hands wrapped around my body, and he easily lifted me upright, which positioned me in front of the soldier as if we were riding off into the sunset together.
I opened my mouth as the something bad that had been thrown at us hit.
The smell of putrid, stagnant water rolled up my nose, and I snorted and gagged. Crash shook his head and grimaced, taking a step back as he looked at me sideways.
“Not me,” I bit out as the smell from the spell coated my tongue. I spat to the side. Again, super unladylike, but what did I have to lose after that last blast?
“That’s what they all say,” Crash said, and I whipped around to see a distinct smirk on his mouth.
Again, I was going to say something, but the statue under me . . . moved. I blinked and twisted around to see the freaking soldier looking down at me with a pair of very dead eyes.
“Holy shit.” I scrambled to get off the horse, and a lot of things happened at once.
Penny intoned something that was surely a spell by the feel of it in the air, and Crash reached to pull me down as the horse statue under me bucked, freeing one of its back legs from the monument.
Were the people around us not seeing this? How were there no screams, no shouts of Oh my Gawd?
“I can’t hold them away from this for long,” Penny said. “Get her off that damn horse, fae king!”
The soldier statue wrapped a metal arm around my middle and clenched me to his body.
“Damn it, this isn’t the seventeen hundreds! You can’t just pluck me from the field and run away with me!” I yelped as I fought to free myself. I managed to get my legs under me and pushed upright, the little bit of drizzle working in my favor, making the metal slick against my skin.
The horse below us jerked another back leg free with a plunge forward, which loosened the soldier’s hold on me by a fraction of an inch. It was enough.
I managed to stand, so the soldier’s arms were just around my legs. Before he could tighten his hold again, I threw myself off, knowing that the ground was going to hurt, but there was nothing I could do about that right then.
I was not going to get snatched by some statue.
A split second from the ground, Crash’s arms found me.
“Got you,” he said as he pulled me upright. Rather than lock his arms around me, he gave me room to get my feet under me.
I whipped around to look at the horse and soldier.
They were back where they’d started, solid once more, and Penny let out a sigh of relief. “That was too close. I didn’t have much left in me to hold the view back from the humans. The spell had a time limit on it, but I think it might have been extended if you hadn’t slipped out of the statue’s arms.”
The closest tourists to us were giving us some serious side eye, and more than a few waved a hand in front of their noses. So they could smell the spell that had come for me, even if they couldn’t see it.
Crash shook his head and motioned for me to lead the way. I took a wide berth around the statue. It was, I noticed, in a slightly different position than the artist had designed it. Just a half step to the left on the horse and the soldier’s arms were cocked at the elbow in a new angle. That wasn’t what kept my attention.
The soldier’s eyes followed me. I stuck my tongue out at him, and his eyes narrowed. I contemplated flipping him off, but instead I stepped forward and held a hand out for Penny. She latched onto my arm, her fingers trembling. “Who did you see?” she asked softly.
“Guy in a black robe. Thin, not a big guy. I guess it could have been a woman.”
Crash fell in on my other side. I wanted to ask him just what he was doing there, if it had anything to do with angel wings. Not that I was upset he’d shown up, other than the whole fart scene. Not really. He had caught me, after all, and kept me from landing hard and breaking bones.
“Thanks,” I said.
He nodded and winked at me. “Your friends will always do their best to catch you, Bree. If you let them.”