Another guy directed him down a dirt path toward the big central mud-ring where four other cars were already assembled. Two more men quickly removed the blockade around the ring and motioned for him to drive in.
He complied with the greatest reluctance and a bright smile.
“Umm,” Riley’s voice said from her armpit lair, “this might not be a good idea, Remy…”
Before he could respond, a loudspeaker crackled and a familiar, Southern-accented voice asked everyone to pipe down. Silence settled in as the crowd shut up and took notice.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Tucker announced, “welcome to the thirteenth annual New York Fall Fair Demolition Derby. Before we get on with the event, let me take a moment to thank our sponsors…”
As Tucker kissed the asses of the various companies who’d helped make this event possible, Remy examined the competition.
The other four vehicles consisted of two sedans, a brown one and a black one, numbered one and two, respectively, a red pickup truck numbered three, and a blue SUV numbered four. The drivers were a motley group but something in their expression and demeanor was shared among all four. They were members of the same tightly-knit subculture and he was an outsider.
The fairy wriggled her way up his chest and poked her head out the top of his shirt. “They’re going to crash into us? Is this car made for that?”
“No.”
“Well, I can probably enchant it to be more resilient—not invincible, but it ought to give you an edge.”
Some of Remy’s confidence came back to him like the manic boost of a sugar rush. “That…would be helpful, even though my driving skills are top-notch. What would I do without you, Riley?”
She giggled. “You’d be lonely, for one thing.”
Tucker finally reached the part of his introductory spiel that everyone cared about.
“Now, let’s get introduced to our demo drivers. In addition to four returning fan favorites, we also have some fresh meat on display.”
The crowd reacted to this with a mixture of cheering and laughter. Some of that laughter was good-natured and some definitely not.
The man went on to name each of the first four drivers and they honked their horns after he’d revealed their names. Remy paid little attention to them. He could always write them down later if he needed to for legal purposes.
“And finally, appearing here for the first time, Mr Remington Davis from Manhattan. Isn’t that a fancy car he’s driving?”
The crowd guffawed at this.
“Well,” he said, mostly to himself, “I can’t blame them for wanting to see something so expensive get smashed to hell.” When he was six or seven years old, he’d deliberately shattered his aunt’s crystal mirror, simply because he could.
“But wait,” Tucker announced, “there’s one other thing. Mr Davis has volunteered to motivate the other drivers to put in their best damn performance ever. He even signed for it. Heh, heh. Anyone who totals his car will get a bonus prize of ten thousand dollars, cash.”
The crowd went wild. Now, Remy saw, his four rivals stared at him with something almost like hunger.
He glanced at the passenger seat, where Riley seemed to have settled. “How’s that enchantment coming?”
The fairy twisted her hands in circles and subtle flashes of silver light erupted from different parts of the car’s frame. He only hoped that Tucker, perched high in the observation building, wouldn’t notice. The sun was bright and clouds moved over it constantly, so the spell’s effects might be mistaken for natural glare when it emerged from behind cover.
She put such focus into her spell that she gave off a faint thrum. “Done.” Her arms fell to her sides.
“Okay then.” He breathed deeply, adjusted his tie at the neck, and wiped his hands on the car seat.
“Start your engines,” Tucker bellowed, “and begin on my count.”
Remy turned the key and the other drivers did likewise. The revving almost drowning out the announcer.
“…two, one, drive!”
With almost giddy abandon, he pounded on the gas and accelerated directly toward the nearest vehicle—black number 2.
“Ha, ha.” He laughed. “Yeah, let’s fucking do this. It’s like playing chicken back in—”
Brown number one had started at an angle to his right and now veered toward his passenger’s side, its souped-up engine growling with fury. Its front bumper rammed into his front side door.
“Shit!” he cried as metal crunched and the world shook. He was knocked off-course and the car rumbled through the mud in a broad arc to miss black number two by at least a yard.
When he glanced to his right, though, he saw that the sound of crunching metal had mostly come from the brown car’s bumper. His door seemed…fine, mostly.
“Goddamn, Riley!” he exclaimed and grinned. “That actually worked.”
“Of course it did!” she shouted back. She dove toward him and wriggled under his shirt.
In front of him, red number three and blue number four crashed into one another, their front ends colliding as each tried to force the other aside. He dodged them for now. They weren’t trying to defeat the other, yet. They were fighting to get at him.
Dimly, he registered the presence of the crowd and the almost deafening noise, but mostly, his perception had narrowed to the derby itself. The wheel spun under his hands as he snaked his car around the perimeter of the battle arena in search of a rematch with the black car, which had outpaced the damaged brown one and now approached at speed.
“This time,” he vowed, “you’re going down.”
The other three vehicles ground against each other as Remy and number two sought a head-on collision. Both pressed hard on the gas, although the mud slowed them somewhat. An awful lot of gunk had already splashed inside and ruined the interior, but he barely noticed.
The black car careened toward him and he scowled at the front of the vehicle that seemed to encompass the entire space where his windshield had been.
His jaw clenched. “Here it comes—”
The world exploded, or so it seemed. Everything shook and spun so much he could not even see what was happening. But he wasn’t airborne. Darkness and weight bore down on the roof, which sank a few inches and actually brushed his hair.
Then, suddenly, he hurtled ahead with no obstacles.
“What the hell?” he gasped. He looked over his shoulder.
Black number two had flipped over its own hood, landed on top of him, and rolled onto its wheels. The crowd had gone completely wild. A fat guy in the stands jumped up and down and spilled a gigantic cup’s worth of carbonated citrus all over the people next to him.
Riley laughed with mad glee from her place under his arm. “Wow. That was really fun,” she all but shrieked.
He blinked as he turned. “It was, actually. It was.”
Remy realized that while his car was still taking some damage, the other drivers, by now, probably wondered how the hell he held up so well—by rights, he should have already been totaled.
His four nemeses lined up to advance on him like a Greek phalanx. Slipping between them or going around all four in the limited time he had before impact would have been almost impossible. But he had another idea.
“Prepare to be disqualified, you pricks,” he muttered and stamped hard on the gas.
He aimed directly toward them, then pulled a sudden U-turn, fishtailed his driver’s side toward their front bumpers, and put himself in immediate risk of being crunched.
Numbers one, two, and four all applied the brakes while they jerked their steering wheels aside and scraped against one another as their wheels kicked entire sheets of mud into the air. His front end destroyed the front right headlight of number three, the red pickup that had been at the end of the column, and he cackled when he broke free of them.
The respite was short-lived. He saw the drivers exchange glances and nod at one another.
“Aw, hell,” he said, “it looks
like they agreed to split the pot.”
All four of the rival vehicles burst into action. They separated and made for, roughly, the four points of the compass.
Remy guessed their plan at once—a combined charge from four different directions, designed to trap him while they turned his car into a strange, S-shaped metal object.
“These guys,” he admitted, “have some chutzpah, I have to admit. They’ll probably total their own vehicles with this shit. I guess if that’s how they want to play, then—”
The four engines screamed as wheels spun. There was nothing to do, he decided, but attempt a mutual kill.
He accelerated only a fraction of a second after his foes did. It would literally be only a second or two until impact.
A quick mental calculation presented itself. Black two and red three would collide with his front corners. Brown one headed toward his rear driver’s side corner, and blue four was about to T-bone him on the passenger’s side. He had one avenue of escape.
His right hand fell to his side and clicked his seatbelt off at the same time as his left hand opened the car door.
Riley’s voice, barely audible amidst the din, cried, “What are you—”
He jumped.
The ground pounded into him, threw him, and rolled him like a piece of dough destined for spaghetti. Pain and shock followed, mud and noise were everywhere, and twisting, shattering metal howled in what almost sounded like pain. He somersaulted into a barricade and lay still but the earth somehow still rotated around him.
The crowd cheered in a downright frenzy.
Remy scrambled to his feet and identified a few places in his legs and left shoulder that would probably need examining later. He felt giddy and half-nauseated.
In front of him was a Lovecraftian clusterfuck of vehicular abomination. All five vehicles had been totaled.
“Hah!” he cackled. “No one gets the bonus.” He wobbled in place and braced himself against the barrier in an effort to not fall. A few people in the audience ran up and supported him on their arms while they laughed and shook his hand.
The loudspeakers crackled. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Tucker’s voice began, “it appears we have a washout. Let’s congratulate all five of our losers on their mutual failure.”
A few spectators laughed at that but mostly, they seemed floored by Remy’s sheer audacity.
He smiled and waved as they began to surround him. “Thanks…thanks. Is there a medical examiner on hand? You might want to check on those other guys, too. I think they’re alive.”
A hasty glance at the wreckage confirmed that the other four motorists stumbled out of their wrecked vehicles. At least they weren’t dead.
Riley, who’d somehow remained lodged under his arm this whole time, shouted toward his ear through the cacophony. “We need to leave.”
“Good idea,” he whispered and smiled and waved as he shoved his way through the people around him.
He hurried away from the ring and ducked between milling herds of admirers—some of whom catcalled or patted him on the back—and tried to put as much distance as possible between himself and Tucker, whom he suspected would descend from his perch at any moment.
His legs and shoulder still hurt, but at least he was now out of sight—and reach—of most of the audience. A small voice emerged from within his shirt. “Now, please let me out of here. It’s getting so hot and stinky.”
Remy glanced around. No obvious preternaturals were in sight and he had no reason to believe that any of the normals would be able to see the Fair Folk.
“Okay,” he whispered and raised his arm.
A small bulge moved up his chest before she burst out from the collar of his shirt, literally shaking sweat from her hair as she hovered in midair.
“Thanks, by the way,” he said. “But yeah, let’s get the hell out of here, shall we? Before I attract even more attention. Although I suppose the ship has already sailed on the whole low-key investigation secret-agent type shit.”
And, of course, he no longer had a drivable car.
He pulled his cell phone out and called up the rideshare app. Idly, he wondered if his old pal Stanislaw drove this far upstate. Probably not, although he would have happily endured his life stories all the way home.
Chapter Seventeen
Fall Fair Demolition Derby, Middletown, New York
Jenny Ocren, a reporter for the Page Six, stood gawking at the fiery, smoking aftermath of the derby. She had to write this down but before she was even physically capable of pulling her tablet out, she needed to wrack her brain to confirm what she’d actually seen.
Or, more precisely, who she’d seen—David Remington. It had to be him. She’d met the handsome, smarmy bastard once at some bland gala charity event his parents had hosted.
Her hand went into her pocket and retrieved her tablet. Feverishly, trying not to stick her tongue out the corner of her mouth—as she’d done far too often as a child—she added a ream of shorthand notes describing all she’d witnessed.
It was incredible—the gold-plated heir to a multibillion-dollar family fortune, mixing it up with these salt-of-the-earth types and risking life and limb in a contest of steel against steel.
Demolition derbies were something of a guilty pleasure of hers, to begin with. It was always fun to observe the devastation and pad out the storylines behind it. But she’d never expected to see him there.
David Remington did have a reputation as a playboy, bad boy, thrill-seeker, and so forth. She and her co-workers had helped leak some of the earliest rumors surrounding that infamous party—the one that had spawned all the lawsuits. The “respectable” press quickly picked up on the aroma of scandal and subsequently conducted their own investigations.
Jenny snorted as she finished writing. “Respectable press,” she muttered. “I fail to see how they’re really any different than we are. They simply do the follow-up and make it more presentable. We’re the ones on the front lines out here.”
Some guy whom she had tried to interview once had asked “What’s it like, working for a gossip site? Your work doesn’t even see print.”
She had maintained her professional composure and explained to him that all journalists did important work by drawing society’s attention to significant events. He’d merely taken another swig of beer, ignored her, and made his way to the dance floor.
The reporter drove this irksome memory from her consciousness as people jostled past her, heading to the outhouses or the concession stand now that the big match was over. Instead, she tried to think of why Mr Remington had turned to a life of automotive self-vandalism.
“Maybe,” she said, softly, “he has…gambling debts. No. The lawsuits. Either they’re negotiating an out-of-court settlement and the potential payouts are threatening him financially or the stress and attention are causing his mind to crack. Now, filled with unhinged aggression, he seeks relief in the crunching of car frames and the burning of rubber, his only solace the symphony of controlled destruction in which he must play the active role….”
It sounded good. Lacking any actual evidence, however, she would have to be careful about how she worded it. Page Six didn’t have much budget for litigation.
Jenny looked around for the beefy Southern guy who seemed to be running the operation. She might be able to coax a quick interview out of him. But, browsing through the stands and the crowds and even poking around at the official buildings yielded no results. The man had vanished somewhere into the chaos.
“Dammit,” she muttered. “Well, at least I have David. How difficult can he be to track? I bet he’s been doing all kinds of other interesting things lately.”
She grinned and pulled her phone out to call her boss. Without a doubt, she had a good feeling about this.
Harrison, Westchester County, New York
Remy slumped in his usual chair in the foyer and allowed his head to rest on one fist while Presley examined his shoulder and legs. He decided he ought to wait un
til the old man had checked him thoroughly for serious injuries before he attempted to flee.
“You idiot!” Taylor raged and her fangs showed beneath her upper lip for the first time since he’d met her. She swiped a long-nailed finger through the air in his general direction. “A quarter of the state of New York has now connected you to Tucker and his fucking bumper-car shitshow. What the hell were you thinking?”
“Well…” He shrugged. “At least I found him. We know he’s connected to the…uh, demolition derby industry. I had to participate in order to keep my cover from being blown.”
She threw her hands up and looked at the ceiling. “You already blew it. The instant he saw you, you were fucked and should simply have turned and left. Sometimes, we have to cut our losses. Instead, you had to keep losing, and losing, and losing.”
The butler prodded his shoulder blade. “It doesn’t seem to be dislocated, sir.”
“Thanks, Presley,” said Remy.
“Now,” Taylor continued, her usually soft voice practically booming, “our enemies know we’re onto them, which destroys our ability to take any stealthy or subtle actions against them. And”—she looked back at him, took a heavy step closer, and extended her finger toward his face—“while I’m trying to stop them from killing us, there is now the possibility that the Moonlight Detective Agency will be mentioned on the Internet and the goddamn evening news for everyone and their grandmother to hear about. Do you realize why that is a problem?”
He allowed himself to sulk, even though he definitely recognized the possible repercussions. Painful though it was to admit, he had fucked up. Still, he wasn’t about to go down without a fight.
“In all fairness,” he replied and looked squarely into the woman’s wide, dark eyes, “you did beat up an entire hotel a few nights ago, didn’t you? Wouldn’t that have clued them in already?”
She snapped her jaw shut, straightened stiffly, and folded her arms over her chest. “Yes.” Her voice was calmer again now. “But—and this is important—I knew exactly what I was doing. I sent them a message, but it’s not the kind of message they can publicly acknowledge. To accuse me of attacking their hideaway is to admit they were meeting secretly to plot something, to begin with.”
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