"Your sternum." He presses two fingers flat against my breastbone through the gingham. Gentle. Testing. The adrenaline is still screaming through my bloodstream, turning everything sharp and bright and oversaturated. His face is six inches from mine. The cut on his forehead has started to clot, a dark line bisecting his brow. The feather behind his tusk trembles in the wind from the absent windshield.
His fingers find a tender spot below my left collarbone. I hiss.
"Bruised." His jaw works. "Not broken."
"How can you tell?"
"Broken sounds different." He pulls back. His hands leave my shoulders and the cold rushes into the spaces where his palms had been. "Your pupils are even. No concussion. Elevated heart rate is adrenaline, not shock. You'll have bruising tomorrow across the chest where the seatbelt caught."
"You got all that in ten seconds?"
"Seven." He reaches past me, one arm crossing my body, and wrenches the seatbelt back across my lap. The buckle clicks. His arm retracts. "Drive."
I drive.
The van protests every mile. Without a windshield, the highway air hits us at fifty-five miles per hour like a wall of frozen needles. My eyes water. My hair whips free of its careful low bun and lashes across my face in every direction. Dash sitsin the roofless passenger side with his arms crossed over his shredded tuxedo, completely unbothered, like he's riding in a parade float instead of a mobile disaster.
The heater doesn't work anymore. Something severed in the griffin's initial landing, probably. My fingers go numb on the steering wheel first, then my nose, then my ears. I clench my jaw to stop my teeth from chattering. Fail.
Dash unbuttons what's left of his tuxedo jacket, peels it off his shoulders, and drops it across my lap without looking at me. The silk is warm from his body and smells like ozone and something deeper, woodsmoke and iron. The armor-silk panels glow faintly in the dark, residual enchantment still pulsing through the weave.
I don't say thank you. He doesn't want me to. I tuck the jacket around my thighs and keep driving.
The Silverleaf Country Club announces itself two miles before the actual entrance. First the stone walls, twelve feet high, covered in crawling luminescent ivy that the Elves imported from some pocket dimension. Then the wrought-iron lampposts lining the private road, each one topped with a captured wisp-light that casts everything in a soft, expensive blue glow. Then the gates. Bronze. Thirty feet. Carved with interlocking leaf patterns so detailed they seem to breathe.
The gates stand open. Beyond them, a sweeping drive of crushed white quartz winds through manicured gardens toward a clubhouse that resembles a cathedral crossed with a greenhouse. Crystal spires. Living wood columns. Windows that shimmer with internal starlight.
And at the entrance, a valet stand staffed by three Elves in matching silver livery.
I drive the van up the quartz drive. Glass fragments rattle off the dashboard. Wind whistles through the windshield frame. The muffler, which has been dragging for the last six miles,chooses this exact moment to detach fully and clatter onto the pristine white quartz with a metallic shriek that echoes off the crystal spires.
The head valet steps forward. Tall. Cheekbones that could cut glass. Ears pointed enough to pick up satellite radio. His silver-gloved hand rises, palm out, in a gesture so elegant it belongs in a ballet.
"Absolutely not."
"I have a reservation."
"You have a biohazard." His nostril flares. One single nostril. "This vehicle will not park within two hundred meters of the main entrance. Club policy prohibits any conveyance lacking a primary windshield, a functional exhaust system, and"—his gaze slides to the passenger side where the door should be—"a complete set of doors."
Dash unfolds from the doorless passenger gap. All six feet nine inches. He keeps unfolding. The valet's chin tilts up. And up. Dash's undershirt, stretched across a torso that the griffin's claws had failed to breach, is stained with road grime and blood.
The valet's composure holds, but barely. A muscle twitches beneath his left eye.
"Sir, the overflow lot is behind the service building. Past the compost facility."
CHAPTER 6
DASH
The Elf's left eye twitches again. His silver-gloved hand stays raised, palm out, fingers trembling at the tips. Behind him, the other two valets exchange a glance that communicates, in the universal language of service workers confronting catastrophe, a shared desire to be anywhere else on this plane of existence.
I assess the situation.
Okay. We have a two-hour drive. The rehearsal dinner is at seven. My watch, cracked across the face from the griffin's second talon strike, reads 4:47. The valet's overflow lot sits behind the service building, past the compost facility. A four-minute walk on flat terrain. Six minutes in Magnolia's heels, which she described in the van as "architecturally ambitious." Eight minutes if the quartz path is uneven, which it is, because Elves prioritize aesthetics over function in all surface materials.
Eight minutes puts us at the entrance at 4:55. Acceptable. But the compost facility will coat the soles of her shoes in organic residue. She'll track it across the lobby. Someone will notice. Someone will comment. The contract specifies that I neutralize all sources of social threat for the duration of the engagement.
Compost on her shoes is a social threat.
