“As I was saying, we have her on camera entering the Fort Nashborough site, but we don’t have her on any camera leaving. We can track the entrance and exit of the three girls she was with, but we don’t know what they were doing, or why they wandered aimlessly around the Fort for an hour, then left without touching anything.”
“You don’t know?” Skeeter’s voice sounded incredulous over the speakers. “You’re totally going to have to turn in your nerd card. They’re playing FairyQuest Live!”
“The video game?” Yates asked. I turned to him, question written all over my face in big letters.
“What?” he asked, shoulders raised. “I’ve got two daughters. It’s all they can talk about. How many fairies they snared today, how big they are. And where’s the best place to go to hit toadstools for more fairy dust.”
I must have looked at him like he had two heads, but Skeeter’s voice called me back to the screen, where a colorful display now dominated, swirls of glitter and sparkles all over the screen with the words “FairyQuest Live!” floating in the middle of the display. “It’s a mobile game,” Skeeter’s disembodied voice explained. “You play it on your phone and wander around cities trying to find different types of fairies. Then you find different magical fruits to give them new spells and powers, and eventually you put them in a Fairy Ring and claim it for your tribe. There are four different tribes, for each of the legendary Fairy Courts—the Summer, Winter, Fall, and Spring.”
“There are only two courts of the Fae,” I corrected. “Summer and Winter. There are no courts for Spring and Fall—they either belong to Summer, as Spring does, or Winter, which Fall pays homage to.” I looked around, and Clark and Yates were staring at me, along with every other Nashville cop in the room. “I minored in anthropology at Georgia; world mythology was my concentration.” Complete bullshit, of course. I majored in football and minored in beer, but they wouldn’t know that. Besides, it’s fun to show off a little bit and let the smartasses know they underestimated you.
“In the game, there are four courts,” Skeeter continued. “So you wander around towns looking for Fairy Rings, which are landmarks where the game has placed resupply stations.”
“Landmarks like historic places?” Amy asked.
“Historic places, unique outdoor artwork, public gathering spots with interesting features, that sort of thing,” Skeeter said.
“So Fort Nashborough probably has one of these Fairy Rings in it,” Clark said. “It’s definitely a national historical site. And the amphitheater in the park has that light sculpture out front, and the fountain that kids like to play in, too.”
“Yeah, both of those are the kinds of places where the developers put Fairy Rings,” Skeeter agreed.
“Okay, so she was playing a game on her phone,” Yates said. “What does that get us? We’re no closer to finding her than we were five minutes ago.”
“No, but we have another piece. We know she wandered off from her friends because of the game, not because she was lured away by a predator,” Amy interjected. “But you’re right, we need to see the rest of the video.”
Skeeter started the video rolling, with Clark narrating. “She leaves the view of the entrance cam at the Fort here,” she pointed to one screen, “and we pick her up coming into view here. And this is where things get weird.”
“If she thinks this is weird, she should go to a museum with Joe,” I whispered to Amy. To her credit, she held her laughter. Or maybe it’s less to her credit and more a statement on my joke. Whatever.
We watched the screen as the girl walked around the small grassy areas between the reconstructed Revolution-era stockade. She stopped dead center in the courtyard, looking around and frantically tapping her screen.”
“What’s she doing?” I asked.
“She’s found a Fairy Castle, and she’s waging a Wizard Duel to overthrow the Fairy Queen or King that rules it. You match up your best fairies against the fairies that are left there to defend the castle and get experience points for beating them,” Skeeter said.
“I don’t think I understood a word you just said, at least not in the order you said them,” I said. I would usually think Skeeter was just making shit up to give me shit, but he wouldn’t do that in the middle of a case where a girl’s life was in danger.”
“She’s fighting a monster in the game,” he said.
“Oh. Why didn’t you just say that?” I grumbled. The only answer was a patented Skeeter Jones “Bubba’s a tech-ignorant savage” sigh. He had a bunch of different sighs, and I knew them all by heart.
I turned my attention back to the screen just in time to see the display flare to nothing but white for ten or fifteen seconds, then restore to static for another thirty seconds or so, then back to normal. Except for normal without Tamara Sanders anywhere on the screen. Her phone was lying in the grass, abandoned.
“Well, we know she didn’t go anywhere voluntarily. No teenage girl would leave her cell phone lying in the grass,” Amy said, her voice somber.
“What the hell happened?” I asked. “Skeeter, can you fix the image?”
“There’s nothing to fix, Bubba,” Skeeter replied. “The lens was blown out by whatever made that light. The image was so overexposed the chip in the camera stopped taking in signal. That’s what made the snow when it came back online. It had to completely reset and iris out to operate in the low light. There’s literally no image data for me to enhance.”
“That’s the same things our guys here said,” Clark added, a glum look on her face. “I was hoping you could do something they couldn’t. They even took the cameras apart and worked from the chip level, and they got nothing.”
“Sorry,” Skeeter said. “I wish I could add something, but whatever blew out the camera didn’t leave a trace.”
“Not that could be seen on camera,” I said. “Now it’s time to do things the old-fashioned way.”
“We’ve been over the scene with a fine-toothed comb,” Yates said.
“Yeah, but another set of eyeballs never hurt, did it?” I asked.
“No, you’re right. Let’s go out to the Fort and take a look around. Clark, you coming with us?” Yates asked.
The young crime scene tech perked up like she’s just been invited to a party, not a crime scene. “Hell yes! I mean, yes, sir. I don’t want to let this one go. There’s a girl’s life at stake.”
“We agree completely, Ms. Clark,” Amy said. “Let’s get out there.”
*****
July 25th, 8PM - 28:00:00
It was gettin’ on toward dark by the time we got to Fort Nashborough, and security was just closing the front gate as we walked up. Yates badged us through, and we walked into the courtyard between the reconstructed wooden buildings that held prisoners in the dawn of the United States. I could almost feel the ghosts of Revolutionary soldiers and British sympathizers that were held there.
“They came in over here,” Yates said, walking us over to a wall that looked completely secure. I must have shown my confusion on my face because he gave a little chuckle and pushed on a section of the wooden palisade wall. It swung up smoothly, opening a portal about six feet high by six feet wide that led straight out onto the street behind the old fort.
Yates laughed at the incredulous look on my face. “It’s for the lawn care company. They have to get lawnmowers in and out of the compound and wanted to be able to leave their trucks out there and just roll the mowers off the trailers and ride in. So the city built them this little doggie door. Apparently the girls knew about it and used it to break in last night.”
“Everybody knows about that door, dude.” We turned back to the opening. The speaker was a kid of about thirteen or fourteen, a skinny white kid with a baseball cap and baggy pants. A t-shirt blazoned with some anime character and bright orange sneakers completed the outfit. He stood just outside the wall with his phone in hand.
“You playing FairyQuest?” Amy asked, nodding at the phone.
“Duh.
Everybody’s playing FairyQuest. Even old people like you are playing it. And this is one of the best places in town to hunt. There’s like four Fairy Rings within two blocks, and there’s always a bunch of fairies around. I heard somebody even found a Puck last night!”
“What’s a puck?” I asked. I was proud enough of myself that I knew he wasn’t talking about Predators hockey. I didn’t need to pretend I knew crap about this game.
“Puck’s like this total badass fairy. He’s super rare, and only comes out at night. You’ve got to find him, and then make Offerings to get him to stick around, and then you almost always have to spin a SuperSpell to catch him, even after you’ve given him an Offering.”
“So if you heard a rumor there was a Puck in this fort, you’d be willing to break in at night to catch him?” I asked.
“Dude, yeah, totally. I’d be all over it. Hell, I’d climb the stupid gate if I couldn’t get the secret entrance to work.”
“Some secret,” Amy said. “If everybody knows about it, it’s not much of a secret.”
“Yeah,” the kid agreed, “but nobody really cares ‘cause nobody messes anything up and there’s nothing to steal. Usually it’s just older kids coming in to drink beer or have sex.”
“Because that’s what you want happening in a place that’s probably as charged with supernatural energy as an abandoned war prison,” Skeeter said over our comm. My usual Bluetooth set had been replaced by a high-powered in-ear unit that automatically paired with my phone but could also jump frequencies to find better signal if I had poor reception. I understood about one in three words Skeeter said, but as long as I had a working comm, and it was a lot smaller than the old thing, I didn’t care how it all worked. Hell, he could have told me that it was a babel fish and I wouldn’t give a single damn. I nodded at his assessment of the situation but kept my attention on the kid.
“Were you out hunting last night?” I asked.
“Yeah, but not here. I live over in Hillsboro, so my parents took me and my cousin to Belmont University to hunt. There’s a lot of people playing there, and they usually put Sparklers on the Fairy Rings to draw more fairies, so we just wandered around campus catching new ones all night.”
“Alright, that’s fine. But look, kid. A girl was abducted from here last night while playing this game, so please be careful. Always stay with other people, and stay near an adult,” Amy said.
The kid’s face lost every hint of the preteen smirk that hadn’t wavered during our whole conversation. “Did you find her? Is she going to be okay?”
“Not yet,” Amy said. “But we’re doing everything we can to figure out what happened to her and to bring her home safely. Now we’ve got to go keep looking for her, but please be careful. Is there anyone out here with you tonight?”
“Yeah, my cousin is just around the corner. I’ll go find him now. Please find the girl.” The boy looked genuinely upset as he turned and ran up the street.
Yates reached up and swung the portal closed. “Well, now we know how they got in, and we know that most people with any interest in the game knew about this entrance.”
“And that there would be a lot of kids here,” Amy said.
“But none of that explains the flash of light and the disappearance. All of that is just normal predator stuff. Not that it’s not terrible, but it doesn’t really address the elephant in the room,” I said.
“But there’s nothing here,” Clark pointed out.
“Maybe there’s nothing that we can find,” I said. “But apparently there are fairies all around us.”
“Are you suggesting that we play that stupid game to try and find the girl?” Yates had a look on his face like I smelled bad or was spectacularly stupid. Since I showered before putting on that godforsaken necktie and pretending to be an FBI agent, I knew I didn’t smell bad.
“It’s actually a pretty good idea, Sergeant,” Clark chimed in. “The game uses augmented reality to overlay in-game treasures, monsters, and battles onto real landmarks, using the phone’s camera. It’s entirely possible that there’s some kind of clue in the game world that doesn’t exist in the real world. Maybe there’s a sign or a clue in there, and we’ll find Tamara hiding in some forest on the edge of town after she got lost looking for a super rare fairy.”
“We can hope,” Amy said.
“Well, let’s download the stupid game and go chasing fairies,” Yates said. “It’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done to close a case, but it’s close.”
“Then we oughta hang out more, Sergeant,” I said. “This shit barely cracks the Bubba Top 40 list of stupidest things I’ve done to solve a case.”
Chapter 3 July 25th, 8:30 PM - 28:30:00
I downloaded the app, with a little help from Skeeter. We all decided that since Yates and Clark knew the city, they would go get one of Tamara’s friends and follow the route they took from the Sanders home to the Fort. This would make sure they didn’t miss any clues or evidence along the way that only popped up in the game, and it would get them away from me and Amy for a while in case we found whatever beastie snatched the girl and had to deal with it. A lot of what we do is better if it’s never seen by the local law enforcement. They don’t usually believe in what we fight, and that leads to a lot of confusion, and sometimes hospital bills when I start killing monsters that aren’t supposed to exist. It’s just easier if I only work with people who already know about the dark side.
We started outside the fort, walking the perimeter. It was now full dark, but there were plenty of streetlights so we didn’t feel like we were in any danger walking around staring at our phones. I don’t ever feel like I’m in any danger just walking around, but I’m better than six-and-a-half feet tall and a little bit north of three-hundred-fifty pounds. Between the beard, the ponytail, the tattoos, and the Desert Eagle pistol tucked under my arm, there’s not much in the world that wants to mess with me. Amy’s a lot smaller, a lot blonder, a lot prettier, and doesn’t look like she can kick near as much ass as she does. So she stays more alert than I do. I mean, let’s face it, when you’ve survived hand-to-hand combat with a damn sasquatch, getting mugged in an alley doesn’t worry you too much anymore.
Until it happens to your girlfriend. Then it’s a bad scene. Especially for the mugger. And this mugger looked like he’d seen better days. He stepped out of a shadowed doorway in the one twenty-foot stretch between working streetlights, a knife in his shaky hand and a stutter in his voice.
“G-g-gimme your wallet, or I’ll cut you, bitch!” He tried to sound tough, but Amy Hall has stared down vampires, werewolves, sasquatch, and me with a tequila hangover. That woman ain’t scared of any skinny-ass tweaker with a ripped Members Only jacket, busted Chuck Taylor high tops, and Levi’s so threadbare they liked like they might disintegrate in a strong rain. I couldn’t tell if he had a scraggly blond mustache, or if he just didn’t wash his face very often, or what. And if I really needed to change the oil in our Suburban before we left, I reckoned I could just hold his head over the engine block and squeeze. All told, he was not an impressive specimen of criminal.
“How about you run away, and I don’t kick your ass?” Amy counteroffered. I thought it was a pretty fair offer, but Greasy apparently didn’t ‘cause he came at her swinging his knife. If it had been a bigger knife, I mighta been worried. If he’d been a bigger dude, I mighta been worried. If he hadn’t looked like his last meal came out of a dumpster three weeks ago, I mighta been worried.
None of those things were true, so I wasn’t worried. And it turns out I was right. Amy shifted her weight onto her back foot and threw a quick roundhouse kick, hitting Greasy on his wrist and sending the knife flying. She let her momentum carry her into a spin, kicking Greasy on the jaw with her other foot. His head spun around like the Big Wheel on The Price is Right, only without Bob Barker or Drew Carey handing out cars. He dropped to his knees in the alley, and Amy kicked him one more time, this time right under his jaw like she was Ray Guy all pissed off ab
out waiting so long to get into Canton. I heard a crack as Greasy’s jaw broke, then another one as he flew back and landed on his head on the concrete sidewalk.
I walked over to him and knelt down, putting a couple fingers on his throat. I felt a pulse, strong despite the probable concussion and maybe skull fracture he was gonna be dealing with. I peeled up one eyelid and saw that there was very much nobody home at the moment. He was out cold.
“Skeeter, you better call and ambulance to our location. Amy got mugged,” I said.
“Holy shit, is she okay?” Skeeter sounded real worried over the comm.
“Skeeter,” I didn’t bother trying to hide the “dumbass” written in my tone, “have you met Amy?”
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “Is the dumb bastard breathing?”
“Yeah, he’ll live. As long as he doesn’t wake up and try to do it again,” I said, grinning at Amy.
“If he comes at me with a knife again, I’ll just shoot him,” she said. “I’ve had my workout for the night, and we’ve got a kid to find. Time to stop screwing around with junkies.”
“Yeah, we’ve got fairies to catch,” I said.
“I wish I had that on tape,” Skeeter chuckled. “I’ll get an ambulance rolling for your friend. Do you want it to be official or anonymous?”
“Make it anonymous,” I said. “I don’t want to screw around with the paperwork.”
“Done and done,” Skeeter said. “Now go bring that kid home. If it’s a mundane kidnapping, you’ve got less than thirty hours left.” He didn’t bother to add that if it was something supernatural, we were probably already out of time the moment she vanished.
We finished our loop around the fort, and by the time we got back to the front gate, I had gained three levels and figured out how to spin spells, catch fairies, morph them into bigger fairies, and battle. I’d also spent a hundred and fifty bucks on upgrades, extra spells, better spells, super fairy catcher things, and all kinds of other in-game crap that I really hoped DEMON was going to reimburse me for.
Midsummer - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 2