Chapter 13
We had two guards down, and maybe three more to deal with, but we were trying pretty hard not to kill anybody, and they weren’t hampered by those kinds of restrictions, so I didn’t have a lot of faith in our ability to get out of this hastily built prison unscathed.
The first guard I saw hesitated when he saw me, obviously trying to figure out whether I was an ally he didn’t know or somebody he was supposed to shoot.
I took care of any doubts he had by shooting him in the center of his chest with a fifty-caliber pistol.
The good news for him was that his bulletproof vest stopped the bullet from blowing a hole in his middle the size of a dinner plate.
The bad news was that it didn’t do shit to stop the kinetic energy of the bullet.
I’m pretty sure I broke his sternum and more than a few ribs, but he was breathing when I disarmed him.
I didn’t bother tying him up. I’ve had broken ribs, and I knew exactly how little running around he was going to be able to do for the next couple weeks.
I did take away his pistol, his assault rifle, his tactical knife, and his cash for good measure.
It was petty, but I was gonna have a lot of extra fees from the wedding venue after this shit.
Interdimensional kidnapping of the entire building meant I was never seeing my security deposit again.
Geri’s submachine gun rang out with a pair of shots behind me, and the screaming I heard told me she’d at least shot to wound rather than kill. This time. Not that she’d do shit to keep the guard from bleeding out, but at least she hadn’t straight up murderized this one.
I yanked the door open and came face to face with a startled mercenary in black tactical gear with a push broom mustache and the telltale bulge of a big wad of dip in his lip.
His eyes went wide, but I reacted faster since I fully expected there to be a bad guy on the other side of the door.
I punched him in the gut, making his mouth fly open, then popped him in the jaw with an uppercut that knocked his chaw right down his throat.
His eyes bugged out, and all the fight rushed out of him, any sense of fear of the giant redneck in front of him completely outweighed by the disgusting sensation of a big wad of chewing tobacco flying into his gut.
He dropped to his knees retching, and I kicked him in the side of the head, dropping him like a sack of pukey potatoes.
I raised my pistol and scanned the room, looking for more bad guys, but found none.
My eyes quickly landed on Amy, tied to a chair near the front of the room with her hands behind her back.
Mama sat next to her, and her parents were on the other side.
“Are there any more in here?” I hollered.
“No, just Major Asshole,” Amy called back.
“Alright.” I ran over to her, dropped the guard’s pistol on the table, and quickly cut her bindings. I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her cheek. “You free the others. There’s at least one more guard running around here, so I wanna make sure Geri doesn’t kill them.”
“Why not?” Amy’s dad asked, his tone belligerent.
I looked him dead in the eyes. “I try not to kill people if there’s any way around it,” I said. “Every life you take, it takes something from you, too. I’ve got enough pieces missing already, and if I can keep Geri from losing any more of herself, I’m gonna.”
“Plus you can’t interrogate corpses,” Amy added. “We need to know how many more of these assholes there are, so we can make sure we get them all.”
“Robbie, I need you to free me before you go outside,” Mama said.
“Amy’ll take care of you,” I replied.
“No.” She used the “mama voice.” I hadn’t heard her use the “mama voice” since I was a kid. “You need to free me now, and I’m going out there with you. These men have laid hands on a daughter of the Winter Court, and they must pay for that transgression. Now set me free.”
I’ve never disobeyed her when she’s used that voice, and I wasn’t about to start.
I had to grab my Leatherman multi-tool to cut her loose because the assholes had used special metal-core zip ties on her, stifling her magic as well as restricting her movements.
I clipped the wire, and she massaged her wrists as she got to her feet.
Mama had a look on her face I’d never seen before.
She was more than angry, and trust me, I’d seen her angry face plenty when I was a kid.
No, this was angry all rolled up with offended, affronted, and totally, one hundred percent pissed.
I stepped aside as she strode toward the door, then slid into step behind her.
I wasn’t going out there with her to back up Mama anymore.
I was going out there to try and keep her from slaughtering every poor sumbitch in a Pest Control uniform. This wasn’t the woman who’d kissed my skinned knees and bitched me out for swiping Pop’s moonshine. This was the Heir to the Court of Mab, and she was going to seriously wreck somebody’s shit.
* * *
I followed Mama out the door of the building into the courtyard of the impromptu prison camp, with Amy hot on my heels.
She’d stripped the choking guard of his weapons and had his AR-15 pressed to her shoulder, making an incongruous picture since she was still wearing her wedding dress.
It was a long, flowing white thing that provided pretty good camouflage in all the snow, but I was pretty sure those shoes weren’t going to work well outdoors.
“You look great, sweetheart. I hope it’s not bad luck for me to see you in your dress before the ceremony,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. Maybe if I could make Mama laugh, she wouldn’t kill anybody.
“I don’t think this wedding could turn into much more of a shitshow,” Amy replied. “But thanks. I liked this dress. Before I had to spend seventy-two hours in another dimension wearing it, that is. What took you so long?”
“We had to find a portal to Fairyland, then we ended up in Titania’s dungeon again, then we had to hoof it here to find y’all,” I replied. “I think we did pretty good on time, all things considered.”
“Fair enough,” Amy said. “Who’s with you? Skeeter and Geri?”
“Half right. Geri’s here, but Skeeter’s back home trying to make sure news of a vanishing building doesn’t end up on the news. No, I brought Ash and Jarvis.”
“Ash, the tech from the venue? And…my brother Jarvis?”
“Yeah. Ash has some kind of weird fighting magic, and Jarvis…well, your brother has done better at this than I ever would have expected. I’m almost starting to like him.”
“Well at least one of my family isn’t being a giant pain in the ass. If my hands hadn’t been tied, I probably would have strangled my father two days ago.”
“Now I’m really sad I wasn’t here to cut you free earlier,” I muttered.
“I heard that.”
I kinda meant for her to but also wanted to keep it half under my breath so I’d have plausible deniability.
I really didn’t like Amy’s parents. They were like all the rich assclowns that have looked down on country folk like me for my whole life, only now I didn’t have to put up with it.
So I didn’t. But they were still her parents, so I hadn’t punched either of them. Yet.
“Mama, what are you looking for?” I asked.
Mama had stopped just outside the door and was turning in place, eyes closed like she was listening for something, but the only sounds to be heard were the screaming of the Pest Control operative Geri had shot and Jarvis and Ash yelling to each other as they looked for any other bad guys.
“I’m not looking for anything, Robbie. I’m listening, which is hard to do with you yammering at me,” Mama replied. “They were using radios to communicate, and my hearing is better than a human’s. So if one of them is hiding somewhere calling for reinforcements, I should be able to hear him.”
“Found one!” Ash called from somewhere behind the building. We all ran around to see her dragging a mercenary out from under the event center by an ankle. He was a scrawny kid with no rifle, just a holstered pistol on his hip, and he was screaming for all he was worth as Ash pulled on his leg.
“Don’t eat me! I’m too skinny! Please don’t eat me! I wouldn’t taste good! I eat too much processed stuff! There’s nothing nutritious about me! Please!” he wailed, his tears turning the dust on his face to a light coating of mud.
I stomped over to him, hauled him upright, and slapped him across both cheeks. “Shut the hell up!” I yelled in his face from barely inches away.
He snapped his mouth shut with an audible click.
“Good,” I said. “Now you’re going to answer our questions, and if you tell us everything we need to know, I won’t let any of the faeries eat you. Deal?”
His head nodded like a bobblehead on my dashboard going down a dirt road. “Yes, sir. Just please don’t let the cannibal fairies get me!”
“Technically it wouldn’t be cannibalism if you got eaten by a faerie,” Ash said. “Since you’re different species and all.”
“Not helping,” I grumbled, and they mimed locking their lips shut. I turned my attention back to the kid, who had at least stopped hyperventilating. “How many guards are here?”
“Six,” he said. “Me, Benny, Alejandro—”
I held up a finger, and he stopped. “I don’t need introductions, just a count. Who’s in charge?”
“Captain Burke, but he went to the castle with another strike team yesterday. So there’s only the six of us guarding the prisoners.”
I looked at Ash. “How many have we secured?”
“There’s the two you took out getting in, the one Geri shot in the leg, and the one you shot in the courtyard. Was there anyone inside?”
“One. So with this one, we should have everybody.”
“Everyone’s secured,” Geri said, coming around a corner of the building.
“Yeah, but we’ve got a buttload of hog-tied mercenaries scattered all over the road from here to Titania’s castle. We need to get them all in one place and under guard before we go after this Captain Burke.”
“No,” Mama objected. “We must pursue the captain immediately. If he is moving on the capital, he likely has something big planned.”
“I think he probably thinks he’s walking into an empty city,” I said. “There’s some kind of biological weapon that’s been cut loose across all of Faerie, and it’s got Titania laid flat. It’s some kind of wasting sickness, and if Mab gets it…”
“It could destabilize the power structure of all the land,” Mama replied. “If something were to happen to Mab, it could spell disaster not just for Winter, but for Summer as well. The balance between the two is delicate, but necessary for the survival of all fae everywhere.”
“You mean if Mab gets sick and dies…” Amy’s voice trailed off as she got the gist of what Mama was driving at.
“Then all of Faerie will suffer,” Mama confirmed.
“Then I guess we gotta haul ass after Captain Peckerhead and save my psychotic granny before all of Fairyland gets wrecked,” I said. “Let’s saddle up.”