Chapter 14
After some argument, we decided that the best course of action would be for me, Amy, and Mama to go after this Captain Burke asshole and stop him from infecting Granny Mab, or worse.
Geri stayed behind with Ash, Jarvis, and all our wedding guests to round up the rest of the mercenaries and keep them secure until we could figure out what to do with them.
I had some concerns about that, not the least of which was leaving the bad guys in Geri’s tender care, but she promised she wouldn’t murder anyone, and I got the preacher we’d hired for the wedding to agree to keep an eye on her.
Reverend Hillman wasn’t your ordinary backwoods Georgia preacher.
An imposing figure with his goatee and bald head, Sean lost one leg to an unfortunate firewood accident involving a hydraulic splitter, a stubborn chunk of red oak with a huge knot in it, and a quart of moonshine.
But before he lost his leg, he was Special Forces with two tours in Afghanistan under his belt, so even with a prosthetic leg, he could kick some serious ass.
And Geri not only liked him, but respected him, so when he promised to keep her from committing any more mortal sins, I believed him.
Amy loaded up on with a pair of sidearms and a boatload of ammunition, then stripped the body armor off the smallest guard and suited up, jamming strips torn off her wedding dress down into his combat boots so she wouldn’t be running through Fairyland in three-inch heels.
Mama didn’t bother, and she gave me a dark look when I suggested she might need a weapon or some protection.
She was in full-on Pissed Off Fairy Princess Mode, and I didn’t think challenging her would be good for anyone’s health. And by “anyone” I mean “me.”
With a final admonishment from Amy to the ones we were leaving behind to keep the slaughter down to a minimum, we saddled up and headed deeper into Winter, to try and rescue my grandmother.
The whole mission stank of irony, since the last time I’d seen Mab, she tried to manipulate events to get me killed.
Now I was trying to rescue her from a bunch of humans, a species she would usually consider no more a threat than a mosquito.
But Pest Control had come in with the biologicals first and weakened her whole kingdom, so Mab wasn’t very Mab-like these days, at least if Titania’s condition were any guide.
We’d gotten about half an hour from the church/prison camp when Mama pulled her horse to a stop. “This is far enough. Gather close, I need to cast a spell.”
I paused and cocked an eyebrow at her. I knew Mama was magic, and I knew that she’d be way more magic here in Fairyland, but I’d never heard her talk about casting a spell before. In fact, I kinda recalled her telling me she couldn’t do that. “Say what?” I asked.
“My magic is stronger since I have lived in Faerie these last few years and has grown all the more powerful since my return a few days ago. I don’t know why, but I am far stronger than I have ever been,” she replied.
“Now, I need to fortify our mounts so that we can catch this captain before he and his team get to Mab’s castle.
Otherwise, we’ll be fighting amidst an entire city full of fae, none of whom know you.
They will be as likely to slaughter any human they see as not, and I’d rather not worry about you getting killed while fighting alongside me. So we need to catch them on the road.”
“The guard said they only had about half a day’s head start on us, and they were on horseback, too. So if you can speed us up a little, we should be able to catch them before nightfall,” Amy said.
“That’d be good,” I chimed in. “On account of me not swiping any night-vision goggles from their camp.” I hadn’t seen anything like that, or I probably would have taken it, just because night-vision goggles are cool and Amy wouldn’t let me buy them whenever they came up on the Homeland Security surplus auction website.
We drew our mounts in close, and Mama closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, a lavender glow filtered out from her to the horses, who stamped and snorted as the magic settled over them.
After a few seconds of sparkles, Mama wheeled her mount around and galloped off down the road, leaving me and Amy to follow.
Our horses were flying. Not literally, although I reckon that wasn’t out of the realm of possibility either, but they were moving faster through the snow than anything I’d ever been on, and that includes a sled, a pickup, and a heavy-duty snowmobile one time.
We blew rooster tails of white powder out behind us like we were Motley Crue’s tour bus, and I leaned over my horse’s neck to cut the frigid wind a little.
“Aren’t we gonna freeze the horses, going this fast?” I had to holler to be heard over the pounding hooves and rushing wind.
“I enchanted them with cold resistance,” Mama called back. She was a couple horse-lengths ahead of me and Amy, and we weren’t gaining even a little bit.
“Might shoulda done that for me, too!” I called, pulling the hood of my heavy cloak over my head.
“Sorry!” Mama replied, sounding way less sorry than I thought was appropriate. I just bent lower beside my horse’s head and tried not to freeze off anything I might need in the future.
* * *
It was about an hour’s worth of magic horsey ride before we saw signs of the Pest Control jerks ahead of us, and about another hour before we could easily see their tracks along the road. Mama reined in her horse and waved us off to the side of the road.
“They’re close,” she said as I got down and started trying to stretch out everything that hurt. I finally decided it was going to take more stretching than I could do in one day, and gave up.
“How can you tell?” Amy asked. “Is there something different about the tracks?”
“No, I can sense intruders into Winter.” Her face was grim, and I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me.
“That sounds like a new thing,” I said. “You couldn’t do that before, could you?”
She didn’t meet my eyes. “No, I couldn’t. It started this afternoon, after we left the others.”
“So you can cast spells, which you didn’t used to be able to do, and you can sense intruders in Mab’s portion of Fairyland, which you couldn’t even do when you woke up this morning. What’s going on, Mama? There’s something you ain’t telling us.”
As she finally met my eyes, one tear rolled down her cheek. “I believe Mab is dead, and the mantle of Winter has passed to me.”
“Granny Mab is…” My words trailed off. My grandmother and I didn’t have a complicated relationship as much as a murderous one.
Which is kinda par for the course with me and relatives, frankly.
But I still didn’t want her dead. And what did this make Mama?
Faerie Queen? What did it make me? A faerie prince?
I hoped I didn’t have to wear a crown. I’ve got a really big head, and finding a hat that fits is hard enough.
I didn’t want to think about how much metal it would take to put a crown on my gourd.
“We don’t know anything yet,” Amy said, taking my hand. I don’t know how she knew I’d be upset, since I didn’t know for sure yet whether I was upset or not.
“We know one thing,” Mama said. “They have declared war on my realm, and whether my mother is alive to defend it or not, this is something that cannot be allowed to stand.” Her face was grim, with the little vertical line appearing between her eyebrows.
I hadn’t seen that little line in many a year, not since me and my brother Jason experimented with making grenades out of old glass Coke bottles by pouring vinegar and hydrogen peroxide in them.
It meant she was seriously worried about something, and that something was more serious this time than a couple of elementary school kids almost blowing up the abandoned outhouse back in the woods behind our kitchen.
“I know something else,” I said, my voice equally dark.
“What’s that?” Mama asked, turning to me in surprise.
“They ruined my wedding, got my mama and fiancée kidnapped, and forced me to come back to Fairyland, where I never wanted to be again in all my born days. That’s gonna earn them a special kind of ass-whooping when we catch up with these assclowns.”
“Then you should prepare, Robbie. Because I believe the aforementioned assclowns are less than a hundred meters ahead of us,” Mama said, pointing up the snow-covered road.
It was worth the interdimensional travel and putting up with Jarvis for the last few days just to hear my Mama, Heir to the Winter Throne, use the word “assclown” in a sentence. I looked over at Amy, who was already sliding off her horse. “Gear up, sweetheart,” I said. “Time to go to work.”