“I would never think otherwise,” Dy told her with a smile that said everything.Yeah, despite the rough waters under the bridge, they’d never failed to have each other’s backs.Like someone trying to shove a large water balloon through a narrow window, Dy wrestled a squirming Warg—trying to lick the pixie dust from her face—into the cab of Big Betty.Sugarplum disappeared into the sparkling mist and Big Betty sailed forward with silent grace, gradually fading away like a schooner in a fairytale being enveloped by a mystical fog.
Cha shivered harder at the image, hoping this foreboding wasn’t a real omen, as she emphatically didn’t believe in such things.“You’ve just inhaled too much pixie dust,” she told herself.“Getting all paranoid and dreaming up crazy scenarios.”
To make herself feel better, she drew her sword, the hilt comfortingly solid in her hand.She’d like to pace off the nervous energy, but without really knowing where she was stepping, that wasn’t a great idea.She could stay where she was or sit in Katu, neither choice great for her nerves.
She also minded the clock, having nothing else to do.The time ticking by did nothing to make her feel any better about the situation.Getting the clandestine shipment from Sugarplum only marked the halfway point.They still had to get the stuff back to Otto by the deadline or they’d be out the final payment.The deposit would go a long way, but nothing like the payday they’d planned for.Once again she kicked herself for forgetting to get that platinum coin from Azul.
Wherever he was, she hoped he had made it all right.Unlikely the imps had gotten to him, but he’d seemed like he had some distance to travel and then there was that oddness with his people not showing up for him.Knowing what little she did—that his family had pressured him into the marriage with Lenorae and that there’d been some hidden component, something so terrible that he’d run rather than deal with it—it was entirely possible that his family had prevented his staff, or whatever, from coming to his aid.
Which meant he was on his own out there.Not her problem, but she still worried about him.
And she worried about Dy and Big Betty, carried off by Sugarplum.What if this whole escapade was some elaborate scheme?There’d been something off from the beginning, with attention from places that shouldn’t have noticed them.And Monat getting caught in the first place… Was this how it had happened?Maybe the Moonstone fae were collecting human sorceresses for some nefarious purpose.Something even worse than a fae barbeque party or whatever they did for fun.
Nearly half an hour had elapsed.If Dy didn’t reemerge, what then?
Staring at the opaque, swirling mist until her eyes prickled from the strain and her stomach lurched from the dizzying prismatic effect of the sparkling white dust that her brain continued to insist was snow, Cha considered her options.Which were basically no options, but it sounded better in her head than being utterly fucked, and not in a good way.
1.Turn around and go home.(Not really an option, but listed first so she could cross it off.)
2.Keep waiting.(This was the default option, but not one that could last forever.)
3.Go do something else entirely.(Also not really an option, but included for thoroughness.)
4.Charge straight forward, heedless of the consequences.
Who was she kidding?The choice was obvious.
At twenty-seven minutes since Big Betty had vanished into the malicious Moonstone mist of doom, and a lifetime of imagining the worst, Cha had settled on the only option she could live with and still be herself.
Sliding into the driver’s seat of the idling Katu, she brandished both sword and magic wand, then signaled the jag to zoom straight into the mist after Dy.Into what, who knew, but she imagined a fae version of a loading dock, perhaps with a shimmering Moonstone door lowered and barred against entry.She’d never deliberately crashed Katu before, and wild doubt suddenly stabbed through her.
Was she crazy?Maybethiswas how the fae eliminated humans with the idiotic bravery—or desperation—to invade their realms.The fae simply messed with the humans’ heads until they put themselves out of their own misery.The poor sods staggering back into the human realms with mutations, additions, deletions, or simply not who they’d been when they went in, were the lucky ones.
All of this flashed through her mind in the time it took Katu to leap into the mist on slow white that was still faster than most fast blacks.Snowblind, and feeling more than a little crazed, Cha gave herself up to fate.
And braced for impact.
~32~
All Is Lost, Including Herself
On the upside,they didn’t crash into anything solid enough to kill them.On the concerning side, several soft, grunting things went flying—to the side and over the top of the jag, close enough that Cha had to duck—and she could only hope none of them was Dy.Or Warg, she supposed, since Dy was fond of the appalling creature.
Katu skidded to a stop so abruptly that he skidded sideways, hitting a few more soft, grunting things with the side of the carriage.Cha took in the scene with one, sweeping assessment.
Sugarplum—or its mostly identical twin, hard to say—held Dy wrapped in several appendages, holding the sorceress still so she couldn’t move enough to hurl a spell, one cloven-hoofed, weird finger-hand thing securely slapped over her mouth.Another Sugarplum-looking fae held Warg, quite a bit less securely, probably as it’s not easy to hold onto the equivalent of a greased and pissed-off water balloon.Warg twisted and howled with ear-piercing shrieks, trying to bite its captor with no success, but liberally spraying the creature with slobber, which—judging by the disgusted expression on the fae’s otherwise serene face—was just as bad.
Big Betty, still in cargo transport form, trumpeted in quiet distress as swarms of pearly imps with cherubic faces and stubby wings carried crates stamped with the Obsidian logo out of her cargo compartment.Others lay in various grunting piles scattered about the big room, clearly the things Katu had hurled about during their dramatic entrance.Cha didn’t know what species of fae they were.Some kind of Moonstone imp.
Black pixie dust swirled in the air from several broken crates, combining with the ever-present white dust to make a gray haze.For a second, Cha winced at the waste of all that expensive Obsidian dust, thinking she and Katu had broken the crates—then she saw one of the imps smash an intact crate with a sledgehammer three times its size.
Check: cherubic Moonstone imps are super strong.
They also didn’t seem to care about the rest of their cohort, singing an annoying song as they continued with their carrying and smashing of crates task, ignoring their injured fellows and Cha with equal blissful obliviousness.
Not so much the case with the Sugarplums around the room, who now converged on them, even as Dy made wide, blue eyes at Cha, attempting to convey some mute message.Cha had no idea of the specifics, but the general “we’re fucked here” gist made it right through.
All of this took barely the time to blink and, before Katu had quite finished sliding to that sideways stop, Cha leapt to her feet, one foot on the center console and another on the dash, waving the sword and magic wand at the advancing Sugarplums.“Don’t do it,” she warned in her finest menacing style.
