Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(103)
“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.