Which did nothing to slow them.Charming.
Figuring her best bet lay with the wand, since flesh wounds didn’t slow most fae much, with their super-quick healing, Cha tried to recall how she’d banished the iron demon and its puppy brigade.Moonstone and Ruby combined should work on Moonstone fae, right?
Hopefully this time wouldn’t take three tries.Just in case, she tried building in a three on the first try, since magic liked threes so much.“Once, twice, thrice, I banish thee!”she shouted flinging pretty pink sparkles onto the nearest Sugarplum.Yeah, she didn’t know why she used old-timey language either.
It flinched like a demon spattered with angel blood, emitting a faint scream like a melting snowflake, then vanished.The other Sugarplums halted in their tracks.Oblivious to the ruckus, the Moonstone imps continued carrying, singing, and smashing.
The Sugarplum holding Dy—their personal Sugarplum, perhaps—said, “What is the meaning of this rude and arrogant intrusion, human?”
Rude and arrogant?Cha had just poofed one of its friends.Gotta love a species that worries more about manners than, you know, life itself.Though maybe Cha had only banished the thing, not murdered it.She’d like to think that way because, though she’d do literally anything for Dy and she had a rep as a cynical badass bandit, but Cha really didn’t like to kill anyone.She was an asshole, not a murderer.A girl had to havesomestandards.
“Release Dy and Warg,” she commanded, pointing the wand—gently—at the Sugarplum holding Dy.
She’d expected some back and forth, but maybe the poofing had served as sufficient intimidation, because Dy’s Sugarplum immediately released her and Warg’s Sugarplum dropped him to the ground, wiping its hands off in the universal gesture of relieved disgust.Warg, unfazed by the fall, scrambled to Dy, who crouched to put her hands on him.
Within a breath, the white and black pixie dust whorled into a funnel, spinning with tornadic glee into Dy, who looked momentarily like a monstrous toad—with wildly spronging golden corkscrew curls—as her mouth expanded to inhale the dust.Cha barely had time to reach toward Dy, to do what, Cha didn’t know, before Dy exhaled again, freezing all the Moonstone imps in mid-carry, sing, and smash.Even the Sugarplums froze in mid-sneer.
The ensuing silence was crushing.Cha checked to make sure she could move.Fortunately, the answer was yes.She didn’t know how Dy had managed to exempt her from the cloud of frozen doom, but good for her.
“What in the seven hells happened?”Cha demanded, jumping down from the idling Katu.
“Probably whatever happened to Monat,” Dy retorted, standing and lifting Warg in one easy movement.“We need to get out of here.I don’t know how long my spell will last.”
“Agreed, but…the shipment?”
Dy, having shoveled Warg into the cab of Big Betty, turned and shook her head.“I don’t know.The Sugarplums kept asking where the astra was.Then,” she continued when Cha opened her mouth, “when I also had no idea what they were talking about, started having the puttoes unload and search the supposedly decoy shipment.”
“Puttoes is what you call the imps, huh?”Cha asked absently, collecting her wits when Dy glared, then clapped her friend on the arm and squeezed.“I feared the worst.”
“This is pretty damn bad.Otto fucked us.”
“Yeah, he did.”Cha sheathed the sword, but not the wand, and climbed a few steps up the ramp to Big Betty’s interior.Since they seemed sturdy and she was in a bad mood, she grabbed the puttoes in her way and chucked them off to the side, methodically clearing a path.“Hurts my mercenary heart to see all this dust spilled and wasted.”
“Whatever the Sugarplums were talking about,” Dy said, climbing in behind her, “they clearly expected to be receiving something, not giving us something to return to Otto.”
“Which means Otto never expected us to return.He sacrificed us to a one-way delivery.”
“No wonder he was willing to promise so much coin,” Dy agreed.“He never intended to pay us the rest.”In an uncharacteristic display, she punted a nearby putto off Big Betty’s bay.“What?”she asked when Cha eyed her.“That song of theirs was getting on my nerves and they were carelessly hurting Betty.”She stroked the inside of Big Betty’s cargo bay and the elephant rumbled sadly, Katu sawing in sympathy.
“Want to kick some more of them?”Cha offered, and Dy’s worried frown dissolved into a reluctant smile.
“Yes, but we should get out of here before enchantment frays too much.You arrived in the nick of time, Cha—thank you.”
“Late, I would say.”
“You didn’t wait our standard thirty minutes, I notice.”
“You know me,” Cha replied with a grin.“Do you think Monat did complete Otto’s delivery and ours was the second?”
She surveyed the unbroken crates.The spilled stuff was mostly worthless now, so no point in gathering it up, much as that, too, pained her mercenary heart.The value of the remaining cargo wouldn’t come anywhere near Otto’s promised payday.It wouldn’t be worth even the platinum coin she’d carelessly squandered, but the remaining crated dust would fetch a tidy bit of coin.Enough to keep Dy off the corporate circuit for a while and the kids in new shoes, or whatever they went through so fast.
“This decoy shipment had to cost Otto,” Dy observed.“Even if he was smuggling something to the Moonstone fae inside this stuff, how was he getting paid?”
“I don’t know,” Cha agreed.“It makes no sense, but I’ll tell you what does make perfect sense: whatever the Moonstone fae wanted, it’s still in here.Let’s get this stuff back over the border to the human realms, find out what’s in here that had everyone so excited, and get Phin to locate a buyer for the dust.We can salvage something from this ill-gotten gig.”
“Steal it?”Dy asked thoughtfully.
“Yeah.”She gestured at the putto-strewn loading bay.“I’ll clear a path.You rev up Big Betty and Katu and I will blaze us back down the Moonstone Throughway.”
