* * *
They walked.
Mist rose and swirled around their ankles, thicker between the trees. Conrad did not look around. He kept his eyes to the path, and to Lily, and forcefully did not see the slithering thing.
He did not see whatever it was that had been following them for some time now, making a horrible chattering noise like bones in a well, yellow eyes peeking between the trees, because Lily knew what she was doing, and she was still glowing, which was pretty great.
Even certain death was kind of okay with her here. He didn’t mind. He’d stay if she stayed, dirty and glowing, because she was pretty goddamned gorgeous like this—and he was being a pretty big wuss about the whole thing, but hey. Loki was real, apparently the entire Norse pantheon wanted to kill them, and the illusive Laundry Girl not only liked him, but wanted to hold his hand. Exceptions, at this point, had to be made.
Eventually, the mist cleared. Conrad happened to glance back, just to look at the trees really, and caught a brief, horrifying glimpse of the yellow-eyed thing. Clacking its needle sharp teeth at him and grinning, the… thing’s face twisted, gnarled unlike anything he’d ever seen, yellow eyes glittering deep in the folds of its somehow horse-like features, tiny wings jutting like razors from its back. And Conrad was suddenly, horribly sure that it was a fairy, and that he never wanted to see something like that Ever Again.
And, oh hey, look. Suddenly, they stood in the parking lot of a convenience store. No road or anything led to it, but there it sat just the same. An ugly little building that looked spat out of the wrong end of 1990, squatted like a pimple on a rocky plane of asphalt, surrounded by grass. Grass and trees and that yellow-eyed thing he was still going to have nightmares about when he was eighty.
Lily squeezed his hand and gave him the look. Conrad nodded. He understood that look. It meant don’t stare at the locals, they will stare back and they might eat you. Since they’d picked up their little parade of invisible and not nearly invisible enough things that had wanted to eat him, Conrad had become very familiar with that look. It often preceded a similar look that went you’re very nice; please, don’t break down into a gibbering mess.
He was quickly becoming very fond of that look.
Together, they set off across the parking lot, over the thin lip of a sidewalk and into the store. A bell rang to mark their entrance. No one looked up, which was pretty good as far as Conrad’s surviving sanity went. Especially considering the patrons included a wolf, prowling between the isles with a box of an off-brand brownie mix in its mouth; a very tall woman in a shimmering white dress buying Twinkies; and a man so grizzled Conrad first mistook him for a tree, staring longingly at shelf full of marked-down Miracle-Gro.
Yeah.
Don’t stare at the locals. Check.
Lily marched through the aisles, grabbing beef jerky and cheese straws as she went with the furious energy of a woman who Has Had Enough. Conrad snagged a bag of Cheetos as they rampaged past the display—wait, since when had the cheetah looked like that?—a case of Mountain Dew because damn it, it was either caffeine or hard liquor, and a packet of sour gummy worms.
Because he had just survived more near-death experiences in the past seventy-two hours than he could probably count, he could eat like a five-year-old if he wanted to. For a minute, Conrad stood staring at the assembled hoards of sugary things he hadn’t seen since he was a kid, thinking about the semi-disastrous turn his life had taken somewhere shortly before puberty, and wondered why he had bothered to wake up this morning at all.
And then Lily stopped in front of the ice cream display with the face girls sometimes got that said I am female and by the strange laws governing my gender I am forever dieting and cannot buy this ice cream (even having just faced almost certain death), if you do not at least pretend it is for you, and Conrad remembered.
He opened the door with a flourish and emerged in a cloud of frosty air with a gallon of something half chocolate, half heart attack.
Lily smiled, a sparkle in her eyes that had nothing to do with magic, and, oh yeah…
Conrad grinned back at her.
He won at life.