I grinned at my friend. I’d truly missed her. It’d been three months since I’d seen her and I had so much to tell her. “Well, that’s comforting news. And, yes, she might be a Hag—as in the all-powerful brain-scrambling kind. It makes sense, but I have no idea for sure. It’s only a suspicion.”
Marcy whistled low. “That’s crazy. So what else do I need to know? Have you pissed off any gremlins? They do serious destruction on a very large scale. What about any serpentines? They’re these creepy half snake, half man—”
I held up my hand. “Okay, I get it, I get it. I will share the details of my trip to the Underworld with you. Rourke and Ray were there for some of it, so they know a bit.” Ray grunted from his seat across from Rourke. “But Naomi hasn’t been debriefed yet either.” Naomi had her arms braced over the top of my seat, likely eager to hear the details as well. I moved in closer to Marcy. “But before I start, you have to promise me you’re not going to interrupt this recap or it will take more time than we’ve got on this plane. Understood?” Marcy nodded, running a finger and thumb over her lips to show me they were zipped, and then she mimed throwing away the key. “What are you, four?” I laughed.
“Hey”—she shrugged—“that’s the timeless international signal for ‘you have my undivided attention.’ ” She faked looking at her wrist with a wry expression on her face. “You just wasted seven seconds of story time asking if I was a four-year-old child. Now, get talking, you.”
“All right. Here it goes…” Rourke kept a solid grip on my hand as I recounted what had happened to me in the Underworld, starting from the time I’d landed there to running through the tunnels, dodging the beasts and the demons who were dressed like janitors, meeting and then killing Lili, and reviving the Princess of Hell. His touch helped keep me calm. Reliving ordeals was never fun. Naomi listened quietly behind me, and surprisingly, so did Marcy. Every so often there was a garbled agreement from Ray, and I finished with “So all we can do now is wait. There aren’t many options, since we don’t know how the Hags operate. Juanita’s call is the first thing that’s happened since we rode the portal back. So by my reasoning, if she’s involved with Fate, she either has to be a Hag or she’s an oracle who works for them—I don’t know for sure. It’s only speculation at this point.”
“Good grief.” Marcy collapsed back into her seat like she’d just run a marathon, arms out to her sides. “That was a killer story—literally. So let me get this straight.” She moved forward. “You killed this evil Lili character and now you think you’ve thrown Fate off its true course? And now Juanita is calling you to warn you—”
The plane took a sharp nosedive, tossing us around in our seats.
I grabbed on to the armrests, thankful I’d fastened my seat belt when the pilot warned us of turbulence. Rourke leapt up, roaring. Ray was just ahead of him, both of them racing toward the cockpit.
“The power’s dead,” Rourke called over his shoulder. I craned my neck and glimpsed the panicked pilot through the opening in the small doorway. He was frantically pushing levers and punching buttons.
Marcy met my gaze solidly across the seat, her face pale. “We’re nearly over land,” I told her calmly, “and we have two vamps who can fly. There’s no need to panic. We’re not going down without a fight.”
“I know that.” She shook herself, trying to relax, even though the plane was still in a nosedive. “I’m just a terrible flier. I always have been. Tally used to make fun of me whenever we flew together, the old biddy, and would purposefully make the plane bounce around in fake turbulence. But I’m a witch, for Pete’s sake. I can fix this.” Marcy had suffered from performance anxiety in the past, but she smiled at me as her eyes slid shut and she began chanting under her breath.
Her power swept over me in a hot breeze as the plane began to right itself slowly.
Go, Marcy.
“Rourke,” I called, “have the pilots guide us down anywhere they can. We need to get off this plane.”
“Damn straight we need to get off,” Marcy muttered, her eyes still closed, a fierce look of concentration on her face. “I’m fixing the drop with a counterspell, but I can’t undo whatever knocked the power out. Everything on the plane is dead, just like my phone. At least I think it’s a spell… I can’t even be sure. It all just feels dead.” She continued to chant under her breath and the plane evened out completely.
“Ma Reine,” Naomi whispered, crouching down in the aisle next to me. “I can leave the plane and help from below if need be.”
I shook my head. “Not yet. Let’s let Marcy handle it for now. She only has to keep the plane steady for a few more minutes until the pilots can guide it down. If we let you and Ray out, that means opening the doors and I don’t want to freak out the pilots if we don’t have to.”
She nodded, alert as always. We’d been up in the air for a little more than an hour, and as I looked out the tiny window, I could see what was likely the Florida Keys passing below us.
We were closing on land quickly.
The pilot’s voice came out of the cockpit in a rush. “We just passed Eagle Key. We’re going to make it to the mainland, but just barely. We can’t make it to any airstrip. We’ll have to set it down in the marsh flats.”