by D V Wolfe
“Of course,” Sprig was saying. “If they are victims of ‘will sickness’ too, they might attack and try to kill you.” Lovely.
“Well, if the circle thing doesn’t work,” I said. “And we have to kill them. What’s the best way?”
Sprig was quiet for a moment. Vix had told me once that fae don’t mind killing each other in battle, over politics, or even out of plain dislike in the ‘otherworld’, but they didn’t like humans killing them, even if it was their sworn enemy.
“Sprig,” I said. “We’ll only do it if we have to. But we can’t let them keep killing little kids.”
“Well you know about iron,” Sprig said. “You’ve threatened Vix and I with that dagger of yours. But with Bugbears, you might need ammunition. They can be fast and they’re very strong when they’re enraged.”
“Thanks, Sprig,” I said.
“Bane,” Sprig said. “If you find out anything from the Bugbears…”
“You’ll be my first phone call,” I said.
Joel was leaning towards me and sneaking french fries off my plate while Noah dug in next to me. I shooed Joel away from my plate and picked up a fry. I took a bite. Ash. I dropped it back onto the plate and looked towards the kitchen. “I don’t think you’re getting that omelet,” I said, watching the waitress showing her nails off to the cook through the kitchen window. I shoved my plate at Joel. He glanced at the kitchen and seemed to come to the conclusion that it was a lost cause and dug in.
“So Sprig,” Joel said through a mouthful of fries. “Is that one of the Pucas?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I called to try to talk to Kess…”
“The Druid?” Joel asked.
I nodded. “But she’s ‘crossed the plane’ apparently, according to Sprig.”
Joel looked up. “You mean he killed her?”
I shook my head. “No, meaning she’s sitting on her living room floor, chanting. Sprig says he heard the spell for crossing the plane and that Kess told him she was going to look for the source of Vix’s ‘will sickness’.”
Joel went back to eating. “Well, a safe journey to her.”
I nodded. “But Sprig had some advice for dealing with the Bugbears.”
“I’m all ears,” Joel said. “Did he say how to kill them.”
I took a drink from the chocolate milkshake and then pushed it at Joel too. “Do you have any wrought iron rounds?”
Joel nodded. “A few. I’ve got some iron bolts for the crossbow too.”
“What the hell were those for?” I asked.
Joel shrugged. “They were just a part of the set that Randy made me.”
I nodded, “Well those might come in useful too.”
“Ok,” Joel said, picking up the burger. “So we shoot them.”
“If we have to,” I said. “Sprig told me about this cleansing circle thing where we could interrogate them and they’d have to answer our questions. I thought we might try that first and then shoot.”
Joel shrugged. “Do you know how to do this circle thing?”
“I have a book Kess gave me a while ago,” I said, trying to remember where it was and hoping to hell I didn’t leave it with Stacks. “I’m pretty sure the cleansing circle rite is in there.”
“Well,” Joel said, his mouth full of burger. “How hard can that be then?”
“Oh,” I said. “It won’t be hard. It’ll be annoying.”
12
I pushed through the door and turned to hold it open for Joel and Noah as we left the diner. Something hard pressed into the back of my neck.
“Bang,” Nya said. “If I was the demon, you’d be dead.”
I let go of the door, grabbed Nya’s hand at the base of my neck, and turned to hug her. I heard Joel and Noah protest behind me as the door hit them, but I didn’t care.
“Wow,” Nya wheezed. “It hasn’t been that long, has it?”
I pulled back. “You jerk. Do you know how crappy it is to not be able to get a hold of you? I didn’t know if you were dead, alive or otherwise.”
“Now you know how I felt until you got that cell phone,” Nya said.
“Hypocrisy, thy name is Nya,” I grumbled.
“And proud of it,” She said. She turned to look at Joel. “Joel.”
“Nya,” He said, forcing a smile.
“Noah,” Noah said.
I turned back to Nya. “Noah’s the one I was telling you about. He’s been on the last few hunts with me.”
Nya looked Noah up and down. “Is there an after school hunting club that you’re sponsoring or something?”
I turned just in time to see Noah’s face turn pink. I shook my head. “Don’t let his appearance fool you,” I said and I could see Noah start to straighten up. “He acts every one of his seventeen years.”
“Eighteen,” Noah muttered.
“Well,” Nya said. “Some of us have tight schedules and better things to be doing than going after some faeries.” She looked pointedly at Joel. “So let’s get this show on the road.”
I rolled my eyes at Nya. “Ok, just for the next twelve hours, can you two stow the beef you have with each other, so we can play like big kids.”
“Fine,” Nya said.
“Fine,” Joel agreed.
“Ok,” I said. “I can feel the love. Now, let’s get to work.”
Luckily, Kess’s book was at the bottom of Lucy’s toolbox in a cardboard box of crap that Kess had given me and I’d forgotten about. As soon as I’d learned that you could kill faeries with an iron dagger, I’d kind of tuned out of the lecture Kess had been giving me. Joel filled Nya in on what had brought him down to Sparta and what he’d found out since.
“I think we go back to the forest behind the school first and try to find the den,” Nya said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I just need to find that cleansing circle ritual first.”
Nya rolled her eyes. “Bane, if what’s happening to these faes is the same thing that’s happening to that Puca, do you really think we’ll be able to hold a conversation with them?”
I shrugged. “Maybe the cleansing circle will help with that,” I said. Nya looked skeptical. “I promised Sprig that I’d try,” I said. I looked over and saw Joel studying Nya. He turned back and smiled at me.
“Well I licked this hunt first, which makes it mine,” Joel said. “And I say we try the circle thing first.”
Nya rolled her eyes and as she breezed past me, I heard her mutter, “Kiss ass.”
I grinned at her. “Come on. At worst, we still have to kill them, but at best, they might be able to tell us something to explain what’s happening. Walter didn’t see this hunt coming. Joel just stumbled into it from a report on the news. Maybe whatever is blocking Walter is tied to the fae.”
Nya looked like she was considering it. “I mean, demons don’t have the juice, but maybe faeries do.” I could hear the sarcasm in her voice.
I shrugged. “No stone, unturned.” Nya heaved a weary sigh and I met her gaze. “Nya,” I lowered my voice. “I’ve got less than five months left. I have to hunt. I need Walter back on his game. Not to mention how nice it would be if he happened to hear something about the demon you all keep harping on about.”
Nya sighed and nodded. “Let the annoyances begin.”
Fae rituals were always tedious, I’d found. With so many other baddies, life was simple; shoot and repeat. Wave a little raw meat or human bait in their faces and they’d come running. For fae, I had to make a bakery trip. I was about to send Joel and Nya on to the school when I saw the two of them glaring daggers at each other and thought better of it.
“Hey, Noah, why don’t you go with Joel to stake out the school, and Nya and I will run to the store for supplies.”
Noah shrugged and headed towards the Subaru with Joel. Nya climbed into Lucy with me and we headed off for the store.
“So the kid,” Nya started as soon as she grabbed a shopping cart.
I nodded. “Tried to send him home many times. He doesn’t
want to go and the authorities may still be looking for him there.”
Nya stopped and turned to look at me. “Not only did you pick up an innocent to hunt with, but you picked up a fugitive innocent?”
I shrugged. “He’s not an ordinary innocent.” I dropped my voice. “He has this thing he can do with his hands. He can set things on fire.”
Nya looked surprised. “What kind of things?”
“Paper, Tags’ truck upholstery, me.”
“You?” Nya asked, stopping short with the cart causing me to run into her.
I decided to tell her only about the helpful times Noah had set me on fire. “He cauterized this,” I said, pointing to my right bicep. “After Sister Smile took a bite out of me.”
Nya raised her eyebrows, looking impressed. “Not a bad guy to have around when it comes to you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
She cut her eyes to me. “You’re accident-prone and you jump into shit without looking. Frankly, you give Charles Darwin a middle finger every day that you continue to exist.”
I couldn’t argue with that. We picked organic sugar cookies off the shelf and went to the bakery for a cake. The bakery display was almost empty. There were two boxes left.
“Sorry,” one of the bakers said from behind the display case. “There’s a church convention in town and apparently no one thought to bring desserts for the buffet. Two women came in an hour ago and just about cleaned us out.” Great. She pointed to the two remaining boxes. “We have this chocolate cake that fell on the floor, in the box of course!” She held it up. The cake had broken in the middle exposing the cake part and the frosting was coating the box lid on one side. I sighed. Any other time, that cake would have been fine. But for fae…
“What’s in the other one?” I asked. The baker looked apologetic as she held the box up for us to see. It was a cake with blood-red frosting, in the shape of a fire truck. The frosting was perfect. “We’ll take it,” I said.
Nya and I spent an exhausting ten minutes trying to anticipate what kind of tray we would have to put the stupid treats on to ‘entice’ the faeries.
“We should probably just bite the bullet and get something fancy and metal,” Nya said.
I shook my head. “It can’t be iron or steel.” We looked at the platters. “What do you think they’re made of?”
“No idea,” Nya said.
“Screw it,” I said, reaching for a platter on a high shelf. “We’re going with plastic.” I pulled it down and we both looked at it. It had a cartoon drawing of a flying plane on it and the plane had a face. “The cake will probably cover that,” I said.
“Works for me,” Nya said. I paid for the stuff and we headed back towards the school. Nya filled me in on the little bit of progress she’d been making on the demon front.
“Nya,” I said. “You don’t have to go through all this trouble for me. I know you would probably rather be hunting.”
Nya shook her head. “No Bane, this is more important.” She turned to look at me. “Besides, I didn’t want to be the one taking any hunts away from you when I knew you needed them for your total. How close are you, by the way?” Her voice and her face had an edge of worry.
I sighed. “No idea, with Festus gone... I killed six demons and Scratch in St. Louis. I’m hoping that was worth something and Noah and I took down a necro-witch. I don’t know how I’m supposed to know my total now.”
“Festus will show back up,” Nya said.
I shook my head. She hadn’t understood me when I’d filled her in over the phone. Or maybe I hadn’t said it. “Nya, Festus is dead.”
“What?” Nya asked.
I dug Festus’ tooth out of my pocket and held it up for her to see. “I found this at the cannibal’s old campground, south of Lancaster.”
“Oh shit,” Nya whispered, staring at the tooth. Her gaze turned to me and there was horror in her eyes. “He’s waiting on an Empty House again, downstairs, right?”
I shrugged. “I assume so, but the odds of him getting back up here before my time is over?” A sharp pang of guilt hit me in the side. Festus was another casualty of being around me. He’d taken beatings from downstairs, given us help when we needed it, and then ended up being eaten by cannibals. What a shitty life, topside. “Maybe he decided to throw the towel in and is staying downstairs or maybe the ‘powers that be’ feel like I’m so close to the end that they aren’t going to waste another Empty House on him.”
“How are you supposed to know what your number is now?” Nya asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Wing it, I guess.”
“How many did you have the last time you talked to him?” Nya asked.
“Four hundred and eighty,” I muttered.
Nya smiled sadly and shook her head. “Still a long row to hoe, but hey,” she met my gaze with a genuine smile. “That’s a hell of a lot better than six hundred and seventy-nine.”
I couldn’t argue with her there. I felt a little better, despite Festus being gone, the bugbears, Vix, Walter, and the cannibals. Having Nya with me helped. I couldn’t figure out how other than the fact that it felt like family was sitting in the seat next to me. Noah was starting to feel like that too, but Nya had been there first.
I moved Lucy to a parking spot on the street, just behind the blue Subaru and I turned to look at her. “Nya, it’s so good to see you.”
Nya grinned. “I feel like there should have been some Bryan Adams playing just then.”
“Will you just get out,” I huffed, but I couldn’t keep from smiling.
We left the stuff in Lucy and moseyed over to peer in the car at Noah and Joel. Joel pointed up the road. “There’s the school. We did a drive-by and there’s a cop car sitting in the parking lot. It’s Saturday, and with it being summer, maybe they figured they could be more mellow on security. But...”
I didn’t like where this ‘but’ was going.
“But?” I asked.
“We’ll have to drive past the cop in front of the school and then around the corner to get to the woods by the playground,” Joel said.
I sighed. “Are there any side streets where we could go around the school and then turn down them, to make us look more legitimate?”
Joel shook his head. “There are one or two houses there, but the road dead ends.”
I looked around at the four of us. “We should take one vehicle,” I said. We’d left Nya’s S10 on Main Street since she’d jumped in with me. Lucy was too small for all four of us, so Joel’s Subaru was the obvious choice. We gathered all the weapons we would need from Lucy and tucked them under the blanket in the back end of the Subaru. The blanket looked lumpy when we were done and you could definitely see the outline of Joel’s crossbow. If we were stopped and our vehicle was searched, we’d be screwed. Nya and I got into the backseat. I held the cake on the plastic platter and Nya held the bag with everything else for the circle. In the front seat, Noah sat with Kess’ box between his feet.