“At least you won’t beat me up,” she muttered, bringing out her phone. “Do you have a plan, or does it just seem like you do?”
“It just seems like I do. Though going back to the bar is our smartest bet. If Darius is bringing his new friend to keep an eye on her, they probably haven’t shown up yet.”
“You don’t think so?”
He gritted his teeth, uncertainty rising through him. It was a shifter bar, which gave jurisdiction to Roger. If Darius waited too long, he might lose his chance to interrogate the mages and gain firsthand knowledge of the situation. Emery doubted Darius would take the risk.
Of course, it also seemed implausible that Darius would bring a dangerous elder out in public with him, but that possibility was dangerous to Penny. More so than Emery would like to risk.
“Damn it. We need a plan B.” He wanted to break something in frustration. Instead, he took a deep breath. Best not to panic Penny. Then she’d really be unpredictable, and that might be lethal in their current situation. “We can’t walk to Reagan’s place from here, even if that wasn’t a horribly bad idea. I’m not great at stealing cars, even if that wasn’t a horribly bad idea.”
“Right. Does your phone work?”
“Yes, why?”
“Do you have a rideshare service on it, like Uber or Lyft?”
He patted the phone in his pocket for no particular reason. “No. It only has the apps that came with it.”
“One of us needs to be the designated tech-savvy one. I’d hoped that would be you.”
“Hope dashed.”
“Not at all. You just need to learn. I’m pretty sure you can. You’re smart,” she said, utterly serious. He couldn’t help chuckling despite the situation. “You should set Lyft up on your phone really quick and call for a ride.”
“Except I don’t have an account to download apps. Or a credit card to set up an account…to download apps.”
“In the house that Jack built,” she said randomly before exhaling. “Okay, plan C. Do you have any cash? Or wait, what am I thinking? We can see if Callie and Dizzy are—”
She spun, ramming his arm with her elbow and knocking it away from her. Her hands pulled up to her chest and magic pulled from her cloud and into a tight, focused weave three inches thick. A moment later, he knew why.
A bright red blast, full of dazzling elements, flew at them from behind. Sophisticated, practiced, and somewhat powerful, the spell had clearly been created by an advanced user.
Penny’s spell blasted out toward it, wrapping it up easily before turning end over end, eating through it.
Shapes slipped behind the corner a block down, the attacking mages taking cover. Emery and Penny were wide open.
“Let’s go,” she said, grabbing his arm and yanking him forward. “There are two more grisly spells in the making. I don’t know how many more of them are around, but it’s safe to say we’re outnumbered, and this isn’t a good place to fight.”
“If we don’t take them out, they’ll just—” Her spell, having successfully consumed the other, grew in power and continued on its way. “It is headed back to the user.”
“I hope so. I don’t honestly know if it’ll work. We made No Good Mikey use a casing to attack me, but my spell didn’t reach him in the end. He’d already scrambled over the fence, into his yard, and shut himself into his house before my spell started pursuing him. He was not impressed with Reagan tricking him into using magic. Or being a magical target.”
Emery didn’t have time to laugh at her antics. Black fog clouded his vision and he saw the way ahead, teeming with bodies and flashing magical spells.
“We can’t go straight. We need to turn up here. Pick up the pace.” He started to jog. “They’re here in numbers. Our stint in the bar must’ve given them time to organize.”
“There are a great many ways out of here,” she said, yanking him right at the next corner and then down another street. A group of girls yelled and jeered at a group of guys on the other side of the street. One of the guys was showing his man-boobs and shaking his rather large belly. “We can walk quickly down the middle of Bourbon Street and blend into the crowd. You’ll have to take off your shirt, though.”
“You first.”
“I’d rather be the one jeering and whooping.” She laughed, strangely not a forced sound, given the situation, and shoved him left at the next corner.
With the next turn, the black fog rushed into his vision, only to clear immediately when Penny pulled him around the corner. “One back there.”
A jet of magic roared behind them, the power blistering as it passed by.
“They’re either packing serious power, or they’re constructing spells together,” Emery said, breathing heavily now.
“I thought mages didn’t work together.”
“Not in the way you’re thinking. Not like witches. Remember when we made that spell in Darius’s warehouse? We each created half of it, then merged it together? Mages work that way when confronting a larger power source. Or else naturals would go unchallenged.”
“Like building a Lego village with someone.” She nodded, like that made sense, and pointed in front of them. Beyond a roadblock cutting off traffic, people meandered up the middle of the street. Neon light glowed and spilled across the cement, sliding over the passersby. Music pulsed and people moved, lifting their plastic cups and cheering for no reason other than the fun of a constant party.
“We’ll walk down there for a ways.” She grabbed his hand and they veered right, around the roadblock and into the crowd. The crowd wasn’t as dense as it would be for a festival or Mardi Gras, but there was ample opportunity to hide. “Stay to the middle,” she said. “Keep with the crowd. When we can, let’s break away and run again. We need to get away from the mages.”
“I agree. The chase is on. If we can get them to follow us instead of surround us, we’ll be fine.” He clutched her hand, smiling for show and even moving a little to the pounding music blasting out of a nearby bar, fitting in with the group of people in front of them.
“You can dance.” She shook her hand loose before slipping her arm around his middle. His gut tightened in a way that wasn’t appropriate for the situation, and he exhaled at the warm feeling unfolding in his chest. He let his arm fall around her shoulders as she said, “I’ve always liked to dance.”
“I don’t know about dancing, but I can jive to rhythm well enough.”
“Jive?” She smiled at him, and the world around them started to dim. Her effect on him was not helping him focus. “Next you’ll tell me you have fancy feet.”
She chuckled and scanned the area around them. Her hand gripped his waist a little tighter and her face dropped, now looking through her eyelashes.
He followed her gaze. A scarred-faced man stood at the side of the street with cunning eyes and a naturally downturned mouth. He wore scraped-up leather pants, a worse-for-wear leather duster, and a black shirt.
“Someone must’ve told him you were dangerous,” she whispered.
Emery laughed. “Or tricked him into thinking it was a costume party.” He looked away, scanning the other side of the street, then above them, just in case someone hanging out on one of the balconies looked out of place. “He’s a mercenary. They aren’t clever in their fashion choices. The Guild is outsourcing. Unless he’s working for someone else.”
“Is he magical?”
“Maybe. Or else he’s just a thug. He either doesn’t know what he’s up against, or knows exactly what he’s up against. The choice of outfit would be the same for either situation. We’re hoping for the former, obviously.”
“They want us really bad,” she said, that halo of survival light covering her body. This time, it expanded to cover him as well.
Unbelievably, his survival magic kicked in, too, welling up from deep inside of him and rippling into hers like a new current in a tranquil pond. The colors swirled and mixed until they blended, pumping with power and turning a hazy gray.
“Sorry,” he said, spotting a plain woman with a tight bun and a purple sash around her neck. The color signified power level, he remembered, though he didn’t know which tier that specific color was.
“For what?” Penny’s nails dug into his sides. Beyond the woman, who was obviously with the Guild and showing her higher status, leaned another mercenary, this one in somewhat newer leathers. Either that meant he made a good living, or he was a greenie.
Emery hoped for the latter.
“I made your snow-white halo a muddy gray,” he said, not liking the numbers stacked against them.
She shrugged. “You turned me from the color of a blank slate into a drab color. At least I have a little color now.”
He laughed despite himself, remembering their conversation in Seattle about her white survival magic versus his black. He’d always seen his magic as a reflection of his soul—black—but she’d flipped the script, saying she had no color because they’d all fled, but he was full of them.
A crowd of guys stood to the side, looking up at two girls dancing on a balcony, ready to flash their goods.