I assumed the offending vehicles belonged to the vendors, because the fans’ cars were being directed off to the side, where a colorful explosion of several thousand floated like giant, oddly shaped clouds over the landscape. They were arranged in three tiers—like a parking garage without the garage—with the highest maybe thirty feet up. There were no stairs.
The obvious message was that, if you couldn’t manage a basic levitation spell, you shouldn’t be here. It was typical; mages acted as if they controlled the supernatural world and the rest of us just lived in it. But considering who was sponsoring this year’s event, it was pretty tacky.
We headed for the closest group, which was forming next to an ornamental pond. Beer bottles, soda cans and snack wrappers tangled in the surrounding rosebushes and bobbed beside a fountain designed by Bernini. Nearby, a massive set of weathered bleachers faced the house. It was packed with people watching the empty space over the large circular driveway with rapt attention.
Every few minutes, another line of assorted craft—mostly cars, but with the odd motorcycle, airplane or even boat thrown in—would levitate out of the mass in a cordoned-off area beside the house. They would line up even with the balcony and stay there for a moment, letting the frenzy wash over them. Some of the drivers would wave or stand up to further incite the already-rabid fans. When the flag-waving, banner-fluttering, screaming hysteria had reached a peak, the consul would rise from her seat in the center of the balcony and drop a scrap of silk. An earsplitting crack later, and the whole lineup would disappear.
The hordes in the stands would be given a few moments to rest their vocal cords and buy more beer. Then the whole process started over again. I found it monotonous, but no one else seemed to agree with me. It was that time of year again, and the whole supernatural world had gone insane. There was a war on, but nobody cared. Not during race week.
“That’s gonna be you tomorrow,” Dave said, his eyes on the swimming-pool-sized mirror that was floating over the house.
Ronnie twisted around to watch the mirror change. “Not likely.”
It had been reflecting an image of blue skies, green fields and weathered bleachers filled with waving fans. But then it rippled and switched to a scene of leaping purple flames. Weaving in and out of the fiery mass were the same racers who had just disappeared, now looking impossibly tiny next to the inferno around them.
“Oh, man, don’t tell me he bailed on you again,” Dave groaned.
“It’s for the Championship,” Ronnie said, his lips tight.
“But you’re the best!” Lilly said indignantly.
“Not when there’s ten million dollars on the line,” Ronnie told her, but his eyes looked hurt.
Lilly passed me another beer from a cooler at her feet. “Ronnie’s father is Lucas Pennington,” she said proudly, as if I should know who that was.
Maybe I should have, but the yearly madness of the World Championships had never been more than a flicker on my mental map. They were a mage thing, and other than doing the occasional job for a magic worker in a jam, I don’t associate with them much. They tend to be more than a little strange, like their favorite sport.
The supernatural world doesn’t have NASCAR. It doesn’t have football, soccer or tennis. Instead, it has the insanity known as ley-line racing.
Mages figured out long ago that, with strong enough shields, they could surf along the surface of the lines, riding their energy from one point to the next. And since ley lines stitch the world together outside of real space, this meant traversing huge distances in very short periods. Assuming you survived, that is.
Every year it was the same story. Out of the two hundred or so entrants who qualified for the Big Kahuna of the racing world, maybe twenty percent would actually finish. Out of the eighty percent who were left, most would eventually limp back to the starting line, having fabricated an elaborate tale of how nature/their vehicle/ the gods had conspired against them. But there were a good five to ten percent every year who were claimed by the lines.
There would be editorials in all the papers the day afterward, loudly denouncing the barbarity of it all, and some officials would make properly distressed faces. But nothing ever changed. It was just part of the race.
I must not have done a great job at looking neutral, because Ronnie flushed. “There’s more to racing than driving, you know,” he told me.
“Actually, I don’t know.”
“You don’t follow the races?” Lilly looked stunned and vaguely freaked out, like I’d just admitted to eating live snakes.
“Sorry.”
It was finally our turn at the floating ticket booth, where the kids forked over an eye-popping amount for three-day passes. “You shouldn’t need a pass,” the blonde told Ronnie indignantly, as we moved toward the levitating parking lot. “You should be in the pits!”
“I suck in the pits,” Ronnie admitted. He glanced at me. “I was lollipop man last time around and I got distracted and lowered our sign too soon.”
“That doesn’t seem so bad.”
“And Dad left without a back rear tire!”
“Well, it’s not like he needed it.”
“Oh, he needed it,” Ronnie said, looking miserable.
“The race is mostly in the lines, but they don’t all intersect, you know? Sometimes you have to travel a mile or more to get from one to another….”
“Ouch,” I sympathized. He nodded glumly.
“But that wasn’t what you trained for!” Lilly said loyally.
“What did you train for?” I asked. Because it sure wasn’t driving.
“I’m a spellbinder.”
Lilly nodded enthusiastically. “He’s the best!”
“I’m not sure I know what that is,” I said, only to have four incredulous sets of eyes turned on me.
“You really don’t follow the races,” Lilly said, like she hadn’t believed it before.
“What do you know about racing?” Ronnie asked, curious. He looked fascinated, like a scientist confronted by a strange new species: dontgiveadamnus from the phylum couldntcareless.
I shrugged. “You have to be a mage, you have to pony up a big-ass fee and you have to be insane.” In fact, insanity wasn’t a requirement, but it may as well have been. Because nobody in their right minds would have signed up for what was essentially a death trap.
Lilly was frowning at me, and okay, maybe that hadn’t been too tactful. But Ronnie just grinned. “Are you sure you don’t follow the races?”
“I think I saw part of one in a bar once,” I admitted.
“There are typically four people to a team,” he told me. “The driver, who leads the team; the navigator, who helps him find the best route; the shield master, who maintains the shield; and the spellbinder, who protects the team from, er, anything they need protecting from—”
“He means the competition,” Toni said lazily.
“—and gets them through the obstacles,” Ronnie finished. He looked at me, expectant, and I bit.
“What obstacles?”
“There’s no actual course, so the only way to make sure everybody really circles the Earth is to have them make pit stops along the way,” he explained.
“With obstacles at each stop,” I guessed.
He nodded enthusiastically. The races were obviously his passion. His thin face lit up when he talked about them, and his pale blue eyes shone. “They can be anything. You just never know because they change every year. Physical barriers, magical ones, even mazes—”
“And your comp-e-ti-tion,” Toni singsonged, obviously half-wasted.
“The competitors are always gunning for the biggest names,” Lilly agreed. “And there’s no monitoring outside the pit stops because there’s no set route, so it’s a free-for-all! The spellbinders have to fight off the attacks of other teams, as well as get their team through the obstacles. It’s the most important job in the race!”