celiabreslin

The bus jumped the median, skidded a half circle, and accelerated at us fast. Nearly impossible driving moves, unless you had four Fey picking the outcomes from a catalog of every possible future.
Cars swerved in a crazy scramble to move out of the bus’s way.

Chloe twisted around in her seat and stared at the bus in horror. She pointed.

On the roof of the bus, a single, long eared Fey with skin as dark as blue-black ink knelt like gravity meant nothing. He held a long rod of dull silver set into a wooden stock. From a distance, it looked like a sniper rifle, but it was much worse.

A ray of blue-white magic raked Aston on the right side. Steel melted and bubbled and part of the hood blasted off in an explosion of flaming metal.

“Gods, they’re throwing magic in the middle of the day.” Panic made the world slow down and life passed in crazy slow motion. On both sides of the street tourists gawked, cameras and cell phones whipped out, and cars either fled or stopped.

Hells, did the humans think this was some kind of movie?

Rachel grabbed my shoulder and snapped me into the moment. “Do something.”

“What?” A pickup moved into our lane a block ahead. I screamed.

Rachel skated lanes without slowing down. “You have to throw fate.”

I clutched my chest and gasped for air. My heart bounced along the road behind us. “I’m not a Sidhe like those Fey assholes attacking us.” D’uh, Rachel should know better. Elemental Fey didn’t stand a chance against Sidhe in a contest of weaving fate.

“We know,” Chloe chimed in. “But Rachel’s driving and I can’t.”

“This isn’t driving. This is suicide by car.” Hells. I stared at an intersection down the hill, a red light we were supposed to stop for, and a wall of cars and trucks moving both ways across our path without a clue we were coming. I opened my hands and shut my eyes to concentrate. Strings of possible futures branched into threads and weaves in an impossible to control pattern.

My brain wanted to implode. My heart ran as fast as Aston. I sensed the lines of fate falling away.

The Fey in the bus were weaving and up ahead I saw a single line, the future they chose for us, growing thicker. Damn. Sidhe wove fate naturally, instinctively. Elemental Fey couldn’t see as many possibilities or as far into the future. Every time I tried to find a future that had us get away, lose them in traffic, hells just miss with their next shot, the line of fate vanished as their magic stripped away possible futures they didn’t like. At the end of the line they chose for us, their magical gun fired and we died, five humans on the sidewalk died, and a car full of Japanese tourists died, all in a ball of fatal heat.