by R. J. Blain
She was still considering the wisdom of the idea when all hell broke loose on the other side of the curtain.
Chapter Nine
You’d think war would start quiet and build to a roar. Not this one. It started with shrieks that would curdle demon blood, roars that sounded like freight trains, shouts, screams, clangs of metal, pops, thumps, and thuds.
Mal tossed a protective shield around Nayena. It only protected against magic, but Mal was glad to see that the pixie’s companions rose around her, none appearing like they planned to stab her in the back. The other group of pixies came buzzing out, looking for the source of the noise, and dived through the curtain. Mal wasn’t at all certain that all of them had cleared out. A sniper or two might be left behind.
She snorted. A sniper. To take out a bride in order to prevent a wedding. How insane was that?
Nevertheless, the threat was real, and she wasn’t about to let Nayena be murdered. Or her husband-to-be. But first, Mal had to make sure she stayed safe.
A glitter bomb came flying through the curtain. Four more followed. They exploded as they hit the ground. The pixies practically spasmed and shot like bullets up out of range.
Mal dived back through the curtain, wrapping a shield around herself. Glitter bomb magic would eat it, but better than eating her. At least until she could figure out what to do next.
Nayena had risen up high enough that Mal couldn’t maintain the shield around her, so she let it go. Hopefully the pixie could take care of herself for a little while.
The curtain turned into a spiderweb and dissolved as the glitter bombs took effect. If someone had been trying to break into the pixie grotto, they’d succeeded. They’d busted down the door anyway. There was still the issue of the battle raging outside.
Mal dodged a… something. Blue with tentacles and armor and fungus ridging out all over it and a shiny gelatinous protrusion that could have been an eye or a cancer or maybe a kidney. It didn’t seem to be done becoming whatever it was going to be because it was still growing and sprouted a bunch of things that could have been penises or possibly thick hair. And it stank like boiled cabbage.
She ran into a giant, or rather, a giant’s calf, as she avoided the swipe of a big pole axe, which said giant happened to be swinging. He glanced down at her and snarled.
Rude. She flipped him off and lit his topknot on fire. Since he was a ginger, it matched. His copper-colored eyes widened as he realized his danger, and he started slapping at his head with his free hand.
“Knock yourself out, asshole,” Mal said. “Please and hurry.”
More glitter bombs exploded.
Mal shot bolts of mage fire at them, hoping to incinerate some of the dust. Then she turned her attention to lighting up more topknots, then boots, and moved on to pants and weapons. Pretty quickly the battle turned into stomping and slapping and shouting and whining. If only someone could start playing some good Cajun music, it would be perfect.
She stood back as much out of the fray as she could, sending firebombs at the pixies who kept wanting to dive-bomb the distracted giants and hoping Law would show up and do his Walker, Texas Ranger, thing.
For a second she imagined him jumping around, kicking giants’ butts, dressed in tight jeans, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat and chortled to herself.
Something whizzed by her head with a sort of ringing metallic sound, the kind you get when you slide steel against steel.
Mal blinked, tracking a blur of blue as it whipped past her and into the crowd of angry giants. It took her a good three seconds or more to register that it was a dragon.
A dragon.
A small dragon, admittedly, but a dragon, nonetheless. It looked to be about seven feet long or so, nose to tail, with a wingspan of about ten to twelve feet. It twisted and turned through the air, flipping over, without hardly slowing down, and pivoting like it was on ball bearings.
Its flames were bluish white and lit whatever they hit on fire, including steel, stone, and glitter bomb creatures. It crossed paths with a green dragon, this one slightly larger and spitting liquid. Acid, maybe. Whatever it was melted things like a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.
As she scanned the rioting crowd, Mal realized that there were more dragons zooming in and out. Orange, gold, brown, green, blue, and white. They seemed to be leaving both the giants and the pixies mostly alone.
One giant snatched a little dragon out of the air and threw it to the ground. She stepped on its throat as it wriggled and flapped it wings. She said something to it and smiled in a very unfriendly way. A gold ring with a small red jewel dangling off it gleamed in her nose. She held out her hand, and blue magic wreathed her fingers. It looked oily thick, almost sludgy.
Mal didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know the oversized bitch was about to kill the dragon. Not that it didn’t deserve to be dead. On the other hand, maybe it didn’t deserve to be dead, and Mal didn’t really feel like letting the colossal colostomy bag get away with killing the dragon on her turf. Well, Law’s and LeeAnne’s turf, but she was an employee at the moment, so it counted.
Mal flicked a lash of electric power out to encircle the giant’s neck. Instantly the massive woman went rigid, her muscles locking up. Mal flicked again and the giant rocked forward and back and kept going, falling flat.
The little dragon flailed and rolled over, launching itself into the air, quickly climbing out of reach of those on the ground.
Something hit Mal hard from behind—so hard her teeth rattled. The force flung her forward off her feet. She landed face down on a churned-up area of dirt and grass. Pain exploded in her face, nose, and lips. She tasted blood. She coughed, trying to breathe, sucked in dirt, choked, coughed again. Rolling onto her side, she tried again to breathe, tried to see through the involuntary tears blurring her eyes.
The ground under her crumbled slightly, and a wave of bugs crawled over her, swarming like flies on carrion. Needle-like stabs pricked her all over. More crawled onto her face. More stabs, and the creatures clung like ticks. The bloodsuckers kept coming and fastening on, some crawling inside her mouth as she inhaled and tried to get her bearings.
Mal sucked in a breath, feeling bugs crawling into her airway. That set off her coughing again. She couldn’t see. Her eyelids were thick with the parasitical creatures, and she couldn’t even lift them anymore. Her ears filled so that all she could hear were muffled rushing sounds. She’d closed her mouth almost completely and breathed through a narrow slit, since they already clogged her nose. Critters wriggled their legs and tried to force their way through, then fastened on where they were.
As the critters dined on her blood, they swelled, their many little legs wiggling happily. Or spasmodically. Hard to say.
Mal was certain she ought to be entirely disgusted and probably freaking out, but she found the entire situation as ridiculous as the pixies no doubt thought it was. She didn’t know if the little bastards would get full and jump off before or after she suffocated, if at all; if they’d get full before or after she ran out of blood; if they were depositing masses of eggs under her skin with every passing moment; or giving her some kind of bizarre disease like clown fever or monkey-butt flu.
She decided not to wait to find out. She summoned energy, snapping together pieces of a spell with unconscious ease. It was a sort of a combination electrical, poison, and cold spell. She pushed it out so it covered her like a second skin and activated it.
A quiver ran through the mass of bugs. Simultaneously, they hardened into frozen little rocks. Mal squirmed and shook herself. The creatures broke off and tumbled away. She rubbed them from her hands and her face, scraping them off her eyes and blowing them from her nose. Her skin prickled with frozen little flesh-piercing straws. Who knew what scientists would call them and who cared?
Mal spit them out of her mouth and wrinkled her nose at her red and purple blotched skin. Around every little straw or hole where one used to be was a tiny white ring surrounde
d by varying shades of mottling. She could only imagine what her face looked like. She ran her fingers through her hair and found it knotting up around the little creatures. Now that pissed her off. Crap. She was going to look like hell at the wedding, and she’d been planning to dress to the nines and rock Law’s world. Now she’d be better off putting a paper bag over her head.
She picked the things out of her ears and climbed to her feet, staggering as her head spun. How much blood had those little vampire bastards stolen?
She didn’t know and at that moment, she didn’t care. She was done letting these overgrown children throw tantrums around each other. It all smacked just a little too much of squabbling on the playground because Billy and Julie were kissing behind the science building and Bryan and Melissa were jealous and so now there was going to be a big West Side Story fight between their two groups of friends. Pretty soon someone would start playing sappy music about being pretty in a pink dress, or candles on a cake, or having breakfast at some club or some fire at Elmo’s.
The fastest way to handle this by herself was scorched earth. That wouldn’t really deal with the pixies and would probably end up killing the groom, which, while giving Mal a great deal of satisfaction, wouldn’t make LeeAnne or Law happy.
From what she could tell, the fighting had resumed full force. They must’ve put her fires out. Well then. Time to get more creative.
Since dead wasn’t a good option, Mal opted for sleep. She drew deep on her own magic and pulled what she could from around her. Surprisingly, or maybe it shouldn’t have been after what Tazho had said about her having a foot in that world, the wildwood magic leaped at her call, flowing swiftly into her.
She converted the magic into a sleepy spell and pushed it out in a bubble. She wanted everybody to feel the urge to sleep but not make it instant, so the pixies had a chance to land before they passed out and dropped from the sky like rocks.
Mal flung her net wide around the battlefield then created a lure for the flying pixies and dragons. Unable to resist, they flew into her trap and pretty soon all the combatants lolled sleepily or snored where they’d fallen. The glitter bomb progeny succumbed as well.
Mal wandered over to an overturned bench, righted it, and sat, exhaustion turning her limp. She scratched at her arms. The prickly little straws itched something fierce and the white circles had turned to hard little bumps that both itched and hurt.
Pixies, dragons, and giants lay piled on one another all across the former gardens. The treehouses had been stripped of limbs to use as clubs, while several others burned merrily. A little russet-colored dragon just a few feet away struggled to stand upright but clearly couldn’t manage to stay awake and collapsed again.
“Mal! Where are you?”
Law dodged in and out and around the clumps of giants and pixies, head turning as he searched for her.
“Over here.” She raised her hand and waved then dropped it back down and scratched her arm again. It was worse than having poison ivy.
“Christ! Are you okay? What happened to you?” He squatted down in front of her, pulling her hands into his and examining her.
“Glitter bomb bugs,” she explained. “I think there might still be one in my nose.” She did sound a little nasal. Plus the inside of her nose itched fiercely. She wondered if she could find a little bottle brush to scratch it with. Maybe a mascara brush would do the trick.
“How bad are you hurt? You need to see a doctor.”
“Witch doctor, maybe,” she said. “I itch. And I look like crap. Other than that, and the critter still lodged in my nose and maybe one in my ear, I’m fine. Well, there are a bunch tangled in my hair. They should all be dead, though.”
He picked one off her shoulder and held it up. Ew. It was sort of muddy red and about the size of a marble, with little jointed grasshopper legs sticking out in every direction and no discernible head. A little spot of blood indicated where its drinking straw/syringe-needle mouth used to be attached to it.
“I hope it didn’t give me malaria or rabies or something,” Mal said. She glanced past his shoulder and stiffened, her eyes practically popping out of her head cartoon style.
“What the actual fuck?”
Law spun around and stood in one graceful swirling move, magic crackling around him. He stared around, searching for a threat, then followed Mal’s gaze down to the ground where the little dragon was finishing morphing into a small woman. No, a small giant.
Mal stared, repeating that to herself.
Nope, still didn’t compute. And yet there could be no doubt. She had the same shaven sides of the head, the same topknot—brown—the same blunt features and broad face, the same zaftig body as the big female giants, just… smaller.
And seconds ago she’d been a dragon.
“Tell me the truth: I’m having a stroke,” she said to Law. “Or no, all those tick-critters injected me with hallucinogens and there aren’t really any dragons. Hell, maybe you aren’t even here.”
“I’m here. And that’s one of the small giants, and she just shifted from a dragon.”
“I get that there are small giants. Or rather, I don’t get it at all, but you said it’s true so it must be. But now you’re telling me they are dragon shifters?”
“It’s a rare gift among giants, usually shared among the virdanas. Most of the small giants can shift as well. A result of the curse, it appears. Not a fact that many among the giant clans were aware of until now.”
“Tell me more about this curse and what’s going on.”
Law nodded. “It’s very important for the small giants to make this alliance with the pixies. If they don’t, things will become very hard for them. The large giants don’t see them as true giants anymore and plan to strip them of all rights and property and turn them into forced labor. Right now, they come from multiple clans, so they have no united voice. The alliance gives them their own clan. It will mean they have a voice in the giants’ council and maintain rights and properties, plus have a virdana of their own, which is a big deal. Virdanas are extremely powerful.”
“A pixie virdana. A lot of giants are hating that, I bet.”
“To be sure, but there’s more. The curse made all the little giants infertile. Many are the last of their familial lines. It seems that male giants can get pixie females pregnant, and this is of major importance.”
“What about the little giant women? Can the pixie men get them pregnant?”
“It appears they remain barren.”
“Doesn’t seem very fair.”
He shrugged. “It isn’t but it’s steps in the right direction, and at least the females will keep their rights and properties.”
“Okay, the little giants get a bunch out of this, especially the males, but what do the pixies get?”
“The possibility of dragon shifter genes in their clan, for one. They produce a very rare dust long coveted by other clans and have been targeted over the years. Their numbers have greatly dwindled because of those attacks. This alliance gives them immediate protections, plus potential dragon shifter children to protect themselves in the future. Cherry on the cake is that they’ll have access to the giants’ business network.”
“It’s all very tidy,” Mal said. “Do the bride and groom even like each other?”
“I’m not sure it matters, but they seem to get along well enough.”
He wasn’t sure it mattered? That was a hell of an attitude. Shouldn’t people getting married at least like each other, even if it’s just for convenience? Then again, maybe he was just saying that the two didn’t have much choice about their marriage, so whether they cared or not didn’t matter. Hopefully that’s what he meant.
Mal gave him a weak smile and gestured toward the mess of bodies. “You should go find them, the bride and groom. Not sure how long the spell will last. You’ll want to get them somewhere safe until tonight. Whoever started this ruckus might not have been out to kill them, but that was a definite possibility. They could ea
sily have ruined the wedding or started a war.”
She bent and scrubbed at her legs with both hands, then her calves and ankles. Her entire body was one big itch. She wanted nothing more than to dive into a swimming pool of calamine lotion.
“You need help,” Law said, not moving.
“I’ll see to her.”
LeeAnne stood a short distance away, looking like she’d like to cut someone’s throat. Her impatient gesture toward Mal suggested she was on the chopping block. “Come on, then.”
Mal rose on unsteady legs and picked her way across and around the bodies and followed LeeAnne back to the towers, marveling when the housekeeper maintained a slow pace so Mal could keep up.
They ended up in LeeAnne’s home office, or at least that’s what it appeared to be. A wall of windows looked out over the wildwood and sea gardens, with an all-too-good-view of the recent battlefield.
The carpet was a cool blue, and shelves full of interesting art objects lined the walls.
Mal wondered if they were souvenirs of travels or if LeeAnne was a closet QVC addict. Presupposing there was some sort of QVC for ancient artifacts and weird magical talismans.
There was no sign of a desk. Instead there was a comfortable seating area consisting of two couches and three easy chairs with a glass coffee table. It was such a showroom sort of space that Mal expected the chairs to be hard as rocks and was pleasantly surprised to find them cushy.
LeeAnne disappeared and returned with a small bottle of something and a thimble-sized cup. She took the wax off the delicate green bottle and filled the cup, passing it to Mal.
“Drink.”
Mal eyed it but decided if it were poison, dying would be preferable to this insane itching, and lifted it to her lips.
She expected bitter or sour, but instead the taste was summer and dreams and joy. A surge of warmth and energy ran through her, electric and fizzy. It filled her like champagne bubbles and instantly soothed her skin.