The Faerie King

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  By Friday, Meggy and Toula had worked out a cover story and called the high school to report that Olive was safe and sound. “Sneaky kids and a smoke grenade,” Meggy lied to the principal when she phoned that morning. “Olive called me from Myrtle Beach when they ran out of money and he sneaked off… Yes, Myrtle Beach. I just got back from picking her up.” She and the principal had clucked into their phones in shared understanding, and with Meggy’s insistence that the whole thing was a silly mistake and wouldn’t happen again, the principal decided no further punishment was warranted. Meggy had then broken the news to Moyna that she’d be returning to school the following Monday—spoken through the door, of course—and had received a soft groan for her pains.

  Just to be on the safe side, Toula put a temporary ward around the building that would block Moyna’s unauthorized egress. Neither woman thought she would seriously attempt escape—“She wants that bind off, and no one else around here can do it for her,” Toula explained, trying to reassure Meggy—but the action still sat uneasily with them. Meggy didn’t want to make Moyna a prisoner in her own home, but she rationalized that house arrest and mandatory education was preferable to an extended stay in my cellar.

  Still, she opted to play it safe and informed Moyna she’d be driving her to school Monday morning. “It’s supposed to be fifty and breezy again,” she told Moyna through her locked door. “Better than standing in the wind, waiting for the bus, am I right?”

  Moyna hadn’t replied, as both knew the answer to that question: better always to suffer in the elements than suffer the indignity of being chauffeured by a parent. But she also knew better than to protest, and so she emerged on Monday at seven-thirty, attired barely on the proper side of the dress code and carrying her bag for cheerleading practice. “Keeping up appearances,” she’d muttered as she slunk to the car behind Meggy. “Assuming they haven’t kicked me off the squad yet.”

  Meggy had slid behind the wheel and cranked the heater. “You don’t have to keep cheering if you don’t want to,” she said, watching Moyna in the rearview mirror. “We’re not going to force you. If you want to do nothing but go to school and come home, that’s fine.”

  Moyna had sighed at that and rolled her eyes—Meggy’s eyes, merely younger and fringed with spider lashes. “I suppose I should do something so as to keep me from killing myself.”

  “Keep that up,” Meggy had cautioned as she backed onto the street, “and you’re going to be spending some quality time with the guidance counselor.”

  The ride had been brief and silent but for the rumble of the engine and the crunch as the tires turned onto the school’s gravel-covered driveway, which was being repaved before winter. “Have a good day,” Meggy told Moyna as she pulled up in front of the building, a few car lengths past the front door. “And I know you don’t believe it, but I do love you.”

  Moyna had climbed out without a word, and Meggy had watched through the rearview mirror as she shouldered her bags and headed for the entrance. Before she reached the stairs, however, she stopped on the sidewalk and waited as someone—a boy, Meggy presumed—in an oversized burgundy sweatshirt jogged up to her. His hood was pulled low over his face, obscuring the details, but Moyna seemed to recognize him and dropped her bags to run into his arms. He hugged her tightly, and Meggy was beginning to allow herself the tiniest hope for the rest of the school year when the boy gestured, opening a gate. “No!” she shouted, fumbling for the seatbelt buckle with gloved hands, but as she watched, trapped in her seat, he released Moyna and stepped through the hole in reality, and Moyna, with a smirk and a mocking wave at Meggy’s car, ran after him.

  By the time Meggy had relayed the news to me, I was almost dressed and awake enough to know I needed to take the situation in hand. “We’re going to find her,” I said, holding Meggy by the arms to steady her. “It’s obvious where they’ve gone. I’ll warn Greg and Oberon in case she tries anything stupid again, and then we’ll figure—”

  My phone began to play its canned fugue before I could finish, and I retrieved it from the counter, thinking black thoughts about technological development. “Yes?”

  “Hey,” Toula drawled, “we’ve got a little situation here. Where’s Megs?”

  “With me. Moyna’s run off with Geheret again, can this wait?”

  “Mm. Nope.” I heard a door slam and the lock turn. “There’s a couple of things coming down the alley, Colin. You need to get over here.”

  “Things? What things?” I asked, reaching for my loafers.

  “I don’t know what you’d call them. They’re big,” she replied, and I understood then why her voice sounded off—she was trying to keep herself calm. “One’s yellow, one’s kind of beigy-brown, and I think the best descriptor for them is ‘chitinous.’ So how about doing me a favor and getting the hell over here, huh?”

  “On my way,” I said, and the line went dead as I shoved my shoes on and opened a gate back to Rigby. “Stay here, stay safe,” I told Meggy. “I’m going to go fight some…”—I grasped for a noun, then gave up—“things with Toula. Tell Val what’s going on,” I added, then slipped into Meggy’s apartment bedroom and closed the gate before she could follow me. A moment’s search produced Toula, who was standing by the kitchen door, having transformed the frosted panes into clear—and, I hoped, bulletproof—glass. “Where are they?” I whispered.

  She beckoned me closer with a cocked finger, then tapped the glass. “Thing One, Thing Two. I was going to go with Ugly and Uglier, but I couldn’t decide which was which.” Stepping back from the door to give me a better look at the monstrosities lurching down the road behind Meggy’s building, she muttered, “What’re we dealing with, Gramps?”

  The things I saw out the window looked rather like the mutant love child of a wolf and a praying mantis, albeit blown up to gargantuan proportions. They were perhaps twenty feet tall and slender, their long torsos covered with patchy, sickly-hued fur, and they crept forward on four insect-like legs. The remaining pair of legs was raised like pincered arms, and their heads, bald and terminating in fanged mouths, swiveled back and forth as if scenting the breeze.

  “I’ve got nothing,” I said, “but I’m guessing Gray Lands.”

  “Magical?”

  “Doubt it—have you seen the teeth on those things?”

  “I discount nothing without proof,” she replied, and pushed up her sleeves. “Okay, I take beige, you take yellow?”

  “You have a plan?” I asked, flipping the brass turn bolt.

  “I was thinking something along the lines of ‘kill it with fire,’ but if you’ve got a better idea…”

  “No, that works,” I replied, and stepped out onto the landing. By the time I’d navigated the stairway debris to the ground, the creatures had noticed me and picked up speed. Foregoing a shield, I summoned what magic I could from around me—I’d gotten so spoiled in Faerie—and threw it at my target as a bolt of plasma. The beast wasn’t quick enough to duck, and it shrieked with pain when the shot burned a hole through its thorax. Before it could recover, Toula aimed a rapid stream of fireballs at its partner, blinding it and burning its legs in short order. With the backup distracted, I finished off the first, abandoning the artillery in favor of reaching in and stopping the thing’s heart from a distance. It took some work to penetrate the film of dark magic clinging to the creature, but the thing wasn’t properly shielded, and so giving its heart a lethal squeeze was simpler than it had any right to be. When the beast fell, taking out a section of Meggy’s neighbor’s wooden fence in its descent, I looked over and saw that Toula had made similarly quick work of the other, and we stood together in the driveway, catching our breath as we surveyed the damage.

  “Allow me,” she finally said, and snapped. The corpses burst into flame, and before I could stop it, the fire had begun moving through the downed fence as well. Toula muttered a brief, profanity-laced incantation, and both the fence and corpses vanished, leaving nothing but twin pools of dark ichor and holes in
the sod where the fence posts had stood.

  She cleared her throat and nodded to the yard. “You want to…”

  A duplicate fence appeared, and I brushed off my hands. “Well,” I began, “that wasn’t too tough—”

  A screech echoed down the alley behind us, and we turned to see another four of the beasts skittering up the street. “Oh, come on,” Toula groaned, throwing up a shield. “Okay, new plan: I’ll take care of these,” she said, raising her voice over their excited hunting cries, “and you get the targets evacuated.”

  “Meggy’s already safe!” I yelled back, sending a quick volley of fireballs into the pack to slow them. “We need to—”

  “Anyone Fringe needs to get out of town!” she protested. “Get Rick!”

  Before I could reply, I heard a high-pitched scream to my right, and I spun around to find Mrs. Cooper standing beside Meggy’s back staircase, still clad in her bathrobe and clutching her hands to her mouth. “Hold them off,” I told Toula, then sprinted toward my former neighbor. “Time for a field trip!” I said to her, trying to distract her from the monsters closing on Toula, then grabbed her by the arm and dragged her back to the main street.

  By the time we reached the front of the building, the initial shock had begun to fade, and Mrs. Cooper dug in her heels. “What on earth are those?” she demanded, pulling back against my insistent tug. “I…I never—”

  I stopped trying to motivate her through force and grabbed her shoulders as I stooped to look her in the eye. “They’re dangerous,” I said as quietly as I could over their shrieks of pain—Toula’s aim was fantastic. “And there may be more, so I’m getting you out of here for the time being. All right?”

  She cringed at the rasping death cry behind her. “Where are we going? My pocketbook’s in the kitchen—”

  “You don’t need it. I’m taking you home with me.” With that, I opened a gate in the middle of the street, ignoring the lone passing driver, who gawked, then burned rubber as one of the giant lupine mantises crashed into the flagpole of the little veterans’ memorial park. “Go through,” I told her. “It doesn’t hurt, and you’ll be safe. Stay in my office until I get back, okay?”

  But she pursed her lips and shook her head so vehemently that her spray-locked blonde waves actually moved. “I can’t leave Stuart, he’s all I’ve got.”

  “You’re at the epicenter of this,” I protested, but she was having none of it.

  “If there are monsters on the rampage in Rigby, then my idiot grandnephew is going to get in the middle of it,” she insisted. “He thinks he’s a wizard. Colin, dear, I appreciate the offer, but I can’t leave him here alone to get”—she flinched as another beast fell on top of its companion, impaling itself on the flagpole on the way down—“eaten. Or squished. Or worse. Someone has to try to talk sense into him.”

  I started to argue with her, then gave up and tried another tactic. “Where’s he hiding now?”

  “Probably at his shop,” she said, then swallowed hard as the latest corpse slid down the pole in a streak of black. “It’s about three miles down the road, after you cross the square. The old knitting shop—you know, Mrs. Amari’s place, she always had the obese calico in the window?”

  I knew it, and I also knew that Eunice Cooper, the most prim and unflappable of Rigby’s old biddies, was on the verge of full-blown panic. If I was going to keep her with me, the last thing she needed at that moment was superfluous magic. “Sure,” I said, pivoting her so as to block the sight of the carnage down the road, and waved the gate closed. “You know, I think Meggy left her car at the high school—can we take the Continental?”

  “Of course,” she replied, letting me guide her across the street to her garage, but froze at the median. “Oh, gracious,” she exclaimed, remembering her attire, “I can’t go out like this! My face—”

  “Is perfectly lovely,” I interrupted, pulling her out of the light morning traffic, then raised my voice over the sounds of squealing brakes and screaming hell-beasts. “You’re an absolute picture, don’t change a thing. Keys?”

  “Oh, you,” she said, swatting me on the arm, but let me lead her inside to the car. “The keys are on the hook in the kitchen—there’s a big ring, you can’t miss it. Shall I—”

  “Just stay where you are,” I said, imagining a pair of gardening gloves into reality. I didn’t fully trust them, but under the circumstances, I couldn’t be picky. I ran up the stairs to the apartment above Mrs. Cooper’s teahouse, then pushed the door open and flicked on the lights. The place was immaculate as ever, covered in doilies and yellowing lace, and it took only a second’s search to locate the painted wooden key rack nailed to the wall beside the dining nook. It was incongruous with the rest of the Victorian finery, a colorful cutout of a farmhouse overlaid with a sloppily painted HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS motto, but the center hook bore the promised key ring, which wouldn’t have seemed out of place on a warden’s belt. I grabbed it, then tossed it from hand to hand as I ran back to the garage in case my gloves failed. Mrs. Cooper picked the correct key from the dozens available and unlocked the car, and I sped out onto the street, swerving to miss the head of the third fallen creature.

  Mrs. Cooper peered out the window through her bifocals. “How many—”

  “Toula was up against four, last I checked,” I replied, ignoring the stop sign at the empty intersection. “And she’s about to have company,” I muttered, and pointed to a shape moving against the sunrise. “Shit, how many are there?”

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “Gray Lands, I think.”

  “No, where are they coming from? How are they getting in?”

  I cut my eyes to her, saw that a touch of the mad sheen had left her face, and breathed slightly more easily. “Someone’s opened a gate, but I’ll be damned if I know where. Slim might have an idea—”

  “Who?”

  “Slim. Uh…Rick Matherson? Runs the bar downtown?”

  “Oh. Him.” Her distaste couldn’t have been more evident if she’d taken out a flashing billboard. “What on earth would he—”

  “He’s got toys in his basement that I can’t even operate,” I said, then had an idea. “Okay, change of plans: we’ll go by Slim’s and see what he’s got to offer, then we’ll pick Stuart up.”

  “Toys?” she echoed, pulling her robe more tightly over her bosom. “And dear, I don’t mean to be a backseat driver, but you’re supposed to yield—”

  “As far as I’m concerned, the guy trying to stop the giant monsters has right-of-way,” I replied. “And this thing’s a tank. What’s the vintage, 1970?”

  “It’s a ’68, and I’d rather you didn’t total it. Now, what toys?”

  I slowed a notch as we approached Rigby’s modest town square—largely a repository for its churches and the police station—then picked up speed again when it was apparent that the two cops nominally on duty were still eating breakfast elsewhere. “Slim does piecework for the Arcanum,” I explained. “He’s not a wizard, but given the circumstances, he’ll do.”

  After a few turns, I pulled Mrs. Cooper’s land yacht into the line of empty spaces in front of Slim’s, then hopped out and was pounding on the locked door before I noticed that my passenger was slumped down in her seat. “Come on, Eunice!” I yelled at the car. “I’m not letting you out of my sight!”

  She hesitated, then opened the door and approached the bar with as much dignity as she could muster in her nightclothes. “Perhaps he’s not home,” she whispered, slinking close to the building as if she might fade into the brick.

  “Oh, he’s home—he’s probably just sleeping. Slim!” I bellowed at the door, then sighed, pulled out my phone, and tried to recall the bar’s main line.

  “Can’t you just…you know?” Mrs. Cooper asked, but I shook my head.

  “Place is protected. Warded,” I said, pressing my free hand against the invisible barrier I felt hugging the building like a skin. Certain perks came with being the Arcanum�
��s go-to craftsman, and while I could have punched my way through Slim’s defenses, something told me I’d regret that decision. “I assume it goes down during business hours. And…yes, that’s it.”

  I tapped out the last few digits and waited, hearing the faint ringing through the windowless door, until Slim opened the line and grunted, “What?”

  “Evacuating. There’s things running around here out of the Gray Lands, and I’m getting you out before I go searching for the gate, so put your pants on. Oh, and if you’ve got any sort of detector for dark magic flow—”

  “Damn it, Leffee,” he muttered, and the springs of his mattress creaked. “The hell have you done now?”

  “Hard to believe, I know, but this one’s not my fault.” I waited, listening to the sounds of faint cursing as Slim groggily fumbled for his clothing, then added, “We’re in a bit of a time crunch, so how about hurrying it up?”

  “How about not waking me in the middle of my night?”

  “Monsters!” I shouted into the phone. “There are monsters in this town, Toula’s killing some as we speak, and you’re holding up the parade. Move it!”

  Some sliver of my disquietude seemed to penetrate his sleep fog, as Slim’s profanity picked up in tempo and clarity. By the time I heard him stomping down the stairs to the bar level, he could have given sailors everywhere a master class, and Mrs. Cooper was shielding her face from the street, lest any of her acquaintances witness her humiliation. He unlocked and threw open the door, pressed his palm against a plaque on the wall—the trigger for the wards, I gathered—and beckoned us in with a toss of his head. “Get in here while I get my gear out of the hole,” he said, slamming the door behind us and reactivating the wards, “and stay away from the windows. Try not to use magic,” he added as he hurried behind the bar and opened the trapdoor. “They can smell it, zero in on it.”