Chapter 11
What the hell do we do now?” Jarvis asked as we gathered in the largest tent, set up as some kind of command post, to go over what Geri had gotten out of the Pest Control leader in her interrogation. “We can’t take on an army!”
We’d kinda already done just that, since we stormed their little camp after taking out most of their team.
It only took a quick glance at the bodies of their teammates draped across the backs of our horses before the guys that stayed behind decided they weren’t getting paid enough to deal with Geri.
I couldn’t fault them for that. We’d tied them all up in one tent for warmth, and now we were hunting for clues in their main command post after Geri spent half an hour alone with their leader making sure she got every bit of information out of him.
I hadn’t asked for any details on her interrogation, being pretty sure I didn’t want to know.
“They didn’t send an army,” Geri replied, sitting behind a desk and rifling through some papers.
“Looks like there’s a strike team and a dozen or so support staff.
The support staff here are sorted, so now we can expect to find another crew manning a gate on the way to Winter, and a strike team farther in.
That’s probably who set loose whatever biological weapon they’re using. ”
“How did they get all this shit here?” I asked. “Do they have some kind of transporter thingy that’ll open up a portal whenever they want?”
“Basically,” Geri replied, holding up a strange device. “From what our seven-toed friend told me, he uses it to open the portal once a week for shift change and resupply.”
“That dude only has seven toes?” Jarvis asked. “How would you even know that?”
“He only has seven toes now,” Geri replied without elaboration. Jarvis turned a little pale but didn’t ask any follow up questions.
“So we’ve got a team of Pest Control roaming through Fairyland spreading disease everywhere they go.
How do we find them, and what do we do about it when we do?
Is there a cure? There’s no cure, is there?
They just want to wipe out everyone with a drop of fae blood, including me.
Shit, can I catch this thing?” I heard my voice speed up with my anxiety, but I couldn’t help myself.
I don’t do so good with enemies I can’t punch or shoot, and without Amy here to talk me down, I could feel myself slipping into a shoot anything that moves headspace.
Not exactly conducive to clear thinking.
“No, you can’t,” Ash said. “If you could, you would have caught it from Titania. Come to think of it, Oberon wasn’t sick, either. Did we see any sick male faeries?”
We all thought for a long moment before Geri said, “No. It seems like only women are affected.”
“Makes sense,” Jarvis said.
Every head turned in his direction, and he raised his hands in surrender. “I mean, fae society is a matriarchy, right? So if you want to destabilize that society, you attack the women.”
“That’s…surprisingly astute,” Ash said.
“I majored in sociology,” Jarvis replied.
“I thought you were a finance guy,” I said.
“I…had a lot of majors. Took me a while to nail down a course of study.”
“You mean you were a fifth-year senior before Daddy cut off the money?” Ash asked.
“Well, if you want to be mean about it…”
I turned to Geri. “Anything on that desk about where the strike team was headed?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Big surprise, their primary targets are the two queens. Looks like the plan was to hit Winter first with whatever weapon they have, then let the disease spread to Summer and follow up with a direct strike on Titania’s palace if they needed it.”
“And if they didn’t need it? Because it looked an awful lot like their mission was pretty damn well accomplished without another attack,” I asked.
“If a secondary attack on Summer wasn’t required, they were to return here and wait for orders and…holy shit.”
“And holy shit what?” I asked.
“And an occupation force to come through the portal.” She looked up at me, her face pale. “Bubba, they aren’t just trying to kill people, they’re trying to take over all of Faerie.”
“I bet they’re gonna make it into an amusement park for the mega-rich,” Jarvis said.
“Nah, they’re gonna mine the natural resources,” Ash opined.
“I don’t give a shit what they think they’re gonna do, what they’ve done is pissed me off.
I might not like Granny Mab any more than whoever’s running Pest Control does, but I do like the idea of being married, and Amy likes the idea of a wedding, and these assholes done screwed that up.
I don’t like it when people screw up my fiancée’s plans, and I really don’t like it when she gets kidnapped because of it.
So if these dickheads are supposed to be on the way back here, I reckon we’ll be here waiting on ‘em when the get here.”
“I don’t think we can do that, Bubba,” Geri said, putting down a sheaf of papers.
“Why not? You said they were gonna come back here and send for reinforcements,” I replied.
Geri’s face was grim. “Because they were to make sure that the Winter Queen and all her potential heirs were dead before calling in the occupation force. They want Faerie to be completely destabilized before they try to take it over.”
“Fuck,” I whispered. “Mama.”
Geri nodded. “Yep. If Mab transported your mother back to Faerie for help, then she’s going to be the next target on Pest Control’s hit list.”
“Saddle up,” I said, turning around and stomping out of the command tent. “We’re back on the road in fifteen minutes.”
“What do you want to do about these assholes?” Jarvis asked, pointing to where the Pest Control mercenaries were tied up on the ground.
“I don’t give a shit,” I growled. “Leave them for the Fairyland forest monsters for all I care. But don’t kill them.” I pointed at Geri. “That’s not what we do.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “It’s not what you do,” she said. “And you’ll shoot about anything that moves except a human.”
“Right, we don’t kill humans,” I said. “We hunt monsters, not people.”
“When are you gonna learn, Bubba?” she asked. “Humans are the worst monsters we’ve ever run into.”
I didn’t say anything, just kept moving out of the tent to check on my horse and scrounge for some extra provisions.
* * *
I felt the tightness in my chest get worse the more dark thoughts whirled around in my head.
I had a complicated relationship with my mother, to say the least. For a lot of years, I hadn’t known if she was dead or alive, if she ever thought about me, why she left when I was a teenager, or anything other than I had her in my life for sixteen years, then suddenly I didn’t.
When she came back a few years ago, she explained that she couldn’t live outside Fairyland for too long without her magic, and thus her life, fading away to nothingness.
So she had to spend as much time in Fairyland as she spent in my world.
That meant that after she spent twenty years or so in my world, having two kids, building a life for me, my brother, and my father, she had to go back home for at least that long or she’d get sick and die.
Which was why she’d vanished from our lives one day when I was in tenth grade with no explanation.
She came back when she needed my help to rescue the half-sister I never knew anything about from being kidnapped by Puck, the legit villain of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and kind of a bag of dicks.
And of course there turned out to be a lot more to that story than anyone expected, too, leading to me spending most of a year here in Fairyland, meeting both my asshole granddad Oberon and psychopathic grandmother Mab, chasing down Puck, and generally causing a ton of chaos before going home to try to pick up the pieces of my life.
And now I was back. This time to rescue my fiancée from my grandmother, and apparently my mother from a plague.
And the rest of my wedding guests from whatever Fairyland and its inhabitants wanted to throw at them, which was probably not gonna be good if I couldn’t get it sorted out.
Life was way easier when I just hunted quarterbacks for the University of Georgia.
Of course, hunting monsters wasn’t the hard part.
But it was just like Geri said—sometimes figuring out if the monsters were the ones with all the fur or the ones with the expensive shoes was the hardest part.
“We’re ready,” Jarvis said, stopping several yards back. “You…uh…you okay?”
I whirled around, ready to bite his head off, but stopped at the look on his face.
“No,” I said. “Not anywhere close to okay. My fiancée is missing, along with my mother and pretty much everybody I even like in the this world, and it turns out that my psycho granny didn’t kidnap them out of spite, but because they, and now me, might be the only thing stopping a bunch of military cosplaying assholes from killing every female faerie in the entire dimension, including my mother. So I’m pretty screwed up.”
“Yeah,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking around.
“Me too. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a little out of my depth here.
I mean, I wanted to come to try and help get Amy back, and Mom and Dad and everybody else, but…
shit, dude, is this the kind of stuff you get into on the regular? ”
I was about to deny it, say that of course this wasn’t anything normal for us, then I realized this was my third trip to Fairyland for one reason or another, and I’d fought monsters of pretty much every description, helped root out a corrupt super-secret government agency, and maybe had a small part in saving the life of every paranormal creature in our world.
So I shrugged and said, “Yeah, kinda. More often than I care to think about, this is exactly the kind of stuff we get into.”
“How do you handle it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how do you deal with the fact that the fate of the world might be riding on whether or not you fail? How do you deal with fact that if you screw up, a lot of people might die?” Jarvis looked distraught, like maybe this was the first time in his life that he’d been part of something bigger than himself. Hell, maybe it was.
I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder.
When he looked up at me, I said, “I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. When I started hunting monsters, it was because I didn’t have any other options.
I’d blown out my knee, thrown away my scholarship, and gotten my sorry ass kicked out of college.
It was either join the family business or scrap together enough credits to get a bachelor’s in something random and spend the rest of my life either selling cars, selling insurance, or coaching high school football.
I decided to hunt monsters. My dad told me that no matter what I did, the odds were always gonna be against me.
Everything I faced would be bigger, or stronger, or faster, and probably smarter than me.
And some of the things I was gonna hunt were more likely to be hunting me than afraid of me. ”
“So what did you do?”
“I did it anyway. Not because I’m some big damned hero.
I’m not. I’m an overgrown hillbilly who’d like nothing better than to sit in his cabin looking out over the mountains and not have any idea that there are real monsters in the world.
But I do know, and that means I can either fight them, or be one of them.
So I fight ‘em. It’s all I know how to do. ”
“But aren’t you afraid they’ll kill you?
Because I gotta tell you, every time I go around a bend in the road, I’m almost pissing my pants wondering what’s gonna come at me next.
” Jarvis didn’t even seem embarrassed to admit it.
Which he shouldn’t have been. Normal people aren’t built for this gig, and if they’re lucky, they don’t ever even know that people like me and things like what I hunt even exist.
“Of course I’m afraid they’ll kill me. Or worse, and trust me, there’s worse.
I’ve seen some of worse.” I held up finger as he opened his mouth.
“But I do it anyway. Dying would suck, and I’m seriously not in a hurry to do it.
Especially since I somehow convinced your sister that I’m worth hanging around.
But I’d rather die than know some innocent person got hurt, or killed, and I could have stopped it.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to kill anybody or anything.
But if it means protecting someone who can’t protect themselves, I’m willing to do either one. Or both, if I have to.”
“That’s…that’s pretty damned heroic,” Jarvis said.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m no hero. I’m just a guy who thinks people should be able to live their lives without being afraid that a monster’s gonna come out of the pages of a storybook and ruin their lives.
” Like they did mine, I thought, remembering how I’d lost almost everyone in my family to monsters.
Pop to fighting them, my dad and brother to becoming them, and Brittany to the monsters my family became.
“All I can do is fight, J. Fight, and hope to hold back the dark a little bit. We’re always scared, and we’ve learned the goddamned hard way that not everybody makes it out of this shit alive, but we fight.
As long as there’s hope, we fight. And even after all the nasty shit that got out of Pandora’s box, there was still one thing left in the bottom of it. Remember that?”
He shook his head. “I was never much on mythology, Bubba.”
“Hope,” Ash said, walking up beside Jarvis.
“The last thing remaining in the bottom of Pandora’s box, after all the evils of the world escaped, was hope.
It shows that no matter how dark it gets, there’s always some light somewhere.
We just have to remember it, and keep it with us, and use it to hold back the dark. ”
“Yep,” I said. “And if you pee about every half hour, when something jumps out of the woods at you and wants to eat your face, you can fight without worrying about pissing your pants.”
“Now that’s the kind of expert advice I was expecting,” Jarvis said with a grin. “Come on, let’s go kick some ass and get my sister back!”
He and Ash turned and headed for the cart, and Geri walked up next to me. “Nice speech. I thought you didn’t like him?”
“He’s growing on me,” I replied. “A little.”
“Like moss?”
“More like athlete’s foot,” I said, walking to my horse. “Let’s ride. We got pests to exterminate.”