“I highly doubt Prince Charming will be with us,” Cha explained, doing her best to sound insouciant rather than forlorn.“I expect we’ll spring him from whatever plush, luxury accommodations count as genteel captivity in the Citrine Palace and he’ll blow us a kiss and be on his way.”
Phinny gave her an odd look and opened her mouth, but Dy shook her head slightly.
“Oh, stop it, both of you,” Cha directed, tipping her chair back on two legs.“I’m no fragile flower weeping and waiting for some boy.This is a favor for an old friend.Tit for tat.I don’t expect anything from him and he won’t expect anything from me.”
“Except for this ‘rescue,’” Phin pointed out.“Have you wondered what he thinks a human can do that he or his family cannot?”
Politically tricky.“Sometimes, my friend,” Cha said, folding her hands behind her head, “it’s the blundering idiot who breaks into the jail and evades the police.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s just in stories,” Dy said drily.
“And an epic story this will be,” Cha agreed.
“Make it ashortstory,” Phinny suggested, scowling at Dy.“Because if you’re not back before I go into labor, I’m calling up that cute brunette to hold my hand.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Dy said meekly.
Phin held out her hand and Dy took it.“It’s a good thing I love you so much,” Phinny said, shaking her head in disgust.
“Yes,” Dy agreed fervently, lifting her wife’s hand to kiss it.“A very good thing.”
~4~
Who You Gonna Call?
“You want tobuy agnicurna?”Nerd Girl repeated, clearly perplexed.She tipped down her protective glasses—an unlikely piss-green—and stared at them over the top.Very short, and with spiky vermillion hair, the scientist/sorceress sat on a high stool at her lab bench, sneakered feet propped on a rung so her bony knees poked up.“Why come to me?”
“Because you already know about our previous, ah, encounter with the stuff,” Cha answered.
“We want to keep this quiet,” Dy added.“And we need your advice.”
“Sounds illegal.What’s in it for me?”
Cha leaned her hip against the lab bench.“You met us because Lucky Ducky hired you.”Lucky Ducky was the fence Phin had called in to handle their haul from Moonstone, such as it was.
Nerd Girl shrugged.“Not saying I won’t do it, just that the price goes up in proportion to the likelihood of me getting stuck in fae jail.I may be short and scrawny, but I like my body the way it is, thank you very much.”
As the fae had a tendency to inflict punishment by way of various mutations—or perhaps it was experimentation—on human inmates, Cha could understand Nerd Girl’s caution.Cha was lucky she’d gotten out of Moonstone jail with only a bit of minor torture and no additional appendages.
“What if we offered you some pure yellow pixie dust, straight from the source?”Dy asked casually.
Nerd Girl almost fell off her stool.“Seriously?”she squeaked.She glanced wildly about the pristine lab space.Grimy windows looked out on one of the seedier sectors of Rockton.“Do you know what I could do with pure yellow?”
Cha followed her gaze, not really comprehending the significance of the various bubbling flasks springing ponytails of tubing and sealed bottles with ominous looking contents.She had no idea what any of that stuff did.“No?”
“Neither do I!”Nerd Girl answered gleefully.“And I want to find out.How much can I have?”
“That depends,” Cha said decisively, cutting off Dy the softhearted, who was frankly a terrible negotiator.“Besides a source for agnicurna and instructions on mixing it with Obsidian dust to disguise it from the fae authorities, we need a method for concealing the Citrine dust on the trip back.”
Nerd Girl goggled.“You’re actuallygoingto Citrine?”
“You don’t need to know that part,” Cha informed her.“You’re better offnotknowing that part.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”As it was, the scientist/sorceress swallowed nervously, glancing out the windows as if someone might be looking into the tenth story lab.“Are you twoinsane?”
“In a word,” Dy put in, “yes.But we plan to come out again and with high grade yellow dust.How much we can put in Big Betty depends on how much we can effectively disguise.”
“Hmm.”Nerd Girl spun idly on her stool as she considered the problem.“You’re leaving the agnicurna behind?”