“Why not?You said they were gonna come back here and send for reinforcements,” I replied.
Geri’s face was grim.“Because they were to make sure that the Winter Queen andall her potential heirswere dead before calling in the occupation force.They want Faerie to be completely destabilized before they try to take it over.”
“Fuck,” I whispered.“Mama.”
Geri nodded.“Yep.If Mab transported your mother back to Faerie for help, then she’s going to be the next target on Pest Control’s hit list.”
“Saddle up,” I said, turning around and stomping out of the command tent.“We’re back on the road in fifteen minutes.”
“What do you want to do about these assholes?”Jarvis asked, pointing to where the Pest Control mercenaries were tied up on the ground.
“I don’t give a shit,” I growled.“Leave them for the Fairyland forest monsters for all I care.But don’t kill them.”I pointed at Geri.“That’s not what we do.”
She raised an eyebrow at me.“It’s not whatyoudo,” she said.“And you’ll shoot about anything that moves except a human.”
“Right, we don’t kill humans,” I said.“We hunt monsters, not people.”
“When are you gonna learn, Bubba?”she asked.“Humans are the worst monsters we’ve ever run into.”
I didn’t say anything, just kept moving out of the tent to check on my horse and scrounge for some extra provisions.
* * *
I felt the tightness in my chest get worse the more dark thoughts whirled around in my head.I had a complicated relationship with my mother, to say the least.For a lot of years, I hadn’t known if she was dead or alive, if she ever thought about me, why she left when I was a teenager, or anything other than I had her in my life for sixteen years, then suddenly I didn’t.When she came back a few years ago, she explained that she couldn’t live outside Fairyland for too long without her magic, and thus her life, fading away to nothingness.So she had to spend as much time in Fairyland as she spent in my world.
That meant that after she spent twenty years or so in my world, having two kids, building a life for me, my brother, and my father, she had to go back home for at least that long or she’d get sick and die.Which was why she’d vanished from our lives one day when I was in tenth grade with no explanation.She came back when she needed my help to rescue the half-sister I never knew anything about from being kidnapped by Puck, the legit villain ofA Midsummer Night’s Dreamand kind of a bag of dicks.And of course there turned out to be a lot more to that story than anyone expected, too, leading to me spending most of a year here in Fairyland, meeting both my asshole granddad Oberon and psychopathic grandmother Mab, chasing down Puck, and generally causing a ton of chaos before going home to try to pick up the pieces of my life.
And now I was back.This time to rescue my fiancée from my grandmother, and apparently my mother from a plague.And the rest of my wedding guests from whatever Fairyland and its inhabitants wanted to throw at them, which was probably not gonna be good if I couldn’t get it sorted out.Life was way easier when I just hunted quarterbacks for the University of Georgia.Of course, hunting monsters wasn’t the hard part.But it was just like Geri said—sometimes figuring out if the monsters were the ones with all the fur or the ones with the expensive shoes was the hardest part.
“We’re ready,” Jarvis said, stopping several yards back.“You…uh…you okay?”
I whirled around, ready to bite his head off, but stopped at the look on his face.“No,” I said.“Not anywhere close to okay.My fiancée is missing, along with my mother and pretty much everybody I even like in the this world, and it turns out that my psycho granny didn’t kidnap them out of spite, but because they, and now me, might be the only thing stopping a bunch of military cosplaying assholes from killing every female faerie in the entire dimension, including my mother.So I’m pretty screwed up.”
“Yeah,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking around.“Me too.I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a little out of my depth here.I mean, I wanted to come to try and help get Amy back, and Mom and Dad and everybody else, but…shit, dude, isthisthe kind of stuff you get into on the regular?”
I was about to deny it, say that of course this wasn’t anything normal for us, then I realized this was my third trip to Fairyland for one reason or another, and I’d fought monsters of pretty much every description, helped root out a corrupt super-secret government agency, and maybe had a small part in saving the life of every paranormal creature in our world.So I shrugged and said, “Yeah, kinda.More often than I care to think about, this is exactly the kind of stuff we get into.”
“How do you handle it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Imean, how do you deal with the fact that the fate of the world might be riding on whether or not you fail?How do you deal with fact that if you screw up, a lot of people might die?”Jarvis looked distraught, like maybe this was the first time in his life that he’d been part of something bigger than himself.Hell, maybe it was.
I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder.When he looked up at me, I said, “I just keep putting one foot in front of the other.When I started hunting monsters, it was because I didn’t have any other options.I’d blown out my knee, thrown away my scholarship, and gotten my sorry ass kicked out of college.It was either join the family business or scrap together enough credits to get a bachelor’s in something random and spend the rest of my life either selling cars, selling insurance, or coaching high school football.I decided to hunt monsters.My dad told me that no matter what I did, the odds were always gonna be against me.Everything I faced would be bigger, or stronger, or faster, and probably smarter than me.And some of the things I was gonna hunt were more likely to be hunting me than afraid of me.”
“So what did you do?”
“I did it anyway.Not because I’m some big damned hero.I’m not.I’m an overgrown hillbilly who’d like nothing better than to sit in his cabin looking out over the mountains and not have any idea that there are real monsters in the world.But I do know, and that means I can either fight them, or be one of them.So I fight ‘em.It’s all I know how to do.”
“But aren’t you afraid they’ll kill you?Because I gotta tell you, every time I go around a bend in the road, I’m almost pissing my pants wondering what’s gonna come at me next.”Jarvis didn’t even seem embarrassed to admit it.Which he shouldn’t have been.Normal people aren’t built for this gig, and if they’re lucky, they don’t ever even know that people like me and things like what I hunt even exist.
“Of course I’m afraid they’ll kill me.Or worse, and trust me, there’s worse.I’ve seen some of worse.”I held up finger as he opened his mouth.“But I do it anyway.Dying would suck, and I’m seriously not in a hurry to do it.Especially since I somehow convinced your sister that I’m worth hanging around.But I’d rather die than know some innocent person got hurt, or killed, and I could have stopped it.I don’t want to die.I don’t want to kill anybody or anything.But if it means protecting someone who can’t protect themselves, I’m willing to do either one.Or both, if I have to.”
“That’s…that’s pretty damned heroic,” Jarvis said.
“Nah,” I said.“I’m no hero.I’m just a guy who thinks people should be able to live their lives without being afraid that a monster’s gonna come out of the pages of a storybook and ruin their lives.”Like they did mine, I thought, remembering how I’d lost almost everyone in my family to monsters.Pop to fighting them, my dad and brother to becoming them, and Brittany to the monsters my family became.
“All I can do is fight, J.Fight, and hope to hold back the dark a little bit.We’re always scared, and we’ve learned the goddamned hard way that not everybody makes it out of this shit alive, but we fight.As long as there’s hope, we fight.And even after all the nasty shit that got out of Pandora’s box, there was still one thing left in the bottom of it.Remember that?”
