Chapter Nineteen The Unexpected
I don’t expect to see Andrea and Chopin streaking down the side of a dark, windy road.
I don’t expect Hugo to be the first one out of the truck and into the rolling, screaming fray that’s happening in my yard.
I don’t expect the succubus with an eighties hairband mane of white waves to be pummeling my mother into the ground while sobbing that monsters don’t have to hurt humans anymore and that my mother is going to ruin her chance at a better life.
I need to sit down, but I can’t. I’ll sit later.
With practiced motions that I don’t have to think about, I leap from the truck and seize the axe on the side.
I bring it down hard in the middle of three bodies with a war cry that would make my mother proud—if she ever felt that sort of maternal emotion.
As it is, it separates the tangle of bodies.
Hugo and the succubus rise. My mother doesn’t. She is a bleeding, scraped mass on the ground, her breathing labored, blood gargling in her mouth as she continues to thrash and slash.
“Hello, Mother,” I sigh.
“I’ll kill you. You and the human bitch.”
Well, I don't know what sort of greeting I expected, but it was probably something like that. “No. I’ll kill you first,” I say calmly.
“Gordon, no!” Andrea calls from the truck.
“You stay there,” I warn, hand up as if I can will her to listen.
Nope. Andrea clambers out of the truck, but at least she leaves Chopin in the cab.
“Mother, why are you here? Why are you here?” Hugo asks Mother, then the demon next to him.
“Thought you could leave an old woman to starve? Faithless seed,” she spits in Hugo’s general direction. “Followed you. Days later. Tracking your scent. Stupid seed. Never learned how to hunt properly!” she raves.
“Lots of trolls leave. They eat the weak and old. They abandon them. Father tried to teach us to live as a family, didn’t he?” I sneer. “But you didn’t like that. Now you want us to carry out the lessons you always told us were worthless?” I challenge.
Andrea creeps over. “Um. The succubus helped. She saved me. I don’t want you to hurt her,” she whispers, taking my arm.
“I wasn’t going to.” Yet.
“Why are you here?” Hugo repeats. “Blanche, is it?” Hugo gives a nod to the creature beside him, who looks like she’s wearing my mother’s best handiwork.
There are tusk gouges in her arm and shoulder, and bruises rapidly forming, turning red skin black in several places, visible in the glare of the headlights.
“I’m Blanche. And I... I want to stay. I mean, I didn’t intend to stay at first.” She hugs herself and her wings close behind her back, forming a half cape.
“I’m not from the mortal realm, and I usually travel in the dreaming world.
But... But this place is like a bright beacon in the dreamscape, an energy highway!
” She looks between all of us with wide, glistening eyes.
“I landed on the night of the big fire festival.”
“July 4th,” I mutter.
“I don’t know the human calendar well. I’ve seen holidays in dreams. Anyway, I didn’t mean to end up in the mortal realm, but between the energy beacon and then all the teeming human energy...
I did. I found a sleeping figure by the small shed, intoxicated.
I entered his dream and fed, and then realized the festival was ending.
He had papers in his pocket, a leather case—”
“Wallet?” Andrea suggests, and Blanche nods.
“It had a paper that said his name and address, another paper that told me the type of vehicle he owned. I put him in it and returned to hide in the shed. But I saw so many people here. People and monsters, together, happy. I decided I would come back.”
My mother makes a sudden vicious grab at my ankle, and I swing the axe close enough to open her skin. “Stop.”
I don’t know what to do with her. I need time to figure it out.
But dawn is coming, and I realize that I don’t have to wait long for a decision to be made for me. I turn my attention back to Blanche. “Did you land in these woods? Did you invade my brother’s dream?”
“I did,” she confesses. “Again, I wanted to come back to the energy here. It’s the sweetest energy, and so enticing, but it doesn’t feed me.
I’m a succubus. I need a certain type of energy, and...
” She looks at Hugo with an uncomfortable smile, “I stumbled upon him, and when I entered his dream, we only spoke. Nothing else. Although, he did wake up when I crouching over him, and when I was startled I injured him in my haste to get up. But we spoke about this place. Why he longed to come here. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of Pine Ridge, not that I knew the human name for it.
There was another of my kind, a long time ago—Liam? ”
I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked. He literally is a handsome devil who is centuries old, and to hear him tell it, he’s been just about everywhere. “Liam Icarus?”
“You know him!” She actually jumps and claps her hands.
“He left and never returned to our realm. Rumors always said he went ‘good’ and found a way to stay in the mortal realm without harming humans. I... I don’t like the realm I’m in.
I had to try so hard to get back to this realm.
I tried for hours—and suddenly I was through. ”
“Does your transportation come with a burst of hellfire?” I ask drily.
“Yes, but I don’t have to transport between realms if I am allowed to remain in the mortal realm. I’ll learn to feed from the other kind of energy, the one that harms no one, only gives pleasure. Please don’t send me back.” Blanche shudders.
Andrea shudders, too. “Is it Hell? I can see why you’d want to move. And you have to be telling the truth about not hurting people. Right, Gordon? Aren’t the wards cast by the coven meant to work on demons with evil intentions? Good ones can get through because they don’t mean any harm.”
“Something like that.” Wards are imperfect—but then again, so are humans and monsters alike. Blanche tried to get to this realm in hopes of a better life. I can relate. Besides, she rescued Andrea. I owe her a chance for that alone.
“She can stay, at least for now, right?” Andrea pleads, shaking as she leans against me.
Blanche looks at Andrea with worried eyes. “Are you okay, little human?”
“I’m Andrea,” she laughs, and my brave, beautiful girl sticks out her hand and shakes Blanche’s bloody hand with its long claws. “If you stay here, you might want to get a manicure. There’s a place in town.”
“Yes, and the woman who runs it knows about supernatural beings. She is married to a kraken,” I add.
“All this disgusting fornication. Fucking your food.” Mother makes her presence known—as if we could ever forget her.
“Well... That’s kind of how succubi eat,” Blanche murmurs guiltily, stepping back.
Hugo pats her shoulder. “I appreciate you not eating me. Or doing the other thing.”
Blanche nods, a grimace on her face. “I’ve been in some very bad dreams. When I ‘work,’ I always ask. I would like to stay in this realm, where I can be sure my meals agree, and where I can be asked if I agree.”
Andrea makes a sound of pain and reaches out a hand to pat Blanche’s uninjured shoulder. “Oh, God.”
Blanche winces and rubs her arms. “You have no idea.”
“I don’t want an idea,” Hugo shudders.
“Weak! All of you!” Mother spits, snarling and trying to rise. All she does is roll from side to side like a flipped turtle.
To my shock, Andrea marches over and stands at my mother’s head.
“Look, Mama Troll. It’s the height of summer, and we’re in the mountains.
Dawn is coming fast. You are going to become garden gravel in about thirty minutes when the sun rises.
You can either change your ways and get your big, sorry ass carried inside, or you can die like you lived, hating everyone who might help you.
You have two of the best, kindest, sweetest, bravest sons.
Sons to be proud of! Why would you throw that away to kill food when you can literally buy steaks at the store?
Or catch fish and deer if you want the hunt? ”
My mother stills. “Perhaps... Perhaps you are right, child. Come here, little human. Let me see who speaks so highly of my sons.”
Andrea hesitates, then bends, and Mother’s arm shoots up with surprising speed and force, thick gray fingers closing down around her throat.
I don’t even think about what happens next.
My arm is in motion before Hugo even takes a step.
The axe swings down, and Mother’s arm falls off at the elbow.
Andrea screams, shakes the lifeless limb off with my help, fighting the fingers that still remember they’re supposed to choke.
I lift her into my arms as my mother lies in gory grass, cursing my name, my choices, my father, and every non-troll she has ever met.
Andrea’s voice is shaking, barely audible. “Gordon, I’m...”
“Andrea, go get the cat. Hugo, go with Andrea. Take Blanche inside. Andrea, you should get cleaned up. Get Blanche cleaned up.”
“I’m staying with you!” Andrea rasps, rubbing her throat and shuddering. “I love you. This is... This is hard, and I’m staying. Whatever happens, you shouldn’t be alone. People who love you stay for the hard parts.”
I love her more than anything right then.
Hugo stays. Blanche... Blanche slinks away to the firetruck and gets the cat, who is yowling in his carrier. “I’ll take this inside,” she whispers, and goes.
Mother doesn’t apologize. Or plead. She curses and rails and claws.
Lack of blood makes her ranting end sooner rather than later.
The sun rises, and she doesn’t just turn into a clean, neat “statue” of an encapsulated troll, forever imprisoned in stone for her sins.
The sun sends ripples of stone across her skin, and without even breathing on her, the rocky surface erodes.
Crumbles. Refines to dust, then powder, and gentle morning breezes carry the sifting bits of her remains away.
“Oh. She was evil, evil,” Hugo breathes, rubbing the hollow in his side where she attacked him.
“Oh, baby. Oh, Hugo.” Andrea whispers. She sobs into my chest, and Hugo takes that to mean that I am the designated hanky. He comes and sobs on my shoulder.
I don’t cry at all. I let out a deep, relieved sigh. My family is safe. And what is done is done. What comes next? Something better than the past. “We should go. I have to return the firetruck.”
“I’ll go with you. Hugo—watch Blanche and the cat,” Andrea instructs.
That was smart. She’s a smart teacher, a clever woman altogether. Hugo, given this gravely honorable task, snaps out the sobbing, wipes his eyes, and asks, “May I pet him? Will he want to be fed?”
“Let me give you a five-minute course on cat care,” Andrea says after a moment of thought. “I’ll be right there, babe,” she says to me, squeezing my hand.
“I’ll be waiting.”