Chapter 15
Mama’s assclown radar was on point because even tethering the horses to a low-hanging branch and walking through the snow, it was less than ten minutes before the sound of boots marching ahead of us came through the trees.
The Pest Control mercenaries were around the next bend, so I waved Amy and Mama over to the side of the road for a quick strategy conference.
“How do you want to do this?” I asked Mama, keeping my voice low.
“You’re actually planning before you rush headlong into danger? Are you sure you’re feeling okay, Robbie?”
“It’s your world, Mama,” I replied. “I’m just visiting. You want me to rush them guns blazing? I will. You want me to capture them and haul them back to my dimension for prosecution, I bet I can find somebody to make sure they never see daylight as free men again. Your call.”
“And if I want you to stay back here and let me go turn them into donkeys to sell to Titania? Will you let me do that as well?”
Amy held up a hand. “Umm…can you do that? Did Titania really do that?”
“I don’t know if I can, but I do know that Titania definitely did. It wasn’t just William’s imagination, as fertile as it was.”
“William?” I asked. “Mama, are you on a first name basis with Shakespeare?”
“Not anymore, Robbie. He died many years ago. Are you sure you didn’t hit your head in the last scuffle?”
I let out a huge sigh that felt like it came all the way up from my half-frozen toes. “But what’s the plan, Mama? You want me to run in like I usually do and beat them to a bloody pulp, you want to turn them into donkey sex toys for Titania, or somewhere in the middle?”
Mama’s face crinkled up like she’d drank sour milk when the phrase “donkey sex toys” crossed my lips, and she waved a hand through the air like she was trying to fan away a stench.
“Let’s just subdue them and find the antidote for whatever disease they unleashed upon Faerie.
Then you can take them all home and bury them under a prison. ”
“If there is a cure,” Amy said, her voice grim.
Mama and I both turned to her and she shrugged.
“If the disease only affects female fae, they may not have cared enough to develop a cure. Or they may not have brought any across with them. If the plan was to destroy the leadership of Faerie, why would they bring an antidote? I’m sure their superbug was tested in a lab back in our world, probably at the expense of captured faeries, but they may not have brought the treatment across with them. ”
“Then we’ll have to hunt them down back on our side of the portal and bring some back,” I said, knowing full well that there wouldn’t be any time for that.
As sick as Titania was when we left her castle, and as few faeries as we’d seen on the trek here, this disease was fast-acting and very contagious.
We needed to stop screwing around and solve this problem.
And my only solution involved a lot of punching.
“Come on,” I said, waving them forward. “No point in worrying over what’s not a problem yet. Let’s catch up to these dickheads and find out what’s what once and for all. But try not to kill the boss. If anybody’s gonna have the antidote on him, he’s the one.”
“Got it,” Mama said. “Kill everyone but the boss. On it.” With that, she started marching down the road again, hands extended from her sides and snow billowing around her like a cloak.
I looked at Amy. “That’s not what I said, is it?”
“Now you know how it feels trying to get you to follow a plan that involves anything other than punching monsters and blowing things up,” she replied, following Mama down the center of the road.
* * *
Pro Tip: If you want to sneak up on a group of bad guys, don’t stop to discuss your plans less than fifty yards behind them around a bend in the road. They might hear you coming.
Pro Tip #2: If you are going to set yourself up to be ambushed by a bunch of paramilitary speciesist bastards, let the woman with magical bullet-deflecting cold weather powers take point.
We came around the curve with Mama in the lead, and four mercenaries opened fire on us from the tree line.
If it had just been me and Amy, we’d have been cut to pieces.
But it wasn’t just me and Amy. It was me and Amy and Mama, who was pissed-off about being kidnapped, amped-up with faerie magic, and not in the mood for any bullshit.
So when the first crack of a rifle sounded through the woods, Mama just raised her hands and a shield of ice appeared before us.
Now, usually ice is not very useful in stopping bullets.
But magical ice created by the Winter Princess less than twenty miles from the heart of Winter itself?
That’s a little tougher than anything you’re making in your Frigidaire.
The mercs kept shooting, and Mama just held up her hands, making more crystal-clear ice as the bullets chipped away at the surface.
“Hold fire!” One of the mercs yelled. “Go around and get them from the sides!”
I looked at Amy. “Found the boss,” I said.
She nodded. “On it. Handle the others?”
“Not a problem,” I replied. “Mama? Can I get a little cloud cover?” I asked.
Mama didn’t say anything, just nodded as fog rolled in over the road, coming in wet and thick and almost opaque.
I couldn’t see ten feet in front of my face, but that meant none of the guys with assault rifles could see me, either.
I went right while Amy went left, and it was just a few feet when I encountered the first mercenary.
“Ahhh!” he yelled, falling backward onto his butt as I loomed out of the fog at him. “It’s Bigfoot!”
I stepped forward and punted him in the jaw, letting out a grunt of disgust as he sprawled in the snow, unconscious.
I don’t look anything like a Sasquatch. And I wear pants.
The next merc I stumbled into, literally, was facing the wrong way, and when he spun around to chastise his buddy for being out of position, I thumped him on top the head.
Hard. His eyes crossed, his knees went to jelly, and he dropped like a sack of rotten potatoes.
A shape came out of the fog toward me, and I raised Bertha until it hit me that the shape was way slimmer than the mercenaries, with a softer outline.
I holstered my pistol as Amy came out of the mist like a heavily armed angel, her wedding gown billowing out behind her like wings. “You see the boss?” I asked.
“No sign of him,” Amy replied.
“Drop the cloud cover, Mama!” I hollered, and a breeze wafted away the fog.
I looked behind Amy at the two fallen mercenaries, then handed her a fistful of zip ties and started securing the two mercs I’d dropped.
If we made it home, I was gonna invest in whatever company makes zip ties. Those things are damned useful.
Mama banished her ice shield, and I slapped one of the guards a little until he woke up.
Okay, my idea of slapping somebody a little might be someone else’s idea of knocking the piss out of somebody, but it woke him up after a couple love taps.
A third slap uncrossed his eyes, and I glared at him.
“If you tell me what I want to know, I won’t hit you no more. Deal?”
He nodded, eyes watering. “Deal.”
“Where’s your boss?”
“Captain Burke?”
I didn’t speak. Didn’t even nod. Just glared at him until he kept talking. “As soon as we heard you behind us, Burke spurred his horse on ahead. Said we were only an hour from the castle and if we held you off, he could kill the head of the cell and we could all go home.”
“Cell?” Amy asked, crouching beside me. “What do you mean, cell?”
“We’re here hunting down a cell of terrorists planning to invade Earth and turn everybody into Communists,” the mercenary said.
“What?” I asked, looking at Amy. She shook her head like, “I have no idea what this idiot’s talking about.”
“That’s what we signed on for,” the merc replied.
“Captain Burke told us all that we were infiltrating a terrorist training camp and unleashing a biological weapon on them before they could come through a portal and invade America.
They want to take our jobs and make us all Communists, so we gotta stop ‘em.”
By the look in his eyes, he believed every word that came out of his mouth, no matter how stupid.
I took a second, then decided that I could either sit and explain to this mouth breather that monarchs like the Faerie Queens have less interest in making anyone Communist than they do in making their castle staff celibate, or I could just get the problem in front of me solved.
So I punched him in the face again until he passed out.
Problem solved. I stood up and looked at Amy and Mama.
“We gotta go. Burke’s got a head start on us and I bet he’s pushing his horse hard to get to Mab before we do. ”
“I cannot enchant our mounts again. The strain would kill them,” Mama said.
“You got a teleport spell up your sleeve then?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. “We shall have to hope that our horses can catch up to Burke’s.”
“I’ve always found that I can motivate a horse pretty well,” I said, turning and heading back to our mounts.
“Yeah, by promising it that if it runs like hell, you’ll never make it carry your giant ass again,” Amy said, walking alongside me.
“Motivation is motivation,” I said, grinning. “Now let’s haul ass.”