Page 70 of Pixie Problems
“The timing will have to be near-perfect then,” Cy said.
“Can a vampire hold and toss the orb?” August asked the wizard, and the young guy nodded. “Then I can do it. I can throw it quickly and accurately.”
The officer nodded and made everyone else go back to the passageway just in case things went horribly wrong. I refused to go, which caused a bit of disagreement and frustration for some—namely my bodyguards, Naut, and Rhys—but I wanted to be nearby in case my guys needed help. Who knew? Maybe my sarcasm would be necessary in order to save the day.
The wizard called magic into his palms—a tropical looking shade of pink, which made the wizard blush—and quickly handed it off to August. August and Rhys nodded at each other. Rhys formed a starlight dome over the device and crate but left just enough space on the sides for someone incredibly skilled and accurate to hurl something in quickly. August chucked the orb into the crate in a way that would make any major league pitcher proud, Rhys extended his starlight shield so that it melded with the ground, and everything went perfectly.
For about five seconds.
And then the forcefield device exploded, the white flash burning my retinas. The sound was so loud that I cupped my hands over my ears in pain and yelped. I shook my head, trying to rid my ears of the shrill shrieking sound that had accompanied the blast, blinked my eyes, trying to get them to function again, and looked at what used to be the device and one small, wooden crate. They had both been decimated and were just dust now. The starlight dome, which Rhys was still holding up just in case, was hazed with it.
I was confused. “Shouldn’t it have blasted through the floor?” I asked Rhys.
He shook his head. “Starlight shields in the shape of a sphere are the strongest. They protect on all sides, which comes in handy when you want to prevent a cave-in by keeping the cavern floor, and everything that might be underneath it, whole.”
I nodded. Made sense.
When the dust settled, he dropped his shield, and those of Hux’s pack healthy enough to move, came out. They were carrying those pack-mates too sick or too wounded to walk.
The gnarled elderly woman hobbled toward my small group. A large man helped her walk, taking her weight onto his outstretched arm.
“You are the police of Moonhaven Cove?” she asked, her voice dry as sandpaper.
“Well, I’m not, but lots of us here are. I’m the one Hux has been harassing.” I held out my hand to shake her tiny, wrinkled one. She was probably ancient. Shifters didn’t age to look as old as she did for several hundred years. “I’m Paradise Hart. Please call me Dice.”
The lead officer came forward. “Is there another way out of these caverns? They blew the front cavern and caused a rockslide. We can’t go back the way we came.”
The big man holding up the gnarled elderly woman nodded. “Yes. There are a few. Some go out the south end of the caverns.”
“How is it possible one huge dome rock covers this much space?” I asked, puzzled. We’d walked down the passageway a bit before hitting this cavern, at least a few minutes. The space under this rock was either mystifyingly large, or there was something else going on here.
“Didn’t you notice the slope of the passageway?” Cy asked. “It sloped sharply downward. I’d bet we’re under the dome rock in some inter-connecting underwater caverns.”
The man and elderly shifter nodded. “That makes this place more dangerous,” she said. “If anyoneof Hux’s bombs detonate down here, we could find ourselves trapped under a lot of water.”
While the lead officer spoke with her, my little group went among the rest of Hux’s pack, trying to determine if we could offer them any help.
My Insight was practically blaring an air raid alarm at me, loud and insistent, as I took the group in as a whole: malnourished, dehydrated, broken bones and contusions, totally depleted blood cells, exhaustion . . . Each of them had a laundry list of problems that only a fully staffed hospital could help with. But before we could take them to one, one of the teams needed to track down where Hux had gone and take out his tethering stone. Without doing that, none of these people would be able to leave.
Our whole team broke open our backpacks and offered the coyote shifters water bottles, meal replacement bars, bandages, and a few splints. I quickly got to work immobilizing the broken legs so they wouldn’t get worse and took care of whatever else I could with the supplies we’d brought with us. It wasn’t much, but it was the best that could be done at the moment. I’d brought a few space blankets with me and handed them out. I always carried them in my backpack for emergencies.
After telling them we’d be back for them, we took off back down the way we’d come. The cavern behind us had been important for us to find, but also a dead end.
Even though we’d just set off an explosion that had rattled the very stones around us, we moved quickly and quietly down the passageway, not knowing if there were more bombs in ahead caverns that might be set off by vocal vibrations or otherwise. Really the fact that magic was so specialized that you could create a magical bomb that had someone speaking as the match that lit the fuse amazed me. I mean, if you really stopped to think about it, it was pretty cool.
Rhys held my hand and squeezed it when I turned to look at him. His starlight shield was still around us, and I was grateful for his magical protection. Once again, I wished it was possible for him to protect everyone with it, but they needed to be able to scout ahead and move around, and they couldn’t do that trapped in a bubble of magic.
I’d bet that Rhys had used me as the focal point for the shield, because he could be ridiculous sometimes, and he sort of liked me better alive, rather than using himself as the focal point. Rhys nodded as if he could hear my thoughts and kissed my cheek, and my heart melted a little. We were in this together, and I was content with that.
We hit another cavern and the shifters did their thing, sniffing for bombs or magic that might backlash on us. They found a device hidden on a rocky overhang over the entrance to another passageway.
A shifter came over, pointing at it, then asked using hand signals for the lead officer’s phone, and the officer handed it over.
Officer/Shifter: We all need to be in the passageway before that thing is set off.
Dice:Does it need to be set off? Can’t we just bypass it?
Officer/Shifter:I’m getting the feeling that if we don’t set them off as we come across them, that it will bite us in the butt when it’s time to get out of here.
