But I definitely noticed when the bug stopped its flight in midair and hovered between us and the giant gnome, hands on hips and a glare on its tiny face.
Sebille!
The giant gnome glared down at the sprite, his hostile gaze over-scored by twin slashes of angry white brows. “Princess Sebille, what are you doing here?”
“Gerrard Gnomish the First, you are in violation of the Queen’s directives. I’ve been sent to warn you to cease your activities immediately or face her wrath.”
The gnome’s angry eyebrows lowered even further over the beady black eyes. Gerrard Senior took another step forward, the weight of his tread making the branches above our heads tremble. The wooden soldiers spun out of his way, scattering in all directions to keep from being crushed. “You overstep yourself, Princess,” the giant gnome ground out. “You are not your mother’s enforcer.”
Sebille’s wings buzzed faster, sending her a few feet higher into the air. “You’re right,” she said, “I am not an enforcer. I am simply carrying a message from her. If you refuse to acquiesce to the warning, she will be forced to descend on Gnomish with an army of the fae.”
Gerrard’s wide forehead creased between his eyes. “To what purpose?” he growled out.
That seemed pretty obvious to me. Which made me wonder what he was up to.
As if reading my mind again, Lea said, “He’s stalling.”
I nodded, wondering if Sebille was aware.
She seemed pretty savvy, and she’d definitely been around supernormals longer than I had. But I just didn’t know.
I glanced at Lea. “If you were working on something to help us get out of here, you might want to step it up a bit.”
Lea nodded. “I need to grab a piece of this tree…”
I moved to the side, out of the view of the three in the lobby, and leaned over the short wall that encompassed the green space. Squinting through the darkness, I located what I’d been looking for streaming down the trunk in messy lines. My fingers grasped a thin but sturdy vine and tugged, extracting a portion that was long enough to reach Lea. “I don’t know how all this works,” I told Lea, “…but Sebille magicked these. Would there still be magic inside them?”
Lea nodded, her eyes taking on an excited glow. “This is perfect. I just need a couple of minutes to concentrate.”
I nodded and moved away, my thoughts on that suitcase. I noticed that Alice had dropped it to the floor and was watching Sebille with obvious suspicion, her hands lifted and energy encompassing them in a charcoal gray glow.
I frowned. That didn’t look right. Alice’s magic was the color of mine. A pale silver.
Then I concentrated, tugging on the magic hiding in my core, and let it seep through me, giving me the power to envision Alice’s aura.
I blinked in horror at what I saw. Pure black energy swirled around her, oily in its blackness and unusually intense, as if gathering for an attack.
Spikes of it speared from her fingers and lashed the floor beneath her feet.
Alice was building magic. And I was afraid I knew what she intended to do with it.
I glanced at Lea, finding her sitting cross-legged on the floor inside a circle she’d made with chalk. The vine was laying across her two palms and it was glowing, the energy slowly crawling up the climber and moving toward the tree.
It was going to take her a few minutes to do anything useful.
I needed a distraction.
But to do what I needed to do, I also needed an infusion of energy.
Closing my eyes, I pictured the magic coiling in my core and concentrated on building it. I pulled energy from my cells, propelling it into my core in an effort to create pressure. When I reached the end of my internal magical stores, I sent questing fingers of energy into the air around me, finding it a rich source of more magic and pulling it close. That was much harder. I hadn’t learned to extract energy from the air around me. I’d barely learned how to pull it from my own stores.
But dire circumstances called for drastic measures.
Vaguely aware of the voices on the other side of the tree, I reached for the green space, finding pockets of Sebille’s residual magic nestled among the flowers and bushes there. I carefully extracted the magic where it was willing to be collected, and gave up on the stuff that clung too closely to the plants.
I didn’t have the strength or the time to force that magic to me.
When I felt as if my skin was tighter for the buildup of internal energy, I opened my eyes and sent my consciousness across the room, fixing it on the suitcase Alice had abandoned.
The energy left my palms in a thick wash, rather than the tidy ribbons Alice was able to expel.
My magic shot past the tree, sending its branches into motion like an errant breeze, and hit the suitcase with a whoosh. The suitcase wobbled a moment and then toppled to the ground with a loud thump. The sound was ominous in the magic-drenched air and I flinched, ducking as Alice’s gaze shot to where I stood.
A rictus of a smile curved on her homely face, and for the first time I noticed she wasn’t wearing her glasses. That surprised me because I didn’t think she could see without them. She shoved her hands outward, palms facing me, and expelled a dense arrow of oily black magic toward my hiding spot.
It shot toward me like a cannonball and smashed into the tree, slicing off a good-sized branch and sending a cascade of deadly debris down on my head.
Somehow I managed to avoid any serious damage. And when I looked up, there was a glossy umbrella hanging on the air above my head.
My gaze skimmed to Lea. Her eyes were open and she was smiling, a dense spider web of
