“Not thinking about much of anything,” I said.“But this whole mess is a lot, you know?”
“The whole going back to Faerie thing or the whole getting married thing?”
“Both.I mean, look, I was ready for my life to change in ways I don’t even understand when me and Amy got hitched, but now I’m back somewhere I never wanted to be thefirsttime I got here, much less ever wanted to come back to, and she’s here somewhere but I’ve got no idea where, and somebody’s murdering faeries or giving them the faerie plague or something.I feel like we came here to do one thing, and now we’re stuck off on some wild goose chase that’s got nothing to do with getting our people back, and I don’t know where she is, or if she’s okay, or…” I trailed off and just absolutely lost it.I broke down and cried like I haven’t done since the night I killed my crazy-ass megalomaniacal brother.I just buried my face in my hands and sobbed.
Geri put an arm around my shoulders and whispered, “It’s okay, Bubba.Let it out.Get all of this shit out of your system.”She rocked me side to side and hugged me for several long minutes until I got my shit somewhat together, then I pulled away and looked at her.
“Thanks.I reckon I needed that.”
“I know you did,” she replied.“You’ve been wound tighter than a pocket watch ever since we got here, and we need you loose for whatever’s coming next.You’re not worth a shit when you’re tense and freaked out.You’re only good to us when you’re your normal, wild-ass, improvisational, half-idiot, half-genius self.So now that you’ve had your little breakdown, are you ready to find Amy and get her and everybody else back home?”
“Hell yeah,” I said, wiping my eyes.And I was.I felt a clarity that I hadn’t had in days, like a buzzing just outside the range of my hearing stopped.“But what are we gonna do about the faerie plague?”
“Well, it stands to reason that Mab brought them all here not because she was pissed at not getting an invite to the wedding, but because she thought bringing in people who were most likely immune to whatever’s killing faeries was her best chance at survival.That means we’re not going to be able to just find Amy and poof ourselves back home.”
“I don’t even know how to get us back when we do find them,” I admitted.“I was kinda hoping I’d be able to make things right with Granny Mab and she’d send us home.Or I figured I could probably irritate her so bad she tossed me out of her dimension.”
“How veryRansom of Red Chiefof you,” Geri said with a grin.
“You ain’t old enough to knowRansom of Red Chief,”I said, grinning back at her.
“Brittany made me watch it whenever I was a pain in the ass as a kid.She called me Red Chief until I was nine.”
I didn’t ask why Britt stopped at nine.I knew, because Geri was nine years old when Brittany died.“I can see the tendencies,” I said, keeping at least half of my grin.
Geri punched me in the shoulder, then said, “Go get some sleep.You finally let all that poison and worry and stress out, so in about three minutes you’re probably gonna pass out, and I’d rather you not fall over on top of me when you do.”
“Yeah, I’d squish your narrow behind,” I said.“I’ll go over yonder with Jarvis and see if my snores can harmonize with his.”
“Because that’s what the world needs, the sound of two water buffaloes screwing in the middle of the night.”
“Well, kiddo, it’s pretty hard for one water buffalo to screw,” I said, then walked across to the other side of the fire, laid down a few feet from Jarvis, and was asleep before I knew it.
* * *
I woke the next morning feeling pretty good for a man in his forties who’d just spent a night sleeping on the ground.Maybe that whole unburdening my feelings thing was good for me after all.Ash was fixing breakfast, so I walked off into the woods to take care of business, then when I got back to camp, Geri pointed me off to the other side of the road where there was a stream I could wash up in.I did smell a little horsey after yesterday’s travels, so I scrubbed off a little of the funk, put my same clothes back on, which did make me question the usefulness of bathing in the first place, and headed back for a little grub.
I was surprised at the spread Ash had laid out for us.They grinned as we all tucked into biscuits, ham, and a bunch of fruit, with two different kinds of juice.“Apparently after she decided you weren’t there to murder Titania, Chef Vonn gave us the hookup.There’s some kind of spell on the food bags so the hot stuff stays hot, the cold stuff stays cold, and the fresh stuff stays fresh.All I had to do was pull stuff out of containers.Even Jarvis could have done it.”
“Which is more than we can say for feeding the horses,” Geri said.
“Where is Jarvis, anyway?”I asked.
“Chasing down the last horse.He took them out into a field to graze, but he didn’t hobble them or tie their reins to a tree, so one wandered off,” Geri replied.
“And nobody thought to tell him he needed to tie the horse to anything?”I asked.
“The exercise will do him good,” Geri said.
“And it kept him from shoving every biscuit we have down his throat,” Ash added.“He’s a little spoiled, isn’t he?”
“A little,” I said, then conversation halted as Jarvis limped back into camp, his shirt dirty and his face painted with a scowl.“What happened, bro?”I asked, trying not to laugh.
“I caught up to the horse, but it didn’t want to come with me.I grabbed the reins, but it decided to go somewhere else.I went along.Unwillingly.By the time I let go of the reins, he’d dragged me twenty yards across a field.”
“How’d you get him to come back?”I asked.
“I picked a bunch of the little apple things he was eating and lured him back.Problem is, now I don’t have any more apples in my pockets, but he won’t believe me.Greedy bastard keeps trying to eat my pants!”
