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“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.
“All right, that’s enough!” The cop dropped to issue a warning to whoever the joker was below, and I caught another bottle that had been about to bean me.
I whipped it back at its thrower—a young guy standing at the top of the bleachers. He and a group of friends had been talking to the driver of the Bug, who was still pointing in our direction and yelling. And then they froze, gawking at something behind me with their mouths still open.
