“Who won?” I asked.
“The House of Flowers was aligned with William’s army,” Skeeter said.
“Yeah, I didn’t pay that much attention in history class. Who won?” I asked.
“They call him William the Conqueror for a reason, jackass. Our friend is destined to sit on the elvish throne if we send him home,” Amy said.
“Well I’m all in favor of that. The sending him home bit. I don’t really give a sweet damn what happens to him then. So we need to find some way to tie up the little prince here, and then we need to figure out what brought him here, and how to send him back.”
“Binding him is easy,” Skeeter said. “Silver-plated handcuffs will do. Now that the moon is up, his ties to the sun are weakened and the silver will sap his strength. It didn’t work in daytime, but it’ll hold him now. At least if I’ve been reading about the right elves, it will.”
“I’ll double up just in case,” I said. I pulled a pair of silver-plated cuffs from my belt and clapped them around the elf’s wrists. He was starting to come around as I rolled him over, so I borrowed Amy’s cuffs and helped him onto a pew and sat him up.
I moved around in front of the groggy elf and slapped him a little. He jerked awake and strained against the cuffs. He couldn’t budge, so I figured we were okay.
“Look here, shining boy. We figured out a few things while you were getting your beauty rest. You don’t belong here, and we don’t know how you got here. But we’re gonna go figure that out, and figure out how to send you back there. Now you just sit tight until we get back, and try not to break anything else. Especially no more people.”
The elf just glared at me, saying nothing. That might have had something to do with the bandana I’d shoved into his mouth and tied in place with part of Joe’s communion tablecloth, but I just took the win.
I stood up and looked at Joe and Amy. Joe still had his Blessed Beat Stick, and Amy looked like a SWAT commander’s wet dream. “All right kids, let’s go find out who’s been summoning elves, and I don’t mean the cute kind that make Fudge Stripes.”
“Mmm…Fudge Stripes,” Skeeter said in his best Homer Simpson voice.
“Shut up, Skeeter,” I said.
“I love me some Fudge Stripes, Bubba.”
“Focus, dammit. We gotta figure out how to get this elf back to his shelf so we can move on with the Christmas imbibing. I lost my buzz hours ago, and I can’t start drinkin’ for distance until this mess is dealt with,” I said.
“Well, let me work a little magic . . . Yeah . . . That’s good . . . Okay I have a couple ideas,” Skeeter said after about a minute of us listening to clicking keys and otherwise standing around scratching our butts.
“Well, let’s hear it, Skeeter,” I demanded.
“I ran some facial recognition from the parade to try and figure out who from the town wasn’t at the parade, so I cross-referenced with the DMV records of everybody who lives within thirty miles.”
“You have access to the DMV records?” Amy asked.
“I don’t exactly, but DEMON does. And since I’m working for DEMON now . . .”
“Occasionally, as a contractor,” Amy corrected.
“Well, I might not have bothered to mention all that when I talked to the dude at the DMV’s IT department. I mighta just said I was with DEMON, and if he didn’t know what that stood for then he obviously wasn’t a high enough pay grade to know, so he should just give me access and get out of my way.”
I snorted. “You told him to know his role and shut his mouth.”
“Pretty much. There were eighty-seven people in the area who weren’t at the parade. I eliminated some people as obviously not our elf-summoners—”
“Who did you eliminate right off the bat?” Joe asked.
“And what made you so sure they weren’t our guys?” I asked.
“Well, the first four I eliminated was us, because I was pretty sure I’d remember if any of y’all had summoned an elf in Bubba’s living room. Then I eliminated Jason, who still comes up in the database because his license is still valid, but we know couldn’t summon a sneeze in January. Then I took out anyone under thirteen and over eighty.”
“How many did that leave you with?” I asked.
“Forty-six. I cut out the people who lived out of town, and that cut the number to nineteen. Then I eyeballed that list and cut out the people who were actually in the parade, and not just in the crowd. That left me with seven names. Three of them stood out.” Skeeter sounded awfully proud of himself, and I didn’t blame him. He’d narrowed down almost a hundred suspects to three in just minutes.
“Let me guess,” I said. “One of them is Jennifer Oakes, and at least one of the others is her boyfriend, Ryan Norris. That Knudsen kid that follows Ryan around like a puppy dog is my guess for the third one, but it might be a brother for all I know.”
“How did you know that?” Skeeter sounded like I’d just told him Tom Cruise was really straight and there wasn’t a Santa Claus.
“I noticed when we were fighting Legolas that the doors to that hippy store Jennifer’s mama runs were open. Everything else on the side streets was shut up tight so people could watch the parade, but this joint was open, but still looked deserted. So I thought there might be a connection.”
“Damn, Bubba, that’s some good detective work,” Skeeter said.
“I keep tellin’ y’all I’m more than just a pretty face,” I said.
“Thank God, because if you had to get by on your looks—” Amy said.
“We’d all starve!” Skeeter finished, and the two of them broke up laughing.
I stood there for a minute listening to my girlfriend and best friend laugh their asses off at my expense, not really minding a bit. But after a minute I said, “Now that you got that out of your system, can we go talk to the Oakes girl and her little band of elf-summoners?”
Joe zipped up his leather jacket against the outside cold and said, “I think that’s a great idea. Let’s go find out where our friend came from and see about sending him home.” I motioned for Amy to go ahead of me and we walked out of the church through one of the remaining side doors and hopped in my truck.
The door to Golden Oakes was still standing wide open when I pulled my F-250 up in front of it. I strapped on Berta, but figured I wouldn’t have a whole lot of need for her in intimidating a trio of high school kids. Amy and Joe followed me into the store, which smelled of incense, herbs, and musty books. I pulled a flashlight from my jeans pocket and clicked it on, flashing the beam around the inside of the room. I blinked a couple times as the shop exploded in light, then turned to see Joe standing by the door, his finger on the light switch.
“I thought it might seem less suspicious to just turn the lights on. After all, we’re not here to rob the place or hurt anybody, we just want to ask a few questions.” He pitched his voice louder than normal, I reckoned to make sure anybody hiding in the shop heard us.
“I don’t see nobody,” I said, then immediately got proven wrong as a muffled thump came from the back of the store.
We made our way through racks of books on yoga and the healing power of crystals, shelves displaying all sorts of herbs, powders, and substances to cure everything from erectile dysfunction to planter’s warts.
I picked up a jar and shook it. “I never knew there was such an epidemic of planter’s warts in our part of the world. I mean, look at this, Amy, there’s three different drugs for it just on this shelf.”
“Can you focus?” Amy said. “It sounds like there’s somebody trapped back here.”
“Well, I’ll just bring this along. If they’ve got a planter’s wart, I’ll be ready.”
“Put it back, Bubba,” Skeeter said in my ear. “And it’s a plantar wart, not a planter’s wart.”
“You ruin all my fun,” I grumbled at him, but I put the jar down on a shelf and kept working my way back to the source of the noise. We eventually found a door behind a rack of shelving that had toppl
ed half over, obscuring it from the front of the store. I straightened the shelf in a clatter of bottles and other falling glassware. The door flew open and a skinny girl with long strawberry blonde hair ran into my chest and bounced off, landing on her butt in a puddle of broken glass and scented lamp oil.
“Be careful,” I said. “Don’t cut your ass. Here, lemme help you up.” I reached down and hauled her to her feet. She tried to run past me again, and I grabbed the back of her String Cheese Incident t-shirt as she shot past me, pulling her back in front of me and shoving her back into what looked like the shop’s storeroom.
“Let me go! I’ve got to save him!” She ran at me again, this time pounding on my chest with her little fists. It was kinda cute, if a little annoying. I mean, she was probably twenty, but she was a little chick, maybe five-six and a hundred fifty pounds soaking wet. In addition to the long hair and the required jam band t-shirt, she had on Birkenstocks and jeans with daisy patches on the legs. She looked a lot like a refugee from a Woodstock remake—like Hollywood’s idea of a hippy more than a real one.
I just stood there for a minute until she stopped hitting me. I looked down and said, “Tired yet?”
She nodded, and I pointed back into the storeroom. “Then get your ass back in there and let’s have a little conversation.” I followed her into the back room, which was almost the size of the shop’s front. It was set up for classes or meetings, with a big open space and a couple dozen chairs in rows at the front of the room. Sitting in the floor was a dirty-looking kid that I recognized from catching him hunting on my land a time or two.
“Well, Skeeter, we found Ryan and Jennifer, but I don’t see that Knudsen boy here anywhere. What’s his name?” I asked the air.
“Tommy,” Skeeter said. “Satellite imagery only shows me five heat signatures in the building, so he’s not back there with y’all.”
Amy and I looked at each other, then she pressed her comm into life. “Skeeter, did you say . . . satellite imagery?”
“Yeah, I might have borrowed a satellite or two to keep tabs on y’all.”
“Did you tell them that it was DEMON business?” Amy asked.
“I didn’t tell them nothing. It’s a Chinese satellite. I didn’t figure anybody we cared about would mind if I stole it for a little while, and the Chinese wouldn’t admit it anyway.”
Amy looked up at me and I shrugged. “He’s got a point. So, Skeeter, you’re saying that there ain’t nobody back here but us, Jennifer and Ryan?”
“And Ryan doesn’t look so good,” Joe said. He was kneeling next to the boy, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor at the edge of a circle. I looked over the circle for a second and immediately recognized it for what it was—a summoning circle. Ryan was rocking back and forth like an autistic kid that had withdrawn completely. Only problem was, I’d seen Ryan just a few days ago, and he wasn’t autistic. He was a normal, engaged twenty-something dude, thinking about hunting deer and Jennifer.
“Yeah, Skeet, something went seriously wrong in here,” I said.
“Jennifer?” Amy asked. “I need you to tell me what happened here. Did you kids try to perform a spell? Did something go wrong?”
Jennifer looked from Amy to Joe, then over at Ryan on the floor, then at me, then back at Amy and said, “No, we didn’t do anything like that. I don’t know what’s going on, but we didn’t do anything to cause it.”
“Really?” Amy said. “Because your boyfriend is almost catatonic, his best friend is missing, there’s a summoning circle on the floor of your mother’s shop, and there’s a mysterious elf tied up in the sanctuary of the Catholic Church. But you don’t know anything about any of that?”
“Nope, nothing.” Jennifer crossed her arms and leaned against the wall nearest the door. “Can I go now?”
“Nope,” I mimicked, drawing Bertha. I put the gun to the back of Ryan’s head and looked at Joe. “You should probably move, Padre. It’s hell washing brains out of leather. I know from experience.” Joe stood up and stared at me, mouth hanging open for a long second, then nodded and stepped back.
“You’re right, Bubba. Without enough information about what came through this circle, we can only assume that Ryan is possessed. Just give me a moment to administer Last Rites before you put him down.” Joe pulled out his rosary and started mumbling over the boy. I had no idea if he was talking real last rites or if he was just saying “watermelon” over and over again in Latin, but whatever he was doing, it worked.
“Wait!” Jennifer cried and put herself between my gun and her boyfriend’s head. Good thing for her I wasn’t rolling cocked and locked like normal. I’d never chambered a round in Bertha, just pulled the hammer back and counted on Jennifer not knowing the difference.
“You got something to say, young lady?” I deepened my voice and looked down at Jennifer, doing my best looming bad adult impersonation. It gets easier the older I get.
“We didn’t want to actually summon anything bad. We just wanted to bring a nature spirit to show those idiots out there what winter solstice celebrations used to be like, back when the pagans ruled and stuff!”
“So you tried to summon a ‘nature spirit’ on the winter solstice, just because you thought it would be cool?” I asked. Jesus, these kids were even stupider than I thought. They were lucky they hadn’t called up a whole damn Wild Hunt instead of just one grumpy elf.
“Where’s the book?” I asked.
“What book?” Jennifer wouldn’t look me in the eye, so I moved one step past mildly disapproving looming adult into straight up pissed off Bubba the Monster Hunter. I grabbed the girl by her t-shirt and yanked her over to me. I didn’t trust the thin cotton not to shred if I pulled on it too hard, so I reached down and grabbed her by the belt buckle and picked her straight up until we were eye to eye.
“Little girl, you have fucked up so royally you don’t even have words for it. The ‘nature spirit’ you summoned turned out to be a goddamn warrior elf from the eleventh century, who was impressively pissed off at being yanked out of his time and dropped into ours. He’s thrashed half a dozen parade floats, smashed about eighteen windows, turned at least four cars into scrap metal, completely demolished the inside of St. Peter’s, and put your boyfriend into a coma! And that’s on the first friggin’ day of Christmas, cupcake! Now if you aren’t going to help us find our how to send Tinkerbell back to the rest of the Lost Boys, then I don’t have any more time to screw around with you. So tell me where the goddam spell book is pronto or I’m going to turn this shop into a pile of bricks and patchouli and find it my damn self.”
I dropped Jennifer onto her feet, and she sagged to one knee, never taking her eyes off me. I’d holstered Bertha, but I stood there, clenching and unclenching my fists like they’d really like to be wrapped around her skinny neck. It was an easy act to put on because it wasn’t an act. I was pretty pissed at these kids, who had endangered my whole town with almost everybody in the world I cared about, just by being stupid.
Jennifer stood up and walked over to a bookshelf and pulled a thin brown volume off it. She handed it to me, open to a spell about three-quarters of the way through the book, and went over to sit beside Ryan. She took one of his hands between hers and patted it as he rocked back and forth. I looked down at the spell, then handed it to Amy.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked.
“I dunno. I shoot things. Sometimes I punch things. In rare but highly enjoyable situations, I blow shit up. I do not, under any circumstances, cast spells. No matter how good the intentions. And I don’t speak Latin.”
“You barely speak English, Bubba,” Amy replied.
“Give it to me,” Joe said, stepping over to Amy. She handed over the book and he read it over quickly, his finger tracing the lines of the spell.
“I can cast this. I think I can even devise a reversal given a little time. The two of you go get our displaced elf and bring him back here, along with some holy water. By the time you return, I’
ll have this sorted out.”
“You okay to do this, Joe? I don’t want you un-holying yourself or something by casting some kind of spell,” I asked.
“It should be fine, Bubba. It’s no different than an exorcism, really. I’m just casting the unwelcome spirit out of our time instead of casting a demon out of a body.”
“You sure about that?” I asked.
“Not at all, but I’m the best opportunity we have,” he said. So Amy and I went out to go get the king-sized Keebler and hopefully send him back where he came from.
Joe had transformed the storeroom completely by the time we got back. He had candles lit at the cardinal points of the circle, incense burning all over the place, and the fluorescent overhead lights off. He was kneeling in a corner of the room when I walked in with the elf over my shoulder. I deposited him on the floor in a clatter of plate mail and profanity, then gave him a little kick.
“Get up, asshat,” I said.
The elf glared at me. “I told you I was perfectly capable of walking, oaf. Now you dare to defile my person with your touch? Once I am free of these bonds I shall UMMMFFF!” I put a quick end to his bitching by shoving a bandana in his mouth. It might have been the same rag I had in my back pocket that I checked my oil with earlier in the day, or it might have been the one I was using for a snotrag,
“Sorry about the interruption, Joe, but your asshole is here,” I said.
Joe stood up and walked around until he was in front of the elf. “I am going to remove your gag, and then we’re going to discuss removing your bonds. But if you are rude or threatening, I will gag you again. I am trying to help you, not harm you, do you understand?”
The elf just glared at him for a few seconds, then nodded. Joe took my bandana out of the elf’s mouth and handed it back to me with two fingers.
“That’s gross, Bubba,” he said. Yup, it was my snotrag. Oops.
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 21
