The Junkyard Druid Box Set 2

by M. D. Massey

  Here goes nothing.

  I sprinted across the yard, my feet pitter-pattering in the dirt as my shoe soles slapped the ground. Within five strides I’d reached the grassy expanse beneath the tree, and in ten strides I was touching the trunk. A bullet whizzed past my head, just before I heard the crack of suppressed gunfire in the distance.

  Supersonic rounds. Let’s hope my head doesn’t explode like a melon.

  Nearly duckwalking to stay as low as possible, I trod widdershins around the huge tree trunk, waiting for the inevitable. Another bullet struck the tree in front of me, making a divot in the bark. The shots were coming from the south, so the north side of the tree offered relative safety, at least until they sent another sniper team to the north.

  No way I’ll make it two more times around this tree. I’m dog meat for sure.

  I hid behind the trunk on the north side, mentally girding my loins to sprint around the south side. I was just about to make a run for it when a greenish, feminine hand sprouted from the bark of the tree. It grabbed me and yanked me toward the trunk with surprising force. Then, I fell headlong into nothingness.

  18

  The impact was much less worse than expected, as the soft grass around the druid oak inside the grove cushioned my landing. Unfortunately, I landed face first, which resulted in a mouthful of grass and dirt and a minor amount of embarrassment on my part. I was here to confront Jesse, after all, and falling flat on my face didn’t exactly make me look like I meant business.

  I spat out earth as I got to my hands and knees, with Jesse fawning over me all the while.

  “Were you hit? Tell me that those big bad men didn’t hurt my Colin.” She grabbed my chin and lifted my head, turning it this way and that. “Hmm… except for the dirt in your teeth, you seem to be okay. You should swallow that, you know. Magic dirt has a ton of probiotics in it.”

  “Damn it, Jesse, I’m fine—get off me!”

  I shook my head in an attempt to release her grip, but she was exceedingly strong, and all I got for my efforts was a sore jaw. I ended up slapping her hand away with more force than was necessary. She stood abruptly, arms crossed as she gazed down her nose at me.

  “See if I ever save you again,” she huffed.

  “Yeah, that sentiment seems to be going around,” I muttered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind. Say, when you were looking me over like a cattleman eyeing a prize steer, did you happen to notice anything different about me?”

  “We’re not going to talk about the Circle operatives that currently have the junkyard surrounded, nor about the sniper who was just taking pot-shots at you?”

  I remained silent as I stood up and dusted myself off.

  “Fine,” she replied. “I suppose you are looking a bit more—masculine these days.”

  “I—say what? Did I look feminine before?”

  Jesse shrugged. “You’ve always been a pretty boy, my love. You may as well own it.”

  I palmed my forehead with a growl of frustration. “And you don’t know a thing about this”— I moved my hands in small orbits around my face for emphasis—“new look I’m sporting?”

  She leaned in and stared closely, perched on a tree root that grew under her feet so she could stand eye level with me. “Hmm… nope, nothing.”

  “Jesse, it’s him. You know, my other side?”

  “Oh, him. Yes, now I see it.” Her eyes narrowed as she stepped down and backed away a few steps. “You’re aware that I’m not particularly fond of that side of you? It did once tear me limb from limb, after all.”

  “Wait a minute—you mean you’re not doing this?”

  She placed her hands on her hips with a frown. “You think I caused this? Colin, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve changed since I possessed your dryad. Her mind is, well, fae—warped and twisted and altogether inhuman. Mind you, that might have caused me to take on certain guileful characteristics, but under no circumstances would I ever wish to bring that thing out in you.”

  “Not even to drive a wedge between Belladonna and I?”

  She harrumphed loudly. “As if I needed to stoop to such measures to win you back.” Jesse placed a finger atop her head and spun in a graceful circle on tiptoe. “I mean, just look at me—I’m magnificent!”

  I sat hard on a moss-covered boulder. “Damn it! If it’s not you making this happen, what the hell is causing it?”

  Jesse was still admiring herself, holding her arms at length as she posed like a ballerina. “Meh, I don’t know. Could be a curse or something.”

  “Jesse.” She continued taking in her own beauty, alternately extending one leg then the other as she sighed in self-contentment. “Jesse…” I snapped my fingers repeatedly in front of her face. “Jesse!”

  The dryad paused, turning those deep green eyes on me as she slowly looked up. “There’s no need to yell, Colin. I’m right here, you know.”

  “I’m having an existential crisis, and all you can do is revel in self-adulation!” I screamed.

  Her eyes went wide and her jaw slackened. “Oh, wow. Yeah, that side of you really is coming out. Usually you’re quieter when you’re whiny, not angry and loud.”

  “Whiny? Really?”

  “You are the king of whine, my dear. Dionysius reborn, in fact. But don’t worry, I love you all the same for it. I mean, men can’t be strong all the time—that’s what women are for.”

  I rubbed my forehead with my fingertips as I covered my face with both hands. “Rather than arguing gender roles, do you think you might use your magic to check me over, perhaps to see if there’s something I might have missed?”

  Her face lit up. “See! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re not at all afraid of asking your better half for help.” Jesse cleared her throat as she approached, hands extended. “Allow me.”

  “Ooh, I’m so honored, great earth mother, that you should bless this puny mortal with your magnificent and omniscient regard.”

  Jesse slapped my hand. “Ssh… you shouldn’t blaspheme like that.”

  “Ahem, I’m Orthodox, Jesse. We kind of don’t go in for all that nature worship stuff.”

  “And yet you’re a druid. What a walking hot mess of contradictory behavior you are. I mean, really—the cognitive dissonance must drive you insane at times.” She patted my cheek playfully. “It’s okay, I won’t hold it against you.”

  “Oh, joy.”

  “Hush,” she replied, placing a finger on my lips. “I need to concentrate.”

  Jesse worked her hands in complex patterns as she ran them over and just above every surface of my body. It took several minutes, and when she was done she stepped back, arms crossed, heels together, tapping a finger on her lips.

  “What? Am I cursed?”

  Jesse shook her head slowly. “No, in fact, it’s nothing of the sort. Whatever is causing these changes to occur, I’m almost positive that it’s not coming from outside of you, but instead, from within.”

  “Um… what does that mean?”

  She cocked her head to one side, scrunching her face with an eye squeezed shut. “Maybe that your human side and Fomorian side are fighting for dominance? Or, they might be trying to achieve a balance within you. Kind of hard to say, since I’ve only been at this dryad-slash-eldritch-creature-with-the-magical-powers-of-nature thing for a few weeks now.”

  “Great, just great,” I muttered. “You mean to tell me this is happening naturally?”

  Jesse leaned in, placing her hands on my knees as she whispered in my ear. “I. Don’t. Know.” She nibbled my earlobe. “But I do know how to take your mind off of things—if you’re up for it.”

  I closed my eyes. Having her this near to me was intoxicating, despite the dire circumstances. “Jess, you’re doing that pheromone thing again.”

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  I grabbed her gently by the upper arms and guided her to take a seat next to me. “It’s time we had a talk.
”

  “You mean that talk? Slugger, I don’t need to worry about getting pregnant anymore—not in this form, at least.”

  “No,” I growled. “I mean, about us.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?” she asked, with a dangerous glint in her eye.

  “No—yes—I mean, how could I? Jesse, up until a few weeks ago, you were a ghost. I’d moved on after losing you—”

  “Killing me,” she interjected.

  “—please, as if I didn’t feel bad enough already. My point is that I’d moved on in your absence, and suddenly you showed up expecting to pick up where we left off.”

  Jesse tapped the side of her nose and winked. “For one, I never left you. You’re the reason why I never moved on, in case you forgot about that small detail. Second, I do not expect us to pick up where we left off, and I could care less whether you sleep with that Spanish whore while you’re on the other side.” She snuggled close to me, wrapping her arms around one of mine. “All I care about is having you here, with me, in the grove.”

  “You realize you’re asking me to invoke the zip code rule, right?” I asked.

  “Believe me, sugar—we are worlds away from Austin right now. This would be more like the alternate dimension rule.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, because this was all giving me a headache. “You should know better than anyone, Jesse—I don’t work that way. I’m not a cheater, no matter how much my hormones plead otherwise.”

  “Didn’t stop you from practically asking to be raped by that spider chick earlier,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Honestly, I had no idea you were that kinky.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “See, this is why you need to spend more time with me, here in the grove. The tree is a dimensional doorway, Colin. That means I can see things that are going on, wherever I care to point it.”

  “Wait a sec—the tree can open a portal wherever you like?”

  She wobbled a hand back and forth. “Sort of. Right now, all I can do is look, but that’s because you haven’t fully taken control of the grove. That’s why it’s not operating at full capacity. And even after you do, it’ll be years before you master it, which means you won’t be dimension hopping for quite some time yet.”

  “Jess, how do you know all of this?”

  “The Dagda told me when I followed you into Underhill. I made a deal with him there, to bring me back to life.”

  “You what?” I stood up and turned to face her. “Jesse, you know how dangerous it is to deal with the fae. The Tuatha—they’re much worse.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Oh, please. So it’s okay for you to travel to Underhill and cut deals with The Dagda and Lugh—never mind double-crossing Niamh—but I do it, and suddenly it’s ‘dangerous’?” She stuck her tongue out and gave me the strawberries. “You sir, are a hypocrite.”

  I realized immediately what she was saying was true. I was a hypocrite, and I couldn’t blame her for wanting to come back to life. Heck, it’s what I would have done.

  “You’re right. But still, you might have warned me beforehand. At least I could have braced myself for it.”

  “Uh-uh, the Dagda wouldn’t allow it. He said if I let you in on his plan, you’d never plant that acorn, because your deepest wish was for me to move on to the next life.”

  “I want you to be safe and happy, Jesse. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  “I am. I have everything I could ever want here. Light, water, trees, grass—this fantastic body—and if he’d ever come to his senses, the love of my life as well.”

  “I can’t cheat on Belladonna, Jesse. I love you and I always will, but I’m just not made that way.”

  “She’s not meant for you, Colin. You’ll come to see that, eventually.”

  Maybe she was right. I had no clue, confused as I was about—well, everything. For the moment, I couldn’t really tell which emotions were my own and which were coming from my Fomorian side. Yes, it was all me—just not from the “me” I preferred to be most of the time.

  “We can discuss this more, later. Right now, I have a jorōgumo to hunt down, a missing child to find—”

  Jesse’s brow furrowed. “Again? Sheesh, you sure are the brat wrangler these days.”

  “—and, as I was about to say, I came here to retrieve something from you.”

  “My dryad virginity?” she asked, gazing up at me with a wry smile on her face.

  “No, Jess,” I sighed. “I need the nachtkrapp back. I’m here for Nameless.”

  “The what?” she asked, truly perplexed.

  “The night raven, Jesse.” I spread my hands about a foot apart. “Black bird, about this big, made of shadow and smoke? I left him here just a few days ago.”

  “Oh… that thing. Let’s see, where did I put him? Ah yes, out at the edge of the grove. He kept crying and complaining, ‘oh, this place is killing me, oh, the druid double-crossed me, oh, this grove is a death sentence, blah, blah, blah.’ The bird reminds me a bit of you, actually, but not in a good way. Anyway, I got sick of it and banished him to the outer reaches.”

  “Well, I need him back, so can you please take me to him?”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s your grove. If you’d take the time to familiarize yourself with it, you’d know where everything was.”

  “Jess, I really don’t have the time for this.”

  “I know. You have to save the world, etcetera. This way, please.”

  Jesse skipped away from me, dancing and twirling in circles as she meandered her way through the grove. The path she took led more or less in a straight line, out maybe a few hundred yards from the tree, or so it seemed. Distances were weird inside the place, and from what I could tell, anything but linear.

  “Here it is,” she said, pointing to a young poplar that rose about fifteen feet above our heads. Hanging from one of the lower branches was a bird cage, woven from live branches that were connected to the tree. While the rest of the tree was lush and green, the branch on which the cage hung had few leaves, and those were sickly and yellowed.

  I looked beyond the tree at what appeared to be a vast expanse of forest ahead of us. “Wait a minute, I thought you said this was the edge of the grove?”

  “Oh, it is.” Jesse nodded. “But if you keep walking in any direction, it’ll just lead you back to the druid oak. The standard laws of physics don’t always apply here.”

  “Good to know.” A black lump lay inside the cage, unmoving. I looked more closely and gasped. “Good night, is he dead?”

  “Heck if I know,” Jesse replied absently, preoccupied as she admired a bright blue butterfly that had landed on her arm. “I told you leaving him here was a mistake.”

  I tried to get inside the cage, but I couldn’t find a door. “Could you open this thing, please?”

  She waited for the butterfly to flit away, then turned and fixed me with an impatient stare. “I keep telling you, this is your grove. Everything here obeys your will, and if you’d only take the time to—”

  “Yes, I know, I’m supposed to ‘master’ the grove somehow. I’ll get to that eventually, but for now I need you to open the damned cage!”

  Jesse’s eyes grew wide and the corners of her mouth turned downward. She blinked at me several times, tsking like a mother witnessing a child’s tantrum.

  “Well, excuse me, your royal highness, let me just get right on that task.” She snapped her fingers and the “bars” of the cage spread apart. Jesse curtsied, but her voice was sharp with sarcasm as she continued. “Will there be anything else, m’lord?”

  “Not at the moment, no,” I deadpanned, refusing to play her games. I reached into the cage, laying hands on the pitiful bundle of feathers, tattered cloth, and smoke that lay still in the center. As I lifted the night raven from the cage, he stirred slightly.

  “Are you here to end my misery, jaeger?” the nachtkrapp whispered weakly. “Come to finish me off, and break your vow for good?”

/>   Nameless had withered away to almost nothing in his time here in the grove. He felt light as a feather in my hands, or a bundle of feathers in this case. The bird had also molted badly, revealing patches of black, wispy “skin” underneath his feathers, and his beak was cracked and worn, as if he’d been trying to peck his way out of the cage. If the nachtkrapp hadn’t been about to eat a couple of defenseless children a few days hence, I might have felt sorry for him. Honestly, the only real remorse I felt at his pitiful condition was that I wasn’t holding up my end of our bargain.

  “No, I’m not here to kill you, Nameless. Actually, I’m here to take you to someone who can keep you alive and out of trouble.”

  “Liar,” the night raven croaked. “I’ll never trust anything you say again, druid. Not after leaving me like this.”

  “See what I mean?” Jesse interjected. “He whines just as much as you do.”

  I shifted the bird to the crook of my left arm, cradling him there with as much gentleness as I was capable of mustering. My Fomorian side immediately began whispering for me to kill the thing, and it took considerable effort to resist ending his miserable existence once and for all.

  “I’m going to ignore that comment, Jesse. Can you create a diversion outside, in the junkyard, so Nameless and I can get away without getting our heads blown off?”

  Nameless squawked as he rustled slightly at my side. “That would be a mercy, at this juncture.”

  “Quiet, you,” I murmured. “Jess, can you do it?”

  Jesse tapped a finger on her chin as she stared at the sky above. Or, what appeared to be sky—I wasn’t really certain about the nature of what was up there, and in fact I tried not to think about it.

  “Sure I can. But you’re going to need wheels to get you where you need to go. And as soon as those goons realize what’s happening, they’re going to bust through your wards in force and turn you and the bird into Swiss cheese via bullet storm.”