by John Conroe
“He’s a handful. Isn’t he, dear sister?” Morrigan called, clearly delighted.
“He’s dead,” Zinnia said in icy tones.
Two elven screams rang out on opposite sides of the island, followed immediately by another to the south of us. Zinnia spun, looking around before turning to the nearest Hunter. Before she could speak, I interrupted.
“Hey Summer Queen, you ever go to a haunted house?” I asked. “Not the ghost kind but the ones that charge money at Halloween.”
“You speak nonsense,” she said.
“Sounds like the answer is no. Let me explain. You pay money and go into this house, building, cornfield, or sometimes it’s a whole forest. The people running the show have like forty or fifty actors inside, dressed in scary costumes, and they spring out at you as you move around,” I said. She stared at me, frowning. “All good fun. Welcome to my haunted island,” I said, waving around at the forest surrounding us. “But my actors don’t act and it’s not really gonna be fun… for you.”
Right on cue, something shot out of the forest in a blur, snatching a Hunter from just behind Zinnia, both disappearing into the thick brush on the far side of the woods. I might have glimpsed blonde hair but who the hell knows. Like I said, just a blur.
“Was that…” Morrigan asked.
“A vampire? Why yes, I believe it was,” I said. “Interesting bit of news—your sun here on Fairie doesn’t seem to bother vampires at all. So I brought a few over.”
“ETA seven minutes, Father,” Omega said in my ear.
“You brought your allies here,” Morrigan stated. Something that wasn’t Stacia roared in the distance. Tiger? A deeper, louder roar answered it, one that I instantly recognized. Awasos.
I’ll admit to a bit of nervousness. I had researched tiger behavior after hearing of Summer’s weres. They were known to sometimes kill and eat bears. Admittedly, it was younger and smaller bears for the most part, and almost always from ambush. But still… ‘Sos was my friend. Of course, bears sometimes killed and ate tigers too.
The forest erupted into an ear-crushing blast of roars as battle was joined somewhere on the island. I felt the ground shake and heard trees splitting and falling and every being in the clearing looked toward the chorus of combat. A flicker of motion caught my eye and I turned to see a small black blur whip into the clearing from the opposite side where most were looking.
The figure streaked through a group of three goblins then was gone, sending one head flying, one goblin disemboweled, and the third one jumping backward with only one leg, the other twitching on the ground. That one might have had black hair and might have had two swords. Hard telling.
The beast battle in the distance suddenly ended with the victory roar of a Kodiak. Okay, maybe tigers don’t do well with bears of the Kodiak persuasion.
“Don’t these scare houses take place in the dark?” Greer asked, suddenly, pointing at the lightening sky to the east.
“True, true,” I said, turning to look back at the western sky. My turn to point. Ominous black clouds approached from my realm, moving on an unnaturally fast wind.
“You called it? You set this whole thing up?” Morrigan asked, looking at me in a new and somewhat scary light.
“The probabilities were very high that Summer would show up to the party. There was a potential for you to double cross the whole thing, but the odds were on Queen Zinnia jumping in with both feet.”
“So you have a few vampires and a scary storm. I have an army that covers my realm,” Zinnia said.
“But you only brought a few of them, then you shut the door on the rest. And I might be new at this portal stuff, but I distinctly remember being told that electrical storms wreak havoc on portal opening,” I said.
More screams rang out across the island and reptilian dactilyns were taking off, riderless, fleeing the island.
“Also, I brought Angels. Fallen Angels, but don’t hold that against them,” I said. A tiger roared, close by, then started to roar again, only to cut off sharply. Something came flying over the treetops, a massive lump of black and orange that hit the ground halfway between me and Zinnia, rolling to a stop at the prone body of the first tiger man. On closer inspection, it turned out to be half a weretiger, the lower half, sliced as if by a machine.
“Did you know that Angels really aren’t all that nice? People use the word to indicate someone nice, such as aren’t they perfect angels or isn’t she a little angel, but in reality Angels, are God’s shock troops. They’re absolute engines of destruction,” I said.
The first weretiger, the one I shot, started to move, the damage the steel slugs had done now likely healed. Shame the slugs weren’t part silver. He sat up. Something flickered out of the brush at the forest’s edge and tiger-man suddenly sprouted a silver spike in his forehead. He fell back down.
“ENOUGH!” Zinnia yelled, throwing both open hands in my direction. The vines doubled in size and I could feel their roots pressing from below. A magic circle extends to the heavens and descends to who knows how deep, so nothing flying or burrowing was getting in, yet the pressure on my mind grew exponentially. Then she waved again and her goblins and Tinks flocked to me, climbing the vines, pressing the circle from every direction to get to me.
Squatting down slowly so that I didn’t lose concentration on my circle, I triggered another set of runes. I couldn’t see out of my column of living Fairie flesh and plants—in fact it was pretty dark—but I could feel my spell take hold.
All around the clearing, the steel shot and expended slugs were pulling out of trees, ground, and bodies. Stacia had fired sixteen rounds of number six steel shot. Each round had an ounce of pellets, a little over three hundred in each. My spell didn’t get them all, probably only two-thirds of them, but that was still well over three thousand pellets and six big twelve-gauge slugs.
I felt them levitating out of dirt and pulling free from wood, flesh, and bone. I twisted the spell. The pellets and slugs started to spin, counterclockwise—widdershins—around the clearing. The sky over the open top of my circle was now charcoal dark with storm clouds, and thunder shook the air as the storm rolled in.
I could hear the queens yelling to each other and to their subordinates as the pellets shot around the clearing, but my attention was now on the storm. It was lovely. A massive presence of power and energy, much more real to me than any storm had ever been before. Now in addition to the Air energy of the winds that whipped through, and the Fire energy of the electricity that crackled, I felt the very power of the water itself. Amazing.
Then it started to rain. Buckets. Sheets and sheets of rain. I only experienced what fell down my tube of a circle, but immediately the bottom of my ring became a quagmire. I’d considered that when we planned this whole thing. The water started to rise as the vines at the bottom constricted tight enough to be waterproof. I hadn’t planned for that.
The turtle shell working floated up on top of first three inches of water, rising faster as the storm came fully overhead. The water washed away the runes of my shot spell, but the pellets were already in air and spinning, so I was able to take over maintaining the spell with only a small extra effort. Still, I had to maintain the circle, feel the storm for what came next, and now hold the steel pellet spell.
The magic battery was underwater, but it was unaffected by fresh water, and the conduit to the shield wall was already running, so the runes stayed fixed in the mud. Salt water would have been a different story.
The water had climbed to my knees, rising much faster than it should. The first flash of lightning lit the sky and, looking up, I could see Tinks at the top of the living column linked together like army ants. Except they were tighter, making a living carpet or… funnel to catch the rain.
Zinnia was trying to drown me in my own circle. The water was up to my waist and I’ll admit I started to panic a little. The main body of the storm wasn’t here yet. Did I have enough time?
I couldn’t hear anything outside my
watery well, the wind, pouring rain, and thunder silencing anything the thick layer of vines, goblins, and flying toxic bugs couldn’t.
“Father, are you not now a Water witch?” Omega said in my ear. That damned Bluetooth earpiece was soaking wet yet still working like a champ. If I got back to Earth, I’d have to give it a hell of a review. Holds up great while submerged and fighting Fairie killers offworld. Great audio integrity in adverse alien conditions. Five stars.
“Father?”
I snapped back to reality. Water witch, right. But what to do? My Water spell repertoire was still beginner level. I could move water around, part the pool party waters like a fake Moses, and probably create an air bubble around my head, but how long would that hold? My only act of watery brilliance had been to pull the water from the Red Cap. I didn’t want to do that here ‘cause I had more H2O than I wanted, thank you very much. I’d rather put it back. Hmm. Put it back.
Water, like air, would normally flow through my circle unless I specifically spelled it against such permeability. Since I like breathing, I tend to let my circles stay porous. The vines were keeping the water in, so why not see if they needed watering themselves?
I took a deep breath, checked each of the spells I was running, pulled back my awareness of the storm, and pushed. Go on, get in there. Shove right on into that thick jungle vine.
It was really hard. I found out that plants are a lot more waterproof than flesh as I tried my trick in reverse. Nothing really happened. So I lifted my gaze till I got to the part of the column where the vines ended and the goblins stood atop one another, all staring at me with killer eyes.
“Thirsty, fellas? Here, have a drink,” I said, shoving the water up the wall of vines and into the skin of the lowest level of goblins, then the second, and third levels.
Their fearsome gaze turned to bewilderment, then fear. Then the first one exploded. Because of the invisible shield of the circle, he exploded outward, back toward where I assumed his queen was. Then the next one popped. And another, and another. It was like damned popcorn: Once you get it started, they start to pop all at once.
The layers fell, falling outward, some still bursting from within, the water-collecting canopy of Tinks falling down, some bouncing off the vines, others clinging to them.
The storm thundered overhead as I stopped to take a breath. The vines were still higher than my head, but the view had opened enough that I could see treetops above the top vine.
Lightning branched across the sky and break time was over. Reaching back into the power of the thunderstorm, I grabbed onto the huge electrical potential, making it mine.
Then I pulled it all down at once, into my circle, into me, closed my eyes and pushed it out into the spinning ring of steel pellets.
Chapter 29
The clearing exploded. Arcs of raw electricity blasted the vines to burning mulch, jumping from pellet to pellet, the light so bright it seared my eyes, even shut and covered with my hands. The ground shook, throwing me around inside my circle, lifting me up out of the mud and slamming me right back down into it.
A thick, steamy fog filled the entire area, the icing on the cake of my haunted island. The circle around me sputtered and collapsed. The battery was drained, exhausted by the Summer Queen’s plants and goblins. The turtle shell working floated away then stuck in the mud, the wispy seeds all gone, the watercress just strands.
I looked around. Steam, charred spattered plants, charred spattered flesh, broken weapons, crumpled Tinks, a pile of blue-armored elves. The damage extended out into the first layers of trees encircling the clearing, their trunks and branches blasted and burnt a fairly even shade of black. Nothing lived in the entire clearing—nothing but me.
Motion caught my eye to the left. I fumbled Stacia’s gun up to level, pumping the action, aware I only had steel shot. Greer entered the clearing, his face smudged with mud and soot. A second later, his sister and mother followed him into the open. A massive dark shadow loomed behind them.
“Well, that was… exciting,” Morrigan said, wiping her mud-spattered forehead with a sleeve. They advanced no further, so I lowered the gun… a little, the muzzle now pointed at the ground roughly between us.
“I’d forgotten what terrible risks the young take,” the Winter Queen said, looking through the fog at the destroyed space. Overhead, the storm was moving off the island and the sky had lightened considerably. “I wonder… did you kill her? I find that hard to fathom.”
Something moved in the middle of the clearing—one of the blue-armored bodies. An arm lifted and fell, then a blue elf rolled over… and over, falling off the pile to lie in a lump. From below rose a slender arm covered in mud and blue blood. Zinnia, Queen of the Summer Court, pulled herself from under the protective forms of her dead bodyguards. She looked like shit, but she held one of the guards’ blue-armored shields in front of her like she was ready for a fight.
“See, she’s hard to kill,” Morrigan said.
“Like a cockroach,” I said, mouth operating without any brain oversight.
Morrigan laughed. Zinnia’s exhausted face tightened with anger. She reached a hand up and grasped a gold and green amulet hanging between her breasts, which I hadn’t noticed before because, well, breasts.
“Oh ho, sister. Desperate times indeed,” Morrigan said, her voice picking up a note of not quite alarm but at least increased attention. “See, now, you’ve made her tap her reservoir.”
I fumbled a shield up, my own power levels alarmingly low. Her gem gleamed with power and I realized my self-crafted batteries were crude, primitive things to the queens. What she held in her hand was many times stronger than the power cell I had just exhausted.
If it came to a fight and she still had a battery that size, I was in trouble.
Motion at the edges of the clearing. Human forms stepped out of the trees. Chris, Tanya, Arkady, Nika, and, still adjusting her shirt, Stacia.
Zinnia pulled back whatever spell she’d been about to unleash and snapped a powerful circle of her own—without the need to draw one, I noted.
“‘Sos is chasing the last of those flying dinosaur things out of the rocky area. Everything else is dead,” Chris said, eyes locked on Zinnia.
His arms were covered in blue and red streaks of blood, matching the gore that dripped from Tanya’s twin swords. Arkady carried an ax that I wouldn’t have been able to lift and even Nika held some kind of guard-less, curving saber.
“You were supposed to be at odds with your Earth allies?” Morrigan questioned, eyes locked on Mr. & Mrs. God Hammer. “That’s how Zinnia planned it.”
“We got over it,” I said, handing Stacia back her shotgun and bandoleer. She immediately cradled the stubby gun in one arm and began feeding shells into the twin magazine tubes.
“I would explain that we are, in many ways, family, and family can survive a great deal,” Tanya said. “However, I think the explanation would be completely lost.”
“Family is exactly the reason I chose such a direction,” Zinnia said. She was pretty much a mess. The blonde hair on one side of her face was burned completely off, while the other side was dripping mud and gore. Her face, arms, and clothes were spattered with disgusting things that either came from the ground or from inside elves and goblins.
“What do you think, Dec? Rip through her shields?” Chris asked, like he was wondering if I wanted sugar with my coffee. One lump or two?
“Oh my. Much as I would love to see that, I think retreating to a safe distance will be in order. Should you succeed, Fallen One, I do believe sister dearest will detonate her little pool of power,” Morrigan said.
“Dec?” Chris asked, eyeing the Winter Queen.
“That thing has a huge amount of power in it,” I said.
“Like your battery?” Tanya asked.
“It’s like my battery as a D cell is to a Tesla’s power pack,” I said.
“All very Earthy references, I’m sure,” Morrigan said. “As long as you realize it
will flatten the island. What’s left of the island.”
“What will it be, boy?” Zinnia asked, shifting her feet on the pile of bodies.
“The issue, as I see it, is how are you going to leave?” I asked.
As if on cue, a sharp, reptilian cry sounded and a massive dactilyn swooped down from above the trees, a blonde elf rider on its back. The flyer swooped low, right at Zinnia, who dropped her shield, leapt up lightly behind her daughter, and reignited the shield around them in a shining orb of power.
The reptile flapped huge wings and powered back up into the sky before turning toward the south.
“Father?” Omega asked.
“Let them go, please,” I asked.
Morrigan turned to me, one eyebrow raised.
“You could have stopped her?” she asked. I didn’t answer. Not for her to know that Zinnia’s shield let light through and a drone’s laser could have boiled her brain inside her skull.