the dash. “This may have unknown consequences,” he warned.
“Yeah. Like my foot on Landon’s ass.”
“The radio station?” Jenks said, voice loud beside my ear. “Take the next right. I know a shortcut. Rachel’s car is small enough.”
“So why sunder the lines?” the host prompted as Al wove aggressively through traffic. Horns were beeping, and I wasn’t surprised that Al knew all the appropriate hand gestures.
“I had to,” Landon said. “It was regrettable, but temporarily ending magic was the only way to insure that Kalamack wouldn’t force the undead’s souls back to the ever-after again.”
“My God! Are you listening to this? He destroyed the lines so elves would be the only ones able to do magic. That it took out the vampires and demons was just the icing!” I exclaimed, holding on as Al drove my car within an inch of its abilities. I’d had enough of Landon’s lies. If Trent wouldn’t say anything, fine. But Cincinnati was used to me doing outrageous things.
“Even so,” Landon was saying as Al followed Jenks’s pointing finger down a narrow, potholed street overhung with scrubby trees, “I had to gain the support of the witches. Without them, it never would have been possible to reinstate the power in the defunct Arizona ley lines.”
“You little liar!” I shouted, but they were going into a break and I held the dash as we bounced along a narrow street that ended in a dirt track going almost straight up. “Whoa, wait a moment, Al,” I said, worried. “My car doesn’t have a tall enough suspension for this. You’re going to rip out my transmission.”
“Mmmm.” Jenks’s wings tickled my neck. “I don’t remember it being that steep.”
Al put it in park, my car facing the impassable road. “He’ll be done with his spot by the time we backtrack and reach the station in this archaic, outmoded form of combustion travel.”
I said nothing for three heartbeats as an ad for red wigglers played. That Landon’s lies were being accepted as truth—each day making his political clout more secure—really rankled me. It was just pain, wasn’t it? My pulse hammered and my hands went damp. “Okay, jump us there,” I said, shocking myself when I looked at Al and saw that innocent elf staring at me from behind my mirrored sunglasses.
“Truly?” he asked, his almost white eyebrows high in his young, tan face.
I nodded. “I need to shut him up.”
Grinning, Al locked the doors and cut the engine.
“Wait!” Jenks shrilled. “You are not leaving me in this car. I want to go, too! Damn it, demon, don’t you leave me in this car!”
Al’s aura slipped over me midbreath, shifting my aura to match the resonance of the nearest ley line. Like two water drops joining, it pulled me in.
Agony stabbed through me, and I swear I would’ve passed out if I’d had a body, but I was only thought, and my thoughts were on fire.
A weird gurgle rose up, and I choked it back. My knees threatened to give way, and I locked them, glad I had knees again. My skin wasn’t on fire and a glowing spike wasn’t being hammered into my brain—it only felt that way. Al had been quick, unsettlingly so, but it still hurt.
I took a ragged breath. Even Jenks’s dust spilling down my front seemed too hot. But we were there, or here, rather, and the deep quiet of a radio studio muffled my ears. Coffee. They have coffee at radio stations, don’t they? Coffee can fix anything.
My head felt as if it was going to split open, but when I saw Landon sitting with his back to me at the little table with its overhanging mics, my anger pushed the pain down. A man who could only be Mac, the host, had his head down over his notes as the last of the commercial played out. Al was beside me, holding my elbow as I caught my breath. He looked like that elf kid as he made a bunny-ear kiss-kiss to the technician in the adjoining sound room. The tech stared at us in slack-jawed amazement, frozen as Mac, oblivious to us, tidied his papers and opened his mic.
“This is Mac, and we’re back with Sa’han Landon of the elven dewar. Landon, thank you again for talking with us today. It’s not just the vampires who have been impacted by the new ley lines. Weather control at the track has been iffy. There have been issues at the hospital requiring secondary spells and charms.