Since we had a race to win, Skippy had requested that we travel light. Milo had been bummed when he hadn’t been able to take his heavy free samples from the show, but Skippy had said they could load them up for the ride home. Milo was simply too excited to play with them to wait for UPS to ship them back to Alabama. So we had two orcs, four humans, and a small load-out of weapons and ammo, with me being the biggest piece of cargo. It was hard to tell when Skippy was unhappy, what with the mask and all, but he had grumbled something about me being “big, like ox make us slow,” but how that evened out because “blood of great war chief bring good luck.” That was the sort of thing that replaced complex aviation calculations when you were an orc. Because I was related to a rock star, it meant we could go faster.

Thinking about my brother gave me a twinge of guilt, and I promised myself again that I’d go visit him before the conference was over. With the blow his career had taken, he was reduced to working in Vegas, playing shows that would’ve been far below him a couple of years ago. The whole thing was my fault, and Mosh had been avoiding my calls. I was worried about him.

There was a sudden bang. I grabbed onto the overhead straps as the chopper lurched.

“What was that?” Holly asked, alarmed.

“No problem. No problem,” Skippy’s gravelly voice came over the intercom. “Tail rotor break.” He pronounced it row-tor.

“Break? What do you mean break?”

“No…is good break. Skip mean…break in.”

“That sounds bad, Skippy!”

“No…The spirits that live in tail rotor…happy together now.”

“You said the spirits were happy before we flew last time!” Trip exclaimed.

“No. Engine spirits happy. Tail rotor spirits…not so much. Very angry tail rotor.”

“Last time I checked, you need a functioning tail rotor to fly a helicopter.”

“No. Not to fly. Only not to spin around. Like circle…Until hit ground. Explode!” Skippy made the horrible wheezing noise that passed for orc laughter. “But rotor happy now! Yay!”

“We’re so gonna die,” I muttered.

“No. No,” Skippy insisted. “Gretchen sacrifice chicken for us. Skip knew. Rotor spirits come ’round.”