Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(102)
So he wanted her. And he was right. Because despite what the stories say, love or infatuation or whatever the hell we’d had doesn’t really triumph over all. Not when two people came from backgrounds as different as ours. And not when they are genetically designed to kill each other.
It had been a bad idea from the beginning, and it was just as well that one of us had realized it before it went any further than it had. Game over, book closed, the end. Except for these damn memories that wouldn’t leave me alone.
The rain was getting worse and I was close to soaked. Not to mention my floor, my bedside table and my bag of nasty tricks. I pulled the duffel out from under the bed, took everything out and set it in a row on the dresser to dry. That sort of stuff was expensive, and it came out of my budget.
The second damp T-shirt went into the clothes hamper, and I tugged on another one before falling back into my hot, rumpled bed. I viciously plumped my pillow, looking for a cool spot. I had a job to do tomorrow; I didn’t have time for this. I concentrated on the intermittent sound of the rain and willed myself back to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-nine
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.