Mama turned to me, and I found myself bathed in that same orange light. I tried to scurry away, but the second the magic hit me, I stopped wanting to flee. My concussion faded, all my sore muscles vanished, and even lingering soreness from my old college knee injury vanished. I wasn’t just healed from this fight, I was healed. Of everything.
I looked up at Mama, and her eyes no longer flashed yellow or orange. Her hair didn’t spark, and as the last of my old injuries healed, the light around her dimmed until it was just normal sunlight backlighting her as she stood in the clearing. “Thanks, Mama,” I said, standing.
“You’re welcome, Robbie. Can we rejoin the others now?”
“I think we probably should. Do we need to…do anything about them?” I gestured at the splattered remains of the will-o’-the-wisp and the lump that used to be a witch. I walked around the clearing picking up my guns and shoulder rig as Mama looked down at her handiwork.
“No, the forest will reclaim them. I daresay Vlanriel will be more useful as fertilizer than she has been for a thousand years.”
“I don’t doubt it.” We walked in silence for a few minutes before I spoke again. “I’m sorry I ran off. And I’m sorry I was a dick.”
“I’m sorry I ran off. And I’m sorry I didn’t send word.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.”
“No,” I said. “I reckon it ain’t. But I forgive you, and you’re still my mama.”
“I can live with that, then. Now let’s find your sister. I’d like for you to meet her.”
“I’d like that, too.” Then we walked through the woods to where the rest of the team stood by the carts waiting for us.
“That was a long damn spell,” Skeeter said as we came out of the forest. “Bubba, what is all over you?”
“Guts,” I said. They all gaped at me. “Long story. Let’s get the hell out of these woods so I can find a beer. Mama, which way are we heading?”
“Well, I have good news and bad news,” she said. “The good news is that the spell worked. I have a strong sense of which direction to travel to find Nitalia.”
“That’s great,” Amy said.
“What’s the bad news?” I asked.
“We still have to go south. According to the spell, Nitalia is either with, or is very close to, the dragon Oberon sent us after.”
In a repeat of what felt like my phrase of the day, I just looked at Mama and shook my head. “Well, shit.”
9
The light was fading by the time we got all the crap loaded onto the wagons and back on the road. Amy rode ahead looking for a village or anything with an inn, but I wasn’t real hopeful. If we’d made decent time, we probably would reach a safe place to stop for the night, but since we spent hours casting a spell and then fighting a faerie witch in a ring of mushrooms that wouldn’t even get me stoned, it was probably gonna be a night of sleeping on the ground for my heroes.
“Are you okay, Robbie?” Mama asked after we’d been rolling for about half an hour. “You seem very quiet.”
“I’m alright,” I said. “A little pissed that I fell for the will-o’-the-wisp, but I’m okay.”
“Why would you be upset about that? The wisps have lured travelers to their death for centuries. They are very good at it.”
“Yeah, but I’m a monster hunter, remember? I been doing this a while, and I’ve fought some serious shit.”
“I remember. I was there for some of that serious shit.” My mind flashed back to Mama tied to a stake, about to be burned alive, and me killing my kid brother to save her life, and the lives of pretty much everybody on the east coast. She had seen some shit, indeed.
“Yeah, so you know what I mean. This is what I do. This is who I am. I shouldn’t get lured into the woods like some dumbass in a fairytale!”
“Robbie, my love, you are in a fairytale. My entire life is a fairytale, and not a particularly happy one. I have an insane mother, a power-hungry heartless father, two dead husbands, one dead son, a kidnapped daughter, and one remaining son who wavers between loving me and wanting to kill me. If that doesn’t sound like a tragedy straight out of the tales, I don’t know what does.”
“I never waver,” I said, staring at the reins in my hands and the brown rumps of the horses in front of me.
“Excuse me? You never waver? You haven’t been able to decide whether to shoot me or hug me since I walked into that recording studio in Alabama.”
“That ain’t the point. I love you, Mama. I never stopped loving you, not even when you left and went back to Fairyland. I ain’t saying I haven’t wanted to strangle you more than once, but I can think two things at once. I mean, hell, I love Pop. I never didn’t love Pop, not even when he…”
“When he murdered your first love.” Mama finished the sentence for me, because all of a sudden there was something in my throat and I couldn’t talk.
I got my shit under control and went on. “I loved Jason every minute of every day, even when I shoved three feet of steel through his chest. I love him every minute today. So I love you, Mama, and after tonight, I’m almost over being mad at you. Not quite, but almost.”
“Well, thank you for that.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “We got to fight a damn dragon, and that means I gotta be more of a Hunter than I ever have been. So I love you, but I gotta get back on my game. I can’t be ‘working through shit’ with you, or dealing with any of my feelings about you leaving and coming back, or not telling me that you ain’t human, or not telling me that I ain’t human for that matter.”
“You are human, Robbie. Mostly.”
“Yeah, but not completely. I’m part faerie, and I don’t even know what that means, if it means anything. Is that why I heal fast? Is that why I move a little faster than most people? Is it why I’m strong?”
“No,” Mama said, her voice firm, like back when I was little and asking for the hundredth time if I could open a Christmas present on Christmas Eve. “Half-fae are not magical by nature, although they may have an affinity for magic that, if trained, could blossom into some ability. You are strong because you work out, just like any other man. You are fast because you train constantly, probably in a vain effort to keep up with that lovely girlfriend of yours, who is more capable than almost any human I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, me too,” I agreed, peering through the darkness ahead to see if I could get a glimpse of Amy’s blond hair or her white horse. No such luck.
“Healing? That may come from me. It is almost impossible to kill a faerie.”
“I noticed,” I said. “I’ve had to do it a few times, and it ain’t easy. Cold iron will get you there, but about anything else is useless. No, wait, fire works too, but you gotta get ‘em really good.”
Mama’s face went pale, and I could almost see the memory of being tied to a stake and threatened with burning a year ago. “Yes, we can be killed by immolation or cold iron. Decapitation or crushing will also get the job done.”
“Maybe that’s why Jason couldn’t kill me with Great-Grandpappy’s sword,” I said, having an unpleasant flashback of my brother. The more I remembered Jason, the better I felt about killing his ass.
“No,” Mama said. “You killed him with the same sword, remember? And I think there may be more to that blade than we understand, so that’s not it. You likely survived because your brother either didn’t want to kill you, or he was very bad with a blade. But your faerie blood will aid in your healing, make you more resilient and resistant to things like poison and disease.”
“I’ll have to write that on my character sheet,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Sorry,” I said. “It was getting a little D&D up in here for a minute. So that’s it? I’m half faerie, and all it does is keep me from getting a cold?”
“There are other benefits, but unless you plan on learning to walk across dimensions, they are largely irrelevant to you.”
“Once I get the hell b
ack to my world, it’s going to take dynamite to get me out of Georgia, much less into another dimension again. But just out of curiosity…” My words trailed off as Amy rode up.
I reined in the horses and drew Bertha as Amy came alongside. “What’s up?” I asked.
“There’s a wide clearing beside the road in about half a mile. It looks like as good a place to make camp as anything I could think of, since I doubt we’re going to make it to a town tonight.”
“That sounds like a plan,” I said. “Mama, that work for you?”
“It should be fine,” she said. “Your compass no longer works exactly as designed, but the sense that I get from it is that there is still some distance before we approach the dragon’s lair. We should be safe to make camp in the area Amy describes.”
Wagons ain’t the fastest mode of travel, but it was still less than ten minutes before we came around a bend in the road to the clearing Amy mentioned. It was a wide spot in the road, more than enough room for two carts to pass without any trouble, and there was a good thirty yards on either side of the road cleared of woods. I pulled my cart off to the right and climbed down, rubbing my sore back.
“You alright, Bubba?” Skeeter asked, hopping down out of his wagon without so much as a grunt. Must be nice, not being the one who turns into a punching bag for every damn monster in the free world.
“I’m sore as shit, Skeeter. I’m tired, my ass hurts from the wagon seat, my back hurts from fighting a faerie witch, my pride is bruised to hell from getting bamboozled by a will-o’-the-wisp, and my shoulder feels like I just got tackled by the entire Alabama offensive line. Again.”
“That sucks. Want me to go look for water for the horses?”
“Yeah, but don’t go too far into the woods. There’s weird shit out there.” Skeeter gave me a little mock salute, and I set to unharnessing the horses. Amy strung up a picket line between the two wagons, and Joe started unloading the tents and stuff. Mama waved her hands, and a glowing ball popped into the air about twenty feet up, bathing the clearing in a soft, golden light. Then she walked toward the edge of the campsite.
“Where you headed, Mrs. B.?” Amy called.
“I’m going to see to our perimeter,” Mama replied. “I’ll set a trip line around the clearing that will alert us if anything crosses into the circle.”
“Good idea,” I said to the horse in front of me. “I gotta admit, Horse, Mama’s pretty smart.”
“She has pretty good hearing, too, Robbie,” Mama called from fifty feet away.
“Damn faeries and their pointy ears,” I grumbled to the horse. He didn’t care. I reckon he wasn’t prejudiced against people with pointy ears, having lived his whole life in Fairyland and all.
A couple hours later, we all sat around a dwindling campfire, our bellies full of mediocre travel rations and our feet warmed by the fire. The Summerlands were pretty temperate, just like I imagined they would be, but there was just enough chill in the air to make the fire welcome.
“Do we need to set a watch, or will your wards be enough to wake us in case of danger?” Joe asked. He lay on his back, looking up at the stars.
“The barrier I set will reactivate my light spell at full intensity if anything other than one of us crosses it. That way we can still go into the forest for privacy if anyone needs to relieve themselves, but any creature larger than a field mouse will cause a miniature sun to pop into existence and wake up everyone within a mile or more.”
“Good thing,” I said. “Since we ain’t been exactly secretive about being out here. Anything that wants to do us harm won’t have any trouble finding us.”
“Anything that wants to hurt us here is almost certainly magical in nature and could track us that way, Robbie,” Mama said.
“Oh yeah. Good point. So we don’t need to set a watch, then?”
“No, we should be fine. And it’s a nice night, so we won’t even need the tents,” Mama said.
“Yeah, I figured you could have one wagon, Amy could have the other, and Joe and Skeeter can sleep under the wagons.”
“Where will you sleep, then, Bubba?” Amy asked, her voice all sweetness and light.
“Well, I figured, um…well, I figured I’d share the wagon with you?” I felt my ears burn a little, even though it wasn’t like me and Amy hadn’t been sharing a bunk every night since we got to Fairyland. But it was a little different just coming right out there and saying it, what with my mama watching and all.
“I know, babe,” she said, leaning into me. “I just want to mess with you a little bit. I love it when you blush.”
“He’s always been so easy to embarrass,” Mama said. “Remind me when we get home, and I’ll tell you some stories about when he was a little boy. He was the most modest child I’d ever seen!”
“Yeah, Bubba even hated to shower with the guys in gym class,” Skeeter chimed in.
“Like you would know,” I said. “You spent every day in gym class stuffed inside a locker.” He shot me the bird, and I chucked a hunk of jerky at his head. For a little while, it was like we were all just out camping, shooting the shit and having a good time. It didn’t feel like we were out in the middle of the woods in Fairyland hunting down a dragon and my missing sister. It just felt…natural, and fun, and safe. We sat around talking for a bit longer, then put the fire out and we all went to our respective beds. I drifted off feeling warm, safe, and content beside the woman I love.
Then we all got woke up by Mama’s magical burglar alarm going off and I remembered that we were in a magic forest where literally everything wanted to kill us all.
10
“Um…hi?”
Those are not the first words I expect to hear from the monster that breached my security in the middle of the night in a magical dimension. Of course, I also don’t expect anything that breaches my magical wards to look like Joel Grey in a strange, geriatric remake of Men in Tights, either. The wizened little man with big eyes and thin white hair was obviously Fae, but that was all I could see from where I stood in the back of the wagon, with him square in Bertha’s sights.
“Amy, check him for weapons, cuff him, and bring him over here. Joe, you cover her from anything near the perimeter.” I never let the barrel of the giant pistol wobble, not even the tiniest bit. A Desert Eagle is a big damn pistol, and heavy to hold on a target for any length of time, but I’m a big dude, and I’ve had lots of practice introducing Bertha to people we might not like.
“I assure you, I am alone, and I mean you no harm. I am but a weary traveler, looking for a refuge from the road for the night,” the man called out as Amy approached. She came at him on a diagonal keeping out of my line of fire and moved slowly so that Joe could see anything coming in after her and shout a warning or take it out from a distance.
“That’s fine, pal. We trust you one hundred percent,” I shouted back. “But we’re still going to check all that out before we turn our backs on you.”
Mama hopped down from her wagon and made some gestures in the air. The light dimmed to something more like normal interior light and focused more on the wagons instead of lighting up all of creation. “There,” she said. “That will also reset the trip line, so if he does have any friends out in the woods, we’ll know about it before they get close enough to help him.”
“Or hurt us,” Amy said, hauling the little dude over by our wagon and guiding him to the ground gently. “I’m going to take these cuffs off. The iron content is hurting him.”
“How can you tell?” Skeeter asked.
“I can see the blisters on his wrists. Besides, Bubba’s got him covered, right Bubba?”
“He even looks at you wrong, I’ll paint the grass in brains, darling,” I said.
“You always say the sweetest things, Bubba,” Amy replied.
“I’m a poet,” I growled.
The little man said nothing, just sat cross-legged on the ground with a bemused smile on his face. Amy released his hands, then stepped back and took up a positio
n behind him and off to one side. She was close enough to subdue him if she needed to, but out of the way in case I decided to give him an acute case of lead poisoning. I hopped down out of the wagon and dropped to one knee in front of the guy.
“Okay, pal. Who are you and what are you doing out here?” I asked after making sure that Joe and Mama were still watching the perimeter. Those two had the best long-range ability to take out an attacker, and I felt like Amy and me could handle the little guy if he got rowdy.
“My name is Taryllan, and I am just a traveler on the road. I went to visit my son and his wife in Tisa’ron, but I got a later start leaving than I wanted, so I was still on the road much later than I wanted to be. I had hoped to rest in Hamittown, where my cousin lives, but I grew tired. I spotted this clearing and thought to stop for the night. I heard your horses and decided to see if you would let me take shelter with you. Then your wards went off, and you woke up much more suddenly than I had expected.” Nothing about him looked dangerous, which, of course, made me think he was probably even more dangerous than I expected. Spending so much time in Fairyland was making me downright untrusting.
“How much farther is it to Hamittown?” I asked.
“About three hours,” the old man said. “That’s assuming nothing tries to eat me on the road. There’s a dragon near these parts, you know.”
“Nothing’s tried to eat you so far, and it’s got to be close to midnight,” I replied. I didn’t have a real good sense of time, what with my cell phone not getting signal in another dimension.
“That means anything still out there hunting is going to be desperate enough to eat stringy old man meat!” he protested. I had to give him that point. He was the hunting equivalent of picking up a girl in the bar when the ugly lights come on. You just take from what’s available, no matter if it ain’t exactly prime pickings. “Please,” he begged. “Just let me camp inside your circle. I won’t even stay near you or your people. Then I’ll be gone at first light.”
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 25