Death's Mistress

Page 57

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.