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I pointed this out, but all I got for my trouble was another loud blast from the horn.
So of course I flipped him off.
He said something rude, threw the truck into reverse, then shot past close enough to force me to duck. He swerved around another vehicle, rolled sideways to fit between a couple of buses and vanished into the glare of a blistering August sun. The resulting boom was loud enough to vibrate the ground.
Asshole.
I hadn’t had time to draw a breath before the air around me coalesced and seemed to draw inward, contracting like a collapsing star. I leapt to the side as a white-hot flash sizzled across my eyes and an earsplitting bang ruptured the air. And another vehicle popped into existence in a burst of car-shaped sparks.
A kid in the backseat had his face glued to the window. He regarded me somberly for a moment before deliberately sticking out his tongue. His father hit the gas, revving the engine and grinding the gears, and the car shot up from the ground like the bird it wasn’t.
I understood the principle: it was easier to enchant an inert object than something with a constantly changing energy field like that of the human body. That was why levitation spells always called for some kind of platform. Brooms had been used in the bad old days because they were convenient and didn’t raise any eyebrows if spotted lying around the house. The modern equivalent was the car, which was undoubtedly easier on the backside.
But the reality still made my brain hurt.
Thundering cracks from new arrivals shook the air on every side, mixing with the roar of engines, the thrum of music and a lot of alcohol-fueled laughter. I looked from my objective—the mansion on the next hill, where a certain mage was about to give an interview—to the crazy vehicle-strewn air separating us.
Well, shit.
I’d assumed that getting to Lutkin might be difficult. He was the current World Champion, and right now that made him the center of attention. But I’d thought the main problem would be getting past security, not getting to the guy at all.
Between me and the house was more than the floating traffic jam. The cars had been elevated to keep them out of the way of the sea of gleaming white vendors’ tents that spilled down the hill. They were jam- packed with scalpers hawking tickets, vendors peddling grease-laden food and people, tons of people. They were clogging every available inch of space, buying souvenirs, standing in line for freebies or placing bets. I’d never make it in time.
“Want a ride?” somebody yelled. I looked up to see a sky blue convertible hovering maybe six feet above my head.
One look at the car, and I decided that walking didn’t sound so bad, after all. “Thanks, but I’m just going to the house.”
The blonde who had issued the invitation hung precariously over the passenger-side door to grin at me. “It’s too dangerous!” She gestured with a longneck, flinging a wide arc of beer into the air. “Half the people around here shouldn’t even be driving.”
She said this with no irony whatsoever, despite the fact that her car’s black cloth top kept rising and lowering like some kind of strange bird trying to achieve flight. The driver, a young ginger- haired guy, took a stab at making it stop, and turned the wipers on instead.
“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.
