by James R Tuck
The tears cut down her cheeks in black makeup stained lines. “Then he told me he was going to sell me to an ogre.”
* * *
“Wait.”
The door in front of us was solid wood on a porch with an overhanging roof. Dolly had her key an inch from the deadbolt. She looked over but didn't speak. Her heels raised her to eye level with me. My power hummed, wide open like it always was back then. When her hand got within six inches of that deadbolt it lit up like a neon sign in my head. The taste of rotten clover filled my mouth, dank and fetid. My skin buzzed, the air electric, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
Something weird was up with that door.
My hand tightened on the crowbar I held, rust twisting off into my palm. The Desert Eagle .357 I carried at the time hung under my arm but I only had the one clip of silver bullets that were in it and it wasn't even full.
Silver bullets are expensive.
I only had eight of them left.
Besides, silver can only hurt Elves not kill them, and with their freakshow healing ability it's not much more than a nuisance. It's better than copper, brass, or bronze which, to a fae, are like feathers to a human. But iron . . . iron can kill them. Something about it not only hurts them, but doubles the damage done and breaks their magick.
History lesson: the Fae are the reason the world has steel. Way back, before history was more than some stories passed down around campfires, the Fae used to keep humans as pets. When we discovered iron we discovered their kryptonite and we put an end to that shit, driving them into the mists of time.
It took generations of them hiding, staying out of sight completely, for us to forget and let our guard down. Then slowly, like the sneaky, manipulative bastards they are, they taught us how to make iron into steel, changing the metal, diluting it and making it damn near harmless for them.
Hence the crowbar in my hand.
It came with the Comet, the lever for the old-style ratchet jack that hooks under the bumper to lift the car so you can fix a flat. It was four feet of rusty, blackened iron, just perfect for whoopin' some Elf ass.
And best of all, it cost me nothing.
Right in my budget.
I pushed Dolly behind me and leaned, moving my face slowly toward the door. The closer I got the more I could see the wood grain swirling under the paint. My face began to tingle as it passed the six-inch mark. The hair follicles of my goatee puckered, wiry whiskers standing out like I was in a field of static electricity. The nasty taste in my mouth curdled and began trying to crawl down my throat. I pulled back as my vision went blurry from watery eyes. The cloying, sickly-sweet stench of poppies came with me.
Magic.
Faeries have magic that's different from the magick that witches use. Instead of brokering with demons for power, faeries just have supernatural shit inside them, almost like God gave them a different set of physics to work with. It's not intrinsically evil the way witchcraft and magick are, but that doesn't make it harmless. The door had been warded with some kind of elf magic bullshit. It might just warn this Mael asshole that somebody was outside, but it felt deadlier, more insidious, like the door was painted in cobra venom.
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking. Let me see your keys.” She handed them over. They were a strung together monstrosity of keychains and knick knacks. Seriously, they looked like a jellyfish rolled in bits of crap. “Which one is your house key?” She pointed at a plain brass key that looked like any other key in the world. My fingers closed on it as I pushed my power down my arm.
Nothing.
The key was just an ordinary key. I was hoping it had been spelled to open the door through the ward, but I couldn't feel any magic off it at all. I stood there trying to figure out a way past the ward when a muffled scream from inside the house tore the decision away from me.
“Stay here!”
I slammed the crowbar against the door. Purple energy blasted back at me crackling with white veins of magic as the ward broke. It slammed into me like a scouring wind, chafing my skin raw in a split second. My goatee curled as it singed and burnt. The brunt of the blast hit me ankle to crown. Dolly behind me gave a cry of pain as the edges of the blast brushed by her.
Swinging the crowbar, I smashed it into the door again. It thunked, just iron against wood, the magic broken and gone. Leaning back, I drove my boot against the door by the knob. The wood buckled with a sharp CRACK! I kicked again, leaning forward as I did, driving my bodyweight and mass into the weak spot. The door collapsed at the knob, doorjamb splintering as it swung wide open. I didn't hesitate, pounding into the foyer. The walls were covered in pictures, coats hung on a rack to the left by the door. At the end of the hall I could see the kitchen, bright and yellow.
The screams cut off sharply.
They came from the top of the stairs.
Two at a time I bounded up. My thighs burned through the adrenaline buzz, left hand clamping and pulling on the bannister to get more speed. Fire boiled in my lungs as my feet hit carpet. I slowed the closer to the top I got, everything being robbed by the effort of running up those damned stairs. With a heave on the bannister I stumbled to the top.
To the left was an open bathroom. It looked empty except for a stack of boxes in the tub. Spinning right on my foot, I turned just as a door opened at the end of the upstairs hallway.
“What the hell is going on out here?” The man coming through the door wasn't a man at all. He looked like a man except for the pointed ears. About six foot and slender, he wore a dirty white tanktop over a pair of green boxers. Ropey muscle stretched over his frame, layered in a way that marked him as inhuman. Hair long, wispy, and white hung to his nipples in a straight sheet. White crystals glittered across his upper lip. I could see them sparkle from down the hall.
Great.
A coked up Elvish prince, just what my day was missing.
I didn't answer, moving toward him. The crowbar slid down my hand until it fully extended in my grip. Two giant strides brought me right up on him. I swung the iron bar in a wide arc, pulling the weight through the air, whipping it at him in an overhand swing. His hands flashed up. The crowbar slammed into his palms, vibrating a shock up my arm. His fingers closed on the iron bar and he yanked. Inhuman strength jerked me off my feet, tossing me over to crash into the wall. My raw skin exploded in a firestorm as the carpet burned across my arms and cheek.
I scrambled to my feet as the Elf began screaming. He flung the crowbar away. It spun lazily through the air, banging against the bannister and disappearing down the stairs. He held his hands in front of him, staring at them in horror. Smoke rose from his palms and a clear, yellow fluid dripped off to soak into the carpet at his feet. Light blue rippled up his arms, chasing through his skin cells, becoming an electric indigo. His face pulled into an angular mask, all slanted tear-shaped eyes and sharp feral teeth.
“You hit me with IRON? You asshole! That shit burns!” He looked down at his arms. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a glamour?”
“Don't know. Don't fucking care.” I took one step toward him, hand moving toward my gun, when my head was wrapped in a crushing, suffocating darkness. Pain drove into my skull from all sides.
Pressure.
Intense.
Fucking.
Pressure.
The plates of my skull made grinding noises that drown out my hearing. The darkness drug me backwards, lifting me off my feet. I had one second of relief that rushed over me as the pressure was suddenly cut off. One second before I crashed into the wall again.
The world went red and something drove into my spine with a hard line of pain.
Move! Get moving now! If you stay here you're dead!
I was in the wall, sheetrock collapsed around me. Dry, white dust sucked all the moisture out of my nose and mouth, tasting like mica. Pushing with my arms and legs, I pulled myself out of the hole, using the 2x4 stud that tried to break my back as leverage.
In front of me was an ogre.
A naked ogre.
His lumpy head brushed the ceiling, gray skin covered with wiry black hair like a pelt and pebbled in dark red streaks that looked raw. Thick slabs of grotesque muscle covered him, swollen and jumbled. He was obscenely naked, genitals completely inhuman and looking like a cross between a food processor and a tree stump.
Shut up, I wasn't looking that close.
His voice was smooth and clear through the six inch tusks jutting from an underslung jaw. “Good. Sport and a snack. I was feeling peckish.” Knobby knuckled hands the size of hubcaps, the same hands that had clamped on my head, flexed in the air in front of him.
My eyes flicked around the room, looking for something I could use as a weapon. He'd thrown me into the wall of the bedroom that the elf had come out of. It was the master bedroom and it was huge, easily thirty foot square. Most of the furniture had been pushed to the walls, the center of the room dominated by a gigantic, round bed.
With a naked, hysterical girl chained to it.
She was curled up, knees pulled up by her face. Her hair hung in a mess, the cheap nightgown she wore was ripped, tattering around skinny legs. If she was a day over fifteen then I'm the Pope.
I'm not the fucking Pope.
A camera on a tripod stood between me and the bed, red light blinking on top of it.
My blood ran cold. I stepped between the bed and the ogre. The skin on the back of my head tight and hot as anger acid boiled in the pit of my stomach. My gun was out and in my hand, pointed at the ogre.
“What're you supposed to be? Some kinda hero?”
The Desert Eagle answered with two pulls of the trigger, bucking back against my hand, spitting twin .357 Magnum bullets at the ogre's head. He turned, throwing his arm over his face. The bullets struck, ripping gray flesh like a buzzsaw through wet clay. Rust-colored blood spurted out of the holes and a howl of pain tore from his tusked mouth.
Pushing off my foot I strode toward him, finger pulling the trigger four more times. four more bullets pounded into his side, rupturing the skin in a cloudburst of fluid. It splashed on me soaking my shirt. The ogre swung, fist clenched like a wrecking ball. Time became sticky, clinging to me, slowing everything down in a rush of adrenaline. I twisted under the blow that would have taken my head off my shoulders, ducking under and coming up behind it.
Lashing out, I whacked the barrel of the Desert Eagle across his cheekbone and mouth. The front sight snagged going across one of his tusks, pulling the gun forward, trigger to finger. The gun went off, blasting a silver jacketed hollow-point into the ogre's eyesocket.
The effect was an instantaneous explosion of gore.
My bones vibrated as the ogre roared. Agony pounded into my ribs as its giant fist caught me in the side, lifting me up and driving me away from it. I fell back through the doorway to the bedroom, smacking the side of my face against the doorjamb. It flashed hot with a scraping tear of pain. Everything went red, then yellow.
The world came back to me in a fuzz of black static.
I was in the upstairs hallway on my back. The ogre stood in the doorway. The door hung by the bottom hinge, splayed against the wall. The door frame buckled around the ogre as he stumbled through, monstrously muscled girth not meant to fit. It had one humongous hand clamped over its eye, the other eye pinned me with a baleful glare.
The damned thing was still coming after me.
I turned, looking for the gun that had fallen out of my hand. My eyes landed on the crowbar. It jutted from the drywall at the top of the stairs like some white-trash version of Excalibur. I went for it.
The floor shook as the ogre ran toward me. Scrambling, I dove for it. Hand outstretched, my fingers closed around the end. Shoulder tucked, I rolled to my feet and came up holding the iron bar.
The ogre was right on top of me, eyesocket already healing like wax unmelting. It's tusks dripped ogre slobber in thick ropes of sticky saliva.
I lashed out, kerranging the crowbar off its skull.
The ogre dropped like it had been clotheslined. The skin swelled on its forehead in the shape of the crowbar, one long, egg-yolk of a blister. The skin around it smoked and crackled and sizzled like bacon.
Stepping over the ogre I looked down at it. It's squarish skull had collapsed on the side I struck it, the crowbar finishing what the silver bullet had started. The massive fae made low mewling sounds in his throat. I raised the crowbar over my head.
The ogre was crying.
I lowered the crowbar.
It looked pathetic. Tears streamed down one side of its face, lips pulled down in a grimace of pain.
“Hello?” There was a pause. “Are you still there?”
The girl chained to the bed.
My mind flashed on her, huddled in the corner of the bed. Her torn negligee, the terror on her face. The camera.
My eyes flicked down to the ogre's nakedness.
The crowbar sounded like a bat through a cantaloupe when I brought it down on the ogre's skull.
I kept at it until it just thumped wetly against the carpet.
The iron bar was slick in my hand, from greasy palm sweat or ogre blood I couldn't tell you. The girl in the room still called out. I began walking toward the room to unchain her.
Then I had an elf to kill.
* * *
I found him in the kitchen, wrestling with Dolly. She'd lost her heels and her platinum curl updo was destroyed and going in all directions. He'd lost his glamour and was now completely blue-skinned. His white hair looked like a wig next to his indigo skin tone. Intricate tattoos curled and swirled on his upper arms and shoulders. They glowed with a golden light, making them even more surreal. He had one slender hand around Dolly's throat, her face turning purple.
I stepped inside, tanker boots silent on the parquet floor of the kitchen. “Let her go.”
His head jerked toward me, lips pulled back in a snarl of tiny, sharp teeth. His eyes had grown huge, set far apart and sunk into his skull, features taking on a cat-like quality to them, high, wide cheekbones, short jaw with a small chin, wide, flat forehead. The sharply defined muscles in his chest flexed like steel cables on a suspension bridge as he jerked Dolly against him, one arm across her chest. She gasped hoarsely, dragging air into her tortured throat. There were already dark spots where his fingers had bruised her.
“Leave me alone or I'll really hurt the bitch.”
I started walking toward him. “Go ahead. It won't do you any good.” I swung the crowbar at the end of my arm. The blood and gore splattered across my arms and chest had begun to dry, making the skin pull.
The Elf stumbled back a step, dragging Dolly with him. “What? I'm serious here!”
“So am I. Go ahead and hurt her, hell she's taken it before. I bet she'd gladly do it one last time just to watch me take this crowbar upside your head. Isn't that right Dolly?”
Her voice was low and choked as she forced it out. “Anything it takes to see you kick his ass.”
I kept walking, swinging the crowbar widely in front of me, letting the weight of it stretch out my shoulder, warming up like a batter in a cage.
“See there, Legolas, she hates you so much that she's not afraid of you.”
“Whatever she's paying you I'll triple it.” He kept backing up.
“You need to understand something, Keebler. Dolly is the one who brought me here but Daphne is the reason I am going to bash your head in.”
“Daphne?”
“The girl you had upstairs. The one you glamored to get here, chained to the bed, and were gonna use in your sicko snuff porn flick with the ogre. That Daphne. She's the reason I'm going to kill you, not Dolly.”
His leg hit a chair to the breakfast nook, making him stumble. Dolly spun on her heel and shoved with her hip, knocking him to the ground. He hit flat on his back, arms and legs splayed. His skull bounced off the floor, white hair swirling out around him.
Before he could recover I put a size 13 boot
on his chest.
Raising the crowbar over my head I looked down at him.
“Have fun in hell asshole.”
It only took three blows to hit linoleum.
When I finished, I stumbled back to the island in the center of the room, crowbar clattering to the floor at my feet. My hand slipped out from under me when I went to brace myself, palm leaving a blood slick on the smooth granite of the counter top as I headed toward the floor.
Dolly was right there.
Her hands held my shoulders, firm and surprisingly strong as the shakes ran through me. Adrenaline dumped out of my system, eating up the meager sugar stores I had. I felt hot and sticky, head pounding, vision pulsing in and out and in and out and in and out of a puddle of black. My stomach flipped like an omelet made of acid and gravel. Too much demand on my body after days on end of more alcohol than food or sleep.
“Are you okay?” Dolly's voice sounded far away even though she was standing right in front of me.
I nodded a lie. Dolly looked into my eyes. I don't know what she saw, but she let me go and went over to the refrigerator. After a second she was back at my side holding out a can of soda.
Seeing it, I wanted it more than anything else in the world.
I grabbed it and poured half of it down my throat. In seconds the world sharpened and my headache eased. My stomach settled as the sugar in the soda absorbed. It wasn't a long term solution, just a stop-gap, but I could function again.
Dolly watched me get it together.
I set the soda down on the counter and stood up. “Okay, we have work to do. Daphne is upstairs in the spare room. She's out for now but I don't know how long it'll last.”
“Did you knock her out?”
“No. There's a dead ogre upstairs that makes this,” I waved my hand at the splattered mess of Mael's brains on the floor, “look like a couple of dropped eggs. She got one look at it and went out on me.”
Concern tightened her face. “Did they. . .”
“Doesn't look like it. She's roughed up, but okay otherwise. I'll drop her by a clinic that can look her over. But that brings us to the second problem of cleaning up this mess.”
