“So you have not sworn an oath of celibacy?” The ogre looked confused, and when a critter that looks like a hunk of granite mated with a bulldog looks confused, it is a damn sight to behold.
“No, I have not.” I decided to just keep it simple.
“Good,” he said. “Even though you urinated on my herbs, I did not think you were truly stupid.”
“So you think celibacy is stupid?” I asked. “‘Cause I sure do.”
“It may not be stupid,” the ogre said. “But it is not smart, either.” We both laughed, then Amy came out on the porch looking all clean and damp from the shower, and I was real happy I hadn’t sworn any oaths of celibacy.
“My turn,” Mama said, and walked into the house.
“I’m fixing some lunch,” Amy said. “Come in here and help me, Skeeter. They have a microwave that’s got more buttons than my computer. I might need some tech support.”
An hour later, we were all fed and clean, and Roy’s kitchen was sorely depleted. We left the dishes for him, proving that we were either the worst houseguests in the world, or just vindictive assholes towards people who pointed guns at us. I know I’m both.
We put the cars in the wind and pulled into the parking lot for Ruby Falls about an hour before closing time. That felt just about perfect to us since we wanted to get started on the tour and then manage to get “lost” long enough to find the portal.
But plans being what they are, as soon as I stepped out of the truck, half a dozen people ran screaming out of the ticket shack like their hair was on fire. I just leaned forward, put my head on the hood, and bounced it off the truck three or four times.
“What’s wrong, Bubba?” Amy asked, closing her door. I pointed to the chaos up at the entrance, and she sighed.
“Some days you just have the best damn timing,” she said. “Okay, everybody, gear up. Looks like we’re going in official.”
I walked around to the back of the truck and opened the door. Mama was already out on the other side, so I flipped the whole back seat up to get to the gun case under the seat. First thing I did while Amy was grabbing her Kevlar vest was to grab Bertha’s shoulder rig off the back of the front seat where I always keep her draped if I’m gonna be driving more than half an hour or so and strap on the big Desert Eagle over my XXXL Ultimate Warrior t-shirt. Then I grabbed a big flannel shirt from the gun case and threw on a long-sleeve shirt. No need for everybody in the world to see the cannon I was toting around.
I picked up a black web belt with a Buck hunting knife on one side and a flashlight on the other, and strapped that on. Then I clipped my Judge onto the belt under my shirt and picked up my caestus. The metal-clad gauntlets that Amy gave for Christmas last year had threaded holes in the knuckles, and knowing where we were going, I added a cold iron stud about a quarter-inch long into each hole. Any fairy that wanted to throw down with me, I was gonna be ready. The belt had pouches for four spare magazines, so I filled them with loaded cold iron mags, too. The shoulder holster carried two mags, so I slid on iron mag and one white phosphorous mag in there. I might not be able to kill a fairy setting it on fire, but it would damn sure make it uncomfortable. I left the regular hollow points in Bertha, my Fairyland equivalent of a less-lethal load. I slipped some spare .45 long bullets and some extra .410 shells for the Judge in the pockets of my cargo pants, slipped a SOG knife with a paracord-wrapped handle into my boot, and I was ready to go.
Skeeter, Joe, and Amy all had on their Kevlar by now, and I knew their vests were lined with ceramic plates to stop blades as well as bullets. Good thing since I had been carrying the only guns I saw in Fairyland on my last trip, and I didn’t think they’d gotten real interested in gunpowder since then. Skeeter and Mama both had Mossberg 12-gauges, Joe had his Remington rifle, and Amy had her Sig, plus an MP-5 strapped across her chest. We were loaded for bear, with guns, knives, flares, a couple more flash-bangs, and enough ammunition to star in The Expendables 18.
“Are we ready?” I asked.
“Are we going to investigate a cave or invade Nicaragua?” Skeeter asked.
“Maybe both,” Joe said. “I’ve got the first aid kit in my pack. Let’s go see what’s going on up there.”
Amy led the way, “FBI” emblazoned on her vest in big white letters. I asked her once why she picked that agency to impersonate, and she told me it was more about getting people to listen to her immediately, and it raised way too many questions to run into a crowd of people with “DEMON” on her chest in three-inch high letters. Made a lot of sense to me.
We followed her up the hill, me running second, Mama and Skeeter after me, and Joe bringing up the rear. We left Greg in the truck for the moment, because an ogre running with a bunch of federales was more than even I could bullshit my way through. Amy pushed through the steady stream of panicked people like a salmon swimming upstream until one big old fat hillbilly came barreling down the sidewalk and almost knocked her flat. I caught Amy, then gave the redneck a shove to the side. He popped up on his feet and bowed up like he wanted to come at me, until he realized that he was about to throw down with a heavily armed grizzly bear that looked like it had no time for bullshit.
He made the right decision and took a shortcut across the grass down to the parking lot. “Nice deterrent, Bubba,” Joe said with a chuckle.
“I didn’t do nothing but look at him,” I said.
“Yeah, and sometimes you looking at somebody is scarier than half the monsters we’ve chased,” Skeeter said, slapping me on the shoulder.
“Mama, they’re making fun of me!” I mock-protested.
“It just means they like you, dear. Remember back in elementary school when you used to push Melissa McKnight down on the playground? It’s the same thing,” she said.
“How did you know I liked Melissa?”
“Robbie, you are my son, and I love you, but subtle you are not,” Mama said with a kind smile. All my friends nodded and chuckled. Even I had to grin at that. She wasn’t wrong, my mother.
By the time we stepped into the lobby, the stream of people had slowed to a trickle, and there wasn’t anybody there but one frazzled ticket-taker and a fat old security guard waving his arms at us like he was directing an airplane.
“We’re closed,” he said, coming over to us. “Sorry folks, emergency closing. Y’all gonna have to come back tomorrow.”
I stopped cold in the middle of the room and stared at him. “Dude, can you not see? Look at us. Do we look like tourists? Shit, son, I’d about lay even money on us being scarier than whatever you got down there.”
Amy stepped forward and said the single funniest thing I’ve ever heard come out of her mouth. With a completely straight face, she looked at that security guard and said, “Sir, please step aside. We’re from the government. We’re here to help.”
13
I managed to not pee my pants at Amy’s unintended joke, and instead, I stepped over to the confused guard and said, “What’s down there, pal?”
“What do you mean?” the old dude asked. He was round little guy, with tufts of white hair sprouting out all around his head in a crown. He might have been five-eight, with spindly little arms and a belt stretched almost to its breaking point by his girth.
“I mean, what’s down there making people run out screaming?” I pointed toward the entrance to the caverns.
“I don’t know, I’ve been up here trying to keep folks from running over one another. Aaron went down there a few minutes ago to find out what was going on, though. Let me try to get him on the radio.” He put a walkie-talkie to his mouth and pressed the button. “Aaron, this is base camp. What do you see down there?”
No response from the radio. He tried hailing his buddy a couple more times, but there was nothing.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “You stay up here. Get this woman out safely, then wait here for any stragglers. Make sure they stay calm and don’t break their necks running down the sidewalk or something stupid like that. We’re going down
there to take a look, and if we can find Aaron, we’ll send him up.”
“What do you mean, if?” the old man asked.
“Well, boss, whatever’s down there is probably pretty nasty, if we can judge anything from these people all hauling ass out like they are. So, if it got ahold of your boy, he might be…hurt pretty bad.”
“Son, I know I’m old and fat now, but I still know the smell of bullshit when somebody shovels it on my shoes. You think Aaron’s dead, don’t you?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “But if he ain’t, we’ll get him back.”
“And if he is,” Skeeter said as he stepped forward. “We’ll deal with whatever killed him.”
I just love it when Skeeter’s mouth writes checks that my ass has to cash.
We walked through the turnstile and headed down into the caves, Amy in the lead, then me, since I could shoot over her head pretty easy, and if I went first, I’d be blocking the view of everybody behind me. Mama followed me, then Skeeter, then Joe covered our tails.
The caves were huge, a winding network of water-carved caverns that extended for miles in every direction. The lights were set up pretty regular, but it wasn’t long before we got to a place where a trail of blood led off to the right, away from the regular tourist sections and into the unlit portions of the mountain.
“We gotta go down there,” Skeeter said. “That dude Aaron could be down there hurt.”
“Or he could be a whole lotta dead,” I said. “But we gotta go anyway.” I pulled my flashlight and aimed the beam down the tunnel ahead of me. The light got soaked up by the blackness like it was a living, hungry thing. The others fired up their flashlights, except for Mama. She picked up a rock, closed her eyes for a moment, and wrapped her hands around the stone like it was a baby bird or a firefly she’d caught and was taking it back to show somebody.
That metaphor proved to be more appropriate than I expected when she opened her hands. The rock in her palm glowed with a soft blue-white light, giving off enough illumination to see a good fifteen feet in all directions. She held the rock over her head, a glowing miniature sun barely three inches around.
“I think this might be better than your flashlights,” she said.
We all just stared at her.
“What is it?” she asked. “I told you I am a Daughter of Winter, of the Royal Court of the Fae. No matter how long it has been since I have taken part in the politics of the ruling class, I remain a creature of magic, and I always will.”
“I heard you,” I said. “I just…”
“I think he means that this is really the first time we’re understanding exactly what that means,” Amy added.
“Can I do that stuff?” I asked. I was thinking that being able to cast magical spells would be pretty handy, especially if I could make stuff glow in the dark. I looked at Amy and started to get all kinds of interesting thoughts about the kinds of things I could make glow.
“I’m sorry, Robbie, but no. You are only partly Fae and have not spent any time learning how to use any gifts you may have inherited from me. Even if you had the innate ability, it would be far too late in life to begin training it now.”
“Can Nitalia?” Joe asked.
“She has some magic, but it is not nearly as strong as mine,” Mama said. “Her father was not a noble, so his ties to Faerie are less strong. Her gifts will fade and eventually disappear altogether if not used regularly, where mine will not.”
“Wow,” I said. “Okay, Mama, you just got bumped up the line.” I put my flashlight back in its holster and moved Mama in front of me so my big ass wasn’t blocking too much of the glow from her magical rock. “Let’s move and see if we can find this Aaron dude and get him home before Gollum bites his finger off and throws him into the fires of Saruman.”
Amy stared down the new tunnel, and we all followed. We hadn’t even gone three steps before Skeeter pulled on my sleeve. “You know that’s not even close to how all that happened in the books, right?”
“Yeah, I know, but I wanted to see if you could go a whole minute without correcting me about it,” I replied.
“That was a no, by the way,” I said to Joe. I extended my left hand back over Skeeter’s head. “Pay up.”
“Pay up? Y’all made a bet on whether I was going to correct Bubba or not?” Skeeter’s tone was almost indignant. It was kinda funny, actually.
“Oh, it was nothing like that,” Joe said. “We knew you’d correct him. We just bet on how long it would take you. I took the over. Poor choice, it turns out.”
“What was the line?” Skeeter asked.
“Three minutes,” Amy said from the front.
“You didn’t think I could go three minutes without correcting Bubba?” Skeeter asked. Now he really sounded indignant.
“If I screwed up something from Lord of the Rings?” I said. “Yeah, I knew you couldn’t. For the record, I was wrong.”
“Exactly,” Skeeter said, his voice all smug.
“Yeah, you couldn’t last one minute, much less three. Now pay up.” Skeeter pursed his lips like he was sucking on a lemon, and Joe slapped a five-dollar bill in my hand. Then we got back to the business of trying to save a dude’s life.
The caves were beautiful in spots, where we could see the stalactite and stalagmite formations, and the awesome power of the water carving out sections of rock for millions of years. This was marred every so often by a dark brown smear on the wall or floor, showing us that something had been hunting in these caves for a long time. Then we came upon a pool of fresh crimson stretching almost the full width of the cavern floor, and I knew before I saw the nametag that we had found Aaron’s final resting place.
“That’s a lot of blood,” Skeeter said. “It looks like the kind of mess you usually leave, Bubba.”
“Not funny, Skeeter,” I said. “This dude just showed up for work this morning like every other day. He didn’t deserve this crap.”
“No, he didn’t,” Skeeter said. “So let’s figure out what did it, kill it, then find the portal to Faerie so you can take your bad mood out on somebody else.” I looked over and could see by the way he had that little line between his eyebrows that he was pretty pissed at me.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I said. “You’re right. I’m pissed that Roy sent us on that snipe hunt through the woods so he could try and steal some damn pumpkin seeds. I can’t help but think if we’d gotten here last night instead of losing all yesterday and half of today dealing with that prick, that we might coulda stopped whatever was gonna happen here.”
“Yeah, you got a point,” Skeeter said. “But that ain’t gonna help us hunt down whatever did this.”
“You mean whoever,” Amy said. I looked over to find her kneeling by the pool of blood. “There’s a footprint here. It’s half in the blood, and half out, and it leads farther down into the cave.”
“Is it human?” I asked.
“Looks like it.”
“That’s not good,” I replied.
“Why not?” Mama asked. “Humans are much easier to deal with than many other species we could be facing.”
“Humans, yeah,” I said. “But vampires aren’t. Ghouls or ghosts aren’t, and there are a bunch of other things that walk around like men and aren’t. I don’t expect it to be a vampire because it left behind way too much blood. But that still leaves a whole lot of unpleasant options.”
“I don’t expect it to be a ghost or a ghoul,” Joe chimed. “The attack site is too neat. There’s a lot of blood here, but no flesh, and nothing looks like something tried to eat this man. The undead, excepting vampires, aren’t very concerned with discretion.”
“So that leaves humans, or fairies, since there is supposedly a doorway to Faerie down here somewhere,” Skeeter said.
“Or something we haven’t thought of yet,” I added. “Either way, we need to step lively and be alert. Mama, can you magic up another one of them glow-rocks?” I asked.
“I can,” she said. She pi
cked up a stone from the cave floor, held it in her hands for a few seconds, then handed it to me. I almost dropped it in surprise. It was freezing cold to the touch.
“Damn, that’s cold!” I said.
“What did you expect, dear?” Mama asked, her tone mild but still with a hint of “my son is an idiot” in there. “I am a Daughter of Winter, after all.”
“I reckon I expected a frostbite warning from my own mother,” I grumbled.
“I suppose I expected my big bad monster-hunting son to be less of a baby about the cold,” she said, handing her rock to Joe. “You take this one. I see perfectly well in the dark. Be careful, apparently the stones are very cold.”
I just shook my head. She hadn’t been in my life for a long time, but I remembered how it was pretty much impossible to get the last word on my Mama in any argument. “When were you gonna tell us you could see in the dark?” I asked.
“When it became relevant,” she replied. I swear, talking to women is like trying to get a damn housecat to do what you want. They just sit, stare at you, and say “no” in a way that convinces you that’s what you really wanted all along.
“Is there anything else you can do that you need to tell us?” I asked, fully aware that all my friends were grinning like fools at this woman twisting me up in verbal knots. I didn’t much care. Even down in a cave, under tons of rock, with my sister’s life in jeopardy in another dimension, getting ready to go fight something we had no idea if we could beat, I still felt better surrounded by this family than I had in a long time.
“Nothing relevant,” Mama said. “Now, don’t we have a monster to hunt?”
I started to say something smartass in response, but a very human scream echoed off the walls of the cave and let me know that now was not the time to make jokes, now was the time to whoop ass.
14
“Do you have any idea where that came from?” I asked Amy.
“None,” she said. “Sound does stupid things in a network of caves like this. Whoever that was could be right around the next bend, or they could be all the way back up at the entrance.”
Into the Mystic - A Bubba the Monster Hunter Novella Page 8
