Elfie had tucked handfuls of the fluffy white skirt of the wedding dress into her pants’ waistband to get it out of her way. She stood before the altar in the front of the room and pinched flash paper from her pockets, flipping them into the air and tapping the lit match to them.
Each detonated with a satisfying bang.
She grabbed gerbs from her pockets, pre-packaged tubes of spark showers, held them with makeshift hotpads folded from the wadded ends of her pants, and lit them by sticking a flaming match in the base where the wires should have gone.
Silver sparks shot out of the other end, and she aimed the spark fountain at the crowd, terrifying them. They sprinted for the exits.
She lit the gerbs as fast as she could, one after another, spraying sparks at the crowd. Unfortunately, most of the small tubes in her pockets were 1/2x10’s, so they pumped sparks for only one-half of a second, which was too short to properly terrify people. She wished she had some 5x10’s. Five seconds of sparks spewing ten feet through the air would have scattered those people like a firehose, but those would have been too big to fit many of them in her pockets.
A few feet beyond the tube she held, the sparks flamed out into cool ash, but the crowd was on its feet and sprinting for the exits.
She was just turning to look for Sariah to grab her and leave, when a man’s hand grabbed her wrist.
Elfie yanked, trying to get free, but the man was tall and young, and his tight grip around her wrist hurt.
He opened his lips in a snarl and drew back his fist to punch her.
A woman’s hand grabbed the man’s fist and pulled it behind his head, and for a moment, the three of them struggled in a chain of violence, until Elfie kicked at his knee just as another man’s fist reached through the shower of sparks and connected with the guy’s face, knocking him sideways, like the Prince of Fire himself had joined in the fight.
Tattoos of rose vines scrolled down the wrist and forearm, and Elfie looked up, elated, as she grabbed another gerb out of her pocket.