Tempt the Stars

the sail was as full as ever. But I couldn’t turn around to find out how, because I was half-blind from the sand and trying desperately to cling to a bucking magic carpet that wasn’t nearly as fun as the legends would have you believe—
    Until it suddenly evened out.
    I twisted around, desperately hoping that Rosier had reconsidered, even knowing the odds on that. But over my shoulder was the same boiling mass of fury, just darker now as it swallowed the lights of the city we’d just left behind. But I barely noticed, because Pritkin was . . 
    “No,” I said, immediately rejecting what my eyes were telling me.
    I blinked, and then I pushed a fluttering scarf out of my face and blinked again. But the scene didn’t change. Pritkin was still leaning off the back edge of the rug, his feet were still anchored behind a rigid wrinkle in the cloth, and he was still arching back, to the point that he was lying almost flat. But now his forearms were looped around the ends of the long fabric sash he’d been wearing, which were tied securely around the top two corners of our sail.
    Our wind-filled sail. That he was directing by pulling on one side of the makeshift rope or the other, or by turning his body this way and that. So, basically, he was—
    “No!” I said again, because he was absolutely, positively not windsurfing in hell. It hurt my brain, my relatively sane-no-matter-what-Casanova-said brain, to even think the words, because things like this didn’t happen.
    Unless I really had gone nuts. An idea reinforced a second later, when Pritkin suddenly grinned—
grinned
—at me, and said something that the wind blew away.
“What?”
    “Why do these plans of yours always involve me getting naked?” he yelled, making me blink again. And then scowl, because damn it, brain, this was no time to lose it.
    “You’re not naked!” I yelled back, because it was true, if not by much. He still had on a pair of silky gold trousers, ruffling in the wind and looking ridiculous next to the hard lines of his body.
    And because what else do you say to a grinning, windsurfing demon?
    He said something that sounded like “disappointed?” but wasn’t because that would be absurd.
    And then Caleb and Casanova dove by, just missing the front of our crazy contraption, because they didn’t seem to have figured out Pritkin’s modification. But with vampire strength and Caleb’s brawn, they seemed to be doing okay just holding the ends of the sail, although that gave them a lot less control than we had. But the bucking, weaving, crazy course they were on didn’t seem to bother them.
    At least, it didn’t seem to bother Caleb. Who I finally saw laughing and whooping and giving a good representation as to why war mages were viewed as being slightly off by the rest of us. Like Casanova, who was upholding the banner of sanity with a lot of horrified screeching.
    I turned toward Pritkin, to point out that, see—that was how a normal person reacted when being chased by a giant storm of a demon lord through the skies of hell. But I didn’t, because he yelled something. Something that sounded like “the gate.”
    And oh,
crap.
    I turned back around, flattened out, and stared underneath the rigid edge of our sail. And saw to my horror that in a few short minutes we’d managed to cover almost as much ground as it had taken us hours to walk. Which meant that the portal to this world was coming up, and coming up fast.
    It was already visible, the twin peaks of the canyon where the doorway to Rosier’s court originated, well away from the city. So, I assumed, he’d have some warning if he was attacked. But I hadn’t, and I didn’t know for sure that I could do this, and Casanova’s outraged face demanding why I hadn’t tested Mother’s theory was starting to sound a lot more like the voice of reason and—
    “Shiiiit!” I yelled as the wind howled and the dust whirled and the guards around the portal saw us and hit the ground. And Casanova and Caleb screamed by again, and somehow snagged hold of the side of our carpet in the process, slinging us around in a huge arc. Because no one knew if the gate would stay open for anyone who wasn’t with me.
    Assuming it was going to open at all.
    I couldn’t tell if I was doing anything, because we spun back around, and then around again, still headed for possible oblivion, but in wild, whipping arcs that made concentration all but impossible. Or sight. Or anything that wasn’t