Blood & Honey (Race Games 1)

Chapter Thirty

First gear. Clutch, second gear. Danica jerked the steering wheel around something that flew across the road in front of her from another car, the kelpie team. She didn’t have enough time to see what it was, only enough to avoid it, so she just continued to focus on the road before her.

Clutch, third gear.

“That was a goblin weight,” Arden grunted, his shoulders tense in the passenger seat. “Nasty creatures.” His job was essentially useless until they’d completed a quarter of the track. No one had their weapons systems activated.

“How do they have something like that if the weapons systems aren’t on?” Danica managed to ask as she pressed the clutch in again and shifted to forth gear. She suspected she would be shifting a lot on the track depending on the obstacles. This wouldn’t be a race won in sixth gear. It would be won with the full range of the engine.

“The weights aren’t a part of any system,” Arden replied, curling his hands around his harness.

“They just throw them out the window,” Phi added. “No system needed. The road curves East in about a hundred feet.”

“East?” Danica grunted. The car rolled over what felt like a speed bump in the road, but she wasn’t sure if it was a speedbump that somehow rolled in front of her or something living. Either way, she didn’t slow down. “Left or right, navigator? I don’t have a natural compass.”

“It’ll curve slightly to the left. We’re currently moving south.”

“Let’s stick to normal directions, yeah?” Danica turned the wheel to follow the road, the other racers around her. Some of them barreled full speed ahead but they had sixty miles to go. There was no use running the car ragged at the beginning. Besides, that was how you found traps you weren’t prepared for.

Danica gunned the car and passed the kelpie team, prepared for a rebuttal, but there was nothing from them. The car was moving, but it wasn’t moving very fast at all, not what Danica would expect of a race. She resisted the urge to glance over at the male kelpie who’d she’d seen on the stage. He had been beautiful before. She couldn’t risk being distracted by him.

“Got it,” Phi answered, all business, his fingers tapping away on the tablet mounted in front of him. Danica risked a quick glance in her rearview mirror to check on him. The brief glance she got was enough to show the tension on his face.

“If you two don’t relax, you’re going to stress me out,” she grunted, swerving around the goblin car suddenly slamming on their breaks. There were three goblin teams in this race, every single one of their cars brown. Though there should have only been one team, none of the three seemed to be working together, each determined to cause their own trouble.

As the goblins flew passed when Danica swerved around them, the green-skinned creature on the passenger side hung out the window and shook another weight at them. The moment they went by, he threw it, but Danica had already seen him ready to throw. She dropped the car back down into third gear and gunned it, giving it an extra push. The weight just barely missed the roof of the car.

“Shit!” Arden, thinking the weight was going to hit them, flinched and craned his head around to watch the trajectory. The weight embedded in the side of a brick building. “How did you even react so fast?”

But Danica didn’t answer. She was too focused on the course in front of her, on the way the buildings suddenly ended and spit them out into the desert at night. They’d started the race in the daytime.

“It’s charmed. The track will probably change constantly,” Phi answered before she could even ask.

The ass of the elf team came into view and Danica focused on reaching them.

Something smacked against the back of the window and Danica glanced out the mirror and scowled. “Goblins are back.”

Arden turned as best as he was able to in his harness but when that didn’t work, he flipped down the visor and popped open the mirror. He frowned. “Is that. . . meat they’re throwing at us?”

“Ew.” Danica scrunched her nose up. “Why throw meat?”

“Because it’s annoying,” Phi said. “There’s a trap icon coming up in about fifteen yards. Move to the left. It’ll be marked by a beam of light shooting up.”

“I see it!” Danica moved on the course to the left to run the Porsche directly over the beam of light. The way the marked traps worked was simple enough—run over the emblem and it’ll trigger the trap for the next car behind you—so all Danica had to do was drive over it. The moment the car drove over it, she held her breath for whatever was triggered for the goblin team currently chasing them. They didn’t even seem to care about the kelpie car trailing them.

Nothing happened.

“What the fuck?” Danica growled the same time as Arden.

“It should have been triggered.” Phi rapidly tapped his tablet. “It’s showing we directly passed over it.” He quickly unfastened his harness.

“What are you doing?” Danica growled. “Put your harness back on.”

“I need to see if it’s triggered by the goblins.” Phi twisted in his seat and watched out the back window.

Danica glanced out the side mirror in time to see the goblins drive over the same trap she had. The moment they did, there was a massive boom that had her flinching. Eyes wide, she watched as the trap was triggered and the kelpie car was thrown into the air. It exploded a moment later and a loud trumpet blew in the air.

“That’s signifying a dead team,” Arden murmured, looking in his own mirror.

“And we apparently have a problem,” Phi added, turning back in his seat and fastening his harness with fast fingers. “Someone is working against us behind the scenes. The trap should have been triggered by us. Since it wasn’t, we have to assume none of them will.”

“It doesn’t hurt to drive over them,” Danica nodded. “But it seems it’ll be pointless to go out of the way for them.”

Something else slammed against the back of the car, a weight that made a chink but didn’t do more than scratch the car. A weak throw.

Arden craned his neck. “We need to lose them, little racer.”

She nodded. “I’ve got this. No traps. No weapons.”