“I’ve been thinking about her unique magic for a while,” Darius answered. “It has never seemed to fit with any other magic I have read about. The balance of the two magics within her is a logical conclusion. It fits a few of the pieces together.”
“Logical to whom?” she asked as Emery climbed in beside her. Darius took the middle.
Now nothing stood between them and the beach that seemed to go on forever. The boat rocked and pitched, as though actually on a quickly moving river. The man at the bow stared straight ahead, and Penny belatedly realized that he wasn’t a person at all but some sort of creature in a dark gray robe with a hood over its head. Grayish skin covered its kind-of-human face, but the eye sockets remained empty, bone divots more than actual holes.
“Ugh,” she said accidentally, clasping her hands in her lap.
“Plan B,” Darius said as the creature in the boat animated.
It looked at Darius. “Hello, Walrus.”
Five
Penny’s eyebrows sank low. “What… What?”
The creature’s face turned a little, and adrenaline beat a drum in Penny’s veins. People were gathering on the beach now, looking their way. The magic just kept on unraveling, the sand turning into hard rock and then some sort of green-gray plant matter. The water that had once been concealed by fog rocked and swayed, a decided contrast to the smooth river beneath the boats. Far, far above, the sky was starting to peel away and lose its light. Her simple action was somehow undoing the whole magical façade.
“Who are you?” the creature said as Penny tapped the side of the boat.
“We need to go,” Penny said. The other creatures were all turning to look at their boat now. “We need to go now.”
“Black Sheep,” Emery said beside her.
“Black Sheep,” the creature repeated, as though saying hello. Its sightless gaze came to rest on Penny. “Who are you?”
A creature came jogging out of the rocky path whence they’d come, heading straight for them across the rapidly unraveling sand.
“Sparkly thongs,” she swore, tapping the boat harder now.
“Sparkly Thongs,” the creature repeated. “Where do you go?”
“We have to immobilize those other boats,” Emery said urgently as Darius rattled off some name across the river. “Otherwise they can just follow us.”
A drop plunked down on the top of Penny’s head. She absently wiped at it as she analyzed the magic she could feel. Transport. Safety. Steady.
“The boats are designed to get people to and from the area safely,” she said softly, looking over the side. The tranquil waters didn’t stop the boat from rolling and rocking, but there was magic attached, which seemed to lessen the impact. “I can’t generate rapids or anything. I’m not an elemental.”
“You’ve gotten mighty good with magical explosives, though,” Darius mused, as though there wasn’t some guy pointing at them as he loaded into a boat. As though the rest of the people or creatures in the area weren’t watching them in surprise. There went their freaking cover. There went sneaking in!
“I did this, and I didn’t even mean to,” she murmured, magic crowding around them, Emery forcing it to take shape. “It wasn’t even a spell that I did.” A thread of doubt wormed through her. Or had it been? Maybe she’d accidentally used a sort of spell to give the fog what it had been seeking.
“It doesn’t matter, Turdswallop,” Emery said, his face closed down in concentration, his fingers moving. “This isn’t the only thing that will go wrong. We need to rebound.”
“Yes, exactly. Something was always going to go wrong. Now it has. Adjust,” Darius said.
“How can you be so calm?” she ground out, taking stock of Emery’s spell. Looking back the way they’d come, she felt her chest tighten. Two boats had taken to the water now, drifting after them. They might not be following, but they definitely knew who’d caused all the mayhem.
“My dearest always said that you are the most effective when you are running for your life,” Darius replied, and had the gall to entwine his fingers over his knee. Penny had the presence of mind to notice he didn’t say Reagan’s name. She needed to remember that. “And now you are. Make miracles.”
“Yeah. Sure. Fine.” Penny threaded fire power, magic borrowed from the creature in the boat, through Emery’s concoction. Letting Emery handle the rest, she turned to the creature. It would need to be magically gagged. It would be asked who’d eroded the fog, and she couldn’t chance it spilling its guts.
A swell of power left Emery’s hands, but Penny didn’t look up to see. The bank on the right drifted closer, the creature magically aiming for whatever place Darius had requested.
She pulled ingredients from the magical cloud that constantly traveled above her, weaving the most potent of the gag spells she knew. It might kill the thing but…well, this was life or death. It was time to get serious.