by Elle Casey
I used to hate Jared for tricking me into coming to the Green Forest, and back when this whole thing started, I would have been right there beside him, blaming his sorry butt for everything that happened … but not anymore. Now that I knew what it was like to be fae, and had met and come to know the other fae I now call my family, there was no way I could be anything but grateful to him. These days, he was more like my fairy godfather and guardian angel all rolled into one. It was Jared’s and Scrum’s mission to keep me safe from things that went bump in the night, and so far, they’d done a pretty damn good job of it as far as I was concerned. If a threat came for us during this trip, they’d sense its presence and give us a chance to escape it. At least, that was the theory. Daemon radar —daedar, as I liked to call it— had not proven infallible when there were talented witches around. Good thing I had the baddest badass witch of them all on my side. We Blackthorn girls stick together now. I tipped my head to the side and rested it against the cool glass.
“Does anyone mind if I smoke?” Tim asked, giggling and farting once.
“Keep your buttsmoke to yourself,” I mumbled as I closed my eyes.
“You’re no fun,” he said, farting three more times in quick succession.
My friends ignored us both, falling into a lull of conversation that quickly put me to sleep. Tim’s intestinal problems were the last thing I remembered thinking about before dosing off and falling into La-La Land.
Chapter Two
“FIND THE LYCURGUSSSS CUP, AND bring it to meee.”
I woke with a start. The van wasn’t moving, and I was alone in a parking lot somewhere. Did someone just tell me to bring them a cup? A what cup? A Ly …blah blah cup?
“Hello?” I said out into the empty air. Signs on the short buildings about fifty feet away were written in French. There were several other cars in the lot, picnic tables scattered around under the trees, and wide sidewalks leading to the buildings. A rest stop. Damn. I didn’t sleep nearly enough, obviously. I’d been hoping to see something in English, but my watch said it was only eleven-oh-three in the morning.
The nightmare or weird dream that had awakened me quickly dissipated into the mist of fear rising around me. Where were all my friends and why did they leave me alone in the van? Then I heard a whistling and my fears were tamped down considerably. I’d recognize Tim’s tone deafness anywhere.
“A hunting we will go, a hunting we will go, hi-ho, the merry-o a dragon hunting we will goooo…”
“Tim, where are you?” I looked around the van trying to pinpoint where his voice was coming from.
“I’m right here,” he said. A giggle followed by a snort told me he thought he was being hilarious.
I yawned. “Oh, shit, sorry. I thought that thing on the windshield was a bird turd. Now I can see it’s a pixie. How long did I sleep?”
“Ha, ha, very funny.” Tim flew up from the front seat and hovered just out of my reach. “You have drool crust on your face in case you care.” He rose up to sit on Jared’s headrest, facing the back of the van and me. Once he was balanced, his cuticles became the focus of his attention.
“Where is everybody?”
“Peeing. Getting snackage.”
“What kind of snackage?”
“Nougat, if I know this rest stop.”
“Nougat?” Was this code for something? I blinked my eyes several times, a wave of dizziness hitting me out of the blue. When I squeezed my lids shut and then opened them again, my head was leaning against the glass of the van.
“Tim?” I asked, picking my head up. He wasn’t sitting in front of me anymore, but I hadn’t seen or heard him leave. My gaze roamed the van, as I wondered where he’d gotten to.
“I’m right here.” He giggled and snorted.
I rolled my eyes. “Hide and seek again? Really?”
“Who’s hiding? I’m right here.”
I got the creepiest feeling I’d had since I saw the room full of mimickers in Maggie’s pantry. What? Am I on repeat here or what? I looked down at my watch and saw the time. Eleven-oh-one. I could have sworn the damn thing said eleven-oh-three before. Banging my watch on my leg and the seat next to me did nothing to change the second or minute hand. The seconds just kept ticking by like they were supposed to. What the fudge, man? I was almost afraid to say my next words, but I had to. I had to see if I was losing my mind or actually sensing something was off.
“Oh, yeah. I … uh … saw some bird shit on the windshield and thought it was you. I mean … crap … I saw you there, but I thought it was bird shit.” Ugh. Apparently, I’ve not only lost track of time, I’ve lost track of my ability to tease a pixie. Now that friggin sucks.
Tim flew up from the front seat and glared at me. “Are you trying to be funny or just being stupid? I can’t tell.”
Becky came around the corner of one of the buildings and noticed me through the windshield. She waved something long, skinny, and white at me, distracting me from what I was going to say next.
“What in the hell is that?” I asked, squinting at the thing in her hand.
Tim turned around and snorted. “Nougat. Personally, I think the stuff is better to hang posters with than eat, but whatever. I’m not French.” He went back to his fingernails, and I stepped out of the van.
“What’s up?” I asked Becky, wondering if I missed something while I was awake-dreaming, which is what I decided had just happened. Or maybe I was growing a new magical skill — seeing the future. That could be awesome. I wasn’t nearly as worried about my little brain-fart episode after that thought flitted through my mind.
Becky stopped in front of me, her face flushed and smiling. “Nougat! They have like eight hundred kinds in there.”
“Called it,” Tim said still messing with his cuticles.
I took it from her and examined it, squishing it with little success and turning it over to find things pressed into the middle of it. “Looks like a stale marshmallow with nuts trapped inside to me.”
“Exactly.” She took it back and unwrapped it, taking a giant bite out of the end and chewing it like a cow.
“I’m going to go shake the snake,” I said, leaving her to her stale confection.
“Do you have a snake? Hey! Get me another one of these!” she shouted at my back.
I shook my head. Over the year I’d known her and her buddies, I’d learned that every single water sprite has a serious sweet tooth. You’d never know it by looking at her dental work, though; those choppers of hers were just as sparkly and white as ever, and she never got tired of blinding me with them.
As I approached the rest stop entrance, my other friends came out. Spike paused and took my hand. “You want company?” He leaned down and kissed my forehead.
“No, I can pee on my own, thanks.” I closed my eyes, happily accepting his affection. I never got tired of his attentions, even though I now had access to them pretty much twenty-four/seven.
“Okay. See you back at the van.” He spanked me on the butt as he continued on, thinking he was going to get away with it, but I pulled a little of The Green into me and tweaked him with it.
He twitched and hopped a little with the shock and then turned around, pointing at me and smiling as he walked backwards, his amazing, pointy teeth gleaming in the weak, springtime sun. “You’ll pay for that later.”
I laughed as I turned back toward the entrance. “You wish!”
Scrum was the last one out, but he hesitated before walking past me, looking at me with his head tilted to the side, reminding me of a confused canine.
“What?” I asked, walking right past him, knowing he would follow. He was kind of persistent like that, but I didn’t mind. He was assigned as my protector, after all.
“Something happened.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I scanned the interior of the building until I found the blue sign with the lady wearing a dress on it. It made me wonder when the world was going to find another way to indicate the women’s
bathroom. I never wore dresses.
“Something happened while we were in here and you were out there. Dang it,” he berated himself, “I knew I shouldn’t have come in without you.”
“When nature calls, nature calls, Scrum. I’m fine sitting in the car by myself. I’m not a little kid.”
He was still hot on my heels, and I was just five feet from the bathroom door.
“I know you’re very powerful and can hold your own in most cases, but we’re not in the Green Forest anymore and there could be other forces out here that you’re not used to…” The rest of his speech was drowned out by the flush of a powerful toilet ahead of me.
I tried not to breathe in the heavy scent of fake flowers covering very real poo. Holy hell, that is something else. Damn. Whoever invented a deodorizer that actually worked to ease the smell in places like this was going to be a billionaire. Vay-poo-rise. Yeah, baby. But that person had obviously not gotten that invention filed at the patent office yet, because this place … whoa.
I left Scrum to his fretting and picked a stall, squatting over the potty with my pants around my knees, letting my mind wander. According to my watch, which may or may not keep actual correct time, we were thirteen hours from our destination. Thirteen hours from the town where I had to find a house to live in. And thirteen hours from my new home base that would be the place I stayed in for a couple weeks at least twice a year, keeping the portal guardian of the Underworld company as her companion. Ugh. Calling myself a companion sounded way too sexy for my liking. It didn’t help that her last one was also her mate and of the male dragon persuasion.
I pictured the portal guardian who I was tied to for life, the one I was going to see in just a few days — Biad, the dragon covered in deep red scales that matched the one fused to the palm of my hand. The last time I saw her was over the winter, when I’d gone with my friends into the Underworld to recruit her to our cause. After the decision to open the portals to the Otherworlds was made by the fae council, we needed her and her counterpart in the Overworld, Heryon, to act as guardians, making sure souls didn’t leave the Otherworlds until they’d earned the right to do so.
My thumb absently rubbed the smooth, warm, red scale embedded in my palm. I hadn’t seen that one coming, the moment that Biad had taken my entire hand into her mouth and breathed a fire so hot it melded parts of our bodies together. Thank goodness it wasn’t standard issue fire, or I would have been cremated on the spot.
I glanced down at my palm, noticing it was getting warmer. The scale there seemed to be glowing. I blinked a few times, trying to get my eyes to work properly again, but they weren’t cooperating.
Someone flushed a toilet nearby, but instead of stopping after a few seconds, the sound of that water just kept coming and coming. Quick! Overflow situation! Toilet paper! Stat!
I pulled my gaze from my hand and rushed to finish the job I’d come to do. I was just pulling my jeans up to my waist when a small wave of water rushed around my shoes. I looked down and then back at the toilet. The water levels were rising quickly in my toilet too. Way too quickly.
“What the hell?” It sounded like someone had unleashed Niagara Falls in there, but that didn’t make any sense. It was a bathroom for shit’s sake, not a public monument.
“Jayne?” Scrum’s voice was faint, but I could still hear the hint of alarm in it.
Great. Just what I needed. A bathroom rescue. I hurried to button up my jeans and get the door open so I could beat feet out of there before Tim got wind of my predicament; surely he’d blame me for the system-wide overflow. I could hear him already … Constipated? Not anymore, I guess! Heee heee heee! He’d fly off high-fiving himself.
“On my way out!” I yelled, trying to turn the lock on the door. It was stuck, though, and wouldn’t cooperate. My hand started getting really hot, and I couldn’t decide if it was coming from my almost freak-out or the door itself. I quickly pulled my palm away to wave it in the air and cool it off, and was shocked to find a melted spot on the metal door where my hand had been. I looked down at my dragon-scaled appendage in trepidation, and my jaw dropped open at what I saw.
A giant eyeball? What’s a giant fucking eyeball doing in my hand?
I screamed and the water level in the room immediately went higher, almost as if in response to my fear.
And then, suddenly, I was squatting over the potty again, and it was totally quiet in the bathroom. No water, no melted door, no nothing.
What. The. Fuck.
I looked down at my watch and noticed the second hand had stopped moving. Shaking my arm did nothing to re-start it.
A toilet down the line flushed and wouldn’t stop, but the floor and my feet were dry. I looked at my watch again, eyeing it with suspicion. It was a gift from Céline, the silver elf who started the giant mess I was now paying for for the rest of my life. Not that I hated her for it or anything, but still … I was pretty sure the watch was another peace offering.
The water started to gather around my feet at the same time the second hand started moving again. This time, I didn’t panic quite as much, which was probably nuts. Here I was stuck in a public restroom with toilets and God knows what else flowing toward my favorite moccasins, but my brain was telling me some witchy bitchy stuff was afoot and my only concern was getting out of that stall and out to the car so I could kick Samantha’s ass. I would have thought she’d know better than to come at me with one of her sneak attacks while we were out here in the human world with so many non-fae witnesses, but apparently not. Not cool, Sam. Not cool at all.
The lock on the door was jammed, but a little hot-eyeball-in-the-dragon-scale action from the palm of my hand took care of that. The cheap silver-colored mechanism melted and hissed when it hit the water that was now high enough to get into my shoes through the place where the laces went in to wet my socks. She is so going down when I get out of here.
I slammed the door open with my shoulder and sloshed my way over to the exit.
“Jayne, are you okay?” Scrum asked, his tone louder than normal but not exactly rising to the level of worried. Idiot.
“Yeah, sure, just let me stem the tides of eight fucking toilets and I’ll be right out.”
I turned around to face the bank of stalls and reached into The Green to pull some of its power up into me. Other than shocking Spike’s ass, this was the first time I’d done it outside of the Green Forest or Florida. I didn’t know what to expect, but this wasn’t it. Something was in my way. I could feel The Green out there, trying to answer my summons, but something was blocking it. And that just pissed me off to level nine point five, and at level ten, comas were gonna start happening. “Now she’s gone too far,” I growled out into the empty space.
Pulling up the water element wasn’t my favorite thing in the world to do, since my control over it was still a work in progress, but Sam had left me no choice. Luckily, it was more than happy to answer my call. It reminded me of Becky, the way the blue and green lights that came from it into my mind danced and sparkled, as if it were in a playful mood. Not that any of the elements can be considered playful, really. More like really friggin dangerous. But still … when they came at me in a sparkly flow like that, I seriously had to fight the urge to just go with them. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure no one was behind me watching me as I raised my arms. Today would not be the day I joined my elements and disappeared from the earth. I had business to attend to that included hanging out in Hell with a dragon.
My latest training sessions had taught me that using a little arm action and some verbal commands helped me to focus my energy and harness the elements in a cleaner way, or so Sam had labeled it. And everyone was a fan of me doing things the cleaner way. Comas tended to happen when I was free-flowing my shit.
“Away, away,” I said in a near whisper to the water gathering now around my ankles. “Water be gone, go back to the land, go back to the rivers, the oceans, the sand.” I smiled as my rhyme took hold and the level receded. I nar
rowed my eyes, though, when I sensed that blockage out there somewhere still keeping me cut off from The Green. Time to bust another rhyme…
“And Water, my friend, before you go with your flow, do a sister a solid and hook her up with Earth, yo.” Sometimes my rhyming needed a little help. Pressure never helped the situation.
There was a hesitation in the water’s communication, like it was also running into some form of barricade to my other element, so I gave it a little juice, letting it know I wasn’t playing.
“Water, water, everywhere, do not piss me off, beware … if I don’t get my way right now, I’ll take you with me underground.” That was the best I could come up with, but luckily, Water knew what I was trying to say. Bringing up the pure elements of Earth and Water in the Here and Now was the most beautiful thing in the world. But in the Underworld? Not so much — not for me and not for them. This, I found out during my training as well, when Torrie the former demon explained how even the elements themselves actually felt punished having to be present in that horrible place. Not only the elements, but also the trees and the very air everyone breathed in the Underworld was poisoned to some degree, and that was not the type of pain that went by unnoticed. Yay me, getting to live there twice a year! Three cheers for personal sacrifice! My plan after that particular lesson was to never use my elemental badassery while doing my duty as a portal guardian’s companion, but Water didn’t know that, and so my threat worked.