“Ha ha.We’re not going with Lenorae anywhere.She’s giving us directions.”
“She won’t like that.”
“She can fight me.”
“And Phinny?”
Dy sighed.“She’ll forgive me.Once she cools off.”
“Ten years from now?”
“Maybe twenty,” Dy admitted with a sigh.“I’m going to talk to her.Then we’ll negotiate with Lenorae.”
“Which will be worse your lovely wife or the giant demon?”Cha speculated, then locked gazes with Dy.
“Phinny,” they said in unison.
~2~
Popping the Bubble
Lenorae, as predicted,was not happy.In fact, she was rather epically furious.
The demon had resumed her glamoured form of an astonishingly beautiful human woman with strawberry blonde hair that fell in a straight, gleaming sheet like hammered rose gold nearly to her knees.Her face looked like a flower, dominated by golden eyes.
At the moment, those eyes burned with fiery outrage.“Look, Bridget,” she sneered.“I know humans are stupid, but—”
“What is with everyone calling me stupid lately?”Cha asked Dy.
Dy shrugged.“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”
“How dare you interruptme,” Lenorae nearly howled, clenching her tiny fists by her sides.Her luscious, artificially perfect figure practically vibrated with rage.Cha fancied she could see cracks in the glamour—though she didn’t possess that kind of magic, so it was only a happy fantasy—and thought Lenorae’s creamy, flawless skin might start peeling away like old paint, releasing the horrifying monster beneath.She found it interesting that Lenorae’s vanity led her to using a glamour that made her so lovely to human eyes.Perhaps to fae eyes, as well.
Certainly, she’d created it—or had it created for her—in order to court and seduce Azul.Of course, that meant she or they knew what Azul would find attractive, all the better to sucker him into marrying her.
Strikingly beautiful,was how Azul had described his bride when Cha first picked him up.Elegant, perfect manners, intelligent, very well educated, witty, excellent conversationalist, impeccable breeding, sweet, gentle, accommodating.He had gone on rather long with his list of praises.None of which could really be applied to Cha, except maybe the bit about witty conversation.Cha knew she was hilarious, even if no one else would admit it.
While Lenorae raged, sputtered, and frothed at the mouth in a decidedly non-gentle, non-sweet and absolutely not-accommodating fashion, Cha considered the conundrum.Ifthatwas what Azul liked—the whole elegant, sweet, and gentle bit, not the raging, sputtering, frothing part—then why had he been into Cha at all?No one would call her beautiful.Or elegant.Tall and lean, with her bobbed haircut made famous from her time on the tournament circuit, Cha fell more on the “striking” end of the spectrum.Most men described her as hot, which had always suited her just fine before this.Now a treacherous insecure part of her that seemed to be left over from when she was thirteen and crushing hard on the cutest boy in the neighborhood worried that Azul had kicked her to the curb because he just wasn’t all that into her.
She hated feeling that way.Normally she’d say fuck’em if they can’t take a joke, but with Azul…
Cha shook the thoughts away and pointedly looked at the sun.“We’re losing daylight here, Lenny baby sweetheart.Can we wrap up the tantrum and settle into business?”
That shut the fae woman up, her mouth clamping down on her tirade and eyes nearly bulging out of her head.Dy snickered and Lenorae’s head swiveled with uncanny smoothness to fixate a lethal stare on the petite sorceress.“I need Bridget, but I don’t needyou, tiny rude human.”
“Whoa there,” Cha inserted.“Goldilocks and I are a package deal.Hurt her and you have nothing.”
“I can defend myself,” Dy snapped at Cha, then pointed at Lenorae.“But… what she said.”
At least Dy hadn’t tested her sorcery against the Ruby fae, as Cha was sure her friend itched to do.Dy never could resist a challenge.But Ruby was the highest of all the fae realms, which meant they possessed the most potent magic.Probably Lenorae was minor fae within her realm or she wouldn’t have been relegated to wedding bait and errand girl, but even the lowest, most pitiful Ruby fae outranked and outpowered the most elite of the next realm down, Cinnabar.Amethyst, Azul’s realm, came after that, followed by Citrine, Moonstone, and finally Obsidian.Up until this last gig, Dy and Cha, like almost all humans, hadn’t penetrated beyond the depths of the first fae realm of Obsidian.
Frankly, Obsidian was funky enough, but traveling into Moonstone had been… Cha shuddered internally at the memory.There were no words.Her human brain could barely comprehend the place, just as her eyes had been unable to handle the glaring white light.She couldn’t begin to imagine how much stranger Ruby would be.She really hoped they didn’t have to go there to rescue Azul.
“Your friend sent you to fetch me, right?”Cha asked Lenorae.“We’ve established that.”
“Friendship is a human concept,” Lenorae spat, her disgust twisting her once-pretty lips into something quite ugly.“But yes, I’m to fetch you.You received payment.Now get in the bubble.”She pointed a delicate finger at the conveyance she’d arrived in.
It looked like one of the soap bubbles the kids liked to blow, trying to get them as big as possible before they popped.This one didn’t pop and wasn’t transparent, instead shimmering with opaque brilliance on Phinny and Dy’s slow-black parking area.Not incidentally blocking in Katu, who napped in carriage form while Cha visited.Cha didn’t much like the bubble being so close to her baby cat, but so far it seemed innocuous.No way, however, was she getting inside that bubble with Lenorae.