Joe turned his attention back to the elf. “Now, I believe you said your name was Rec’teer, and you are a Prince of Flowers?”
I might have snorted just a little but kept every single joke about gay knights and Game of Thrones to myself. Skeeter, however, heard me snort and completely cracked up over comm. Joe gave me an irritated look and tapped his ear, shutting off his comm.
The elf spat once onto the floor, and I grinned again. “Yes, I am Rec’teer, Prince of the House of Flowers. And who are you, wizard?”
“I am Father Joseph Jones. I am the pastor here. The priest, or holy man, as you would call me.”
“I know what a pastor is, human. I have lived through many generations of your invasion into my world, do not think to educate me in your barbaric ways.” He spat on the ground again, but this time when he turned his head, I met his nose with my fist. I wasn’t wearing my ceastus, but he got the point.
“Be nice, dickhead. Father Joe is trying to send you home. And he’s going to be a lot more gentle about it than I will.” I tapped the handle of my kukri for emphasis.
“Fine, priest. What do you plan to do? I am obviously far from my home, and I wish to return,” Rec’teer said.
“And we wish to return you. I think that the spell these children cast was intended to summon a harmless nature spirit. A dryad perhaps, or a nymph —”
“Ha!” The laugh exploded out of the elf. “Then they are truly fortunate their spell failed. Have you seen the havoc a nymph can wreak on a gathering of humans if left unchecked? They are spirits of nature, indeed, but their natures are intensely sexual. One nymph could have quickly had every male of breeding age in her thrall, battling for her affections and killing each other for the honor of mating with her. The cost in lives would have been extreme. I merely destroyed some effrontery to the spirit of the solstice.”
“You wrecked a Christmas parade, asshole,” I grumbled. “Kids love a parade.”
“Fat men throwing candy from the back of a wagon? Young women dressed like trollops dancing like harlots atop moving carriages? These are the things you use to celebrate this holy time? You celebrate the turning of seasons and rebirth of the world with these stupid trappings? They all deserved to be destroyed! The solstice is a holy time, a time of hope, a time of reflection, a time of promise. Not a time for frivolity and mayhem. I did your village a favor. Now they can focus on the import of the season without the distractions of your silly fat men and their candy. But my work here is done, send me home.”
“Can I just punch him a couple more times before you send him packing?” I asked.
Joe shook his head. “Step into the circle, please.” Rec’teer stepped into the circle. He turned around and held out his hands.
Amy looked at me, then at Joe, then back at the elf. “You promise no more fighting?”
“I promise to fight only in defense of my person or an innocent,” he replied.
“Good enough for me,” Amy said, then unfastened the handcuffs and stepped back out of the circle.
Joe looked up at the elf. “This should send you back directly to where you were taken from, but I’m not a mage. I’ve never done this before, so all I can say is good luck.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “This morning you woulda said you’ve never kicked an elf’s ass with a flagpole in the middle of the church. But you handled that one. You got this.” I gave him a pat on the back and stepped back. “But just in case.” I drew Bertha and took up a diagonal position behind Joe facing the circle. Anything nasty coming through that circle was going to get a fifty caliber welcome wagon.
Joe muttered a bunch of stuff in Latin, and the circle started to glow. He read from a sheet of notebook paper, and as he kept reading, the glow got brighter and brighter, until he finished with a bellowed “AMEN!” and the circled flashed super-bright for an instant, making me throw up an arm in front of my eyes.
When the flash subsided and the spots in front of my eyes shrank to something I could see around, the elf in the circle had been replaced by a skinny white kid with glasses sitting cross-legged on the storeroom floor. He was about Skeeter’s size, but whiter than the damn Easter Bunny, with bright red hair and about forty-seven tattoos all over his chest and arms. We could all see this because he was wearing a leather loincloth and nothing else.
“Holy shit! I’m back! Thank God!” He jumped up and ran out of the circle as soon as he saw where he was, then turned around and scrubbed out part of the circle on the floor with one foot and knocked over one of the candles, ruining the thing for spell casting.
“Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!” The skinny little bugger kept running around hugging people and thanking folks until he got to me. I put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him before he could get too close.
“Alex Knudsen, I presume?” I asked. “Just stand still for a second, junior. We’ve got some questions.”
“Starting with where are your clothes, A?” I turned to the corner and saw Jennifer staring at the kid. I’d forgotten she was there, honestly. She’d just been siting in the floor holding on to her shell-shocked boyfriend through the whole banishment, but now she was on her feet, and Ryan was standing beside her, his eyes clear. The two kids ran across the room and hugged their friend, and I made for the door.
Amy caught me before I made it out of the room. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“We’re done. I’m going back to my place to get drunk and watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Wanna come?”
“Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“I already know what happened. The albino got switched for the elf, and while he was there, the elves mistook him for some kind of magical being. He probably used something like his cell phone to convince them of his power, and he got laid for his troubles. A lot. Now he’s back, Ryan’s head is unpacked because his best friend isn’t dead, and it isn’t his fault, and Jennifer is going to pretend to be sorry, promise never to do it again, and in five years, we’re going to have to have another meeting with her about her witchy activities, only this time it’ll be a hell of a lot more serious. In an effort to keep that from happening, Joe’s going to confiscate the spell book and I’m going to talk to her mother. We’ll see if it helps. She’ll break up with Ryan because he was too chickenshit to go into the circle, which was why Alex was in there in the first place, and she’ll go out with Alex for a little while. But he’s seen things in the world now, and he’s nailed hot elf chicks, so she won’t be able to keep him. He’ll be fine, and his afternoon of godhood will give him something he’s always been missing—confidence. Ryan will be fine, and after a few months will convince himself that this was just too much stolen eggnog at his Aunt Genevieve’s Christmas party. And the elf is home. So now it’s time to get drunk, and call this one a win. At least for today.”
“How can you know all that? You don’t know what’s going to happen to these kids, and there’s no way you know what happened to Alex back there,” Amy said.
“Don’t bet against human nature, Amy. Everything I said makes sense, and that’s how shit usually plays out, whether we like it or not. And as for Alex, well, the symbols on his fake tattoos might be in Elvish, but the language is pretty damn close to pixie, and I might have had some familiarity with pixie mating rituals at some point in my early twenties.” I didn’t quite meet her eyes with that last bit.
“Oh really? Pixie mating rituals, huh? And how exactly are those different from human mating rituals?” she asked, a smile starting to curl around the corners of her mouth.
“Well, for one thing, there’s a lot more water involved, typically.”
“Hmmm. Didn’t you just have a new hot tub installed this fall?” Amy asked, putting her arms around my neck and bringing her face very close to mine.
“You know, I did do that. You think you might want to go investigate these pixie rituals?” I asked.
“It is my duty as a DEMON agent to familiarize myself with all sorts of extra-natural beings that m
ight interact with humans.”
“Well, if it’s in the name of duty, how could I refuse?” I asked. “Joe, you got this?” I didn’t wait for an answer as I picked Amy up around her waist and headed for the door. Joe didn’t answer. He was in full-on Priest Mode, lecturing the kids about the dangers of screwing around with magic and magical beings, property damage, the kind of community service they’d be doing until everything in town was repaired, and to turn over every scrap of spell book they had in their possession, blah, blah, blah. The kids were trying to look contrite, but they’d touched the magic now, and come through it alive, and their eyes couldn’t be closed again. I just hoped they could handle whatever they dragged up next.
Then I looked down at Amy, glanced back at Joe and thought about Skeeter, and I figured even if they couldn’t handle the next mess, we’d be there to take care of them.
I reached up to my ear and said, “Merry Christmas, Skeeter.”
“Merry Christmas, y’all,” he said, just as I pressed the comm button to turn it off and carried Amy laughing to my truck.
The End
Casket Case
A Bubba the Monster Hunter Short Story
By John G. Hartness
“I hate cemeteries, Skeeter,” I muttered as I climbed out of my Ford F-250 and approached the back gate of the cemetery. Three and a half hours of driving through the mountains at night had left me with a crick in my back, and now it looked like I was dealing with a conscientious caretaker in a town of barely anybody in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. Sure enough, I got to the gate and saw a bright shiny chain with a big new Master lock hanging from it.
“It’s locked, Skeeter.”
“Well, what do you expect, Bubba? A welcome mat?” Skeeter’s high-pitched, nasally voice came through my earpiece way louder and clearer than I really wanted it to. “There’s been half a dozen graves robbed all over Telford for the last couple of months, so I’m not surprised they’ve beefed up security.”
“I didn’t say there was security, Skeeter. I said it was locked.”
“Well, that’s about what passes for security in the middle of nowhere, East Tennessee,” Skeeter replied.
I couldn’t argue with him, or with the caretaker. After all, what was somebody gonna steal in a cemetery? A dead guy? Of course, that’s exactly what had been stolen six other times in recent weeks, so I reckon that’s where I come in.
“I still hate cemeteries.”
“We’ve been over this before, Bubba. You hunt monsters. Monsters hang out in cemeteries. Ergo, you gotta go to a lot of cemeteries.”
“I know, but I ain’t gotta like it.”
“You gonna cut the lock?” Skeeter asked.
“Nah, it’s one of them shrouded jobs, and heavy-ass chain, too. I ain’t got a pair of bolt cutters with me that’ll get through that. The fence ain’t real high. I’ll just go over and have me a little look-see.”
I walked back to the truck and strapped on some gear, just in case I found something interesting or irritable in the graveyard. I already had Bertha in her shoulder rig under my left arm with two spare magazines under my right. I added a Judge revolver to a paddle holster at the small of my back, all five chambers loaded with .410 shells packed with silver shot. On my left hip, I strapped a Cold Steel Gurkha Kukri with a blacked-out blade, a solid foot of sharp edge and bad attitude rigged for a cross-draw, and on the right, I slipped a spike-ended tomahawk, just in case I needed a little additional persuasion. I slipped the caestus on my hands that Agent Amy got me for Christmas and gripped the top of the wall. I heaved myself up the eight-foot wall, my Wolverine steel toes scrabbling for purchase on the uneven rock. It wasn’t pretty, and I was real glad I didn’t have an audience for it, but I got my big ass up to the top of the wall. I sat there for a minute, more to scout the situation than to catch my breath, really.
It wasn’t a very big cemetery, but Telford wasn’t a very big town. Nestled in the mountains of East Tennessee, it had one of each major Protestant churches, a couple of spare Baptists and probably a couple of snake-handling Pentecostals back in the hills. I looked out over a couple hundred years worth of headstones, most of them just simple rounded rectangles announcing birth dates, dates of departure, and meaningless platitudes like “beloved father” or “loving wife and mother” or some such shit. I made a couple of visual sweeps across the graveyard before I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.
“I got something, Skeeter,” I whispered as I jumped down off the wall and crouched in the dewy grass behind a big headstone.
“What is it?”
“Well, it looks like two or three dudes at a grave. They’re too far away for me to see if they’re robbing the grave or doing something else.”
“I think it’s a pretty safe bet they aren’t there for the dancing girls, Bubba.”
“Fair enough. I’m going’ radio silent ’til I see what’s going on.” I stayed as low as I could as I crept across the cemetery toward the other men. As I got closer, I could see that there were three of them, and they were, in fact, digging. Since I had Skeeter check the newspapers before I got here, I knew that there were no funerals scheduled for the next day, and besides, even in little mountain towns they didn’t dig legit graves by hand anymore. So I knew they were probably the grave robbers I was after. This looked like the easiest case ever, and I didn’t even need Amy or Skeeter’s help.
And the second I thought that, I stepped on a beer bottle some jackass left lying out in the middle of the graveyard, my foot slid out from under me and my whole night went to shit in one big clatter of falling giant redneck. I flipped almost completely horizontal, landed on my ass with a huge THUD, and the grave robbers all froze and turned to look at me. They stayed frozen just long enough for me to get to one knee, then they all three took off running in different directions.
Shit, I thought. Running ain’t what you’d call my strong suit. I’m more the stand still and beat something all to hell kind of guy. Skeeter’s better at running, but his skills lie more in the “running away” department than the “running after.” Amy would have probably caught all three of them without having a hair out of place, but if I wanted to catch them all, it was gonna mean shooting two of them. Since I didn’t know exactly who or what they were, I thought shooting them might be a little excessive. If I had a smaller gun, maybe, but there’s no “shoot to injure” with a Desert Eagle. I shoot somebody in the leg with Bertha, there ain’t gonna be a lot of leg left when I’m done. So I chased after the one that ran to my right. He was a couple feet closer than the others, and that seemed like as good a reason as anything.
Problem was, he was fast. I used to be fast. I mean, fast for a three hundred pounder wearing forty pounds of football pads, which meant I was fast for twenty yards or so. I was never fast for long distances, and I did not have nearly the motivation for speed that the fellow I was chasing had. In other words, I was a lot less scared of him than he was of me, so he was keeping a pretty damn good pace. He had a few yards head start on me, and he stretched that out to half a football field or so before I gave up and turned back to the grave. I trudged back through the dark cemetery, thinking back on the last jumbo milkshake I’d had from Cook-Out and how bad an idea that felt like right at that particular moment.
“I lost ‘em, Skeeter,” I panted into the earpiece.
“I reckoned, what with running being a factor and all.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I snarled.
“Bubba, you are more the stand in one place and beat the shit out of everything around you guy than the run down the monsters in a prolonged chase scene guy. Besides, after running more than a couple hundred yards, what would you have done with him when you caught him?”
“Puked on him until he gave up, I reckon.”
“That’s nasty, Bubba.”
“I am what I am, Skeet. And right now what I am is back at the grave, so lemme check out who they were digging up. I’ll get back to you if I find ou
t anything.”
“Later, tater,” Skeeter said, then clicked off.
I pulled a flashlight off my belt and looked around the grave. The robbers had gotten a couple feet down with just shovels, so the ground must have been pretty soft. I looked around until I found the dates on the headstone and read, “Sanford Blinn, August 14, 1967 - September 5, 2014.”
I clicked on the comm again. “Skeeter, see what you can dig up on a Sanford Blinn. He died about six months ago.”
“Is that whose grave they were digging in?”
“And I’m currently standing next to holding a shovel? Yeah, that’s him.”
“Says here he died of pancreatic cancer, left behind a wife and a twelve-year-old son, worked in the local sawmill, high school diploma, clean driving record, no arrests . . .”
“You got all that out of the obituary?” I asked.
“Bubba, I ain’t even read the obit. This is all stuff I got by punching his name into DEMON’s database. All them conspiracy theories about the government keeping secret files on just about everybody? Looks like they ain’t just theories. I’ve got his phone records, credit card statements, voting records going back the last five presidential elections, way more information than I’m supposed to have.”
“Anything peculiar in any of it?”
“You mean like membership in the Necromancer’s Guild, purchase of a Necronomicon on Amazon or getting caught sacrificing bunnies in the woods behind the Boy Scout Lodge when he was thirteen?” Skeeter asked.
“I was thinking maybe something a little more subtle, but yeah, any of that would explain why he was being dug up in the middle of the night,” I said.
“Nope, nothing.”
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Do I stutter?” Skeeter shot back.
“Only when Ryan Philippe comes on the TV,” I teased. Skeeter had an unhealthy obsession with Cruel Intentions. Me, I never got into it. Not enough explosions, but I did enjoy Sarah Michelle Gellar in a bathing suit. “So we got nothing on this guy?”
Grits, Guns & Glory - Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 2 Page 22
