by Scott Duff
“Here, Peter,” I said, handing him my keys. “Stay with the car.”
“You have got to be kidding me.” He was standing with his arms crossed, glaring at me when I turned around to look. “You are not leaving me here to worry. That is not happening.”
“Peter,” I started, confused. I didn’t want to go in there, so I couldn’t understand why he would. I didn’t know how to frame an argument around how he shouldn’t. “Peter, this is dangerous. I can’t ask you to go in there for my sake. Kieran doesn’t even want to go in there. Think about this. Please, stay with the car.”
“Has it occurred to you that when you go through that door you won’t be back for a few days, if you come back at all?” he asked. “And you’re not leaving me holding the purses.” He slammed the door shut and stalked past me into the building, the first in. I locked the car up and headed in behind Kieran and Ethan. I didn’t understand about the purses—none of us had a purse—but I had to admire his conviction, as stupid as I thought it was. I guess I could assuage my guilt some, maybe, if he got hurt knowing that I at least tried to talk him out of it.
I doubted that.
Chapter 13
When we entered, none of us had a clear concept of what we’d see once we passed the doors. Good thing, really, because a hardware store was out of left field. Not one of those modern day megastores that I avoid like mega-bars but the kind from the fifties and sixties with the long counters in front with the foot-thick catalogs and clerks that fetched things from the shelves in back. There were a lot of shelves in back, row after row, with bins lining each shelf. There were large bins in front of the counters holding common items like penny nails and coils of copper wiring. Everything looked new, including the bins, and the flooring was wood. The walls were wooden, too, and decorated in early Twentieth Century memorabilia, like a wooden plow, a butter churn, and a milking bucket and stool. I grinned briefly at the poster of the milk wagon carting the half-dozen milk containers with the over-sized, smiling driver. It reminded me of my batteries safely ensconced in my cavern.
“I thought the Fae hated iron,” I said to Peter at the counter quietly. He was still irritated at me and I needed him to calm down. Maybe that guy was right and I was a puppy, but I didn’t want Peter mad at me.
“They do, why?” he said, just as quietly, scrunching his eyebrows down briefly.
“There’re nails and screws all through here,” I whispered. “And this building is steel, isn’t it?”
“Like all of our beliefs about Faery,” Kieran said in a normal voice, “they have been exaggerated for our detriment.” He picked up a handful of penny nails from the bin in the center of the room. “Take the rumor of iron being physically sickening to the Fae, for example. Shrank, what am I holding?”
The pixie flew to Kieran, landed lightly on his wrist, and looked dramatically into his hand. I’d forgotten he was with us and hadn’t seen him come in the door. He could apparently conceal himself quite well when he wanted to.
“Pikes, sir,” squeaked Shrank, looking up at Kieran. “Metal pikes made mostly of iron and zinc and aluminum, I think.”
“Are they balanced well enough for battle?” Kieran asked.
Shrank picked one up near the head and rolled it down his arm halfway before tossing it aside. “Not that one,” he said, reaching for another.
“That’s good, Shrank, thank you,” said Kieran smiling at him. The pixie shrugged his tiny shoulders, creating a ripple in his wings and lifted off Kieran’s wrist, almost disappearing into the woodwork like a haze in the air. He was translucent and he never stopped in one place long enough for the eye to register his outline anywhere. It was an interesting and natural trait, I supposed.
“The higher up the ladder you go, though, the more susceptible to iron poisoning the Faery are,” said Kieran, moving up to the counter close to us. “But in general, you actually have to hit them with it to hurt them, same as you, or be in prolonged contact with it, elves even more so than any of the others. The Faery do not use iron and it is not found in their realms, but they don’t burst into flames or anything when they are in its presence.”
“Any other myths you care to break? Now would be a good time,” I said, knocking on the countertop loudly.
“Hm. I’d have to know what the myths are first,” he said.
I shrugged. “Elves can’t lie. Don’t take food or drink in Faery or you get trapped there. They’re immortal and unbelievably beautiful. They want us all dead because we stole their world. They’re dying out because they can’t have children. They’re interbreeding with humans to create half-breeds called changelings just to survive. They steal and eat babies.”
“You’ve been reading too many fantasy novels,” muttered Peter.
“The ‘can’t lie’ one is partly true,” said Shrank from the counter in front of me, giggling. “It’s part and parcel to the Original Geas.”
“’Original Geas’?” I asked.
“You’ll find out about that later,” said Kieran, putting a hand on my shoulder and leaning over the counter, peering down a row. “And while they’re certainly long-lived, they are not immortal, except perhaps the queens and kings providing no one sticks a blade between their ribs. There are elven children, but they are few. But you’ve met one. Would you want to have sex with that bitch?” He looked me straight in the eye, mischievous grin wide. “You’re seventeen. You can get it up if the wind hits you right, but could you get it up for her?”
Hawthorne could have made an alphabet of letters on my forehead, I was blushing so hard. Sex wasn’t taboo in my house. Dad talked to me about it when I was eight, rather matter of factly. We lived on a lot of land and there were a lot of animals around so I saw things. I saw a lot of things. It wasn’t dirty or anything, just sex, procreation, survival of the species, facts of life. But this was my, um, equipment we were talking about here.
“Pick your jaw up, I think I hear someone coming,” whispered Peter from behind me. He banged on the counter loudly again. “Hello!”
A small elderly man teetered slowly out from the right side of the shelves, moving toward us. “Can I hep you, gentlemen?” he said. If there was an accent in there, I didn’t place it, but his voice was mild and a little squeaky. He was dressed in a starched pinstriped shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, with wool pants held up with braces. He wore a visor over metal-rimmed, round glasses hanging low on his nose with a stub of a pencil behind his ear. Very Laura Engles and very much a façade with all its haziness. The man behind the façade stood six-foot four and breathed like the bellows of a furnace when he moved. Heaving around all that muscle obviously took effort.
“Please, we’d like to speak to MacNamara,” Peter said, speaking to the shorter, elderly man’s face. I watched the much taller man’s face instead. Kieran stared back into the rows of shelves, while Ethan… Ethan was nowhere in sight.
“Mister MacNamara ain’t here,” said the elderly man. “He’s gone up north for supplies. Won’t be back for three or four weeks.”
“Now we all know that’s not true,” I said to the big man’s face.
The big man got angry at that. The façade fell and the little man disappeared along with most of the accouterments in the front room. All that remained was the counter and the center bin that Kieran had pulled nails from. The big man leaned towards me threateningly.
“You calling me a liar?” he asked, his voice deep and angry, rumbling with the power of violence.
“Obviously,” I said, calmly. I probably would have been more scared if I hadn’t seen him already. Not that he wasn’t plenty scary now, breathing in my face like that. He swung a huge ham-sized fist at me and I caught it. Then there was a very large sword tapping on his nose. He backed off as far as I would let him.
First off, it’s not really fair to say, “I caught it,” when in fact I did see it coming—barely. The Day Sword thrummed like harp string, freshly plucked, and the Stone rumbled to life, slammed upward like lava
from a volcano, and encased his hand completely, holding it in place. But the sword wasn’t mine.
Kieran tapped the man’s nose lightly again on its point with the flat of the sword, pushing him back, so I let the Stone move him back a little further behind the counter while I studied the sword. Before the Day and Night, I’d never thought of a blade of any sort to be particularly beautiful. Of course, that’s changed. In craftsmanship, both the Day and Night are simply gorgeous and incomparable. In power and utility, again they are incomparable. The sword that Kieran held was categorically different. I couldn’t tell what it was made of. I was actually having a difficult time seeing it at all, like I didn’t understand what it was. I followed the dark disruption in space back to Kieran to see him grasping it like the hilt of a large sword just like the form implied, but I couldn’t see any metal in its composition, or any exotic bones, like the Night Sword. It was like a dark gray energy caught in a state of flux. Okay, I’ll be honest—I didn’t have a clue what it was beyond scary looking.
“Should I let him go?” I asked lightly with raised eyebrows, trying to show little of the fear that was rolling through me. I think I actually knocked my knee against the counter once, shaking.
“If you don’t mind,” Kieran said, oh so politely. It was so cloyingly sweet, you’d think we’d practiced it. I stroked the foundation Stone, sending a polite thank you to it, and released the man’s hand. Glancing at it before he pulled it away, I was pretty sure he had a few cracked bones in there.
Suddenly there was a resounding crash in back, far behind the counter to our left. Rapidly followed by another, and another. Someone was knocking the shelves over, domino style. The fluorescent lights overhead started flaring off, most bursting like they were hit. Peter vaulted over the counter and sprinted down an aisle.
“Peter! No!” I shouted, basically to Kieran who was still keen on the big guy in front of us. Since he was six and half foot of muscle tipping the scales at a little over three hundred pounds, you’d have paid attention to him, too. His shoulders were so thick he hunched over. Oh, God, I have to go past him.
“Now you just stay right there and have a nice chat with Kieran while I go find out what the boys are up to, okay, big guy?” I said, flashing a smile at the man. Backing down the counter about six feet, I jumped up and swiveled around, looking carefully on the other side for anything nasty that might be waiting. I jumped down and looked back down the counter to see the man standing there in black silky athletic shorts that were far too small. Even then, his legs looked emaciated. Dark leathery brown with black writing on every square inch. Another crash announced whatever was happening had crossed the wider center aisle. Kieran could handle whatever this thing was.
I tracked back a few aisles and started running. Whatever this place was for, they loved bins. They had a lot of them on shelves stacked to the ceiling. Bigger aisles crossed in the center both ways among the rows of shelves. When I hit the main cross aisle, I skidded to a halt, staring down it. Peter was slowly walking toward me as the shelves tipped over in front of him. He was watching the ceiling, his hands held out in front of him at a strange angle and they glowed with a green light, mottled heavily with black. Definitely not a pleasant spell to be hit with. Okay, maybe I could feel a little less guilty later.
Something moved over my head. Time to get serious. Both Swords unsheathed in my mind, the Crossbow strung its bow, a green Bolt ready to fire, and the Stone set a wall of granite and meshed steel around me. I felt invincible, but just like Ethan said, Kieran walked right through these, so someone or something else might, too. Still, they’d been good to me so far and I’d seen the Stone produce what looked like steel only once before now and the car survived a significant blow. Something jumped the aisle overhead and the lights started swinging. The shelves crashed heavily into one another, leaving the last section against the wall standing. Then something big and dark crossed over the aisle, too. These shelves started swaying in the opposite direction. Then the first set tipped over, crashing into the second.
“Near as I can tell,” whispered Peter hoarsely as he neared me, “Ethan is being chased by something. I can’t see either of them well enough to help, though. And I think I heard him laughing.” Peter started back down the aisle slowly trying to get a vantage point. There was a lot of movement happening up there and if half of it was Ethan, I wasn’t seeing more than I thought.
This was getting out of hand. We were being split up. Whether intentionally or not, it didn’t matter. I could imagine Peter deciding he needed to climb up to help Ethan. I couldn’t let that happen. Another set of shelves fell and I was behind the “wave.” Fine, that put me comfortably safe, now I just needed height. I started walking in place, up the steps the Stone obligingly locked into place for me, rising up toward the ceiling. I knew the Stone was going to be a far more useful tool than just a defense and it was proving it again and again. Peter glanced back at me, then did a double-take when he realized I was nearly level with the top of the shelves, slowly rising to peek over the plane of action.
Yep, Ethan was up there, running up and down the tops of the shelves, jumping lightly across the aisles. The silence was artificial, the sound reflected back to the ceiling by an energy shield at the top of the shelving units. I barely saw it when I stuck my head through, but it was clearly visible looking down at it. Ethan was taunting whatever it was chasing him. It was chewing up the field so Ethan wouldn’t have anywhere to run. That’s why the shelves were falling—it was knocking them over in anger. I almost laughed when I saw that. But what was it?
Ethan was bleeding from his left arm. Three blackened scorched marks about six inches long and a half-inch thick ran down his biceps, thin rivulets of blood ran down his arm from each. It looked nasty but he didn’t seem to be favoring the arm in any way. I focused intently on his pursuer. It looked similar to a bat with two sets of wings, if a bat was made of black smoke and blue fire. It obviously had physical mass because it hit and blew out the fluorescents and knocked over shelves. And it could hurt Ethan. I concentrated on the energy plane, astral plane I mean, and watched as the thing moved. The room itself was thick with ambient energies and the creature was using this to phase in and out between the physical and astral realms. And it wasn’t natural.
“Too slow,” muttered Ethan, batting a clawed wing to the side and grinning. He jumped back a few feet then flipped over to the next aisle, swinging the lights. Running over the top shelf toward me, the creature thought to cut him off, half jumping and half flying across the diagonal path, it misjudged Ethan’s speed and landed inches behind him as he flipped back over to the aisle he’d been on. The creature snarled angrily and launched itself backward across the aisle again.
This was my chance. I raised myself a few feet and pulled the Crossbow. Ethan ran farther down the shelf, ducking under a brown steel rafter then launched himself back across the aisle. The creature braced itself against another rafter and started shoving the shelf. I fired. I fired fast, up and down, into each taloned claw, four times, then eight, then twelve. Each claw was pierced and held in place on the shelf or rafter by a bright green Bolt from the Crossbow and the creature hadn’t even realized it yet, until the unit started to wobble and fall only to be held up by its body. It seemed to stretch out some, but the creature didn’t give and the Bolts held it in place.
“Ethan, are you all right?” I yelled, watching the thing stretch. I might have been more apt to relieve some of the pressure on it if it was real. But this thing was just wrong.
“Yeah, I’ll live,” he said, dejected, off to my right somewhere. “It got me once while I was distracted, before I knew it was there.”
“Kieran’s at the front with a sword on a guy and Peter’s down below us ready to throw some pretty nasty magic at something. I don’t like the idea of any of us being alone right now,” I said, urgently. This was seriously out of my comfort zone.
“I’ll go to Kieran. You take Peter. Head to us and we’ll hea
d to you.” He started jogging across the top of the shelves then jumped, missing a steel beam by a few inches. This was one of the times it helped that Ethan’s personality was based on mine. He knew exactly what I needed to hear and started moving. It was pretty much what I was thinking anyway. Returning the Crossbow to its ready position on the foundation Stone in my cavern, I bounded down the invisible staircase the Stone created and shadowed for me in my mind. With eerie timing, at the same time that I hit the concrete and the Stone dismissed its creation, there was a soft thud above me and the teetering shelf finally fell. I felt queasy when the twelve Bolts returned to the Quiver, but a little relieved to put that thing out of its misery.
Peter was nowhere in sight. I was gonna have to put a leash on that boy. I trotted to the center aisle, looking down each row as I went, turned and pulled up short. Kieran was strolling nonchalantly down the center with Ethan on one side and Peter on the other. Kieran was weapon-less now. I waited for them to come to me.
“How did your chat go with our big half-man go?” I asked when they got within conversational distance.
“It was… distasteful,” he said, grimacing. “Blood magic always is. All he was able to tell me was the direction of the door and we already knew that.”
“Then can we please come to an understanding?” I asked, angrily, forcing them to stop in front of me. “Can we please stick together, at least until we get in and can form some sort of a plan? So we can watch each other’s backs? Or have the three of you forgotten that you are all I’ve got and the power y’all take for granted I’ve only known about for less than a week?” I looked pointedly at Peter and Ethan. They shouldn’t have run off alone. We could’ve needed them and they had needed us. It scared me, as if I didn’t have enough to be afraid of. Fear translated into anger now.