“Fae,” I warned, as my eyes fell on a tall, golden-skinned male figure. Our gazes locked across the width of the harbor. Sunlight glinted off his ash-blond hair. He was a fair distance away, but I didn’t recognize him as being anyone I’d met before.
Rans’ voice jolted me loose from my reverie. “Get in.”
Guthrie and I tumbled into the passenger area of the boat with little in the way of grace. Rans threw off the mooring rope and slid into the driver’s seat, giving the simple control panel a quick once-over as he did.
“You do, um, actually know how to drive this thing, right?” I asked nervously as I stowed my bag and took a seat at the back. I fumbled around, but there didn’t appear to be any seatbelts—which was a bit worrying.
“More or less, and for god’s sake put on a life vest,” Rans said. Which was also a bit worrying. “There should be at least one of the things on board somewhere.”
I rummaged beneath the seats and came up with an orange vest. “Okay, but what about you two?”
“Drowning’s not really a concern for us, love.”
Guthrie shot him a look. “It’s not?”
“You’re still breathing part of the time out of habit, mate, but it’s strictly voluntary at this point, I assure you.”
Guthrie blinked. “Well... fuck.”
I managed to struggle into the vest and adjust the straps to fit just as the boat’s engine rumbled into life. My head whipped around, looking for the Fae. The place where he’d been standing was empty, and the crawling sensation skittering over my skin had eased. There was no sign of him as I scanned the harbor.
“Our spy just disappeared,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the engine noise. “Feels like he’s gone.”
“Off to get reinforcements, I’d imagine,” Rans called back. “I’ll wager he and his friends arrived on the private boats we saw docked near the cruise ship.”
The engine throttled up, and the boat slipped away from its berth. My stomach swooped sideways at the unexpected movement, making me hope I wouldn’t live to regret the fried conch and sweet pastry I’d just eaten for lunch. In moments, we were describing a broad arc inside the roughly rectangular marina, until the bow pointed at a gap between the outermost dock and the rocky spit of land where I’d dabbled a hand in the ocean to prove saltwater wouldn’t hurt me.
Beyond that gap lay open water.
“The most direct route to Antigua takes us right past the cruise ship dock,” Guthrie called over the sounds of engine noise and displaced water.
“Then give me an indirect route,” Rans called back, as the harbor fell away behind us.
“Hug the coast for a bit. If we can make it to Camp Bay we’ll be outside the direct line of sight of the cruise ship’s dock. Then, uh... south, I guess.”
Rans shot him a sidelong look, even as he slid the throttle forward. “You guess?”
The boat surged faster, and Guthrie glared in return. “How wide a berth do you want to give the cruise terminal? We can go counterclockwise around the entire fucking island if you’d rather, but it’ll end up being a hell of a lot more than a sixty-mile trip if we do.”
The familiar and much-despised tingle of Fae magic washed over my skin like spray from the powerboat’s wake, and I craned to look behind us. Two dark shapes interrupted the blue expanse of the water.
“Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better decide now—Fae boats at six o’clock!” I warned.
Rans glanced back, wind blowing through his dark hair and rippling the fabric of his designer shirt. “Bugger. Hold on, you two!”
I clutched the edges of the seat with white knuckles as the boat turned in a wide arc to the left at high speed and headed almost directly toward our pursuers.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled, not reassured at all when Rans flashed me his best I-might-be-a-little-unhinged grin before turning his attention back to the other boats.
“Playing Battleship,” he said with evident relish. “What does it look like?”
Okay, this is it—I’m totally going to die now, aren’t I? I thought, still clinging to the seat with everything I had.
Guthrie didn’t seem to be faring too much better. The hand that wasn’t grasping his phone was clutching the edge of the dashboard with a desperate sort of single-minded focus. “Rans, in case I haven’t mentioned this lately, you are one seriously crazy motherfucker.”
“I think it may have come up one or twice recently,” Rans said. “Don’t lie, though—it’s one of the things you love about me, deep down.”
“No,” Guthrie retorted. “No, it’s really not.”
As our boat flew toward the Fae boats at an approximate speed of way-the-hell-too-fast, Rans’ strategy became evident—and while it was still crazy, it maybe wasn’t quite as suicidally crazy as I’d first assumed. After all, the Fae probably had about as much interest in experiencing a head-on collision as I did—which was to say, none at all. And apart from that, there wasn’t really a good way for them to physically stop us at these kinds of speeds.
One of the Fae boats veered right, though it wasn’t immediately clear if they were trying to block us or get the hell out of our path. As the distance between us closed, Rans spun the wheel to the left. It wasn’t like a car where the effect was immediate, but the powerboat arced in that direction a second or two later, throwing up spray in its wake.
“Get down, both of you!” Rans barked, as one of the Fae in the nearest boat stood up and raised one arm. I caught a glimpse of something dark in his hand, and several things happened more or less at the same time.
Our boat blew past the Fae boats while
