“Put your hands behind your back,” I said.
“Go to hell,” he repeated.
“You are starting to sound like a broken record,” I replied. I stepped in and backhanded him with my left hand. The iron studs on my knuckles left burns on his cheek where they touched him, and he dropped to one knee. He got back to both feet, then turned around and stuck his hands out behind him.
“Very good,” I said. “Amy, you do have something we can use to tie this asshole up, don’t you?”
She just grinned and slapped a pair of handcuffs on the fairy. I didn’t even see where they came from, but it was definitely something I filed away for future use.
Just then Mama held up a hand, and we all fell silent. “I think I heard something. Has anyone seen the girl?”
We all shook our heads, and Mama walked off to a darkened section of the cave, Joe following close behind. A few seconds later, they came back with a battered and dirty, but mostly unharmed, human woman of about twenty. She was wearing jeans, a University of Tennessee hoodie, and no shoes. She looked pretty shaken up and dirty, but she walked fine, and she had enough presence of mind to walk right up to the handcuffed fairy and plant a knee in his nuts.
The fairy dropped to his knees, and she looked around at us. “Thanks.”
“Are you okay?” Amy asked, stepping forward to put an arm around the girl’s shoulders.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little bruised. They said they were taking me back with them to…”
“It’s okay,” Amy said. “We know. That’s not going to happen. Not to you, not to anybody.”
The girl looked around at the fairy corpses. “I guess not. Why didn’t you kill this asshole?”
“We need him to lead us to the portal,” I said. I didn’t think we needed to go too far into the whole “portal to where” concept, so I just left that part out.
“Is that the glowing hole in the cave wall?” she asked. “It’s right over there.” She pointed down one of the many side tunnels branching off from the main cavern. I couldn’t see anything, but Mama nodded.
“I can see a glow coming from that direction. It’s quite likely that she is correct,” Mama said.
“So, do we just go through?” I asked, starting in that direction.
“Slow down there, big fella,” Amy said, grabbing my arm. “We have to get…” She looked at the girl with one eyebrow raised.
“Cheryl,” the girl said.
“Cheryl,” Amy went on with a nod. “Back up to the surface so she can go home, and we should probably get our packs, and retrieve the ogre we left hanging out in the car. Plus, I wouldn’t mind having a little food and a tent at hand if we’re going to go be strangers in a strange land for a while.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed. “But what do we do with Prince Charmless here?” I asked.
Mama pulled a knife from her belt and slit the bound fairy’s throat from ear to ear. Amy and I jumped back as blood fountained from his neck, and he collapsed to one side. Mama wiped her knife on the corpse’s pants and tucked it back where she found it.
“Problem solved,” she said. I gawked at her, as did everyone else in the cave. “What?” she said. “We were going to kill him. I just didn’t waste time arguing about it. He couldn’t be allowed to roam free in this world, and if we took him back to Faerie, we ran the risk of him alerting his confederates. Not to mention the fact that he was a sex trafficker, one of the lowest forms of life in this or any other dimension. So, I killed him. Now let’s get you back upstairs and you can get home where you’ll be safe.” She directed this last bit to the girl, who took an involuntary step back as Mama’s gaze fell on her. I didn’t blame her. She kinda scared me, too.
Mama started across the cave toward the tunnel we came in from, and after looking at each other for a few seconds, the rest of us followed. We had all just reached the mouth of the tunnel leading out when the girl spoke again.
“Who’s Oberon?” she asked.
Mama froze, then slowly turned to look at Cheryl. “Where did you hear that name?”
“The guys that took me said it a couple of times. They said that once they sold me to…Ray-something, I can’t remember the name, that was all they needed to do before they got in touch with their contact and took out Oberon. I was just wondering who Oberon is. I think I’ve heard the name before somewhere…”
“Yeah, probably in school,” Joe said.
“Oberon is my father,” Mama said. “Let’s hurry this up, Robbie. We have to get this girl to the surface so we can come back down here. Apparently, we have to save your sister’s and your grandfather’s lives.”
Part II
Cold as Ice
1
I woke up to the sound of screaming. At least it wasn’t mine this time. I lay still for a minute with my eyes closed before I asked, “Who is it this time?”
“Joe.” Skeeter’s cracked voice came from across the room. I shook my head, guilt washing over me at the thought of Joe being tortured on my account.
The screaming continued, off and on, for an hour or two. I honestly lost track of time for a while and just lay there listening to one of my best friends in the world being tortured out of his mind at the hands of a nasty-ass fairy. I swore to myself, just like I did every time the bastards came into our cell and took somebody out for Head Torturer Brandis’s daily “entertainment.”
But finally the horror movie soundtrack stopped. This time it cut off abruptly, so I knew Joe had passed out from the pain. Brandis must be off his game today, I thought. On a good day, he usually managed to get one of us to scream ourselves completely hoarse before he let us pass out, but Joe still had a lot of voice going when his howls of pain cut off like a switch was thrown.
A few minutes later, the guards dragged Joe’s limp body back into the cell and dumped him on a pallet of straw in the corner. Skeeter made as if to rise and go check on him, but the point of a guard’s sword drew him up short. I didn’t move. I didn’t bother. I knew he wasn’t dead; they wouldn’t kill him. They wouldn’t kill any of us, no matter how much they might like to. No, we were being kept alive so Queen Mab, my grandmother, could get her rocks off daily listening to my friends shriek in unbelievable agony.
Then every night, after torturing my people all day, she sent in the healers to undo all the damage Brandis inflicted so he could start the next morning with a clean slate.
Not to put too fine a point on it, my granny was batshit nuts.
After the guards locked the cell door behind them, Skeeter and I crawled along the floor to check on Joe. The cell was barely more than four feet high, so neither of us could stand up in it, keeping us crouched and off-balance at all times.
“Joe, you okay?” I asked, shaking his shoulder. He moaned a little but didn’t open his eyes.
“Come on, Uncle Joe, what did they do this time?” Skeeter took our bucket of drinking water and dipped his shirttail in it, dabbing it across Joe’s forehead and washing off a little of the blood. Really, he was just smearing the old dirt and blood around, but it made him feel better, so I didn’t bother saying anything. Besides, we didn’t have to worry about infections; the magical fairy healer asshole would be by in a few hours to put Joe right as rain so he could get another dose tomorrow.
“Is he okay?” Amy’s voice came from the next cell over.
“Yeah, just passed out, I think,” Skeeter said.
“I’m fine,” Joe croaked. “I was faking.” I looked down at him and saw the hint of a grin under the blood and muck caking his face. He looked like ten miles of bad road. If he was faking that, he deserved an Oscar.
“Oh, thank God,” Skeeter said, rocking back to sit cross-legged on the straw. “I thought this time they’d gone too far and killed you.”
“They won’t kill us,” I said. “We’re too useful as bargaining chips.”
“Speak for yourself,” Skeeter said. “You’re Mab and Oberon’s grandson. I’m a gay black human trapped in Fairyland,
which is way less fabulous than all those picture books made it out to be. There’s not a rave or a disco anywhere.”
“You hate disco, Skeeter,” I reminded him.
“I hate dungeons more!”
“Fair enough,” I said. I sat back against the wall and looked at Joe. “Anything new this time?”
“Yeah, there was,” he said. “That’s why I decided to pass out. I thought this might be important. While they were burning all my hair off with long kitchen matches, one of the guards from somewhere else in the castle came in and told them to cancel tomorrow’s sessions.”
“Why?” Amy’s disembodied voice asked. I had no idea how long we’d spent trapped in the dungeon, so I couldn’t tell how much time had passed since I laid eyes on my girlfriend, but I knew it was too damn long.
“They said something about distinguished guests and not wanting them to be disturbed if they heard us screaming. I might have said something about them not hitting hard enough to make a puppy scream, and that’s when Brandis decided to pierce my nipples again. So, I passed out.”
“Huh,” I said, wondering what kind of guests the Queen of Winter receives, and who existed that she gave a damn about.
“So, no torture tomorrow,” Skeeter said, laying back on the straw. “Kinda makes this feel like Christmas Eve.”
“I fought a magically summoned giant elf knight last Christmas,” I reminded him. “And the Christmas before that, you were hunting a ghost. Christmas usually sucks for us.”
“Let me dream, Bubba,” Skeeter grumbled at me. “Let me dream.”
“Instead of dreaming, how about some planning?” Amy asked from next door. “Any disruption in the normal rhythm of this place should give us some opportunities.”
“You thinking about busting out of here, sweet cheeks?” I asked.
“Always,” she replied. “And if you promise to never call me sweet cheeks again, I might even take you with me.”
“Deal,” Skeeter, Joe, and I all said at the same time.
I heard Amy scooch closer to the bars of her cell. Her next words came across in barely a whisper. “Okay, so when the healer comes tonight, here’s the plan…”
The healer came in with our dinner, if you want to call a loaf of not-quite stale bread and a bucket of warm water dinner. As usual, there were two guards with the healer, one with his sword out and the other carrying dinner.
The healer ducked into the cell and knelt by Joe’s pallet, peeling the loose shirt off his body with ruthless efficiency. I heard the ripping sound as the cloth pulled away from the flesh it stuck to with dried blood, and Joe cried out in pain. Even if he wasn’t trying to make sure the guards were watching him, he probably would have yelled.
The healer started his work, his hands glowing pale yellow with magic as he eased Joe’s agony. Healing reverses the damage done to a body but hurts almost as bad while it’s being done as the original injuries. Joe was playing up the pain even more, making a real show out of it tonight. Within moments, the dungeon echoed with his cries of pain as the healer’s hands pressed hit cuts and burns. The guards stood just inside the cell, grinning and watching the show as Joe writhed at the man’s touch.
“Hey, you gonna put that food down, or am I gonna have to arm wrestle you for it, Larry?” I asked the chunky guard carrying the food. His real name was something lyrical with a lot of apostrophes, but I just gave all the guards names from classic literature. This one was Larry, and his bald buddy with the sword was Curly. I didn’t see Shemp or Moe tonight, so I figured they were probably already drunk in the barracks. At least I hoped so.
Larry knelt in one of the front corners to set the food down, and Skeeter swarmed him. He skittered along the ground like Gollum on speed, wrapping both hands around the loaf of bread and shoving his face into it. He started chewing noisily, and I came right in after him.
“Let go of that, you little shit!” I yelled. “That’s gotta last all three of us ‘til morning, and you know Joe needs to eat after a healing!” I ducked between Larry’s legs, which at my size put him way off balance.
“Back up, fool!” Curly bellowed from his spot by the cell door. Curly never came all the way into the cell. Like me, he was a tall guy and getting hunched down into our cell was difficult for him. When he showed up tonight, I knew we had caught our first lucky break since landing in Fairyland.
I did as I was told—I backed up. Of course, that wedged Larry’s shins right into my armpits, so when I straightened up onto my knees, the already off-balance guard went down in a heap. The second his feet left the ground, I sprang for the door, and Skeeter leapt for Larry. He planted both knees in the guard’s chest and leaned his forearm into the stunned man’s throat.
I didn’t have the explosion out of my stance I used to, but I still got off the blocks pretty well for a fat old guy with bad knees. I was fast enough to knock Curly’s sword aside and slam a shoulder into his gut before he got the door closed, anyway. We tumbled out into the hall past the cell, and I planted a knee in his balls to take him out of the fight for a minute.
I looked back into the cell to see how the others were doing and was impressed. Skeeter had Larry choked out and was pressing a sword to the healer’s stomach. Joe sat up on his pallet and held the guard’s dagger in one hand. I saw they had their side of things well covered, so I yanked Curly’s keys from his belt and tossed them to Amy. Then I knelt down beside Curly and drew his dagger.
“Curly, old pal, let me explain your situation to you. There’s two ways this can go. We can take all your shit and lock y’all up in them cells where Moe and Shemp will find you when they bring breakfast. That’s not going to go well with my Granny, but you’ll at least be able to tell your side of the story. Or you can object to that plan, and I can carve a zipper from your nuts to your nose right here and leave you staring at your own guts and trying to figure out what goes where. What’s it gonna be?”
“Only cold iron can harm the Fae, you fool. And we are not so stupid as to carry cold iron in the keep. You can no more cut me with that blade than you could fly.”
“Plan C it is, then,” I said. I reversed my grip on the dagger and slammed the pommel right between his eyes. I heard a crack as his skull fractured, and he slumped lifeless to the floor. I turned back to the others. “Hurry it up. He won’t stay out long.”
“Try these,” Amy said from beside me. I looked up, and she held out a set of leg and arm shackles to me.
“I’m not really into that, but I’ve got some silk scarves at home I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” I said with a smile. She shook the cuffs at me, and I rolled Curly over and hog-tied him. I threw him into her cell and shoved a rag in his mouth while she got more restraints for Larry and the healer. There were several empty cells in the dungeon, so after we forced the healer to patch Joe up, everybody got their own private room. We even left them their underwear, which I thought was awfully kind of us.
Once our captors were imprisoned, we took stock of our meager weapons. Two swords, three daggers, and one satchel of various herbs and salves. Joe and Skeeter put on the guards’ armor, and Amy threw the healer’s robes over the rags she was wearing. Our own clothes were long gone, confiscated upon our arrival, and the tunics we’d been stuck in since stunk to high heaven. So did we, frankly, but there was nothing we could do about that until we got out of the castle. And we couldn’t get out of the castle until we found my mother, who was Mab’s prisoner somewhere else in the keep.
“What are we going to do to disguise you?” Skeeter asked. “I hate to point this out, but you’re almost as conspicuous as me, and you know exactly how many brothers you’ve seen on Game of Thrones.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to get lucky and hope nobody notices us,” I said.
“Hope nobody notices the only black dude in all of Fairyland walking alongside Hagrid from Harry friggin’ Potter, with a chick healer and some random guard?” Skeeter raised an eyebrow at me. “This might be your worst plan ev
er, Bubba.”
“Well, as long as I’m always raising the bar,” I said. “Come on, let’s go save my mama from my crazy-ass granny before she gets turned into a toad or something.”
2
We climbed the winding stairs from the dungeon, stopping at every landing to listen above and below for sounds that somebody had raised an alarm. Everything was quiet when we pushed the door open and stepped out into a wide hallway. I recognized nothing from when we were brought in, but that might be due to the burlap sack that covered my head from the moment Granny caught us stepping through a portal into her kingdom.
I cleared the door and looked right and left. We were alone, for the moment at least. Everybody gathered around, and Joe looked to me. “Where now, Bubba?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” I replied. “I was bagged and tagged when they carried me in here. What about y’all?”
“I could see a little,” Amy said. “I twisted the hood around over my face and got an idea of where we were going. I think the exit is this way.” She turned to head down the hall, but I grabbed her elbow.
“Hold up, hon. We can’t leave yet,” I said.
“Bubba, did that guard hit you in the head? What the hell are you talking about, we can’t leave yet?” Skeeter asked.
“We gotta rescue Mama. She’s somewhere in this castle, and we gotta save her. Plus, these bastards got Bertha hid somewhere in this joint. No way am I leaving Granny Batshit’s castle without two of my favorite girls.”
“Good phrasing,” Amy said with a little smile.
“I’m big, but I ain’t completely stupid,” I said, winking.
“That remains to be seen,” Skeeter shot back. “Alright, which way to get your mama?”
“Well, if the exit is that way,” Joe said, pointing in one direction. “Then it stands to reason that we should go the opposite way to go farther into the castle. Although I do want to point out that it might not be our best idea. That healer took care of the worst of my injuries, and I think I’ve regrown all my teeth and toenails, but I’m still pretty beat up.”
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 10
