The Green Mist Man seemed to shrug, but the mist was swirling so much, Cindy wasn’t sure if it was a shrug or a “get screwed” sign.
“Yeah, I know you just got started,” the old guy said, seemingly having a conversation with a cloud of the color that had been drained from drinks. “But this is where it stops. You know you don’t belong here, no matter what today is.”
The old man grabbed at the Green Mist Man, clearly making contact with what looked like a misty arm about two feet above the bar. He then turned and started for the door.
She had to be seeing things, but now, after all this, she had to know for sure. She grabbed the black police baton that she kept behind the bar for emergencies. It could knock a guy coming over the bar at her out cold before he had time to even duck. So far, she or any of the other bartenders hadn’t had reason or need to use it, but she felt better with it in her hand.
She quickly moved down the bar to where Judy stood talking to a customer, ignoring completely the strangeness going on around her as Judy could do so well.
“Cover for me. I’ll be right back.”
Cindy ducked under the lowered bar entrance at the cocktail station, not giving Judy any time to answer. Somehow, Cindy managed to stay with the old man through the crowd. From what she could tell, the old guy seemed to be dragging Green Mist Man along, talking with him all the way.
Clearly the old guy was nuts and she was buying into his weird hallucination.
Normally she wasn’t the type to follow nutty old men who carried a big stick and looked like flashers. She liked her men young, driven, and well dressed. But before tonight, nothing had ever happened to the color green in her bar. It seemed like it was going to be a night of firsts.
Cindy managed to get out the door right behind the old guy. She nodded to the bouncer, and then followed the old man in the trench coat and little Green Mist Man up the street like she was a peeping tom sneaking along behind two lovers.
“You’re not going to tell me how you got in, are you?” the old man said, keeping up the conversation with his misty companion.
There was a pause, and then the old guy laughed, sort of a crackling-of-brittle-paper sound. “I figured as much.”
It was like listening to one side of a really stupid phone conversation.
As the old man walked down the sidewalk and past the alley that went in behind the bar, Cindy stopped, about to turn back to have the bouncer report the old guy to the cops. Suddenly two things happened at once.
First, the air started to shimmer just inside the mouth of the alley. The old man stopped, then shoved the little Green Mist Man at the hole with a shout of, “Don’t come back!”
Then, from the other direction, two guys just appeared out of the air over the street about ten feet behind the old man, stumbling for a second as if they didn’t expect a step down.
There wasn’t a step in the middle of the street.
And those two couldn’t have come out of thin air.
“You’re losing it,” she muttered to herself.
Could she still be at home dreaming? Maybe it was from serving the food coloring. She had read that dye could cause people to see strange things. Or maybe she was just going nuts from not enough sex in the month since she and Twilight Zone Boy had broken up.
Both men sort of staggered toward the old guy who had his back turned to them. They both carried bats, but they sure didn’t look like baseball players. Something about them looked off, like they had been sleeping in a dumpster the night before. Their clothes were soiled, their ugly plaid shirts not tucked in, their shoes untied and caked in a thick mud. They squished when they walked and Cindy couldn’t tell if they were squishing or if the mud was.
She forced herself to take a good look at them, even though everything about them revolted her. One guy had a leg that was turned directly away from his body to the right. The other had two left hands.
One had an ear-looking thing glued to the middle of his forehead with a dangling earring made of beads hanging down over his nose. It looked like a women’s ear.
“Now that’s gross,” she said out loud.
Even from twenty steps away, they smelled like a dumpster behind a fish place in August. Suddenly before Cindy could even guess what they intended to do, they raised their bats and stepped toward the old man.
They clearly meant to hit him hard on the side of the head and back.
“Hey!” Cindy shouted. “Watch out!”
Her voice echoed down the street and she saw the bouncers turn toward her. They were too far away to really help, so she started toward the very one-sided fight.
The old guy spun and managed to get his long staff up to ward off one blow, but the other blow landed solidly on his shoulder. She didn’t like the sound of that at all.
She had no idea what she would do against two weird guys with bats except maybe distract them, but she just couldn’t let them beat up an old guy.
“Squeeze the pimple,” she muttered as she ran. “Squeeze it hard!”
The old guy was on his knees, his hands and arms trying to cover his head. His big stick rattled on the pavement and rolled away from him.
She reached the two and planted the baton against the side of the guy with the third ear stuck in the middle of his forehead. He staggered away, but the other smelly guy hit the old man once more before the two of them turned away as she swung at them.
They half-ran, half-staggered back into the street. A moment later they vanished into thin air like they had never been there.
The shimmering that was still in the air at the mouth of the alley vanished as well as the old man slumped to the ground.
This St Patrick’s Day was sure not turning out to be as much fun as she had hoped, and a whole lot weirder than she ever imagined possible.
Cindy shouted to the bouncer to call for help as she knelt beside the old guy, trying to not get his blood on her skirt. Bright green skirts just didn’t come along very often.
“Hold on, mister,” Cindy said. “Help’s on the way.”
The old guy focused his gaze on Cindy. “You’re the bartender who was following me.”
Cindy could tell the old guy was in intense pain.
“Don’t talk.”
She flipped her green tie over her shoulder and eased closer to him as he fought to focus on her. He had a broken arm and shoulder, and who knew what kind of internal injuries. It was amazing he was talking at all, considering how much blood he was losing from a cut on the side of his head.
“Did you see the shimmering in the alley?” the old guy demanded, staring up at Cindy. The guy had a gaze that could stop a speeding train and Cindy knew she had to answer him.
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“And I knew you were watching me in the bar through my shield. You have a natural power, young woman. Someday you will make a good candidate.”
“For what?” she asked.
“The Knight Watchmen, of course,” he said, closing his eyes in pain.
“Rest. You need to save your strength.” Cindy glanced up as the bouncer signaled her that help was on the way. A half dozen people were standing around in the street and on the sidewalk, watching and whispering.
The old guy chuckled. “You’d think after five hundred years, I’d learn to watch my back a little better.”
Cindy ignored the five hundred years comment, now knowing for sure that the guy had escaped from a special home somewhere.
“They came out of nowhere at you,” Cindy said, wishing like hell that the help that was coming would hurry up.
“Actually, they didn’t,” the old guy said, then coughed again, this time spitting up blood on his white beard.
That couldn’t be good. Cindy knew that much from watching movies.
“I should have seen them coming,” the old guy went on. “Just getting too old for this.”
“Easy,” Cindy said. “Just hang on.”
“We got him, kid,” a man said, shoving Cindy
aside.
Cindy fell backward onto her butt on the curb of the sidewalk, then got up quickly and brushed off her skirt. She was about to say something to the man, but then realized there was two of them.
Cindy just stared at the two who had shoved her aside. They were not medics. They both carried long wooden staffs and both were also wearing long trench coats. One was older than the other, but for some reason, she couldn’t really see them clearly. Maybe they had all belonged to the same convention of flashers.
She took a deep breath and focused on the night and the street around her. The air felt intense, crisp. For some reason the smells of the night air were sharper. Something about helping someone made everything feel more intense, almost like the sex had been with Twilight Zone Boy.
“He’s going to make it,” one man said, glancing around as he kneeled over the old guy.
Cindy just kept staring at the two guys in trench coats. She could see energy in and around both of the men, and strange carvings on the big sticks that were constantly in motion. Both men seemed to almost glow like soft lights.
“Glad to hear that,” Cindy said.
“You can see us?”
She pointed up the street at the crowd. “I think most everyone saw what happened.”
Slowly like an out-of-focus camera viewfinder coming into focus, the two of them came clear.
One of the guys was about her age and really cute. Far too cute to be wearing a stupid trench coat.
The other looked very old, only with no white beard like the dead guy. He looked like the type who would flash a person on a street corner and then just laugh.
The cute guy stared at Cindy and smiled. “Seems we have a future recruit.”
Cindy didn’t let his smile flutter her heart for more than a second, maybe two, even though it was an amazingly lust-filled smile. Or at least that was what she wanted it to be at that moment.
He stood and offered her his hand. His touch sent electric shivers through her entire body and her knees felt like they might not hold.
God, he was good-looking, glowing like he had a lot of light coming through his skin. He was taller than she by a few inches and had thick, wide shoulders. His thick, brown hair was just the kind she liked to run her fingers through. She started to raise her hands to do just that, then stopped herself. His facial features all worked together, nothing too long or too short. And his smile reached his wonderful green eyes that seemed to see right through her.
If someone last week would have asked her to describe her perfect man, she would have described the guy in front of her.
Oh, no, he couldn’t be gay, could he? Maybe if she jumped him right here in the street, she would find out.
She shook her head yet again and the intense feeling eased just a little. She had to get herself under control. The old guy getting beat up shouldn’t be shaking her up this much.
“Squeeze the pimple,” she said, softly.
“Excuse me?” the guy said, touching his face near his nose.
“Nothing,” she said. She took a deep breath and forced herself to think. The fantastically good-looking guy in the trench coat just stared at her.
She had to say something, get to know this guy. But what could she say? After a long moment the need to say something overwhelmed her and she said the first thing that came to her mind.
“I’m not going to be a flasher.”
Oh, God, how lame was that?
Both men laughed and the older one said, “I think with your body, the world will be sad about that.”
The young guy’s laugh was as good as his looks, and again she thought about just jumping his golden-glowing body right there in front of the crowd around the old guy, who still hadn’t come to yet. Now that might make the paper.
And no doubt it would make the Internet as well. Not the way she wanted to be famous. Damn, she had been horny before, but never like this. What the hell was going on?
A siren in the distance broke that thought.
Get it together. Ignore the fact that he smelled like freshly baked rolls, that his skin glowed like a perfect suntan, that his laugh was infectious, and his green eyes showed he was smart, damn smart.
Ignore all that.
He was wearing a trench coat, for God’s sake.
What other bad habits does he have?
Actually, she more than anything wanted to see exactly what was under that trench coat, but managed to not say that out loud as well.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” Cindy managed to finally say. “Sorry about your friend there.”
“First,” the cute guy said, “could you tell us what happened?”
“She saved my life, that’s what,” the old guy said, opening his eyes.
“Glad to see you coming around,” she said.
“Thanks to you,” he said. “I was getting a leprechaun out of the bar, one of the members of the Seelie Court I think, and she somehow saw us and followed me out here. I got attacked from behind by a couple of boggars pretending to be zombies, clearly run by the Unseelie Court, and she beat them away from me before they could kill me.”
Both of the other men in trench coats nodded, very serious looks on their faces.
The good-looking one sighed. “That means the war might be breaking out again.”
“Maybe, or just a couple of rogues,” the old man said.
Cindy stared at them. It wasn’t a convention of flashers. It was a convention of nutcases.
The sirens were getting louder. Help was almost here.
The guy helped the old man to his feet while the good-looking guy handed him back his staff.
“Hey,” Cindy said. “Aren’t you disturbing a crime scene?”
They all laughed, which made the old guy cough.
She was getting damned tired of them just laughing at everything she said. If she wanted to do stand-up, she’d go down the street to the local comedy club. There, the audience wouldn’t be flashers. Or at least not all of them.
“I’ll take care of our friend and the crowd,” the cute guy said to the other.
“Thank you, young woman,” the old guy said as the other guy helped him toward a spinning hole in the air that had just opened. “I owe you.”
Then the old guy and the other guy were gone, leaving Cindy standing beside the cute guy. Her heart fluttered with both excitement and panic.
“So what was all that?” she asked, hoping her voice sounded as firm as she wanted it to sound.
“We belong to a group of men and women called the Knight Watchmen. We protect humanity from all the fairies, trolls, and other creatures that live in dimensions among humans. We are like the policemen of the Unseen World. You just sort of got into a skirmish between two of the ruling courts.”
“Yeah,” she said, shaking her head. “And I’m Alice and I’ve fallen through a rabbit hole.”
He laughed and extended his hand. “My name is Sean. Sean Ballard. I’m from Seattle originally, but that was a while back now. You wouldn’t believe me just how long ago.”
Cindy almost didn’t take his hand, then she remembered how nice his touch felt. “Cindy Kemp. Student and bartender from Chicago, now living in the Twilight Zone.”
Again electricity seemed to flow through their touch, and he seemed to light up again with that golden-tan glow.
Maybe she should start calling herself “Electric Girl” because of the way she kept lighting up Cute-Flasher Boy.
He actually held her hand a little longer than he should have. She didn’t mind one damned bit. A very large part of her wanted to not be angry at being played for a fool, but instead to just learn everything about this wonderful hunk. But somehow her anger won the fight and she pulled her hand away.
“So really, what is going on?”
“Did you see the Men in Black movie?” he asked.
“Far too many times, I’m afraid,” she said.
“We’re the magical version of the guys from that movie. We chase fairies
and elves and trolls and bogies and try to keep peace between the two Seelie courts. And we try to keep them all honoring the great treaty that keeps them out of the human world. The organization has been around a long, long time.”
“Cute,” Cindy said. The feeling of wanting to jump his bones vanished like toilet paper flushing down the drain. “So next you’re going to do a flashie-thing to me and I won’t remember any of this.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” he said, looking slightly sad. “But you have natural magic power like I did. The Knight Watchmen have noticed you now. When your power comes in full, you will be recruited and we can meet again.”
She stared at him. The crazy things he was saying made as much sense as anything for what she had seen, but she still wasn’t going to believe it.
“Come on,” he said, gently taking her by the arm and turning her toward the bar. The police sirens were getting close, real close.
“One more question,” she asked as they walked the short distance back toward the crowd, letting the electricity flash between them. She wanted to jump him so bad, she almost couldn’t control herself. And he smelled so much like fresh-baked bread, she wanted to just lick his skin. “Why do you smell so good?”
He smiled. “All good magic smells wonderful. Bad magic, like those boggars pretending to be zombies, smells awful.”
She shook her head and again the voice cleared. “Smelly magic,” she muttered to herself. “Great, what’s next?”
“For now, nothing I’m afraid. But maybe in the future we’ll meet again. I can hope. And maybe, if you are strong enough, you’ll remember me.”
Her heart actually skipped a beat and her breath got short.
Then he raised that stupid long stick of his and banged it into the ground and everything went white.
“So what happened out there?” Judy, the other bartender, asked as Cindy ducked back under the gate and headed back for her station behind the bar.
“Just the first fight of the night,” Cindy said, putting the black baton back where it belonged under the bar. “They all ran off before the cops got there.”
Suddenly Judy leaned toward Cindy, sniffing. “Wow, what have you been eating?”
Cindy glanced at Judy who had followed her down the bar, sniffing. Had her partner behind the bar lost her last brain cell? “Nothing, why?”
Courts of the Fey Page 13
