Into the Mystic
A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella
John G. Hartness
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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Also by John G. Hartness
1
I didn’t say much on the drive back from Muscle Shoals. Wasn’t much to say, really. I had a whole lot to process, but it wasn’t the kind of processing that ended up with me in the bathroom with a copy of the funny papers. It was more the kind of processing that ended up with a normal person laying down on a shrink’s couch, or for me, the kind of processing that ended up with something, or somebody, getting broken.
We’d just saved the soul of the music industry from a demon that wanted to auto-tune everything to sound like a bad Florida Georgia Line cover band, which is my idea of the ninth circle of Hell. In the meantime, I’d been party to some downright scandalous dreams, and in the middle of my very own reenactment of The Devil Went Down to Georgia, my mama came back and sang with me.
My mama was back. The woman I’d last seen tied to a pole and about to be set on fire by my crazy-ass werewolf brother. The woman I’d pretty much told to stay the hell out of my life forever. The woman who walked out on Pop, Jason, and me when I was a teenager because she couldn’t put up with Pop’s life as a Monster Hunter. She was back.
Oh yeah, and she was a fairy.
Not like Skeeter. As far as I knew, she was straight. That ain’t anywhere on the list of stuff I want to talk to my mama about.
A real fairy. Like pointy ears and magic shit, fairy.
If that wasn’t enough damn surprises, she proceeds to tell me that I’ve got a sister, that she’s in trouble in Fairyland, and that we’ve got to go there and save her.
I’ve been to Fairyland. It wasn’t a whole lot of fun. If given a choice between Fairyland and Disneyland, I’m gonna pick Disneyland every time. Even in the middle of summer with twenty thousand preschoolers. Still taking Disneyland. Mice suck, but fairies are worse.
So, I don’t think it surprised anybody when I pulled into the driveway, got out of the truck, walked right inside, and pulled a twelve-pack of Budweiser out of the fridge. I walked straight out to the back deck, popped open the first of what I anticipated to be many beers I would drink that afternoon and on into the evening, and sucked the sides flat on the can before I came up for air.
I heard the sliding glass door open behind me. I didn’t turn around. I could tell it was Amy for a couple of reasons. One, Joe has a heavy tread from the engineer’s boots he wears all the time. Two, Skeeter knows better than to interrupt me when I’m thinking about Mama. He was with me when she ran off, and he saw what I was like then. I was with him when his mama died, so I returned the favor. Mamas have always been a subject we didn’t talk about. Ever.
I just assumed it wasn’t going to be Mama following me out on the deck because she was never a stupid woman, and it would take an exceedingly stupid woman for her to think I wanted to talk to her right then.
That left Amy. Probably the only person in the world I wouldn’t hit square in the mouth for trying to talk to me right then. There’s a good thirty percent chance I wouldn’t deck Skeeter, and Joe got maybe another five percent for being a priest. But I wasn’t gonna hit Amy, no matter what. And she knew it.
She walked up beside me and put a hand on my arm. “How you doing out here?”
“I don’t know.” I told the truth. There’s no point trying to be brave with the woman you wake up whenever you have nightmares, which is pretty often. Not to mention the fact that she’d been in the room when Mama sang with me, and she saw what that was like. It was magic, and it felt worse than anything I’d ever gone through in my life. And I once wrestled a naked Sasquatch.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asked. One thing I like about Amy. She ain’t one for platitudes or bullshit. She wasn’t gonna tell me that it was all going to be all right, or it was all going to work out, or whatever other crap she thought I might want to hear, or need to hear, or whatever.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I got a lot of beer here.” Then something hit me. “You might want to lock up Bertha.” I slipped out of my shoulder rig and handed the holster with my Desert Eagle to her. “I don’t think I want to shoot anybody, but I can’t promise I’ll feel the same way in an hour.”
“I’ll put her in the gun vault. I’ll put all the hideaway pistols in there, too.” She turned to go back into the house.
“There’s a Glock in a holster duct-taped under the table,” I called after her.
“I know, Bubba.”
“There’s a Sig nine-mil taped behind the headboard of the bed.”
“I know.”
“There’s a little Ruger stuck in the middle couch cushion.”
“I know about that one, too. I know about all the guns you’ve got tucked away, Bubba. I’ll secure them all. You can get as drunk as you want; I won’t let you shoot your mother tonight.”
“No promises about tomorrow morning?” I asked.
“Depends on what she has to say for herself tonight,” Amy said, turning back to the sliding glass door.
“There’s one in a Ziploc bag in the tank of every toilet,” I added.
That one stopped her. “Jesus Christ, Bubba! How many pistols do you have stashed around here?”
“I can’t always keep track. A dozen or so. You were just asking about pistols, right?”
She rolled her eyes at me and went into the house. I reckon she decided that if I couldn’t remember where the guns were sober, I wouldn’t be able to find them drunk. Sometimes I wonder if that woman knows me at all.
I slammed about four beers before Skeeter made it out onto the deck. I’d moved from leaning over the deck to sitting in the ratty recliner that I kept out there to watch the sunset. It used to be in the den before Amy started spending time at my place. She decided it was unfit for anyone, man or dog, to ever sit in and had to leave the house. So, I put it on the porch. She pretended it wasn’t there, and I pretended I still had some semblance of control over my home. I think I heard that was called “compromise.”
Skeeter walked out and started putting kindling in the big clay fire pot over on the corner of the deck. He didn’t look at me, just reached over and grabbed a beer. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Didn’t expect so.”
“What the hell am I supposed to say, Skeeter?” I yelled. A crow flew up out of a cedar tree a dozen yards off the deck. I might have been a little louder than I expected. That happens around beer three or four, usually. “I mean, shit. She’s been gone twenty years, and last year I find out she ain’t dead. So, I keep Jason from making her dead and tell her I don’t ever want to see her again. Then she shows up outta nowhere with my best friends and tells me that she’s a fairy? How do I react to that? Do I just say, ‘Welcome home, nice ears’? ‘Cause I don’t damn think so. I don’t know what to think. I mean…I mean…goddammit.” I leaned forward and put my face in my hands. There were all these feelings rolling around inside me, and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of any of them.
&
nbsp; I sat there for a minute, just leaning forward, and then I felt a pair of skinny arms wrap around me. One of Skeeter’s bony wrists went around my shoulder, and the other one ended up in my ear, but it was the thought that counted. He hugged me something fierce for a minute, until I shrugged my shoulders. He got the hint and went back to building up his fire.
“I’m here for you, brother. Always have been.”
“I know, Skeet. I know.” We sat there for another minute. I popped the top on another Bud.
“You gonna need another twelve-pack,” Skeeter said.
“You got Cheeto breath,” I replied.
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing, I thought we were just saying obvious shit.”
I sat out there most of the night. Skeeter came out a couple times to check on me. Amy sat out with me for a couple hours. Joe came and sat down and looked at me kinda awkwardly like he thought he was supposed to be all “spiritual advisor” and stuff, just because he’s a priest and all. I ran him off when I could tell he didn’t have nothing to say and wasn’t gonna drink with me. If a preacher don’t drink and ain’t got nothing to preach about, what’s the damn point?
The house was dead quiet when I went in around three in the morning. I closed the door from the deck and turned like I was going to the fridge. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement, and I froze.
“Don’t worry, Robbie. I’m not going to pounce,” Mama said from the old wooden rocking chair in the corner by the cold fireplace. That chair had sat empty ever since I brought it into this house from Pop’s place down the hill. Mama used to rock me and Jason in it when we were babies, singing to us in her clear, sweet voice. Seeing her in it now brought back a whole lot of memories and drug up a whole lot of feelings I wasn’t sure I was ready to deal with. But it looked like I wasn’t going to have much of a choice.
“I suppose you want an explanation of where I went when I left and how I came to return and tell you that you have a sister,” Mama said. She was sitting in the dark, nothing for illumination but the light from the half moon and the stars streaming in the glass door casting deep shadows across her face and making her expression even more otherworldly than her ears.
I set my empty Budweiser box down on the floor and walked across the room to take a seat on the couch facing her. I wasn’t close enough for us to touch, but she wouldn’t have to raise her voice to make me hear her. “Yeah, I reckon I want to know about all that. But that ain’t all I want to know.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Mama said. Her voice was soft, like it was a delicate thing that could break if she spoke too loud. “What else do you want to know?”
I stared at her, sitting in shadows, her long dark hair blue-black in the moonlight, the tip of one pointed ear screaming out her alien-ness to me, making me wonder about everything. Did Pop know? What does this make me? What would this do to any kids I might have? Did Jason know? Is this why he went nuts?
I didn’t ask any of those things. I sat there looking across the room at her for a long time, just taking in every new line on her face, every strand of silver shooting through the black sky of her hair, every crinkle at the corner of her eyes.
“Why did you leave?” I asked. It was all I wanted to know. It was all I’d wanted to know for twenty years, since I realized she was gone and wasn’t coming back. I spent years wondering what I’d done, what Jason had done, what Pop had done to make her leave. What could make her leave the family she’d built, the home she and Pop created? What could make her leave me?
She nodded, like she expected me to ask the question. I’m sure she did, but I wasn’t real sure I wanted to know the answer. I held my breath when she opened her mouth.
“I think you ought to wake up the others,” she said. I cocked my head to the side, looking I’m sure like a dog that finally caught the car he’d been chasing.
“Why?” I asked. “I don’t think this is any of their business.”
“But it is their business, Robbie. The reason I left is all tied up with the reason I came back, and your sister, and why we have to go find her and save her. If they’re going to help us, and I could see by the looks in their eyes that we’d have to kill them to keep them from trying to come with us, then they deserve to know what they’re getting into and why.”
“And you want to do this now? In the middle of the night?”
“Some stories are best told by the light of the moon, son. Mine is one of them.”
2
My story starts before I was born, like all tales do. My parents were Fae royalty, the King and Queen of the Winter Court. They were much in love, and the realm of Winter was a happy place, sparkling like the dawn on a snowy tree. At first.
But the Fae are a mercurial people and long-lived. These are not qualities that make for a lengthy partnership, and when I was just a child, barely twenty mundane years of age, my mother, Mab, the Queen of Winter, cast aside my father and sent him from her sight.
I knew they were fighting, of course. My mother was not what one would call shy and retiring, and her voice cut through walls like a brisk January wind. My father gave as good as he got, his booming shouts thundering over her shrieks of rage turning the entire castle into a blizzard of angry words and hurtful accusations.
Even though I knew they were fighting and I knew my father to be desperately unhappy, I was surprised when he knocked on my bedroom door late one night.
I wasn’t sleeping. We require only the barest minimum of actual sleep, a few hours across several days will suffice for us. I was reading, tales of fancy about men and their miraculous inventions. I thought them nothing but stories, these wild books about automobiles and airplanes, about engines and machines. I had no concept of such things. Why would I? We had magic, after all.
When my father knocked, I closed my book, carefully marking the page with a winter rose I had picked from Mother’s garden just that afternoon. I opened the heavy canopy around my bed, put on a robe against the ever-present chill, and went to the door.
“Who is it?” I called through the heavy wood. I could have simply opened the door, of course. I was never safer than in my rooms at the heart of Winter’s Palace. No one would dare assault our home—it was unthinkable. And I knew every soul within these walls, having grown up underfoot in the kitchens, tripping the maids in the hallways, and teasing the guards standing their posts.
But there is a certain decorum expected of a princess, as my mother never failed to remind me, so I called out before I opened the door.
But I didn’t open the door. The knob turned under my hand, and my father pushed into the room. I backed away from him, stepping on the hem of my robe and nearly tumbling to the floor.
“Father!” I cried. “What is wrong? Are you injured? Has something terrible happened?”
I looked at him for the first time, and I saw a bright red handprint on his face and a tiny trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. I knew immediately what had happened. They had finally taken their bickering too far, and Mother had done something she could not come back from—she had struck Father.
Father was a warrior. More than simply a soldier in the armies of the Fae, he was a general, a hero in both the skirmishes against Summer over territorial lines and in the more serious wars against goblins and orcs that constantly wanted to attack the lands of Unseelie and Seelie alike. He had not been in the field for some time, but he still carried his sword everywhere, and he always walked like he expected an enemy to launch an attack at any moment.
Well, the enemy that had assaulted him was one he could not take the field against. Mother had struck him. I did not know why then and do not to this day. I did not ask what was said; I simply reached up to his face and dabbed the blood away with the corner of my robe.
“Get your things. We are leaving this place. I cannot abide her another night.” Father walked to my wardrobe and flung the doors wide. He began pulling riding breeches and shirts from the large cl
oset willy-nilly, throwing them onto my bed. More than half the things he flung aside landed on the floor, but he never looked back to see.
I stepped forward and took him by the wrist. He stopped and turned to me. “I have to go,” he said. His voice was tight, and I could see by the throbbing vein in his temple and the cords of muscle standing out at his neck that he was holding himself in check with the greatest of difficulty.
“I understand,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm. I spoke to him like I did to Thunder, the skittish war horse in the stables that never let anyone save my father or Rogim the Stablemaster ride him. “You cannot stay with her any longer. If you do, you will return to a place that you do not wish to revisit. So, you must go.”
“You must go with me,” Father said through gritted teeth.
“Yes,” I said, picking up some of the clothes on the floor and putting them on the bed. That act, that mundane act of stooping to pick up an ice-blue blouse, snapped him out of his rage-induced trance. He shook himself all over, as if he were a dog climbing out of a river, and looked at me with sad eyes.
“I am sorry, Ygraine,” he said. “I have tried. For years, I have endured the sniping, and the belittling comments, and the infidelity, but tonight…”
“Tonight, she struck you,” I said with a nod.
“Tonight, she struck me,” he confirmed. “I told her long ago that I would tolerate many things from her: I would turn a blind eye to a great deal of horrid behavior for the sake of the love I bore her and for the sake of the child she bore me. But I warned her, I am still a man. I am still a man, and I am still a warrior, and I will not be struck. Tonight, she has crossed that line. I cannot retaliate in kind, for if I do, it will mean only two things.”
“Your death for laying hands on the queen,” I supplied the first, and most likely, outcome. The throne passed to my mother through blood. The Fae are always ruled by queens, and the duty is passed down to the firstborn daughter. Our “kings” are truly prince consorts, king in name only. Some queens entrust much of the duty of rule to their consort. My mother was not such a queen.
Into the Mystic - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 1