously enough they could be on slow black, curved into what looked like a dazzling blizzard.Perhaps Dy’s sorcery, even at low ebb, allowed her to see through the Moonstone-blindness in a way Cha couldn’t.She dearly wanted to ask, but couldn’t think of a decent code phrase and, besides, it wasn’t all that important.Neither she nor Katu much liked being the horse with its nose in the tail of the one before, but they couldn’t always be the lead.
She patted Katu’s dash.“Soon we’ll be on our way and fancy free again,” she told him.
They’d get whatever package would be disguised inside the crates of decoy black Big Betty was carrying and get that delivery on the road in time for payday.And then Cha would go looking for Monat.There had to be some clues as to where she’d gone, if the rumors had made it back out of Moonstone all the way to the human world.
