Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 29

Nine hours later I was still hot. And with less than six hours’ sleep under my belt, I was even crankier. Of course, my current predicament wasn’t helping.

A gust of air almost knocked me to the ground, and a horn blasted my eardrums at point-blank range. I spun to see my own reflection staring back at me from a shiny chrome fender. My eyes were startled, which was understandable, considering that the fender was hovering almost six feet off the ground.

It was attached to a dusty white pickup, which was rocking slowly back and forth in the air, like a boat in the swells. The irate driver leaned out of the window to glare at me. “Get off the road!”

“I’m not in the road.” I pointed up. “It’s that way.”

A good ten feet above us, a line of levitating cars was gleefully ignoring the laws of gravity. Their shadows rippled across the landscape, intermittently blocking the sun and causing me to flicker in and out of the shade. My eyes were having a hard time adjusting to the constantly changing light, but even so it was clear that this joker was well below the designated traffic lane.

I pointed this out, but all I got for my trouble was another loud blast from the horn.

So of course I flipped him off.

He said something rude, threw the truck into reverse, then shot past close enough to force me to duck. He swerved around another vehicle, rolled sideways to fit between a couple of buses and vanished into the glare of a blistering August sun. The resulting boom was loud enough to vibrate the ground.

Asshole.

I hadn’t had time to draw a breath before the air around me coalesced and seemed to draw inward, contracting like a collapsing star. I leapt to the side as a white-hot flash sizzled across my eyes and an earsplitting bang ruptured the air. And another vehicle popped into existence in a burst of car-shaped sparks.

A kid in the backseat had his face glued to the window. He regarded me somberly for a moment before deliberately sticking out his tongue. His father hit the gas, revving the engine and grinding the gears, and the car shot up from the ground like the bird it wasn’t.

I understood the principle: it was easier to enchant an inert object than something with a constantly changing energy field like that of the human body. That was why levitation spells always called for some kind of platform. Brooms had been used in the bad old days because they were convenient and didn’t raise any eyebrows if spotted lying around the house. The modern equivalent was the car, which was undoubtedly easier on the backside.

But the reality still made my brain hurt.

Thundering cracks from new arrivals shook the air on every side, mixing with the roar of engines, the thrum of music and a lot of alcohol-fueled laughter. I looked from my objective—the mansion on the next hill, where a certain mage was about to give an interview—to the crazy vehicle-strewn air separating us.

Well, shit.

I’d assumed that getting to Lutkin might be difficult. He was the current World Champion, and right now that made him the center of attention. But I’d thought the main problem would be getting past security, not getting to the guy at all.

Between me and the house was more than the floating traffic jam. The cars had been elevated to keep them out of the way of the sea of gleaming white vendors’ tents that spilled down the hill. They were jam- packed with scalpers hawking tickets, vendors peddling grease-laden food and people, tons of people. They were clogging every available inch of space, buying souvenirs, standing in line for freebies or placing bets. I’d never make it in time.

“Want a ride?” somebody yelled. I looked up to see a sky blue convertible hovering maybe six feet above my head.

One look at the car, and I decided that walking didn’t sound so bad, after all. “Thanks, but I’m just going to the house.”

The blonde who had issued the invitation hung precariously over the passenger-side door to grin at me. “It’s too dangerous!” She gestured with a longneck, flinging a wide arc of beer into the air. “Half the people around here shouldn’t even be driving.”

She said this with no irony whatsoever, despite the fact that her car’s black cloth top kept rising and lowering like some kind of strange bird trying to achieve flight. The driver, a young ginger- haired guy, took a stab at making it stop, and turned the wipers on instead.

“I’m good,” I assured her.

She shook her head tipsily. “You’re gonna get run over,” she insisted, opening the door and almost falling out. She stopped when the seat belt caught her, looking perplexed. “Is it still ‘run over’ if you’re, like, hit from above?”

“I’d rather not find out,” I said, moving so that I wasn’t directly beneath the car. Magic was magic, but my brain was having a hard time accepting the sight of huge hunks of metal just hanging in the air like that. I kept expecting one to drop on my head, snuffing me out like a mosquito under a thumb.

“Then get up here!” She turned to her companion. “Ronnie—take us down.” Ronnie nervously studied the gears, then did something that made the car shoot up another dozen feet. “No, no, down!” she yelled, as they came within a hairbreadth of hitting a legitimate race car with an official number on the side.

Ronnie panicked and veered sharply to the right, missing the race car but clipping a VW Bug that had stalled out in the middle of the air. Its hood was jacked up, and its owner’s butt was hanging over the side. Or, at least, it was until the impact caused the Bug to go spinning in one direction and flung the owner in the other. He was headed for the ground headfirst, but the race car driver snatched him out of midair to the wild appreciation of the onlookers.

For his part, the rescued man seemed less than thrilled. I could hear him shouting as the blonde’s convertible slowly drifted back down to my level. “Uh-oh,” she said as the race car driver started shaking his head and pointing at us.

Ronnie glanced at me. “Get in if you’re getting!”

I’d have refused, considering his grasp on the fundamentals of the road—or in this case, the air. But traffic was piling up around the accident, pushing more and more people outside the safe zone. And I was beginning to doubt that most of them even knew how to drive on land.

I grasped hold of the side of the car, waited for the top to lower again and hauled myself into the backseat. Ronnie floored it before I was even seated, sending me into the arms of a dishwater blond guy in a blue tank top. “Hey.” He grinned, as I tried to sort myself out without elbowing him anywhere sensitive.

“Toni and Dave,” the blond girl told me, hanging over the front seat. I assumed Toni was the young brunette who was currently giving me the evil eye. I crawled off her boyfriend, and she rewarded me with a sweating Bud from the cooler beside her feet. Enough empties rattled around the floorboards to explain Ronnie’s lack of coordination.

Since I didn’t have to drive, I drank up. The air was pungent with exhaust and heavy with humidity, and I felt like I was breathing through a damp towel. Ten minutes under the blazing sun had left my black T-shirt sticking to me unpleasantly and had me wishing I’d worn shorts and sandals instead of jeans and boots.

“I’m Lilly,” the blonde informed me, completing the introductions. “It’s short for Lilith, but nobody calls me that.”

I nodded. I’d rarely seen anyone who looked less like a Lilith. She was wearing a pink-and-white-checked blouse over a white tube top and shorts. Her bouncy blond curls—the ones that hadn’t escaped to stick to her sweaty face and neck—were trapped by a couple of Hello Kitty ponytail holders. They matched her glittery lip gloss and Pepto-Bismol nails. If the real Lilith still existed on some other plane, she was undoubtedly plotting a hideous revenge.

“Dory,” I said, saluting her with what remained of my beer. I lost it a second later as a couple of kids on Boogie Boards zoomed by like they had rockets attached to their backsides, whirling over and around the car in figure eights. One grabbed my beer and they took off, whooping like savages.

“Okay, that’s it,” the blonde said. “I’ve had enough of those little bastards. Catch them!”

I thought that was unlikely, as the kids seemed to have a lot more control over their small supports than Ronnie did of his big one. But he followed orders anyway, veering around the quarreling drivers and hitting the gas, heading straight for a large oak. The boys were swooping around, laughing at the Bug, which was sticking out of the top of the tree.

A tow truck driver had also stopped by the accident, and was attempting to attach a cable with a hook on it to the Bug’s cantilevered backside. But we whipped past at exactly the wrong moment, and he snared us instead. “Oh, shiiiit!” Lilly screamed, as we were slung around the tree, dragging the tow truck along for the ride.

“Hit the brake!” I yelled, as we were flung through the air like thrown bolas, the tow truck on the other side of the cord providing the counterweight.

It was the sort of situation that might have flummoxed the most experienced of drivers, which Ronnie clearly wasn’t. He panicked and started grabbing at everything. In quick succession, he popped the trunk, got the top to stay down and turned on the radio. He did absolutely nothing to stop us from heading straight for the middle of the traffic lane.

A mellow reggae beat spilled out of the radio as I scrambled over Toni to try to free the hook, but it had been caught in the metal frame of the convertible’s top, and with the hood down, I couldn’t even see it. And then it didn’t matter anyway, because the tow truck guy stomped on his brakes, hurling us around him in a furious orbit. The top tore off the convertible with a screech of agonized metal as we went spinning back in the other direction.

“Don’t worry,” the radio lilted as we headed straight at the race car. “Be happy.”

The driver didn’t look too happy, but he ducked just in time as we screamed by overhead. He immediately popped back up, and he looked pissed. So did the tow truck guy, who was heading our way trailing the flapping remnants of the convertible’s top behind him. Ronnie managed to find the brake, and we spun like a top, with no traction to stop us, for several revolutions. Then he hit the gas and the car shot ahead.

We retraced our own greasy plume of exhaust straight between our two pursuers, the acrid smoke making everyone cough and my eyes water. The tow truck guy had his window rolled down, so maybe he was having the same problems and didn’t realize we’d turned. Or possibly his reflexes just weren’t that good. He kept going forward, toward where we no longer were, but the race car spun on a dime and came after us.

Lilly spied the tow truck and abandoned panic for righteous indignation. “Hey, that guy has my top!”

“Not anymore,” Toni said as the remains flew off the cord like a giant bat, landing over the race car’s windshield.

The now-blind driver slammed on the brakes, causing the car behind him to accordion into his trunk before getting creamed by a third. Meanwhile, the tow truck’s empty hook had snared the top of a tent, which tore loose from its anchors, leaving a bunch of locals to swill their beer in direct sunlight. They did not appreciate this, as they demonstrated by swarming after the tent as it was dragged through traffic, until they reached the cord. Six or seven big guys grabbed it and started towing the truck back to Earth.

“Wow,” Toni said as the three of us hung over the trunk.

“I’m so screwed,” Ronnie moaned, watching the carnage in his mirror.

“Did you see where my top landed?” Lilly asked, scanning the ground while the three-car pileup wafted above the traffic lanes to sort things out, taking the fluttering remains of her car’s accessory with them.

“Twenty on the drunk guys,” Dave offered, as several more joined the tug- of-war. But then the tow truck guy stomped on the gas and tore away, taking a few of the more stubborn types along for the ride.

One unwilling hitchhiker landed on top of another tent, collapsing part of it, while two more were dragged through the crowd at an autograph signing. Several fights broke out over that, as people lost their places in line, but I didn’t get to see how they turned out because Ronnie had exercised the better part of valor and got us out of there. A moment later, we merged with a line of vehicles inching toward the ticket booth hovering above the front gates.

The house was quite a sight, glimmering in the sun at the top of the hill like a marble wedding cake. Despite being in upper New York State, it looked like something straight out of ancient Rome, with columns and porticoes and a huge balcony. Most of the hosts were gathered there in plush comfort, sipping at tall, frosty glasses as if dehydration was a possibility, and watching the controlled chaos below.

I wondered what the consul thought about the wreck the mages were making of her formerly manicured lawn. It was only the third day of the event, which was scheduled to last a week. But the grounds were already strewn with trash and crisscrossed with tires tracks from vehicles that had the sense to stay where God, or at least the automotive industry, had intended.

I assumed the offending vehicles belonged to the vendors, because the fans’ cars were being directed off to the side, where a colorful explosion of several thousand floated like giant, oddly shaped clouds over the landscape. They were arranged in three tiers—like a parking garage without the garage—with the highest maybe thirty feet up. There were no stairs.

The obvious message was that, if you couldn’t manage a basic levitation spell, you shouldn’t be here. It was typical; mages acted as if they controlled the supernatural world and the rest of us just lived in it. But considering who was sponsoring this year’s event, it was pretty tacky.

We headed for the closest group, which was forming next to an ornamental pond. Beer bottles, soda cans and snack wrappers tangled in the surrounding rosebushes and bobbed beside a fountain designed by Bernini. Nearby, a massive set of weathered bleachers faced the house. It was packed with people watching the empty space over the large circular driveway with rapt attention.

Every few minutes, another line of assorted craft—mostly cars, but with the odd motorcycle, airplane or even boat thrown in—would levitate out of the mass in a cordoned-off area beside the house. They would line up even with the balcony and stay there for a moment, letting the frenzy wash over them. Some of the drivers would wave or stand up to further incite the already-rabid fans. When the flag-waving, banner-fluttering, screaming hysteria had reached a peak, the consul would rise from her seat in the center of the balcony and drop a scrap of silk. An earsplitting crack later, and the whole lineup would disappear.

The hordes in the stands would be given a few moments to rest their vocal cords and buy more beer. Then the whole process started over again. I found it monotonous, but no one else seemed to agree with me. It was that time of year again, and the whole supernatural world had gone insane. There was a war on, but nobody cared. Not during race week.

“That’s gonna be you tomorrow,” Dave said, his eyes on the swimming-pool-sized mirror that was floating over the house.

Ronnie twisted around to watch the mirror change. “Not likely.”

It had been reflecting an image of blue skies, green fields and weathered bleachers filled with waving fans. But then it rippled and switched to a scene of leaping purple flames. Weaving in and out of the fiery mass were the same racers who had just disappeared, now looking impossibly tiny next to the inferno around them.

“Oh, man, don’t tell me he bailed on you again,” Dave groaned.

“It’s for the Championship,” Ronnie said, his lips tight.

“But you’re the best!” Lilly said indignantly.

“Not when there’s ten million dollars on the line,” Ronnie told her, but his eyes looked hurt.

Lilly passed me another beer from a cooler at her feet. “Ronnie’s father is Lucas Pennington,” she said proudly, as if I should know who that was.

Maybe I should have, but the yearly madness of the World Championships had never been more than a flicker on my mental map. They were a mage thing, and other than doing the occasional job for a magic worker in a jam, I don’t associate with them much. They tend to be more than a little strange, like their favorite sport.

The supernatural world doesn’t have NASCAR. It doesn’t have football, soccer or tennis. Instead, it has the insanity known as ley-line racing.

Mages figured out long ago that, with strong enough shields, they could surf along the surface of the lines, riding their energy from one point to the next. And since ley lines stitch the world together outside of real space, this meant traversing huge distances in very short periods. Assuming you survived, that is.

Every year it was the same story. Out of the two hundred or so entrants who qualified for the Big Kahuna of the racing world, maybe twenty percent would actually finish. Out of the eighty percent who were left, most would eventually limp back to the starting line, having fabricated an elaborate tale of how nature/their vehicle/ the gods had conspired against them. But there were a good five to ten percent every year who were claimed by the lines.

There would be editorials in all the papers the day afterward, loudly denouncing the barbarity of it all, and some officials would make properly distressed faces. But nothing ever changed. It was just part of the race.

I must not have done a great job at looking neutral, because Ronnie flushed. “There’s more to racing than driving, you know,” he told me.

“Actually, I don’t know.”

“You don’t follow the races?” Lilly looked stunned and vaguely freaked out, like I’d just admitted to eating live snakes.

“Sorry.”

It was finally our turn at the floating ticket booth, where the kids forked over an eye-popping amount for three-day passes. “You shouldn’t need a pass,” the blonde told Ronnie indignantly, as we moved toward the levitating parking lot. “You should be in the pits!”

“I suck in the pits,” Ronnie admitted. He glanced at me. “I was lollipop man last time around and I got distracted and lowered our sign too soon.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad.”

“And Dad left without a back rear tire!”

“Well, it’s not like he needed it.”

“Oh, he needed it,” Ronnie said, looking miserable.

“The race is mostly in the lines, but they don’t all intersect, you know? Sometimes you have to travel a mile or more to get from one to another….”

“Ouch,” I sympathized. He nodded glumly.

“But that wasn’t what you trained for!” Lilly said loyally.

“What did you train for?” I asked. Because it sure wasn’t driving.

“I’m a spellbinder.”

Lilly nodded enthusiastically. “He’s the best!”

“I’m not sure I know what that is,” I said, only to have four incredulous sets of eyes turned on me.

“You really don’t follow the races,” Lilly said, like she hadn’t believed it before.

“What do you know about racing?” Ronnie asked, curious. He looked fascinated, like a scientist confronted by a strange new species: dontgiveadamnus from the phylum couldntcareless.

I shrugged. “You have to be a mage, you have to pony up a big-ass fee and you have to be insane.” In fact, insanity wasn’t a requirement, but it may as well have been. Because nobody in their right minds would have signed up for what was essentially a death trap.

Lilly was frowning at me, and okay, maybe that hadn’t been too tactful. But Ronnie just grinned. “Are you sure you don’t follow the races?”

“I think I saw part of one in a bar once,” I admitted.

“There are typically four people to a team,” he told me. “The driver, who leads the team; the navigator, who helps him find the best route; the shield master, who maintains the shield; and the spellbinder, who protects the team from, er, anything they need protecting from—”

“He means the competition,” Toni said lazily.

“—and gets them through the obstacles,” Ronnie finished. He looked at me, expectant, and I bit.

“What obstacles?”

“There’s no actual course, so the only way to make sure everybody really circles the Earth is to have them make pit stops along the way,” he explained.

“With obstacles at each stop,” I guessed.

He nodded enthusiastically. The races were obviously his passion. His thin face lit up when he talked about them, and his pale blue eyes shone. “They can be anything. You just never know because they change every year. Physical barriers, magical ones, even mazes—”

“And your comp-e-ti-tion,” Toni singsonged, obviously half-wasted.

“The competitors are always gunning for the biggest names,” Lilly agreed. “And there’s no monitoring outside the pit stops because there’s no set route, so it’s a free-for-all! The spellbinders have to fight off the attacks of other teams, as well as get their team through the obstacles. It’s the most important job in the race!”

“Sounds like fun,” I lied, eyeing the crush of cars still ahead of us. Most of the vehicles were bunched up in a midair traffic jam, waiting for one of the harassed parking attendants to slot them into place. I decided I could walk and get there faster. “You can let me off here,” I told Ronnie. “I can—”

I didn’t finish, because he suddenly floored it. The car shot out of the queue with either panache or reckless abandon, depending on whether he’d meant to slip through the narrow space between two rows of already parked cars. The movement threw me back against the seat beside Toni.

“There’s no rush,” I said, holding out the vain hope of arriving in one piece.

“Like hell there’s not!” Lilly spat, pointing with her beer bottle. “They’re following us!”

I twisted my neck around to see our old friend the race car driver. He’d cleared the ticket booth and was in hot pursuit, the angry Bug owner in the seat beside him. “It wasn’t my fault!” Ronnie insisted, as the car dipped alarmingly.

I turned back around to see him staring past me at the pursuit, while ahead of us, the grandstand full of people loomed large. “The stands!” I yelled, pointing.

“What?”

“The. Stands!” I twisted his head back around, and he froze, staring at our collective doom.

“Oh, for—” Lilly reached over and stomped on the brakes, halting us close enough to the back of the bleachers that I could have reached out and touched the sun-faded wood. Luckily, the several thousand people assembled to watch the qualifying heats were facing the other way, except for a redheaded little boy peeking out through the slats.

He had a pink cotton candy grin and a massive treat clutched in one tiny fist. Which he smushed all over Lilly’s hair. She screeched and forgot about the car, which floated up and out, wafting above the crowd like a steel balloon. That was apparently not allowed, because almost immediately an irritated-looking mage in a uniform rose from the sidelines and started for us.

“Damn,” Toni said, looking a little nervous.

I was finding it hard to feel much trepidation, personally. And although I could see the wisdom of not putting the patrols in something as bulky as a car when they’d be zooming around over people’s heads, the choice of substitute seemed a little unfortunate. “They couldn’t have issued you guys motorcycles, at least?” I asked the mage on the Segway.

He scowled and ignored me. “Levitation isn’t allowed above the stands,” he told Ronnie.

Ronnie didn’t respond. He was too busy staring over his shoulder at the irate duo in the race car. They’d paused behind the bleachers, bobbing just above where the multicolored pennants began, in order to shout obscenities at us.

“You’re going to have to move your vehicle,” the patrol tried again, this time addressing Lilly.

It was another wasted effort. “My hair!” she screeched, red-faced and outraged. “I paid a fortune for this color! Arrest that kid!”

The mage didn’t reply, because a beer bottle exploded against the side of the car in a rain of green glass. “What the—” The rent-a-cop looked around, trying to figure out where it had come from, while the people below us shouted in outrage.

I doubted that much of the glass had connected, because a kid had parked his Boogie Board on that side of us as a sun shield. It floated above the crowd, deflecting most of the green hail into the aisle. But that didn’t seem to matter to anyone. We were maybe twelve feet above the stands, so the spectators couldn’t reach us, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t fire up a spell. As least, I assumed that was what rocked the car hard enough to almost tip us out.

“All right, that’s enough!” The cop dropped to issue a warning to whoever the joker was below, and I caught another bottle that had been about to bean me.

I whipped it back at its thrower—a young guy standing at the top of the bleachers. He and a group of friends had been talking to the driver of the Bug, who was still pointing in our direction and yelling. And then they froze, gawking at something behind me with their mouths still open.

I spun around to see almost the entire crowd staring at the huge mirror. In between showing the races, it had been reflecting interviews with noted drivers, car sponsors and paid ads. Only it was hard to imagine what that particular image could be selling.

But one thing was certain: the man seated in the large armchair wasn’t going to be giving any more interviews.