Eternal Winter (Bubba the Monster Hunter #7)

Chapter 1

WHEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HEROES…

For the record, whenever someone more than a decade your junior calls for shots, it’s probably in your best interest to say no.

Sometimes it’s in your best interests to say, “Hell no.” But it is never, ever, in your best interests, especially if you need to be vertical in less than twelve hours, to say “Hell yeah!” and spend the next two hours slamming tequila with bikers and Bigfoot in a doublewide titty bar while your best friend and your priest forcibly abduct more than half a dozen men and turn them over to a shadowy religious strike team.

But my best interests are sometimes boring, and tequila never is.

Which is why I found myself staring up at a pink-haired masochist way too early in the morning with a colossal hangover, what felt an awful lot like a new tattoo on my right butt cheek, and an incredible need to pee, puke, or poop.

Not necessarily in that order. Or in any order whatsoever.

“Bubba, I am not holding your hair back while you vomit, so you’d better get yourself under control and into a shower pronto, or I will not be responsible for whatever Amy tells me to do to you.

But you are not going to be late for this wedding, no matter how hung over you are,” Geri said, glaring down at me.

That put everything into perspective for me.

It was my wedding day. The single most important day of my life, when I was about to make a final, formal commitment to the woman I loved.

In front of my friends, my family, and a bunch of other people Amy decided we should give a shit about.

Or at least a bunch of people Amy decided we should feed for free.

I rolled over, expecting to throw my feet out of the bed and kinda roll to my feet, only my feet didn’t drop like they were supposed to.

Instead, my feet thumped into wooden planks, and I realized I was outside.

On my deck. Flat on my deck, where I’d apparently spent the night. Or the morning. Again.

“What time is it?” I croaked. Something in the back of my mind made me think two o’clock was important.

“It’s almost eleven,” Geri said.

“Does that mean I have to get up now?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t get to bed until…not long ago.”

“I’m pretty sure you didn’t, too,” Geri agreed.

“But now you have a hair over three hours to scrub the stench and body glitter off, sober up enough to say ‘I do’ at the appropriate time, and haul ass to the church. Or your fiancée, who I love dearly, will probably shoot us both. And I’ve seen her shoot.

She can dot the eye on a quarter from fifty yards with a pistol. ”

She wasn’t wrong. I groaned again and rolled over, then used both hands to push myself up to my hands and knees. Fighting back another wave of nausea, I reached out for the porch railing and hauled myself to my feet. “Oof,” I said. “I think that last round of shots was a mistake.”

“I think the first round was probably a mistake, too,” came Skeeter’s voice from the top of my picnic table. He was laid out flat on his back, eyes squeezed tightly shut and both hands pressed to his temples.

“If the first round wasn’t, the second definitely was.” Father Matthew opened the sliding glass door and stepped out, looking rough but holding two steaming mugs. He handed one to me. “Coffee.”

“God bless you, Padre,” I groaned as I slurped the lava-hot black liquid.

“Pretty sure that comes with the collar,” Father Matt said with a half-smile. “I’ve already had my shower, so the bathroom is free.”

At the word “bathroom,” both my stomach and my bladder reminded me of their existence, so I staggered into the house, then down the hall to relieve myself.

I hung a towel over the mirror so I didn’t have to see the evidence of my bad decisions, then carried my coffee back out to the den, where Geri and Matthew stood watching as Skeeter rattled around pots and pans in my cabinets.

“Bubba, where the hell is that big cast iron skillet your mama used to use?” he asked, his head half-buried in the warming drawer under the oven.

“I don’t have any idea,” I replied. “You know I don’t even heat up Pop-Tarts. Did you look in the dishwasher?” The looks I got from the three of them would make you think I told them to shoot the Pope right in front of the Vatican.

“You’re joking, right?” Father Matt asked.

“He’s not that funny,” Geri said, opening another cabinet and pulling out the frying pan. Skeeter pulled a dozen eggs out of the fridge and started cracking them into a big mixing bowl.

“Where’s Jarvis?” I asked, looking around.

The door to the guest bedroom had been standing open, so he wasn’t in there.

Nobody was on the couch, and I hoped to everything holy he hadn’t decided to crash in my bed.

Of course, I couldn’t really remember anything after the fifth round of shots and the impromptu wrestling match between me and three of the bikers.

To be specific, I didn’t remember anything after the three of them body slammed me through a table.

“He slept in the truck,” Skeeter said.

“In the truck?” I asked. I didn’t have any real objection to somebody sleeping in my truck, but we’d had a lot to drink, and I had some serious objections to anybody puking in my truck.

“In the bed,” Geri said. “He’s alive. I checked his pulse as I walked past.”

“Okay, good. Then I’m gonna go take a shower,” I said, heading back toward the bathroom.

“Good call,” Geri said. “You all smell like cheap booze and cheaper strippers. And Bubba?”

“Yeah?”

“Clean underwear. With no holes. This is your wedding.”

I turned around and grinned at her. “If there ain’t no holes in my underwear, how am I supposed to put ‘em on?”

* * *

Twenty minutes later, I smelled better, which was something of a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, I didn’t smell like dollar store cigarettes and bad decisions.

But on the other hand, I could smell the rest of my bachelor party, and they were ripe.

Barry walked in as the platter of bacon hit the table, looking fresh as a daisy and smelling like pine trees.

“Where did you sleep?” I asked. “Or were you Jarvis’s big spoon in the bed of the truck?”

He chuckled. “Bubba, I live in the woods. I did what I always do—I slept on a bed of moss at the base of a big oak tree, then bathed in the stream down the hill.”

“Doesn’t that creek run right behind a housing development?” I asked.

Barry actually blushed, something I’d never seen before. Admittedly, his face was usually covered by a buttload of hair, so it was pretty hard to see normally. “There may have been an unintended audience to my ablutions.”

“Well, once we get some grub in us, let’s get all gussied up and head to the church.

We can still get there a little early if we don’t screw around too much,” I said, piling enough bacon on my plate to give a normal human a coronary right there at the table.

Since I’m neither normal nor completely human, I counted on that to save me.

It took another hour and half to get everybody scrubbed down and headed to the venue, but we were still on track to be there half an hour before the ceremony, which I figured was plenty of time.

Amy must have thought the same thing, since after a couple of reassuring texts from Geri, she stopped calling.

Father Matthew and Skeeter rode with Geri, and Jarvis and Barry piled in my truck to get going.

We pulled off the main road onto the long driveway leading up to the Rolling Clover Event Venue and Soiree, and a familiar-looking black Suburban slid in right behind us and blinked its lights. “Harker’s here,” I announced to the truck.

“Who’s Harker?” Jarvis asked from the back seat.

I looked at Barry who shrugged. How to explain Quincy Harker to a mundane? “You ever watch Supernatural?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well, Harker is kinda like the short brother on that show, only more sweary,” I said.

“More sweary? Dean was pretty profane,” Jarvis said, his skepticism evident.

“Quincy Harker is the only person I’ve ever heard use the word ‘fuck’ as every part of speech,” I said.

“I know a lot of people who do that,” Jarvis said.

“In one sentence?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. He kinda works with us. Sometimes. He’s engaged to Amy’s boss, so be nice.” I left out the part where he also throws fireballs and might roast Jarvis from the inside out if he said the wrong thing, but hoped that was understood.

I saw another compact SUV pull into line behind Harker as we drove up the winding gravel road, then pulled into the wide parking lot and slammed on the brakes, almost causing Dalton, Georgia’s first ever pileup.

“What the hell, Bubba?” Jarvis cried, throwing out a hand to keep from slamming his face into the back of Barry’s seat.

I ignored him, flinging my door open and sprinting up the hill to the venue.

Seconds later, I heard a chorus of other doors open and slam shut, and a series of pounding feet behind me.

I stopped at the base of the steps leading into the main building, and everyone else stopped a few steps behind me.

“What the fuck?” Harker asked, perfectly encapsulating everything I was feeling.

“Bubba?” Skeeter’s voice was thin and worried.

“Yeah, Skeet?” My own voice sounded small, like a frightened child. Which made sense, as that’s how I was feeling right then.

“Where’s the building?” Skeeter asked.

“Skeeter,” I replied. “I have no goddamned idea.”

Where the Rolling Clover Event Venue and Soiree had stood just twenty-four hours earlier, now nothing but an empty patch of bare earth remained.

A few pipes stuck up from the red dirt, and I saw a black snake slither along, unconcerned about the vanishing architecture.

The wedding venue, and everyone belonging to the cars in the parking lot, had simply vanished.

“Um, dude?” I turned to see Ash, the stagehand from the other day, standing next to their car in the black pants and white dress shirt of cater-waiters everywhere. “Does this have anything to do with my gig and everyone in it disappearing?”

I looked where they were pointing and saw a mushroom ring right in the center of the dirt.

I walked over to it and stared down, feeling the fear and rage begin to crystallize in my gut.

“Shit,” I said as I recognized a pattern in the center of the ring.

Four rows of mushrooms, all perfectly arranged to form a capital “M.”

I looked at the rest of my assembled friends and family. “Mab,” I said, unable to keep the dread out of my voice.

“What?” Harker asked.

“Queen Mab, my psychotic grandmother and the Winter Queen of the Fae, kidnapped Amy and the whole damned wedding party,” I said.

“Holy shit,” Geri said.

“Holy shit is right,” I replied. “Because now we have to go to Fairyland to get them back.”