“Funny as hell,” Skeeter said, his voice weak with pain.
“A real knee-slapper,” Joe agreed. Amy didn’t say anything, just gave me a grin that told me she hadn’t given up hope yet.
Puck blurred out of sight in front of me and reappeared by Amy’s pole, a wicked curved dagger in his hand. He traced the dagger along Amy’s stomach, and I watched the fabric part under the razor edge. “Should I cut her this way first, Bubba? Or would you rather I slice down, then across? It lets the stomach open wider if there’s some vertical space, I’ve found. It really lets the victim take a moment to see their entrails spill onto the floor before them. In my experience, that’s how you get the really good screams.” He put the tip of his knife in the center of her chest, right below her breasts, and started to draw it slowly downward, a tiny line of red welling up as he made just the shallowest cut across my fiancée’s abdomen.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t cuss. I didn’t even pull against my bonds. Instead, I let my blood go ice-cold and made my voice chill to match. “You want to put that knife away now, Shadowborn. You may be the Lord of these Shadowed Lands, but I have the blood of Mab and Oberon in my veins, and if you harm my loved ones, I swear by all the Seasons that I will visit vengeance upon you the likes of which you have never seen.”
It was all bullshit, of course. I mean, I do have their blood, but I can’t do any magic, and if I was going to get out of there at all, much less with all my people and my sister intact, it was going to take a whole lot of luck and a not inconsequential amount of bullshit. I had bullshit in abundance; now it was time to see about making some luck.
Puck whirled on me and blinked back to stand right in front of me. His knife pressed against my bare chest, and he glared at me. “Why shouldn’t I just gut you right now and leave you hanging here with your intestines pooling around your feet to watch me slit the throats of those you love the best?”
That was it. All of a sudden, it all clicked for me. The little bastard wanted an out. He was in over his head, and he wanted somebody to give him a way out of it, a way to get back to where he used to be. He was hurting, and he wanted other people to feel his pain, but he also wanted to find a way back to being Robin Goodfellow, the Puck of the stories, not this crazed monster. And I knew just the out he needed.
“Because there’s no challenge in it,” I said, grinning down at him. “There’s no sport to that, no game.” Puck was a trickster at heart, and if I could give him a game to play, and maybe give him a chance to throw the game to put things back the way they used to be, there was a slim chance he could find his way back to some kind of light.
He looked up at me, a sly smile replacing the nasty leer on his face. “You propose a contest, human? You think there is some challenge that you could possibly best me at, in your weakened state?”
“I think there’s half a dozen things I could kick your ass at, no matter if you chopped off both my arms, both my legs, hung me on a wall, and called me Art. But for now, let’s keep it simple. We’ll just have an old-fashioned fight. Barehanded, you and me. We scrap until one of us knocks the other out or kills him. Winner takes all, right here in your throne room. I beat your ass, we all walk out of here and you never come after me or any of my friends or family again. You beat me, then you get to kill me.”
“I could just kill you right now,” he said, drawing a circle on my stomach with his blade, then poking a couple of tiny holes in me for eyes, then carving a long arc right under the belly button nose. Yeah, the son of a bitch just carved a smiley face on my beer gut. Now I really wanted to kill him.
“You could, but where’s the challenge in that? Aren’t you the Puck? The one Shakespeare wrote about? The one whose exploits terrify faerie children in every Court? Aren’t you the shit-hot trickster that makes Loki look like a schmuck with a joy buzzer and a couple of cheap card tricks?”
He turned away, tapping his knife on his chin and cheek, smearing my blood there as he mumbled to himself. I shifted around, trying to get a little more balance on my tiptoes, and wrapped my hands around the cords binding my wrists together. That took a little strain off my shoulders and transferred my weight to my biceps, which was a tiny bit better, but not much.
“I think…that could be entertaining, human, if just to watch you struggle, and struggle, and then ultimately fail and have to watch everyone you love die anyway…I think, yes, I think…” He spun around, the dagger aimed straight at my gut. “I think I’ll just rip you to pieces and let you hang here while I kill your friends!”
He stabbed for me, but I was ready for it. He was a trickster, a liar, and a general sack of shit. I just needed to give him a chance to double-cross me, and he took it. I grabbed hold of the rope tying my hands together and pulled up with all my strength. I haven’t done a pull-up since summer two-a-days, but when my life depended on it, I hauled every bit of my fat ass straight up, kicked my legs out, and wrapped them around the little bastard’s neck.
“Wha?” he croaked as I rested my legs on his shoulders and pulled him in close. I used him for a boost, lifted my hands over the hook I was hanging from, and pitched myself forward like some super-inflated Rey Mystery. Except I’m no luchador, and I barely managed to get myself rolled over without driving my head into the stone floor. It was clumsy as hell and hurt like a mother, but I managed to flip Puck off me and toss him ten feet across the throne room. He even had the courtesy to leave his dagger behind so I could cut my hands free.
Unfortunately, he left it buried in my right quadricep, and it hurt like a son of a bitch when I yanked it free. It hurt, but with a few seconds of determined sawing and a bunch of re-ruptured blisters on my right hand, I got my hands loose. Puck was still disoriented, so I ran over to where Amy hung from her own hook. I gave her a quick kiss, lifted her off the hook, and pressed the knife into her hands. I saw her eyes widen and knew my respite was over. “I love you. Now free the others and get the hell out of here,” I whispered.
“I love you, too. Kill that pointy-eared bastard,” she replied, and I turned back to face a very angry faerie assassin in his very own throne room.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Puck said, that nasty grin stretching back across his face. “For that, I’m going to hurt you a lot, and make it last for years.”
“I don’t know if you missed it, shithead,” I said. “But I’m not a nice person. So come on, little man, let’s get this shit over with. Just like the movie said, I’m here to chew gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum.”
Puck blurred out of sight, then reappeared right in front of me. He threw a kick at my injured leg, and it was on like Donkey Kong.
14
I let him land the kick, right in the big muscle where he’d buried a knife not a minute before. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but I clamped my right hand around his ankle and grabbed him around the throat with my left. I picked him up and spun in a half circle, building momentum as I slammed him to the stone floor flat on his back. He held his head up, so I didn’t get the full concussion, but I think I heard a rib crack, so I took that as a partial win. He wriggled out of my grasp, trying to run away, but I limped after him.
With his jacked ribs, he wasn’t nearly as fast as he was a few seconds ago, and it seemed like he couldn’t teleport either. He came to that realization pretty quick and spun around, launching himself at my face like a psychotic spider monkey. He jammed a thumb into my eye, and I flung him off to the floor again.
Puck was a nimble bastard, I’ll give him that. He managed to roll out of my throw a lot better than I ever could, and he pulled another dagger from somewhere in a boot, or maybe up a sleeve. I couldn’t tell if he had anything strapped to his arms under the flowing sleeves of his billowy black pirate shirt, but it didn’t matter. All I needed to focus on was the blade gleaming in the magical torchlight, the blade that he waved back and forth as the little bastard advanced on me.
“Is that supposed to scare me, shithead?” I laughed, sounding crazy ev
en to myself. “Come on, you little bastard! I’ve fought dragons, redcaps, giant spiders, and reanimated skeletons. You think a faerie with a knife is enough to worry me? Bring it, you worthless little assclown.”
Unfortunately, my bravado didn’t seem to worry Puck at all, and he did bring it. He brought “it” in the form of a thrown knife right at my chest. I managed to twist so he caught me in the shoulder, but I couldn’t get completely out of the way. I mean, I’m no Bruce Lee, and this wasn’t a movie. Knives move fast, and I’m a big target. I got lucky, though, and the knife pierced my shoulder but didn’t bury itself there. I bled a bit but still had a little use of the arm, and the bleeding wasn’t a gusher, so he missed the artery.
I turned around and picked up the knife, then dropped to one knee and spun around as he charged again. Surprising no one, the faerie assassin had another knife in his hand, and I was starting to run out of places to imagine he was pulling them from. At least not really uncomfortable places, anyway. I caught his overhand strike with my left arm, but that arm had a fresh knife wound for him to jam a thumb into, and I screamed like a soccer mom at a Backstreet Boys concert. My shriek caught him off guard, and I was able to bury my knife in the side of his thigh, giving us a matching set. I twisted the blade, then pulled it out, falling backward as Puck slammed an elbow into my nose, filling my vision with white stars and sending blood pouring down my face.
I slammed flat on my back with a broken nose, a stab wound in my leg, another one in my shoulder, and acid burns all over my right hand and arm. Puck grinned down at me and dropped a knee into my gut, then stabbed down at my throat.
So I made sure my throat wasn’t there when his knife landed. I clubbed him in the side of the head with my weakened left arm and rolled to the right. That let me push off with my uninjured leg, giving me enough strength to throw the faerie off me and give me a second’s breathing room.
But just a second, because Puck was out for blood. He rolled over and kept rolling, spinning to his feet, and throwing his blade at me. Lucky for me, I kept on rolling too, so all he did was score a bloody line across my back that I hardly noticed through all the other pain I was in.
I scrambled to my feet, wiping tears from my eyes and breathing heavily through my open mouth. Puck reached around to the small of his back and brought his hands out with two more daggers, making me really wonder where that sheath was and how many daggers he could fit up there. I didn’t have long to think about it because he darted in to me, blades and feet flying. I checked one low kick with my left leg and got a slash across my thigh for my troubles.
I responded by snatching the front of his shirt with my left hand and pulling him in close. When he was pressed up close to me, with his face just under my chin, I sucked in a big breath, pressed my right thumb to one nostril, and blew a jet of bloody snot right into his face. I learned that trick playing against Alabama. Nothing freaks a quarterback out more than a face full of someone else’s boogers and blood.
It works on faerie assassins, too, in case you were wondering. Puck’s hands immediately went to his face, and I landed two hard shots to the side of his head before he lifted a knee into my balls and had to let him go.
Puck danced back, hands flailing at his face, and I took the momentary respite to put my thumbs on either side of my nose and crunch it back into place. It hurt like a mother, but I could kinda breathe through it again. I blew another gobbet of bloody snot to the floor and turned to Puck. It was time to finish this shit.
He must have had the same idea because he flipped the dagger from his left hand at me, then leapt after it, his right-hand blade held low and ready to cut me from nuts to neck. I got crazy lucky and swatted the knife out of the air, then tangled with the tricksy bastard as he slammed into me. I got my right wrist between his knife and my ballsack and punched him in the eye with my left fist. I didn’t have enough room to get much on it, but it doesn’t take much when you’re putting your knuckle in someone’s eye. Puck danced back, but I stayed with him. I was tired and hurting all over. If I let him get room to maneuver, I was dead, and that meant everybody I cared about was dead. That wasn’t gonna happen. Not today.
“NOT. TODAY!” I bellowed, and dug down deep for the last shreds of strength I had. I bull-rushed him, and this time, he didn’t get out of the way fast enough. I caught him around the chest and picked him up, driving him backward toward the stone wall. I slammed him into the wall like I was trying to run right through the bricks, and I heard a lot of ribs break on impact.
“Take that, you little shit,” I growled into his face. Then it hit me…he was smiling. What the hell?
“I will, you ignorant mortal. I will take it, and I will heal…eventually. But will you?”
That’s when I felt it. The fire in my side, spreading from just below my armpit up and down my right ribcage. The shortness of breath, the tightness in my chest…the son of a bitch had stabbed me. I looked down, and sure enough, there it was. Buried in my side, angled up through my ribcage, was the hilt of his last dagger. I couldn’t see anything but the hilt, that’s how far he had it lodged into my chest, and judging by how hard it was getting to breathe, he pierced a lung.
I stepped back, my hand falling to my side, and I dropped to one knee, then both. I couldn’t make my legs work. This was bad. Really, really bad. I knew enough not to pull the knife out because it might be the only thing keeping that lung inflated, but that was about all I could keep straight in my head.
Puck grinned down at me, then snatched the dagger from my left hand. His movements were halting, and he was panting from the pain of his crushed ribs, but he lifted the blade over his head and smiled a sadistic Hannibal Lecter smile. “You were a worthy opponent, Bubba. One of the best I ever faced. But you can’t best the Lord of Shadows in his own domain. You are, after all, just a part-faerie, part-human mongrel, son of neither realm. You had no hope against one of the true Masters of the Fae.”
I watched him take a deep breath and closed my eyes before the knife came down. Then there was a loud crack, and I heard something clatter to the floor beside my knees. I opened my eyes, and Puck stood there over me, his smile gone and a neat round hole in the center of his chest. I watched as two more holes appeared, followed almost instantly by two more cracks, and Puck staggered back, hit the wall that was now covered in blood from the exit wounds, and slid slowly down to sit in a spreading puddle of his own blood, his eyes wide and staring at me in amazement.
“Wha…?” he managed to say, then I heard the quiet slap of hiking boots on stone come up behind me. Amy put a hand on my shoulder and glared down at the dying faerie, my Judge revolver still smoking a little in her right hand. “He might be a mongrel, but he’s my mongrel. And I’m all human, with a pistol full of cold iron for your sorry ass.” She leaned over and pushed Puck on the shoulder. He slumped to the side, stone cold dead.
Amy knelt beside me. “Don’t you die on me, Bubba. You hear me?”
I grinned at her. “I don’t…think I get to make that call this time, darling,” I said.
“The hell you say, you giant redneck son of a bitch. You suck it up, you great big pansy, because we have to get back home so you can marry me and we can grow old together and teach our babies how to hunt monsters.”
I locked in on that word, “babies,” and clung to it like a life raft. I wasn’t going to die in Fairyland. Not at the hands of a second-rate Shakespeare character. No damn way. I sucked in as much air as my damaged lungs would hold and straightened up. I couldn’t stand, but I wasn’t going to fall over, either. Probably not in the next thirty seconds. “Get everybody over here. Now,” I panted.
Amy waved Joe and Skeeter over, and a few seconds later, they huddled down, Joe carrying Nitalia and laying her on the floor next to me. I put a hand on her leg, everybody else touched me, and I clenched my fist, activating Oberon’s magic ring and hoping this wasn’t just another damn faerie trick. I felt the magic swirl around us, then a bright light engulfed me, and I
passed out. Again. This was really starting to become a habit in this dumbass dimension.
Epilogue
I woke up not dead, so that was a good start. I was also butt-naked in an unfamiliar bed, so apparently unconscious me had a lot better time in Fairyland that conscious me did. I sat up, noticing that I didn’t hurt nearly enough for the injuries I sustained, so I assumed that either somebody slapped some faerie healing on me, or I’d been in a coma for about a year. I looked down at my right arm, and since the hair was still missing where the acid burned it all off, I figured it was faerie healing.
Once I’d been awake for about thirty seconds, I realized what every guy realizes almost immediately upon waking—I had to pee like a racehorse. I swung my legs around, threw off the blankets, and stood up, looking for my pants. I found a reasonable facsimile of underwear and pants laying on a chair and shrugged into a loose shirt that lay next to them. Then I started looking around the bedroom for a bathroom, or at least a chamber pot. I opened a door in the near wall and found a bathroom.
That’s when it hit me. This was my bedroom. And my bathroom. I took care of business, then took a better look at the clothes I threw on. These weren’t some faerie recreations of my clothes, made out of magic and a mediocre understanding of just how big I really am; these were my favorite jeans, my Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt with the hole in the left armpit, and even my boxers.
I walked back out into my bedroom and looked around. Sure as shit, that was my bed, my chair, my chest of drawers that I’d had since I was a teenager, complete with the band stickers I tried unsuccessfully to peel off when I got out of college. I was home. Hell, I even saw Bertha lying on the chair, with my sword standing in the corner by the dresser. I felt the emotions well up inside me, and I sat down on the edge of my bed, overwhelmed. I sat there for a couple of minutes, just taking it all in, trying to put everything together.
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 37
