“No, Bubba, the idea is poop.”
“Well, why don’t you tell us about it, and we can decide if it’s a shitty idea or not? Or maybe we can polish the turd a little bit.” I wasn’t really sure why Skeeter hated his idea all of a sudden, but if it let me make poop jokes and Amy didn’t slap me for it, I was gonna go as far as they’d let me.
“Oh, trust me, it’s a shitty idea,” Skeeter said. “Just not how you think. Mrs. B., call the guard. Tell him you need the facilities.”
Mama’s face lit up like a three-week-old Christmas tree falling on a lit match and she walked over to the door. “Guard! Guard! I require assistance!” She put on her snooty court voice, like she used when we were at Mab’s psychotic dinner party.
I leaned down to Skeeter. “I don’t get it.”
Skeeter grinned up at me. “Your mother has to use the bathroom.”
“What’s that got to do with us getting out of here?”
“The guards will have to let her out of the cell to go to a bathroom befitting her status as the daughter of the Consort, Oberon.”
“You mean king,” I said.
“No, he means Consort,” Mama said from the door. “The Fae are always ruled by queens. We are a matriarchy.”
“Does that mean that male faeries can’t get their birth control covered by insurance and all the women leaders write laws about how they have to handle their reproductive organs?” Amy said with a smirk.
Mama laughed. “No, it means that silliness like that is completely ignored. We have more pressing things to do than measure our genitalia. Besides, it’s hard to whip out your vagina and lay it on a table for comparison.”
Amy laughed too, and I was about to say something to defend my gender when a guard came to the door and saved me from getting my ass kicked by my mother and my girlfriend.
“What do you want?” the guard growled. I noticed that he stayed well out of arm’s reach on the other side of the door.
“I require use of a water closet,” Mama said, keeping that imperious tone to her voice.
“I left you a bucket.”
“That is what you brought our food in. It is also the only bucket we have to drink out of.”
“It’s a dungeon, not an inn. Maybe think about your preference in accommodations before you commit treason next time.”
I saw Mama’s back stiffen. “That would be challenging since we have not committed treason this time, much less any other time. Now get this door open and take me to the facilities! And I do not expect to use the commoners’ toilets. Take me to the bath chambers befitting the daughter of Oberon himself!”
Even from the middle of the cell where I was, I could see the shock on the face of the guard. He snapped to attention, like he’d suddenly remembered who he was dealing with, and snatched up a ring of keys from a nearby table. He switched into full-grovel mode as he fumbled with the keys and opened the door, leading Mama out into the main room of the dungeon. “My apologies, Your Highness, I…I forgot myself. I will escort you to the facilities myself…I mean, I will…I mean—”
His fumbling for words cut off with a clang as Mama grabbed the front of his tunic and slammed his face into the bars of the cell door. He slumped to the ground, and Mama snatched his sword free as the other guard started in her direction, confusion all over his face.
“I thought you had to go…” the guard said, then shut up as he looked down at the sword point at his throat.
“They don’t put the top of the intellectual heap on guard duty down here, do they?” Amy asked, pushing the cell door open. “Grab your buddy, drag him into the cell, then hand me your sword.”
The guard did as he was told, except I took his sword and sword belt from him as I exited the cell. Me, Skeeter, and Joe stood along one wall watching as the ladies did all the heavy lifting. Mama locked the cell doors, then snapped the key off in the lock. “That is for speaking rudely to a member of the royal family. Enjoy your bucket, asshole.”
It amazed me how quick Mama could flip-flop from faerie princess to redneck mother in her dialogue, but thinking more on it, she had always been a remarkable woman. We turned to head up the stairs, Amy in the lead with the sword she claimed from me, and me bringing up the rear because nobody’d be able to see around me on the winding staircase up to the main floor anyway. We crept up the stone steps, worn smooth from centuries of booted feet, and Amy pushed open the heavy wooden door at the top of the stairs.
Then she froze as half a dozen guards leveled halberds at her. She called over her shoulder, “I think they were expecting us…”
3
“I wish I could say that I didn’t believe you capable of such behavior, but you were always a willful child,” Oberon said, pacing the dais in front of the royal audience chamber. I was a little uncomfortable, not just because we were all lined up kneeling on a cold stone floor and my knees ain’t what they used to be. Nah, part of it was memory. The last time I was in this room, Titania sentenced me to fight her cousin, an asshole faerie bandit I called Scar, to the death.
It worked out okay since I shot his ass deader than hell and rescued the kidnapped human girls I went to Fairyland to rescue, but it was still not my favorite moment to dwell on. At least that time, Oberon had been on my side, sorta. This time I wasn’t sure where he stood. I mean, he stood on a raised platform about ten feet in front of me, but I didn’t know what he wanted out of our meeting. I pretty much just wanted to either sit down or stand up.
“Screw this,” I said, getting to my feet. One of the faeries knights came over and pointed his pike at me, so I took it away from him, snapped it over my knee, and tossed it to the ground. “Kiss my ass, Peaseblossom,” I said, stopping him dead in his tracks with a glare. “I’m too old and too fat for this kneeling shit. My knees hurt, and I gotta pee. Now you can either escort me to the facilities, or I can snatch that stupid helmet off your head and fill it full of homemade Mountain Dew, if you know what I mean.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he had absolutely no idea what I meant. I reckon there ain’t many Pepsi distributors in Fairyland. “I mean, I’m gonna piss in your hat if you don’t show me where the crapper is.” I let out a sigh. Metaphorical threats lose a lot of their oomph when you gotta explain them.
The knight looked to Oberon, then back to me, then back to Oberon, then back to me. I decided to step in before the little idiot gave himself whiplash. “Oberon, quit jerking him around and tell the little goober to take me to the can.” Oberon waved a hand, and the knight made a “follow me” gesture. I stepped through a little door in the far wall, took care of business, and double-checked that I still had my Judge revolver in a holster tucked into the back of my belt. I loaded it with .45 long rounds for this trip, all cast in cold iron just for this occurrence. I tucked the little gun back under the tail of my long-sleeved shirt and stepped out of the potty.
There was a line waiting for me when I opened the door, every last one of them dancing like they had ants in their underwear. I reckon when I stood up and demanded bathroom privileges, it opened the floodgates, so to speak. A dispirited Oberon sat on one of the thrones on the dais, his intimidating appearance completely wasted on a bunch of humans who all had to pee too bad to notice him being all threatening and shit. Plus, let’s face it, I’ve dealt with a lot worse things than a pissed-off faerie king. I’ve fought trolls, vampire ballerinas, naked sasquatches, and seen Amy before her morning coffee. I ain’t easily intimidated anymore.
While the rest of the crew took care of business in the well-appointed washroom, I walked over to where Oberon sat looking all glum. “So, I reckon you’re my grandpa,” I said, looking him up and down.
He turned to me and gave me a once-over. It ain’t like he’d never seen me before. Hell, when he was disguised as Oakroot, we traveled halfway across the Summer Court together. But this was the first time both of us knew what we really were to one another. Or, I reckon, the first chance we had to try and figure out what we
were to one another. “I suppose I am your grandfather. Had I known that when we first met, things may have gone differently.”
“I doubt it,” I said. His eyebrows went up, but I went on. “From what I’ve seen in my time in Fairyland, and everything I’ve read about y’all over the years, you’re a bunch of tricksters who can’t resist getting one over on somebody, no matter what it costs. So I reckon you still would have played the harmless old merchant. Sure, maybe you would have stepped in earlier when I was dealing with Scar, but I kinda doubt it. If Mab’s attitudes toward humans are anything like the way the rest of y’all feel, that is.”
Oberon smiled, a kinda wistful thing that only touched his eyes from a distance. “My former wife’s views on humans and dalliances with them are one of the reasons I left the Winter Court. She became increasingly jealous of the few human maids we had, convinced they were trying to lure my eye from her. She even went so far as to have one girl flogged for flirting with me, when all she did was bring the clean laundry to my quarters.”
“Well?” I asked, giving him the “don’t bullshit a bullshitter” look. I had little confidence in the fidelity of a man who left one faerie queen to go marry another faerie queen. Gramps was a good-looking dude, too. He had “player” written all over him.
“I had no interaction with the child, other than to take laundry from her, I swear! There may have been one or two…or more…serving women in the palace that I had relations with, but that poor child was not one of them. Mab had her flogged for a conversation about a tear in my tunic, nothing more!”
“Yeah, Granny’s crazier than a shithouse rat. I found that out firsthand.” I told him about the dance-off, and the tournament to keep Mama from marrying some jackhole, and everything else that we’d dealt with since we traveled to Faerie. “And now we get here and we end up tossed in the dungeon. I got to tell you, Gramps, I’m damn tired of Fairyland jail cells.”
“Then perhaps, Grandson, you should stop antagonizing people with the authority to throw you in jail,” he said.
“Easier said than done,” I replied, with a pretty solid sense of deja vú. “Now what?” I asked once everybody gathered back in front of the dais. “We ain’t going back to that dungeon without a fight, and I can damn sure guarantee that your boys here don’t want to throw down with us. We might just be a bunch of humans—” Mama cleared her throat, and I gave her a little nod. “We might just be mostly a bunch of humans, but we will take a toll on your little cluster of guards here, and I don’t think you’ve got all that many of them to spare.”
“What makes you say that, Bubba?” Oberon asked.
“It’s been a few months since I was here, but I recognize at least half these boys as asses I whooped on my last trip through. If you have plenty of guards, anybody who got the shit kicked out of them by a human would be long gone. So, since they’re still here, I reckon there’s a soldier shortage in the Summer Court. So, you ain’t gonna be as likely to throw them away as you might have been once upon a time.”
“Nice,” Amy said with a smirk.
“I gotta get the jokes in when I can,” I muttered.
Oberon stroked his chin, which I realized looked a lot more thoughtful when he did it, despite him not having a single hair on his face, and me having a beard worthy of ZZ Top. He just looked more prone to deep thinking, I reckon. After a few seconds, he nodded. “You are correct, Bubba. We do not have a surplus of guards, and thus we are loathe to throw them away upon a useless endeavor. You would certainly fall to their greater numbers, but there would be little to win, and much to lose even in a minor scuffle with such as yourselves. So you shall be assigned guest quarters here in the castle of the day, and at tonight’s reception honoring our daughter, we shall bestow upon you a great boon.” He looked up at the guard standing behind me, holding his broken spear in two hands. “Corporal Mathis, please escort my daughter, my grandson, and their companions to the guest quarters in the East Wing.”
“Your Majesty? I’m a sergeant,” the faerie stammered.
“No, Mathis. You were a sergeant. Then my grandson disarmed you without so much as breaking a sweat. Now you are a corporal.” Mathis shrunk in on himself a little and waved toward the door in the back of the hall.
“And Bubba?” Oberon called as we turned to go.
“Yeah, Gramps?”
“Clothes will be laid out for you. Feel free not to bring the gun in your belt to dinner. Here we consider it rude to bring weapons to the table.”
I turned away, a little surprised that he noticed. Maybe Gramps was a little more on the ball than I thought. “Where I come from, we consider it just paying attention,” I said.
“What do you expect to happen at a state dinner and reception, Robbie?” Mama asked.
“Well, last time I went to dinner at one of my faerie grandparent’s house, I ended up fighting for my life against a troll. Whatever Titania has planned, it can’t be any worse than that, right?”
I knew the second the words passed my lips that we were all so incredibly screwed.
4
The “guest quarters” we moved to after our little chat with Oberon had about as much in common with a normal spare bedroom as a Motel 6 has with the Ritz. I walked into a huge parlor, with doors leading off to four bedchambers, one for Mama, one for Amy and me, one for Joe, and one for Skeeter.
Skeeter took one look in his room, picked up his pack and the clothes laid out on his bed, and promptly moved all his crap into the room with Joe. “I don’t care if he’s your good fairy godfather, Bubba, I don’t trust that man. Hell, I don’t trust anybody here in Fairyland. I feel like Malcolm X at a Klan rally already in this lily-white hellhole, and you can’t tell me that there’s ever been a horror movie where the black dude doesn’t die first.”
“Deep Blue Sea,” I said, naming the movie that seemed to be the theme of my week.
“Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten by a damn shark, Bubba!” Skeeter shot back.
“Yeah, but LL Cool J lives,” Joe pointed out.
“You ain’t helping. Whose damn uncle are you, anyway?”
“Well, honestly Skeeter, with as many times as your mama said she was going to adopt Bubba, I think…” Joe let his words trail off. Skeeter let out a humph that only a mid-thirties Southern black gay man can produce and stomped off to change for supper.
The last thing I heard from him before he slammed the door was “And I ain’t wearing these damn pantyhose! They bind up my balls!”
I had to agree with him there, and my leg hair got all caught up in the hose, too. So I skipped the hose and the slippers for this welcoming ball, as did Joe and Skeeter. Amy and Mama decked themselves out in full faerie princess regalia, complete with fresh flowers in their hair. Amy looked spectacular out in a yellow and green gown that complemented her skin tone and blond hair, making her even more gorgeous than usual. I almost didn’t notice the knife tucked into her corset when I hugged her.
“That’s new,” I said.
“Our last formal dining experience in this world was a little more adventurous than I expected.”
“Adventurous?” I chuckled. “Baby, Thai food is adventurous. A tournament to the death against trolls and goblins is downright exciting.”
“Well, I think having a cold iron blade at hand might come in handy.”
Mama looked fantastic, but still somehow colder, in her rich gown of green and amber. Maybe it was her dark hair, with a few white streaks running through the black, or maybe it was something about her makeup, but even in all her Summer finery, there was a distinct touch of Winter chill about her ensemble. “Mama, you look fantastic, but I think you might have a little Mab showing,” I said.
“I intend to, Robbie,” Mama said with a smile. “It is important for me to show the Summer Court that I am not intimidated by their magic or their strength, even here in their center of power.”
“And here I thought I was being a smartass wearing jeans instead of pantyhose to the dinner. Y’
all are making all kind of political statements, and I’m just trying to find a place to hide my gun where Oberon won’t find it.”
“That’s easy, Bubba,” Joe said. “Give it to your mother. Oberon won’t dare touch her without her permission, and he’ll be honor-bound to gut anyone else who does. She could hide almost anything in those skirts, too.” He wasn’t wrong. Mama’s dress billowed out around her legs in a mile or more of fabric hanging in folds that looked like the fronds of a weeping willow tree. I thought about it for a second, then went back into my room and grabbed the Judge.
“Here, Mama. Can you tuck this under your dress? I’d give you Bertha, but she’s liable to make you walk funny.”
“Thank you, Robbie. I do think that a ten-pound handgun might be a little much to strap to my leg, but this should be fine.” She disappeared into her bedroom for a minute, and when she came back, the gun was nowhere to be seen. I figured it was kinda like asking how a woman fit so much crap into a purse—just way safer never to ask.
Once we were all dressed and all our weapons hidden, I opened the door and told Corporal Mathis we were ready for our next torture session. I mean, formal dinner. Same thing.
A state dinner in the Summer Court wasn’t all that different from a state dinner in the Winter Court. Dozens of dishes I didn’t recognize littered the table, there was no meat anywhere, no booze, and I was pretty sure everybody there wanted to murder me. So…it sucked.
I sat next to Mama at the high table, while Skeeter, Amy, and Joe were tucked away at one of the lower tables near the back of the hall. I felt pretty sure they still had a clear line of sight in case I did something stupid, or maybe just for when I did something stupid. The plate in front of me was loaded with a bunch of different kinds of fruit and berries, and some leaves of something that looked enough like poison ivy that I was pretty sure I didn’t want to eat it. I moved food around on my plate while everybody else ate, until finally Mama leaned over to me.
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 21
