by M. D. Massey
My pistol was useless to me in my shifted form, because my fingers were too big to fit inside the trigger guard. I was too angry to think clearly anyway, so instead, I bounded across the yard in great, leaping strides and crashed into the lead assassin.
The assassin swung his sword at me, a futile gesture. I stepped inside the deadly arc that the fae longsword made as it traveled toward my exposed neck. I grabbed both of the assassin’s wrists in my thick, misshapen hands and pivoted, swinging with all my might to toss my intended killer into the office wall.
Then I turned to face the other two attackers. Crowley was locked in magical combat with one, and they were trading spells left and right, furiously attacking and using counterspells to thwart the other’s attacks. I had zero patience for that shit. I picked up a nearby engine block, throwing it like a baseball directly at the magician-assassin.
The engine block struck the assassin at an angle in the torso. It was a completely unexpected attack, and the magic-wielder had no chance to evade the missile. His body crumpled with a sickening, wet crunch, and the force propelled him into the side of the yard truck. Smashed between the two objects, blood and guts squirted everywhere as his torso was pulverized.
“Colin, look out!” I heard Crowley shout.
I felt a hot, piercing pain in my side and looked down to see a blade poking out of my stomach. One of the assassins had snuck up and skewered me like a cocktail sausage on a toothpick. The other assassin was getting up, none the worse for wear after I’d bounced him—or her—off the cinderblock wall of the office.
I reached behind me and grabbed blindly, snagging the assassin’s arm out of sheer luck. “Fucking hell,” I growled. “I’m ending this.”
I pulled the assassin around and in front of me, dangling him in the air. I lined that one up with the other one who was already making a beeline toward us to get back in the fight. Then I opened up with all of the Eye’s power I could handle, blasting them with both barrels.
The magical heat emanating from my eyes superheated the air into two columns of plasma. The beams of magical fire cleaved through both the assassin in front of me and his partner. With cloudy vision, I located the bloody form of the third assassin and blasted her into cinders for good measure.
I heard Crowley’s voice coming from my right side. “Colin, your eyes—they’re smoking.”
“Don’t worry about me—my eyes will heal. Just help Uncle Ed, please.”
“Of course. I’ll do what I can.” I heard and sensed rather than saw Crowley shuffle around me to aid my uncle. I fell to my knees, helpless to assist for the moment, and waited for my eyes to heal so we could rush Uncle Ed to the hospital.
5
Crowley had the foresight and good sense to wrap Ed’s hand in plastic and stick it in an old cooler on ice before we rushed him to the hospital. We told the ER doc it had been an industrial accident, explaining that we worked in a junkyard. Unfortunately, shortly after we arrived, Ed regained consciousness and started making a fuss about invisible ninjas and his nephew morphing into a monster. The ER staff had already started an I.V. line, so they injected him with something to ease his pain along with a sedative. That combo zonked him out until the specialist arrived to reattach his hand, and they whisked him off to surgery.
The problem was that he’d wake up after surgery and start in with the ninja story all over again. Feeling guilty as hell about placing my uncle in danger, I put in a call to Maureen, a half-kelpie woman who’d worked with Finnegas for the last several centuries. She was well-connected in the supernatural world, and also well-versed in the sort of magic that could make Uncle Ed forget he ever saw those assassins.
When he woke up all he’d have were vague memories of a horrible accident involving the Hurst rescue cutters we sometimes used to remove the roof sections from junked cars. He might have echoes of the actual events later, but those would only manifest as bad dreams and night terrors. It was the best that Maureen could do, since only a fae magic-user of Maeve’s caliber could erase memories completely from a human’s mind.
Maureen assured me that she’d bring my mom with her when she came to the hospital, as Mom was Uncle Ed’s only surviving family. I sat in the waiting room across from Crowley, who looked rather guilty himself regarding the whole affair.
“I hate hospitals,” I stated. “They always smell like disinfectant and piss.”
Crowley ignored my comment, and instead decided to focus on excoriating himself for some perceived misdeed. The dude seriously needed either a good fuck or to get drunk… probably both, and in that order.
“I’m so stupid. They must’ve followed me to your place. Colin, I am so very sorry.”
“Nonsense. Everyone knows where I live. It’s kind of one of the drawbacks of being known as ‘the junkyard druid.’ Besides, Maeve warned me they’d be coming. I just didn’t expect the assassins to be human.”
Crowley pinched the bridge of his nose, exposing his mangled face to the light for a brief instant. “I should have thought of it and warned you. The fae in Underhill have long been known to brainwash human children in order to use them as disposable weapons… or worse.”
“I have to go after them, Crowley. The Rye Mother, Fuamnach, the Dark Druid—they all deserve to go down for what they’ve done.”
He released a frustrated sigh. “I’m warning you, it’s what they want. If you can even find a path to Underhill—and good luck with that, by the way—you’ll be practically placing the Eye in their laps.”
“But they can’t use it. As far as I know, I’m the only one who can wield its power, and only imperfectly at that.”
Crowley shook his head inside his cowl. “You don’t know Fuamnach like I do. She plots schemes that mature and ripen over centuries. And, she always has a plan for every eventuality.”
“Hmph, sounds like someone else I know. Still, the Rye Mother took off to Underhill with several dozen children. I can’t just leave them to their fates—not when those monsters are deciding who lives, who dies, and who suffers.”
I caught a glimmer of Crowley’s good eye from within his hood. “They’ll all suffer, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Trust me when I tell you this: if you travel to Underhill, you will die.”
“I have a way to get there. And if I had a reliable guide, my chances might not be so hopeless.”
He guffawed. “You mean me? Really? How do you even know you can trust me?”
I chewed my lip for a moment, staring at him through narrowed eyes. “You could have cut and run, back at the junkyard. Or blasted me in the back while I was distracted.”
He extended one long, slender finger on his uninjured hand and exhaled with a hiss. “Have you learned nothing, in all this time you’ve dealt with the fae? There are only two rules for surviving contact with them: take nothing and trust no one. You could very well be placing your oh-so-blind trust in me, only to be inviting your worst enemy into your midst.”
I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders out to release the tension I had stored there, then leveled my gaze at him. “That’s a risk I’m willing to take. Now, are you in, or are you out?”
He shook his head and snorted. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this—hell, I can’t believe I’m agreeing to partner with someone who I once considered my mortal enemy.” He lowered his head, then he looked up again and nodded. “Fine, I’m in. What’s the plan?”
I smiled. “The plan is, we gather our dream team, and then we storm the gates of hell.”
We headed back to the junkyard, and on the way over I tried not to think about Uncle Ed or the fact that the guy sitting next to me had once tried to kill me. Funny how life worked out. But when you were desperate, the enemy of my enemy and all that.
Back at the yard, we cleaned up all traces of the battle. Then I made some hastily designed adjustments to my wards, based on the magical weaponry the assassins had been carrying. I couldn’t ward all humans from the yard, but I could at least make damned sure they couldn�
�t come in carrying fae weapons.
I kept one of the long swords, since it was finely crafted and far superior to the blades I had. Another went to Crowley, but the third weapon had been melted to slag. I threw the twisted lump of metal into my Craneskin Bag, figuring it might come in handy at a later date.
Once that was done, I started making phone calls. The way I saw it, Maeve would provide our healer and another fae, probably one of her personal guards. The ones I’d met were like dual-class paladin-rangers, sneaky-ass archers with a broomstick shoved up their asses. Kind of like Legolas in the big screen version of The Hobbit. I didn’t care for the idea of having a dickhead like that on the team, but every dungeon raid needed a scout and a healer.
Crowley could definitely hold his own on crowd control, so we had that part covered. Now, I just needed a couple of tanks to frontline it with me when the faery shit hit the proverbial fan. I dialed the first number, and a gravelly voice answered on the other end.
“Guts’ phone, who call me at home?” Trolls always spoke in rhymes. I was told that in their own language, they were master poets. But in our language, their skills at prose left much to be desired.
“Guts! Man, I’m glad to know you’re alright. Look, I got this little mission I’m putting together—”
Guts cut me off. “Guts have chance to win glory for tribe? Say no more. You go nowhere ’til I arrive.” Click.
Alrighty then. One down, one to go. I dialed the second number.
“Colin! Good to hear from you, mate. What’s news?”
“Well… I’m headed to Underhill to rescue the rest of the kids the Rye Mother abducted.”
“Hmmm… well, bro, have you really thought this thing through?”
I nodded, even though Hemi couldn’t see me. “Have you ever known me to do something without thinking it through first?”
Hemi voice oozed with sarcasm. “Oh, no—never. Would Colin McCool run off half-cocked?” He made a sound that was halfway between a fart and giving me strawberries. “If it’s settled, then I reckon I’m going with you. Just make sure that if I die down there, you bring my corpse back, eh?”
That threw me for a loop. “Well, that’s not a morbid thought or anything.”
He actually laughed. “Just promise me, and stop being such a hard case.”
“Fine, I promise that if my good friend Hemi dies in Underhill, I will drag his sorry three-hundred-eighty-five-pound corpse back to earth—even if it kills me.”
“Good, because if you didn’t my mum would kill you, for sure.”
Huh. “Hemi, just what is the deal with your mom?”
“No time to get into that, mate. I’ll be there in twenty.” Click.
Now that recruitment was done, it was time to pack. I kept pretty much everything I’d need inside my Craneskin Bag, so I spent some time rearranging the easy access items to make sure I had the basics at hand. That meant loading up on iron and steel weapons.
Why the emphasis on iron and steel? Iron screwed up the fae by separating them from their magic or something. Steel alloys were okay, heat-forged iron was good, but cold-forged iron was best. Modern machinery could cold stamp high-carbon steel with a high iron content into a variety of shapes, using a process known as impression die forging. That’s how a lot of metal tools, car parts, and ball bearings were made. Steel that was cold-forged was actually shit for weaponry, but a lot of hunters liked to glue ball bearings into hollow-point bullets. Voila, instant fae-killing rounds.
I went down the list as I checked the easy-access contents of my Craneskin Bag.
Plenty of cold-iron tipped bullets, check. Cold-iron hand cuffs, check. My best steel sword, forged of L6 tool steel, and damned expensive—but, like I said, the fae hated iron-based weapons, so check. A semi-auto sniper rifle based on the Colt AR-10 platform, chambered in .308 with plenty of extra ammo, because I was not fucking around. If I had to reach out and touch a really nasty someone in Underhill, I’d damned sure try to do it at long range. Checkmate. Assorted magical grenades and incendiary devices—check, check. Food and water, because we couldn’t trust anything to be safe to eat in the Underrealms, check.
And that was that. Now, all I had to do was wait for Hemi and Guts to arrive, so we could head over to Maeve’s before another hit squad showed up. Easy, peasy.
Once Guts and Hemi arrived, we loaded up into the Gremlin and headed for Maeve’s place. That is, after we managed to fit everyone’s weapons and gear into the car. Between Hemi’s massive whalebone spear—and yes, he joked about the size of his spear constantly—and the “provisions” Guts had decided to bring with him, it was quite the feat to get us packed and ready to go.
Guts insisted on bringing a side of salted beef with him. Yes, an entire side of beef. I suggested we slice it up so it’d fit in my Craneskin Bag, but he declined. I decided not to argue, since half of his tribe’s warriors had died on my behalf—and I was leading him into mortal danger as well. Guts didn’t seem to mind that part, however. Once he found out he might get a second shot at the Dark Druid, he was raring to go.
After we all got in the car, I looked around and chuckled.
“So, a druid, a wizard, a troll and a Maori warrior walk into a bar…” My joke was met with a chorus of groans—even from Crowley, who was morose as shit. “Alright, alright already. Sheesh, try to add some levity to a dire situation and everyone’s a critic.”
Thirty minutes later we were standing in Maeve’s parlor, and she was giving Crowley the evil eye. Guts and Hemi, she was totally cool with. But she and Crowley hadn’t exactly hashed things out after he’d stolen the tathlum from her basement.
“I need him with us, Maeve. He grew up in Underhill, and knows his way around.”
Maeve stared daggers at him, arms crossed and foot tapping the ground slowly. “I should fry him where he stands. He can be replaced—third-rate wizards are a dime a dozen.”
I hardly thought Crowley was third-rate, because he was a hell of a lot better at magic than I was, that was for sure. But I needed more than one person who was familiar with Underhill. That way, I didn’t have to rely on only one opinion. Plus, if one got killed… well… it never hurt to have a spare.
“That might be true, but can you find me one who was raised in the Underrealms?”
She scowled. “If you insist.” Maeve walked up to Crowley, nose to chest, and stared up at him menacingly. “But when you get back—if you get back—you and I are going to balance the scales, young man.”
Crowley didn’t even flinch. “I will pay whatever just recompense you deem necessary to square my debt.”
Maeve’s scowl deepened, then she spun toward me with a June Cleaver smile on her face. “Well then, that’s settled. Now, allow me to introduce the rest of your team. Jack, Sabine—if you would be so kind?”
The wisp who was known as Jack-o’-the-Lantern floated into the room from an adjacent hallway, bobbing in time to a tune only he could hear. Behind him, Sabine followed silently, staring at the floor rather than risking making eye contact with anyone. Why am I not surprised?
Maeve always knew how to push my buttons.
Sabine was, as always, disguised behind her reverse-glamour, although she’d dropped her usual see-me-not spell. I hoped she’d look up so I could flash her a smile, but no such luck.
“Jack has the unique ability to find paths and byways where none can be found. He will serve as an excellent guide in Underhill. And Sabine, my loyal Sabine… well, she’s a talented illusionist, as you requested, and has an adequate, if not expansive, grasp of healing magic.”
“Huh,” I muttered. Sabine seemed an odd choice for a combat healer, but I wasn’t about to argue the matter. Sabine was pissed enough at me as it was. “Maeve, if you don’t mind me asking, just what the hell happened to Siobhan?”
Sabine spoke, almost too low to be heard. “Why, would you rather have her going with you instead?”
I glanced at Sabine and found her looking defiantly at me. “What?
No! It’s just that I’m curious, is all.”
Maeve’s eyes tightened at the corners. “Ask the wizard. I’m sure he can tell you.”
I looked over at Crowley. “The fae you know as Siobhan is currently being held captive by minions of my adopted mother, Fuamnach.”
Maeve nodded slowly. “Hmmm, yes. It seems that Fuamnach sent a doppelgänger to abduct and replace Siobhan. I am somewhat embarrassed to say that it took me some time to figure it out. And, by the time I did, the damage had already been done.” She gave Crowley a withering look.
Hemi raised a hand. “What happened to the doppelgänger?”
The queen of the Austin fae cocked an eyebrow. “I turned her into a snail and had escargot for lunch. Delicious.” She licked her lips and winked at the big guy.
Holy shit, does Maeve have a thing for Hemi? Stranger things had happened. I shook my head and shoulders like a dog, trying to chase the thought of those two going at it from my mind. I noticed that Hemi’s face reddened a little in response to her apparent flirtation, so that mollified me somewhat.
I cleared my throat. “Okay. Well, that explains a lot. Now, isn’t it time for us to be off?” Guts grunted in agreement and Jack bobbed up and down enthusiastically, while the remainder of our merry band stood silent.
“Very well then.” Maeve cast a knowing and wicked glance at Hemi and then took off down a hall apace. “Follow me, and stay close. If you get lost in my home, there’s no guarantee you’ll be found again in this century.”
I followed after her, staying right on her heels while glancing back to make certain we didn’t lose anyone. After several confusing twists and turns, Maeve unlocked a door with an old-fashioned key, turning it in the lock clockwise and counterclockwise alternately in a complicated pattern. Behind the door stood the same stairwell we’d taken when I had visited her treasure room, just a few short months ago.
How time flew when you were being manipulated by immortal creatures.
The stairwell curved away into darkness beneath us as we started our descent. As we descended, lights flickered to life in sconces along the walls, only to dim again once we were gone. Along the way, we passed a score of doors of all shapes, sizes, and materials—none of which I recognized from my last trip to the depths of Maeve’s manse. Occasionally, an inhuman pair of eyes would peek out from behind the doors decorated with grates.