Time Slipping (2 page)

“How long is this trip supposed to take?” Becky asked as she took her seat next to Finn, her life-partner.

“Seventeen hours, give or take,” said Jared.

“Seventeen hours, Jayne, did you hear that?” Tim asked. “Don’t sit by the gnome-head, whatever you do.”

“Good idea,” I said under my breath, avoiding being behind Scrum and instead choosing a spot near the middle, saving a space next to me for Spike. I’d left him in my bed earlier this morning, assuming he’d get up and be here on time. Now I was doubting the wisdom of that plan. I should have known better; he was still a night owl, preferring to sleep in until lunchtime.

“Where’s Spike?” Scrum asked, looking back at us from the passenger seat up front next to Jared.

Samantha stared out of the side window from her position behind Scrum. I wasn’t nearly as good at reading her mind as she was at reading mine, but I was pretty sure I knew what she was feeling. She wanted to be in front with Jared, but she still lacked the lady balls to take her spot at his side. Guilt was a terribly heavy burden she refused to let go of, no matter how many times I’d yelled at her about it. Seriously, it was getting old. So what if she almost unleashed evil on the entire world? People make mistakes. So do fae. Suck it up. I was hoping this little field trip of ours would help her get past her issues. If it didn’t, I was going to have to poke her with my demon knife or something. Nothing like a good blood letting to help a fae get some perspective on things, I always say.

“Do you want me to go find out where he is?” Becky asked, looking at me expectantly.

I shrugged. “Go for it. He’s probably still in my room.”

Becky disappeared in an instant, leaving an empty spot behind.

Finn sighed. “I ain’t never gonna not be jealous o’ that.”

“Yeah, yeah, booger boy, we’ve heard you say that about a thousand times now,” said Tim, sounding bored.

“Booger boy?” I asked quietly.

“Green elf. Get it?”

I snorted. “Now you’re just reaching.”

A tiny squeak from Tim’s butt was the only response I was going to get.

Becky reappeared with a yelp and a smack for my arm. “Thanks a lot, Jayne!”

I half laughed in my shock at her obvious anger toward me. “What? What’d I do?”

She glared at me. “You knew he was going to be naked, didn’t you?”

I couldn’t stop laughing at the look on her face. I didn’t know what she was so pissed about, though; he looked pretty damn good in his birthday suit if you asked me.

Tim giggled too. “Incubus junk. Awesome.”

“It’s not funny at
all
. Spike is my friend, and I don’t like seeing my friends without their clothes on.”

“I thought I was your friend,” Finn said, acting confused.

Becky elbowed him. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

“Aww, baby, don’t be like that.” He tried to lean in to cuddle her, but she wasn’t having any of that nonsense, jabbing him in the ribs hard enough to make him wheeze.

“Do I need to go hurry him up?” I asked, sighing.
An already long trip made longer by my boyfriend. Awesome.
I was sleeping with the slacker. Oh well … better than sleeping with the enemy, which I was almost destined to do for the rest of my life. Thankfully the bad spell thrown over me got nixed and Ben got sent to dragon camp for the next fifty years or whatever. Sucks to be him. I still thanked my lucky stars every day that I wasn’t tied to him for life.

A puff of air moved my hair by my left ear, and I turned to find my boyfriend there on the seat next to me, staring at me with a sparkle in his glowing red and black irises. “Hurry who up?”

“Come on, shut the doors,” Jared said sounding bored. “We have seventeen hours on the road, and I don’t want to get there too late.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s seven in the morning. We’re going to get there at midnight. Maybe we should leave later and get there in the morning.” A nap sounded good to me about then. For the last week we’d been preparing to go, and I’d been allowed to sleep in, and that was way too easy to get used to. These six in the morning starts sucked major honkiss.

Jared shook his head, firing up the engine. “No. We want to arrive when it’s dark, when no one will be able to see us very well.”

I nodded. He had a point. We did kind of stick out like sore thumbs in our fae gear and weapons and such, and I didn’t like the idea of being unarmed when we were so close to the entrance to the Underworld. Those demons had a habit of escaping and finding me.

“We ain’t goin’ in there without disguises, I hope,” said Finn, looking down at his green tunic. He did look pretty elfy.

“There are clothes for everyone to change into in the back, but I don’t want to put everything away until we’re gone from here. Just in case.”

I exchanged glances with Sam. She shrugged, telling me she had no idea why he was being so cautious.

I shrugged too and then turned my attention to a spot outside the windows. Beyond the trees just next to us lay my mother’s grave and the beautiful oak that stood sentry over it. I pushed the unhappy memories of her funeral and the need for it away as soon as they started to leak in. There’d be plenty of things for me to stress out about on this trip, I was sure; no need to get myself all worked up over a past that couldn’t be changed or Jared’s paranoia. He still blamed himself for some of what happened, with the demons sneaking into our realm and the Overworld too, and all the fae who ended up paying the ultimate price, but he was alone in that. The rest of us knew it was Leck, Maléna, and Ben behind the scheme, and that all of us were fooled into playing along, including angels who should have been above all that garbage. At least one of those three culprits was paying dearly for his interference in our peace, or so I’d heard from Theresa, the succubus who regularly visited Ben at the Overworld portal. According to her, he was learning how to be a portal guardian with his mind
not
bent on ruling the world. I had my doubts his training was going to take, though.

I used to hate Jared for tricking me into coming to the Green Forest, and back when this whole thing started, I would have been right there beside him, blaming his sorry butt for everything that happened … but not anymore. Now that I knew what it was like to be fae, and had met and come to know the other fae I now call my family, there was no way I could be anything but grateful to him. These days, he was more like my fairy godfather and guardian angel all rolled into one. It was Jared’s and Scrum’s mission to keep me safe from things that went bump in the night, and so far, they’d done a pretty damn good job of it as far as I was concerned. If a threat came for us during this trip, they’d sense its presence and give us a chance to escape it. At least, that was the theory. Daemon radar —daedar, as I liked to call it— had not proven infallible when there were talented witches around. Good thing I had the baddest badass witch of them all on my side. We Blackthorn girls stick together now. I tipped my head to the side and rested it against the cool glass.

“Does anyone mind if I smoke?” Tim asked, giggling and farting once.

“Keep your buttsmoke to yourself,” I mumbled as I closed my eyes.

“You’re no fun,” he said, farting three more times in quick succession.

My friends ignored us both, falling into a lull of conversation that quickly put me to sleep. Tim’s intestinal problems were the last thing I remembered thinking about before dosing off and falling into La-La Land.

Chapter Two

“FIND THE
LYCURGUSSSS CUP, AND bring it to meee.”

I woke with a start. The van wasn’t moving, and I was alone in a parking lot somewhere.
Did someone just tell me to bring them a cup? A what cup? A Ly …blah blah cup?

“Hello?” I said out into the empty air. Signs on the short buildings about fifty feet away were written in French. There were several other cars in the lot, picnic tables scattered around under the trees, and wide sidewalks leading to the buildings.
A rest stop. Damn. I didn’t sleep nearly enough, obviously.
I’d been hoping to see something in English, but my watch said it was only eleven-oh-three in the morning.

The nightmare or weird dream that had awakened me quickly dissipated into the mist of fear rising around me.
Where were all my friends and why did they leave me alone in the van?
Then I heard a whistling and my fears were tamped down considerably. I’d recognize Tim’s tone deafness anywhere.

“A hunting we will go, a hunting we will go, hi-ho, the merry-o a dragon hunting we will goooo…”

“Tim, where are you?” I looked around the van trying to pinpoint where his voice was coming from.

“I’m right here,” he said. A giggle followed by a snort told me he thought he was being hilarious.

I yawned. “Oh, shit, sorry. I thought that thing on the windshield was a bird turd. Now I can see it’s a pixie. How long did I sleep?”

“Ha, ha, very funny.” Tim flew up from the front seat and hovered just out of my reach. “You have drool crust on your face in case you care.” He rose up to sit on Jared’s headrest, facing the back of the van and me. Once he was balanced, his cuticles became the focus of his attention.

“Where is everybody?”

“Peeing. Getting snackage.”

“What kind of snackage?”

“Nougat, if I know this rest stop.”

“Nougat?”
Was this code for something?
I blinked my eyes several times, a wave of dizziness hitting me out of the blue. When I squeezed my lids shut and then opened them again, my head was leaning against the glass of the van.

“Tim?” I asked, picking my head up. He wasn’t sitting in front of me anymore, but I hadn’t seen or heard him leave. My gaze roamed the van, as I wondered where he’d gotten to.

“I’m right here.” He giggled and snorted.

I rolled my eyes. “Hide and seek again? Really?”

“Who’s hiding? I’m right here.”

I got the creepiest feeling I’d had since I saw the room full of mimickers in Maggie’s pantry.
What? Am I on repeat here or what?
I looked down at my watch and saw the time.
 
Eleven-oh-one.
I could have sworn the damn thing said eleven-oh-three before. Banging my watch on my leg and the seat next to me did nothing to change the second or minute hand. The seconds just kept ticking by like they were supposed to.
What the fudge, man?
I was almost afraid to say my next words, but I had to. I had to see if I was losing my mind or actually sensing something was off.

“Oh, yeah. I … uh … saw some bird shit on the windshield and thought it was you. I mean … crap … I saw you there, but I thought it was bird shit.”
Ugh
. Apparently, I’ve not only lost track of time, I’ve lost track of my ability to tease a pixie.
Now that friggin sucks.

Tim flew up from the front seat and glared at me. “Are you trying to be funny or just being stupid? I can’t tell.”

Becky came around the corner of one of the buildings and noticed me through the windshield. She waved something long, skinny, and white at me, distracting me from what I was going to say next.

“What in the hell is that?” I asked, squinting at the thing in her hand.

Tim turned around and snorted. “Nougat. Personally, I think the stuff is better to hang posters with than eat, but whatever. I’m not French.” He went back to his fingernails, and I stepped out of the van.

“What’s up?” I asked Becky, wondering if I missed something while I was awake-dreaming, which is what I decided had just happened. Or maybe I was growing a new magical skill — seeing the future.
That could be awesome.
I wasn’t nearly as worried about my little brain-fart episode after that thought flitted through my mind.

Becky stopped in front of me, her face flushed and smiling. “Nougat! They have like eight hundred kinds in there.”

“Called it,” Tim said still messing with his cuticles.

I took it from her and examined it, squishing it with little success and turning it over to find things pressed into the middle of it. “Looks like a stale marshmallow with nuts trapped inside to me.”

“Exactly.” She took it back and unwrapped it, taking a giant bite out of the end and chewing it like a cow.

“I’m going to go shake the snake,” I said, leaving her to her stale confection.

“Do you have a snake? Hey! Get me another one of these!” she shouted at my back.

I shook my head. Over the year I’d known her and her buddies, I’d learned that every single water sprite has a serious sweet tooth. You’d never know it by looking at her dental work, though; those choppers of hers were just as sparkly and white as ever, and she never got tired of blinding me with them.

As I approached the rest stop entrance, my other friends came out. Spike paused and took my hand. “You want company?” He leaned down and kissed my forehead.

“No, I can pee on my own, thanks.” I closed my eyes, happily accepting his affection. I never got tired of his attentions, even though I now had access to them pretty much twenty-four/seven.

“Okay. See you back at the van.” He spanked me on the butt as he continued on, thinking he was going to get away with it, but I pulled a little of The Green into me and tweaked him with it.

He twitched and hopped a little with the shock and then turned around, pointing at me and smiling as he walked backwards, his amazing, pointy teeth gleaming in the weak, springtime sun. “You’ll pay for that later.”

I laughed as I turned back toward the entrance. “You wish!”

Scrum was the last one out, but he hesitated before walking past me, looking at me with his head tilted to the side, reminding me of a confused canine.

“What?” I asked, walking right past him, knowing he would follow. He was kind of persistent like that, but I didn’t mind. He was assigned as my protector, after all.