by Leo Romero
“Sounds...cool.”
“If you think endless reading ancient spell books and conjuring up magic balls is cool, then yeah, it’s uber-cool. I mean, it’s good to learn new things and all, but I’m a prisoner here. I want my freedom back. At least to come and go as I please. Father’s just too damn overprotective and won’t listen to reason.”
“Yeah, he’s a tough nut to crack.”
Her eyes fell downward.
Something shifted down the tunnel and Aurora turned back to see what it was.
“M’lady, the king requests your presence immediately,” a fae guard said.
“Ugh!” Aurora groaned, her face pinching.
“Duty calls,” I said with a shrug.
“This princess lark isn’t what it’s cracked up to be!” she said.
“Will you be okay?”
She met my stare. “Yeah. Thanks, Gabe.”
“For what?”
“For helping me answer some questions. But, I’m not so sure I like the answers.” With a sigh, she stood upright.
“Just hang tight. I’ll think of a way of getting us all outta here and I’ll be back to get you,” I told her, giving her a sincere stare. “Okay?”
She bowed her head and nodded. I stared at her as she stood there. She looked kinda funny in that get-up, what with the cloak and the tiara like she was going to a Lord of the Rings convention.
“I’ll see you, Gabe. Good luck.” She turned away and marched toward the fae guards who were waiting for her. I watched her leave, my heart sinking a little. She didn’t look happy with her situation and it was partly my fault. Get yourself outta Dodge, then come back and save her, I told myself. Yeah, that was how things were gonna go down. Aurora had more than helped with getting me my Deck of Death. Now, it was escape time. Once Aurora and the fae guards were gone, I leaped to my feet and dusted my hands. I made sure the coast was clear, then whipped out my cards.
“Okay, Shay, my man, grab your stuff. We’re getting outta here.” I flipped through the cards till I found the eight of hearts. I needed a creature that would be able to cut through the bars of the cell then take care of Fishstink with as little fuss as possible. And I knew just the guy.
Seamus watched on with eager eyes. “What are you going to do, fallen angel?”
I gave him a sure grin. “Watch!” I threw the card down and shouted, “Ragnarok”, summoning the barbarian I had waiting in the Void. His mighty hammer would make mincemeat of those iron bars and that asshole Fishstink.
The card hit the stone floor and just sat there. I stared at it, waiting for the portal to the Void to open up and in jump old Ragnarok to start going to work on the cell bars. But, nothing happened.
Seamus kept his stare fixed on that card. “Watch what?” he asked.
I frowned. Was this little guy mocking me? Never mind, maybe I didn’t speak clearly or loudly enough, happens sometimes. “This,” I reasserted. I cleared my throat, then said in a commanding voice, “Ragnarok! I summon you.” I threw my wide eyes down at the card again, eagerly scanning the area.
Seamus had his hands on his knees, bent over the card, his gaze fixed on it. “Nothing’s happening, boyo,” he said.
I scratched my head. “That’s funny.” I checked my deck. It was my Deck of Death, right? Yeah, it looked like it. So, why wasn’t Ragnarok right here smashing shit up?
“Methinks something went wrong,” said Seamus, rubbing his beard. I snatched up the card. Maybe something was up with it or Ragnarok had gone AWOL.
I flipped through them again till I got to the jack of clubs. I licked my lips and held the card in the air. “Here we go.” I threw it down on the floor. Seamus watched it go.
“Rabid Boulderhide,” I uttered, summoning, Rabid the Rhinoman. He’d bulldoze us outta here no problem.
I held my breath. Nothing. The card sat there. I scratched my head. Seamus stared hard at the card. I tried again. “Rabid Boulderhide!” Silence greeted me, bar the noise of tortured goblins and elves in the distance.
Seamus rubbed his beard while staring at the card. “Hmm,” he said, contemplating. He met my stare and pointed at me. “Ye do realize that there are no connections down here to any other plane apart from this one, don’t ye?”
I glared down at him, blinking. “Er, yeah. No.”
Seamus grinned. “Heh-heh! They’ve shut em all off down here, boyo! Well, if they didn’t, every elf imprisoned here would escape in the blink of an eye.”
I groaned. “You could’ve told me that in the first place and not let me waste the last minute and a half of my life.”
Seamus shrugged. “Sorry, thought ye had a plan.”
“So did I.” I slumped back down on my bedding, defeated. “Well, so much for that,” I said in a sulky voice like a kid who’d had his favorite toy taken away.
Seamus hopped over to me. The joyous grin on his face was sickening what with his brown teeth and all. “Don’t worry, boyo, at least we got each other for company.”
Oh boy.
Chapter 10
The lights went out as I stood by the window in my apartment bedroom, staring up at the night sky above Chicago. A single star burned bright, twinkling like a diamond. I knew who it was. It was Mia, looking down over me from Heaven. I’d left her behind and was now spending my days trying to claw my way back to her. I’d give anything to be with her again. Back in Heaven, both of us angels, spending the rest of eternity in each other’s arms. But that would mean leaving Lucy behind. And that was the state of my heart and soul. Both of them rendered in two, straight down the middle. I was torn between the two women I loved. My wife and daughter. I wanted them both with me, but one’s away in the sky and the other away with the fairies.
I let out a deep sigh, that star still burning in the sky.
“How’ve you been, Gabe?” a voice from behind me asked, every word like silk on my ears. I closed my eyes and savored the sound; it was like sweet lullabies.
I turned slow to be faced with her. My Mia. She stood there, her elegant wings spread from her back, a golden coronet blazing around her head, illuminating my bedroom. Her face was brimming with compassion, her brow furrowed in concern.
“Mia!” I gasped. “You’ve no idea how much I need to see you right now. I’m in serious shit!”
“I’m always here for you,” she said, stepping toward me, her footfalls leaving tracers of light.
My tension melted away with each step she took, my heart swelling with love. I reached out a trembling hand, knowing that it was pointless, but my sense of hope and despair compelled me. Drove me. I went to place my hand on her cheek and it fell through her ghostly vision. My heart sunk like the Titanic. I wanted so badly to touch her, to smell her, to feel her. But all I had is this cruel illusion, this deceiving hologram. I growled in anger. I wanted her here, by my side in this crazy world, just like I’d got Excalibur by my side.
A tear slipped out of my eye and trickled down my cheek. I wiped it away, not wanting her to see it, but it was too late. My pain, my twisted torture was too much to bear.
“Don’t cry, Gabe,” she said, her halo glowing effervescent.
“I’m not,” I lied. “Hayfever. Time of year.” I looked back at that star in the sky to see it had vanished. It was now here, in this room with me. This was all I was gonna get and so I had to make the most of it.
“I’m going to be seeing you soon. For real,” I said, turning to face her, puffing out my chest. I grinned. “Gonna be getting an L45 soon. I just gotta bag this contract and I’ll have my wings and we’ll be together at last.”
“That would be nice,” she said with a pleasant smile, running an illusory hand down my cheek.
“Just one little problem. The demon I’m after is Beelzebub.” I nodded. “Yes, that Beelzebub.”
Her eyes widened in concern. “Beelzebub? Gabe, you have to tell the Enforcers so they can contact the Archangels.”
I shook my head. “No way. This is my bounty. I need it.”
“But, a Prince of Hell is too strong for you.”
I took a deep breath. “I can beat him!”
She gave me a skeptical look.
I frowned in response. “I can! He hasn’t been here long so his powers aren’t at their peak. If I can find him quick, I can beat him. I got to. Otherwise I won’t see a penny or my wings. That bounty is too big to just give up. I’ve faced him before.”
“And lost.”
I let out a hot sigh. “Yeah, I lost, but I’m stronger and wiser now. I can beat him.”
She reached out to me, her ghostly hands resting on my cheeks. I couldn’t feel a thing. “Oh, Gabe. You don’t have to do this.”
“I do! I need the cash. I need you!”
She rested her head on my chest and I placed a hand on her imaginary back. She was right; this was a job for the Archangels. There was Michael, Raphael, the other Gabriel (the not so handsome one), Uriel. Those guys were more than a match for a Prince of Hell. They were like the A-Team of Heaven. Nothing in Hell, even Satan himself, could stand up to those guys and their trumpets. The last time old Beezle-brain stalked the Earth—yeah that time he beat me and sent me to purgatory—the A-Team had to be called in and exterminate the rat.
I looked down at her. There was no way I could give up that bounty. I needed that L45 and the cash. I had to take him down. And I would. I would.
“I need to do it for Lucy as well,” I said.
“How is our daughter doing?” Mia asked up at me, and a wry smile played out over my lips.
“As spoiled as ever,” I replied.
Mia sighed. “Where did we go wrong with her?”
“She never had the love of a mother,” I said with lament.
“But she had her father.”
“Yeah, and look how that’s turned out.”
“You try your best, Gabe. It isn’t easy being alone.”
I raised my face to the ceiling as more tears threatened to burst from my eyes. How much longer could I go on with this? How many more years of having my guts wrenched left and right? How much more pain? How much more suffering? How much more did the Big Kahuna want from me? Would he ever be satisfied? Would I?
It was all too much to bear. Too much. Too little. Too much.
Mia’s hologram stirred. She pulled away from me. I threw out my arms to try and grab her, but clutched hold of nothing but air.
I watched her halo dim.
“I’ve gotta go,” she said, her eyes dropping.
Panic gripped me. I didn’t want her to go. Didn’t wanna lose her again. “No!” I shouted, grasping desperately at air. She backed away, her visage fading. “No, no, no, don’t go!” I pleaded, the whole room starting to darken. I went to run up to her, but my feet were glued to the floor. I couldn’t move an inch. I was forced to watch her back away as she faded from view.
“Not again!” I growled in frustration. “Stay. Mia. Mia!” I shouted. “Don’t go. Mia!”
Her image was wafer thin, barely tracers of her remaining. I tried with all my might to move my limbs, but I was rooted, literally stone. The room darkened further, fading to black, and I couldn’t see anything ahead of me.
“Bye, Gabe,” came Mia’s whisper on the air as everything turned pitch.
I thrashed my arms around in the darkness, a strange groaning sound echoing all around me. It swelled in my mind, someone groaning and wailing. The noise intensified and my eyes snapped open to a new place. I sat bolt upright, plastered in sweat, my chest heaving. I had no idea where I was or how long I’d been there. I looked down at my body. I was covered in straw. I frowned in confusion. My eyes fell on stone walls and iron bars and it all came back to me.
The groaning and wailing of the other inmates in the distance set off again and I realized it was what woke me up. I whipped my head around to be met with Seamus the leprechaun, sitting on his bedding while licking the bottom of a bowl of gruel. A similar bowl of cold gruel sat at the foot of my straw mattress, gray and lumpy.
I groaned in disgust, the whole situation cementing itself in my tender mind. I was a prisoner, Mia had been a cruel dream, and time was now rendered irrelevant, kinda like those melting clocks on that famous Salvador Dali painting.
A grim sense of desolation bombed into my mind. This is was what awaited me for the next hundred years? Sharing a cell with a leprechaun? Heaven and Mia never felt so far away.
“Ah, the gruel makes a mighty fine meal, so it does!” Seamus said as he pulled the bowl away from his face. Small lumps of gruel sat on his nose and cheeks. He looked at me in surprise. “Ye not eating yours?”
I glanced at the bowl of gruel at the foot of my bed. It looked like cat puke. “Think I’ll pass.”
“Ach, ye don’t know what ye’re missing, Gabriel. Food of the gods. In over a hundred and fifty years of marriage, the wife ne’er once cooked up a meal as good as this.”
I slumped back and pulled dirty straw over my face. “Oh man,” I groaned. “I don’t know how much of this I can take!” I wished I had Bam Bam with me, then I’d shoot my own brains out and have done with it.
If only I had a bargaining chip, I thought to myself in frustration. Something to entice Bracken into granting me and Aurora our freedom and giving me my weapons back. But I was stuck there in that cell with nothing but a magical deck of cards that had its magic nerfed. I let out a loud groan of torture.
“Come on, boyo. It’s not that bad,” Seamus said. “We get fed, housed, don’t have to work, no women to boss us around. Like the wife.”
“She that bad, huh?” I asked.
“Bad? The old harpy makes a marshlicker look like a fae queen! It’s all ‘Seamus stop drinking that mead’, ‘Seamus stop betting on the hopperbeasts’. In other words, ‘Seamus stop having fun’.”
I chuckled. “What’s life without a drink and a bet, huh?”
“Exactly, Gabriel! T’is no life at all! Nag, nag, nag, that’s all I get! I’m glad to be away from her!”
“She a fae?”
“Aye. A gray fae. Old and fat and bossy! Should ne’er have married the wench, but I was young and stupid.” He sighed. “Ach, if only we could turn back time, eh?”
I nodded. I suddenly found myself thinking back to that fateful night me and Mia got in that car and, bam! life and death were never the same. If only we hadn’t gone out that night, then we’d be alive and well, in love, bringing up our daughter properly. I let out a long breath. Things never work out how we intend.
“Best decision I ever made getting locked up, lemme tell ye,” Seamus said, breaking my train of thought.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“What, ye think I’m in here by mistake? By Perina, Gabriel, I thought I told ye I’m a pickpocket extraordinaire.”
“Yeah, you did. But you mean you wanted to be put in jail?”
“Aye, of course. Pickpocketed a fae guard in front of everyone, made sure there were plenty of witnesses. Was sent here straight away. Happy days!”
I puffed my cheeks. “Holy moly!”
“Anything to be away from the nagging wife, boyo!”
I shook my head. “Man, that’s desperation.”
“That’s smart thinking! Don’t have to lift a finger. Don’t get nagged. Bliss.”
“Don’t you wanna be free?” I asked him. “Do some of the things you used to?”
“And have the wife on my back? No thank ye!”
“I meant mead and hopperbeasts.”
He lay back and stared at the stone ceiling with longing eyes while stroking his beard. “Ah, that would be nice, boyo, ye make a valid point there. A wee drink and a bet would be most welcome. And of course, there’s me gold. Ah, me precious gold.”
I frowned. “Gold?” I echoed.
“Aye, me gold. Every Leprechaun has a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, don’t ye know?”
Yeah yeah, I knew, but every lep had a different type of gold in their pot. There was gold gold, silver-plated gold, chocolate go
ld. “What kind of gold is yours?” I asked him.
“Ah, the finest white gold,” he said with a dreamy smile. “The days and nights of bliss I’ve spent counting out my gold have been—”
“Yeah yeah, shut up!” I said, stopping him in his tracks. “You said white gold, right?”
“Aye. White gold. And it’s all mine, so no funny ideas about getting yer grubby mitts on it!”
“No, no, listen, you silly little man. Don’t you see?”
His eyes rolled left and right. “See what?”
“King Bracken is a fae.”
“Aye, so he is.”
“And what do faes love?”
“Gold?”
I jabbed a finger at Seamus. “Exactamundo. Specifically gold of the white variety. You know why?”
Seamus nodded. “Because it’s the main ingredient in fae bathing salts. They just love to grind it up and bathe in that stuff. They say it’s mighty good for their skin.”
“Now you’re on my page, Seamus, my man.”
Seamus gave me a stern stare. “Are ye trying to say that I should...exchange me gold for me freedom?”
“No, for our freedom.”
“Our freedom? Ye mean ye and me.”
“That’s right.”
Seamus pondered it for a moment, his eyes studying the ceiling. Then, “No,” he said with a shake of his head.
I crashed and burned.
“A leprechaun ne’er gives away his gold, boyo.”
I groaned. “Oh come on, Shay. We can use it to clear our names with Bracken. Look, the whole Underworld will be after us if we break outta here. Your gold will be the sweetener we’ll need with Bracken. Then I can bargain to get my weapons back and free Aurora. You saw how unhappy she was. Besides, you’ve got no use for it while you rot down here!”
“Aye, I accept all that, but it’s me gold, Gabriel. I can’t just give it away. No deal!” He rolled away, turning his back on me.
My top lip curled up in disgust. Damn stubborn little mule! He could save all our asses in the blink of an eye and he refused for no rational reason. Yeah, leps were tied to their gold like it was their lifeline, so it would take a lot to prize it away from him. I couldn’t steal it from him either without his rainbow to lead the way to the secret location. It could be the basement of a derelict house, the back of an abandoned garage, the trunk of a burnt-out car in a city slum. In other words, somewhere where they could squirrel it away where no one could find it. Leps were masters at finding hidden corners of the Overworld to stash their gold.