“Mal needs you to answer her question.”
“You didn’t ask a question.”
“Fine. Did you notice the pixies playing keep-away?”
He growled in annoyance. “I saw them.”
“Did you see what they are playing with?”
“No, why?”
“Because your head hasn’t exploded, and none of them are even mildly dead.”
Chapter Seven
His gaze followed hers,but the lead pixie squealed and turned into a blur as her pursuers began the chase again, only now she had about a dozen others on her tail. It wouldn’t be long before they caught her, and when they did, game over.
“What has she got?”
“A glitter bomb.”
That caught Law’s attention. His face went red. “A what? Here? Inmyfucking house? We’ll fucking see about that.”
He strode away, magic crackling around him in a purple and black aura and setting the stone floor on fire. Mal had never seen anything like that before. He’d tapped into the elemental energy of the auberge and the blood oath binding him to it. He wasn’t even walking on the ground anymore, Mal realized. He’d begun striding across the air, climbing right up into the midst of the pixie mayhem. Neat trick, that.
The truth was the glitter bomb didn’t actually contain anything so benign as glitter. The pixie toy—aka magical nuclear weapon—was called that because the contents, like glitter, got everywhere and was impossible to get rid of once it got loose. The pixies found it delightfully funny. The rest of the world was less enthusiastic.
First of all, the stuff ate holes in the magic all around it like droplets of acid sprayed on fabric. Sometimes that was it and it went inert, and sometimes the stuff decided to turn that magic into something else. Impossible to say what that might be. That was the fun of it, according to pixie ideas of fun. The possibilities were endless and completely unpredictable.
And it got better! Or worse, if you were sane. Once it touched living flesh, things got really interesting. It’s not that you stopped being whoever you were, but you might end up with purple skin or scales or feathers or three noses and twelve eyes or who knew what other interesting modifications might happen.
Or! You could develop sudden new powers or become a cannibal or develop a fetish for collecting people’s fingers… To make things even more interesting, they made the bombs using different cocktails of pixie dust, radioactive toxic waste, some monkey brains, newt’s eyes, testicles from a one-legged space whale, and maybe some cockroach semen, plus a dollop or two of nitroglycerin.
The point was, when one detonated, mayhem ensued. Law and LeeAnne would be cleaning up the mess for months, maybe years, not to mention whatever might happen to the guests.
Mal glanced around, looking for LeeAnne, wondering how the housekeeper was dealing with this.
To her surprise, LeeAnne stood at the front desk, talking on the phone, her expression carefully neutral as she watched the havoc playing out in her lobby.
In the meantime, Law had begun tossing out bolts of magic. They encased pixies in bubbles of magic. Some alone, others in groups. He was clearing away obstacles as he aimed for the keep-away players, picking them off until he finally was able to corner the leader. She saw the bolt of magic coming for her, and she tossed the glitter bomb away, maybe thinking someone else would catch it. Maybe hoping nobody would.
Mal gasped, holding her breath, frozen as she watched it.
It arced through the air, knocked against a crackling mass of magic containing a group of about twenty pixies, and… ruptured.
The other reason it was called a glitter bomb was that pixie dust sparkles and the cloud that burst out of the bomb did just that.
It exploded in a puff of sparkling powder. Mal instinctively threw a shield up wide, trying to circle around the cloud. Stupid, though, because where it met magic, it would just eat it and either go inert or change into something more, or keep eating until it decided what it wanted to do next. Still, it was better than letting it hit people and eat them.
Law had the same thought and beat her to it, his shield snapping into place just above hers. She pushed hers against his and melded it, then let it go. Already she could see things starting to bubble and grow, seeking shape and being. Maybe they’d be lucky and the things wouldn’t be any more worrisome than a giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
She left Law to deal with the situation and went to join LeeAnne, who remained at the front desk. She had one eye on the situation above and another on the annoyed semicircle of guests before her.
“Unacceptable,” pronounced one in a lisping voice.
Mal couldn’t see who, but suspected it was the hulking, yeti-looking ice monster.
“I agree. I’ve already expanded your den space and rerouted the heating lines. There should be no more ice melts in your quarters. Please accept my apologies.”
