“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 picked 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.”
“I’ll take care of the finding,” Mama said. “But this is going to take a lot out of me, so you four will have to handle the rescuing.”
I didn’t bother telling her that I figured I’d be doing most of the rescuing in the first place. No point in being insulting. Plus, we had an ogre with me, so maybe I wouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting. She got down on both knees in the floor of the cave and put her hands together in front of her chest like she was praying or something. After a few seconds, a tiny speck of red light appeared over her head. The speck spun and wobbled through the air, getting bigger all the time until it grew into a baseball-sized orb floating over Mama’s noggin.
She opened her eyes, and Joe stepped forward to catch her shoulders before she toppled over. “Are you alright, Mrs. Brabham?”
She looked at Joe and smiled, patting him on one arm. “Joe, you’re either going to have to call me Mama or Ygraine. I am not going to call you Father, so we should dispense with any formalities altogether. I’m fine, I just need a little hand getting up. As I said, that spell takes a lot out of me.” She waved her right hand at the ball of light, and it flew off down the tunnel ahead of us.
“We should follow it. I tuned the spell to the scream, and to the blood. Wherever either the person who screamed or anything that has touched this blood is, the light will lead us there.”
“Nice one, Mama,” I said. “Toss me another glow-stone, and let’s roll. You and Skeeter stay back here with your other light rock, and we’ll come get you when we’re done.”
“Yeah, not so much,” Skeeter said. “One thing, you ain’t leaving the black dude alone with the old lady, no offense, in the scary cave. This ain’t my first horror movie. I know who dies first in this scenario. Second thing, you ain’t coming back, dumbass. You’re going down there to find and save whoever’s screaming, if they’re still alive after whatever made them holler like that. Then you’re gonna keep going and find the door to Faerie. And your mama is probably the only one of us that can recognize it, or open it. So we’re going.”
“Okay, then you two bring up the rear. Joe, cover them. Amy and I will go first and take care of any threats we find.” For once, nobody wanted to argue with me, and we started down the corridor after our bouncing ball of red light.
We followed the orb several hundred yards, making a couple of sharp turns down barely-seen side tunnels, until the tunnel opened into a giant cavern, complete with underground waterfall and soft illumination coming from a stream flowing through the center of the cave.
“Wow,” Amy said, looking around. “That’s amazing.” She wasn’t wrong.
The chamber we were in was easily half a football field in all directions, and two or three stories high inside. The waterfall was lit from behind by some kind of glowing moss or lichens, and dots of light danced in the stream, phosphorescent fish I guessed. Stalagmites taller than basketball goals reached up to stalactites like giant teeth hanging ten or fifteen feet from the ceiling. The walls were splashed with all kinds of color, striations of minerals shooting through the rock at different levels telling the story of the cave’s formation.
The most interesting thing in the cave, and the thing that had us drop to the ground and scoot back into the tunnel out of sight, was the group of men sitting around a cookfire on the banks of the underground stream. There were about eight of them, all dressed like rejects from The Hobbit central casting. Except full-sized. They wore leather armor, with furs over their shoulders and fur bits around their wrists and feet. They all wore long hair, tied back or worn loose over their shoulders, but more than one of them had their ponytails tied back to reveal the distinct points on the tops of their ears.
Every one of them were fairies. Not particularly nice fairies, judging by the condition of the woman they had bound hand and foot lying on her stomach at the edge of their circle.
“Raiders,” Mama whispered, venom pouring through her voice as though the word was a synonym for “asshole.” Which, maybe to her, it was. I cocked an eyebrow at her, and she sighed. “Female Fae do not breed often. It is very difficult for us to become pregnant, and when it happens, it is a cause for great rejoicing. That is one reason our numbers are few.”
“You didn’t seem to have a whole lot of trouble with it,” I said. “You had me, then Jase, then you went back to Fairyland and had Nitalia.”
“I was fortunate,” she said with a little blush. “And your father was…remarkable in many ways.”
I turned to Amy. I’m sure the horror was evident on my face as I said, “Does DEMON have any of those little mind-wipe things like in Men in Black? Because I really need some brain bleach right now.”
“Sorry, Bubba, you’re gonna have to live with that one,” she said, her tone saying she was anything but sorry. I swear, the women in my life exist only to torment me. She looked at Mama. “What does the infertility of Fae women have to do with that girl down there?”
“Some of the less scrupulous men of Faerie have, at times, enlisted the help of bandits and raiders to pass through the veil and…procure wives for them that would have a greater potential for producing offspring.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“That’s disgusting,” Skeeter said. “You mean those guys down there are like Fae sex traffickers?”
“Unfortunately, that is exactly what I mean,” Mama said.
“Well, there’s some good news,” I said, drawing Bertha and swapping out for a cold iron magazine.
“What’s that, Bubba?” Amy asked. Her eyes were cold, and I could feel the rage rolling off her.
“If these assholes are here to take the girl back to Fairyland and sell her a
s a wife to some horny fairy, then the portal must be around here somewhere. And that ain’t all,” I continued with a grin.
“What else?” Skeeter asked, still a little wary of the grin I was wearing.
“We know these guys are the worst kind of scum, so I can shoot them all I want without feeling bad.”
“Try to keep at least one of them alive, Bubba,” Amy said, keeping her voice low.
“Why? You want to make sure you get to kill one of them yourself?” I asked.
“No. Well, I do, but that’s not the reason. I want to make sure you don’t kill them all so we can get information. There might be a whole ring of them, and if so, we want to do everything we can to stop them all, not just one small group.” She made a lot of sense. But that’s kinda our deal—Amy thinks things through, I blow things up.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” I said. “I’m going to go shoot a bunch of assholes. Y’all come in behind me and clean up the pieces.”
“Is that what passes for a plan in your life, Robbie?” Mama asked.
“Oh, Mama B, you don’t even know,” Skeeter replied as I just stared at them. “That is probably the most complex, well-developed plan Bubba has come up with in the last three years. You know how I know this? Because there was something after the part about him shooting something. Most of his plans start and end right there.”
I didn’t bother sticking around to be insulted. If they wanted to make jokes at my expense, and I’m sure they did, they could wait until we were done rescuing damsels in distress. I walked to the end of the tunnel and stepped out into the cave. I had Bertha in one hand and a caestus with iron studs on the knuckles on my left hand.
I got to within about fifteen yards of the fairies before they noticed me, but when they did, it was like I kicked over a hornet’s nest full of dickheads. They all jumped to their feet and pulled swords, except for the two that grabbed up bows from the ground and started scrambling around for quivers. I put a bullet in the first archer before he ever found his arrows, and fifty calibers of iron does a lot of bad things to a hundred-fifty-pound fairy. I left him lying on the ground with a hole in his chest you could put a normal person’s fist through and drew down on the second archer.
He flopped over backward, kicking up a puff of dust from the cave floor when he fell, lifeless to the ground. I turned the see Joe prone in the mouth of the tunnel, his rifle stretched out in front of him with a little wisp of smoke coming from the barrel.
“Well, that’s two down. How many—never mind,” I started to say something clever, but three fairies ran at me with swords, and I was busy shooting assholes for a minute. The Desert Eagle is, as Ray Wylie Hubbard said, “a great big ‘ol pistol,” and it made a great big hole in two of the ones rushing me. They dropped like sacks of really bloody potatoes, a whole lot of their insides suddenly turned to outsides.
I let the third one get closer while I holstered Bertha, keeping Amy’s reminder in my head to let one of them live. I blocked his sword stroke with my metal-clad fist, which wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever head. Even wrapped in a steel-plated gauntlet, that shit hurt. The fairy drew back for another slice, and I planted a size-sixteen boot in his gut. He folded over like a cheap suit, and I clocked him on the back of the head with my caestus.
“I got your prisoner,” I said to Amy as she stepped up to my side, her Sig tracking another fairy running in our direction. She dropped him with two shots to the chest, then put another two in the face of the one right behind him.
Amy knelt by the fairy on the ground, then glared up at me. “You suck at prisoners, Bubba. This guy’s deader than a doornail.”
“All I did was punch him in the head,” I protested. I held my fist up to show her, then pulled Bertha and blew the leg off an oncoming fairy. This one held an axe. Well, at least until I shot his leg off. He dropped the axe after that.
“Maybe I can save that one,” Amy said, rushing to the downed fairy.
“Wouldn’t hold my breath,” I said. I looked at the dude spurting blood all over the cave floor. It was going to take a hell of a tourniquet to keep him from bleeding out. I did mention it was a great big pistol, right? Well, it didn’t quite blow the guy’s leg off. It was still hanging on by a couple strands of flesh and muscle, but it was coming off eventually. If he lived.
I looked down at the one I punched and poked him with the toe of my boot. Nothing. I leaned down and slammed my fist into his skull, popping his head like a cantaloupe and smearing brains all over the ground.
“What the hell was that for?” Skeeter asked. He was sweeping his shotgun back and forth across the cave, but it looked like between my bloodbath and Joe taking out two more assholes with his rifle, Skeeter was woefully short on targets.
“Amy said he was dead, but I wanted to make sure. Don’t need him spontaneously regenerating behind us,” I said.
“What a load of crap,” Skeeter said. “You just wanted to see if you could hit him hard enough to crush his skull, didn’t you?”
I wasn’t quite ready to admit just how right Skeeter was. “There might have been some of that in my decision-making process,” I said.
“Don’t try to sound like a corporate drone, Bubba. It makes me think everything in the world has gone upside down.”
I grinned down at Skeeter, then looked around. “Hey, where’s Amy?”
“She’s right here, human,” said a fairy who stepped out of a pocket of shadow just past the bound woman on the cavern floor. He was tall and bigger than the other fairies I’d just killed. He also had a knife pressed to Amy’s throat and was using her as a human shield. “She doesn’t have much to say right now, but I think she’d like for you to put down your weapons and step forward so that I can bind your hands. There isn’t as much market for male humans in Faerie as females, but you all look strong enough. I think you’ll make fine slaves.”
15
Contrary to all expectations, I was not the one who lost my mind at the fairy’s words. Skeeter, on the other hand, exploded in a fit of fury that can only be unleashed by a gay black man. “Slave?” he asked, his already high voice going up a full octave. “Slave?!? Oh, hell no! I did not grow up black and gay in Georgia, fight my whole damn life to make something of myself in a world that doesn’t know what to make of any bit of me, just to have some assclown with pointy ears take me back a couple hundred years to when my people were locked in cargo holds and trucked across the ocean against their will!”
He stomped right across the cave to where the fairy stood, his arm wrapped around Amy’s neck and a dagger pressed to her throat. The bad guy just stared at the fury he had unleashed, his eyes darting around the cave like he thought somebody might be coming to his rescue. He was going to be mighty disappointed on that front since we’d killed every other bad guy in the place. Even the guy I shot in the leg was done for, having bled out just after the head asshole appeared.
“Stay back!” He gestured to Skeeter with the knife, and that was all she wrote. Amy grabbed the wrist of his knife hand with both of her hands and stretched that arm all the way out straight. Then she snapped the arm straight down over her shoulder, and I could hear the pop as his elbow dislocated.
The knife clattered to the cavern floor, and Amy spun from the fairy’s grasp. She stepped back, still holding his wrist in one hand, and nailed him in the temple with a vicious side kick. He staggered but didn’t fall, so she pulled him toward her and buried a knee in his midsection. He doubled over, and Amy let go of his arm. She twined both hands in his hair and slammed his face downward as she brought her knee up to meet him. A crack echoed through the cave as his nose basically turned to Jell-O, and Amy let him drop to the ground.
Skeeter stepped forward and kicked the downed fairy in the ribs. I heard another crack and figured it was a rib this time. Skeeter drew back for another punt, but I put a hand on his shoulder.
“He’s down, Skeet.”
“I don’t care,” my enraged little buddy said.
&nbs
p; “Yeah, but remember, Amy wanted one left alive.”
“Still not caring,” Skeeter said, but he also wasn’t still kicking the guy.
“You okay?” I asked Amy.
“I’m fine, just pissed that he got the drop on me.”
“How did that even happen?” I asked. “I looked away for a second, then the next thing I knew, that asshole had his arm around your neck.”
“That’s about how it worked for me, too. I went to see about the one you shot in the leg, then I heard something off behind a stalagmite. I went over to investigate, and this dick jumped me.”
“Well, I’m just glad you’re alright,” I said.
“Thanks. I’m glad we were able to capture him. We need him to find the portal.”
A groan from the ground drew my attention back to the fallen fairy. He rolled around but froze when I stepped over him and aimed Bertha down at his face. “This is a Desert Eagle pistol. I know y’all don’t know a lot about guns over in Fairyland, so let me explain what that means. It fires a bullet that has enough force to blow your leg off from fifty yards away. Imagine what that will do to your face from three feet.”
He stopped moving, his eyes locked on the end of Bertha’s barrel. I kept talking. “Yes, that is a very big barrel. It takes a big barrel to fire a big bullet. Bertha only fires big bullets. She’s picky like that. Now, you’re going to stand up, put your hands behind your back, and we’re going to tie you up. Then you’re going to lead us to the passage back to Fairyland, where we’ll figure out whether or not we’re going to kill you. I’m leaning toward yes, just in case you were wondering.”
I stepped back to give him a little space. “Now get up,” I said.
He just lay there, looking daggers at me. “Go to hell, human trash.”
I poked him in the ribs with the toe of my boot. I might not have been as gentle as I could have, and I might have put extra pressure on the spot where I knew Skeeter had broken a rib, but I didn’t kick him real hard. He rolled over a time or two and got to his feet.
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 9
