area with what I knew were unnaturally wide eyes. No doubt the few tourists thought I was on some sort of drug given the way I was staring, my head moving around as if it were on a swivel.
“You didn’t feel that on your feet? The ground got soft.” I said, then lowered my voice. “Like with the wraiths.”
Penny shook her head. “Wraiths don’t soften the ground.” Her eyes got as big as mine probably were. “Which means whoever is controlling them is close. Damn, I’m getting old if I didn’t notice that. I was so focused on the immediate danger.”
I grimaced and stood on the edge of the flower bed, trying to get a better view. But I still couldn’t see over the tops of the tourists’ heads.
I needed more height than the flower bed was offering, so I turned and waded through the thick bed of flora, grabbed the bottom foot of the metal rider and shimmied my way up.
“Hey, you can’t do that!” a woman yelled.
“Listen, Karen, I’ll get down in a minute! Untwist your panties!” I yelled back. The cold metal of the statue was slick from a steady drizzle of rain, making it hard to get a purchase, so I was sweating by the time I’d climbed over the soldier and stood between his crotch and the horse’s neck. Then again, even with the cloud cover it was warm and humid. Yes, I was going to blame the sweat on the heat, what woman wouldn’t?
I did a slow turn, one hand resting on top of the soldier’s head for balance as I looked for someone who didn’t fit in with the tourist crowd. Just in the time we’d been there, a good number of people had shown up. Baseball caps and brightly colored umbrellas littered the area, and the dark hooded character slipping out of the square stood out like a damn sore thumb.
“Hey!” I yelled in their direction. “I see you with your stupid cloak on like some damn Harry Potter wizard! You aren’t fooling anyone, you jerk face!”
The robed figure slowed and turned to look my direction, the animosity radiating off him palpable even with the hundred feet between us.
Well, I’d gotten his attention.
Whoops.
The hooded figure raised a hand and swept it in my direction. There was no visible magic, but I could feel a wave of unseen badness coming at me. Yes, badness, it was the best word I could come up with in that moment, so sue me.
“Penny, we’d better go,” I said.
“Found trouble, did you? Who you yelling at?” she barked up at me.
I scrambled to get off the horse and rider statue, slipped and went sideways. My foot caught in the crotch of the rider, and I flipped upside down. “Yelling at bad guys full of badness!” I yelped as I tried to sit up.
Hah, an upside down sit up, who was I kidding? I moved a quarter inch. Maybe.
Sit-ups were not on the menu of my workout. Running was, and maybe some stretching and yoga if Suzy insisted on it and I couldn’t escape her. I tried to squeeze upward again, the feeling of something bad coming toward me intensifying. Another squeeze upward, and I may have let some pressure off with a cracking fart. In that moment all I could think was at least neither guy I’m hot for is here listening to this.
Oh, how damn wrong I was.
“What the hell are you doing?” Crash’s voice snapped my head around so I was looking at him upside down. Crash, here in NOLA? I thought he was staying in Savannah to see what he could find out?
Then again, the fae were looking for the angel wings. Was that why he was here?
Damn, he even looked good upside down. A light gray shirt plastered to his body, damp from the rain and jeans that fit him just right in all the right places.
And then I realized he must have heard the roar that had ripped out of my back end.
Jaysus lawd, kill me now.
At least the blood rushing to my face could be blamed on the current angle of my body and not the fact that I wanted to die from embarrassment. That had been no quiet, ladylike poof escaping my body.
Nope, it had been the rumble of a dual set of trains roaring down the tracks as I fought to sit up and unhook myself from my precarious position, putting pressure on my guts that I couldn’t control.