It was a little like I was flying through the sky strapped to a lawn chair propelled by a high-speed balloon. I’d left my stomach somewhere above the skyscrapers we flew over.
“You look a little green.” Fin’s voice cut through the headset, static-laced and flat.
“Aw, thanks, you look pretty today too,” I managed.
With my eyes squeezed tight, and my hands dug into the seat, it was all the smart-ass I could give him. My arm still burned from he cut he’d made, and my head felt too tight, crammed with this extra presence. It wasn’t his mind—we didn’t share a mental connection—but I could feel something hovering at the edges waiting for me to assimilate it.
He chuckled, and I ignored him. Once we landed, he would get my knees in his balls for putting me through this. I hadn’t even wanted to go to the forest of doom to find his sister. Hell, it was likely a trap, anyway.
Fin kept ordering me to look out at the view, but every time he suggested it, I flipped him off and then resumed my death grip on the harness-like seatbelt he’d strapped me into. Every so often I whispered ‘I hate you’ into the headset so he knew my opinion about our travel method hadn’t changed.
“Honestly,” he said, “I’m an excellent flyer. You’d be in more danger riding in a car on the highway.”
That statement earned him another bird. “That’s just something people say to people like me who don’t like flying. If I fall out of this helicopter, I’m going to die. If I fall out of a moving vehicle, I’ll likely be in a lot of pain, but my odds of survival are higher.”
“You’d be a human pancake if you fell out of a moving vehicle,” he pointed out.
“Well, I live to give the captain something to clean up.”
He laughed at that one, and I squeezed my eyelids tighter together. “How did you learn to fly a helicopter, anyway? Don’t fae have a thing about steel and machinery?”
He remained silent, so I risked a glance and then promptly shut my eyes again as the fog strewn view outside his window threatened to bring up my breakfast.
“Were you a Vietnam fighter pilot?” I asked.
He didn’t respond, so I continued prodding him.
“No, that would require a haircut.” I thought about it for a few more seconds. “Secret celebrity chauffeur, taking Marilyn and Elvis to all those places no one is really quite sure how they got into?”
That one earned me a snort from him, but still no answer to my question.
“Oh, I know. Former secret service piloting Marine One, until you had to leave before all the other boys realized you weren’t quite like them. Of course, you're strong and capable in the practice ring, but out on the job you’re always a tiny bit more together, a tiny bit faster.”
Nope, nothing. His face remained a stone wall I was determined to crack.
“Drug runner for the cartels?”
I kept my eyes open now just to watch his face for any micro-expressions. “Magic smuggler from the great Canadian Covens? The captain’s sidekick during the Gulf War and now he’s your henchman because you saved his life and he owes you a debt for the rest of his?”
His eyebrows drew down, and then his face cleared a millisecond later. It wasn’t the reason he could fly a helicopter, but it spoke to the casual relationship I witnessed between employer and employee. Interesting.
A flash of the captain laying in blood-streaked mud and Fin kneeling over him wreathed in light bounced around the inside of my skull. Fin couldn’t access my mind but when he felt something strongly, he might accidentally shove it down the bond. I chose not to bring it to his attention. He had to know already, right?
“Rescuing snow bunnies when they get in too deep on their sun-dappled mountainside vacations?”
He cracked a slight smile on that one.
“I can do this all day.”
“I can ignore you all day,” he countered. “You have a very active imagination.”
“Ouch. For one, it was my job to consider all the ways a person could maim me in my pursuit of them. I’m very good at imagining my own death, and it sucks every time. Secondly, you’re the one who dragged me out in this death machine on a field trip, which will probably leave us riddled with bullets or turned into walking zombies when Esteban catches us. I should have put ‘no stupid plans’ in my contract.”
“You haven’t signed a contract.”
I snapped my fingers. “Then we need to go back and sign that contract and I need to make sure it has an addendum to never include helicopters.”
To that, he only shook his head.