* * *
It was about an hour’s worth of magic horsey ride before we saw signs of the Pest Control jerks ahead of us, and about another hour before we could easily see their tracks along the road.Mama reined in her horse and waved us off to the side of the road.
“They’re close,” she said as I got down and started trying to stretch out everything that hurt.I finally decided it was going to take more stretching than I could do in one day, and gave up.
“How can you tell?”Amy asked.“Is there something different about the tracks?”
“No, I can sense intruders into Winter.”Her face was grim, and I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me.
“That sounds like a new thing,” I said.“You couldn’t do that before, could you?”
She didn’t meet my eyes.“No, I couldn’t.It started this afternoon, after we left the others.”
“So you can cast spells, which you didn’t used to be able to do, and you can sense intruders in Mab’s portion of Fairyland, which you couldn’t even do when you woke up this morning.What’s going on, Mama?There’s something you ain’t telling us.”
As she finally met my eyes, one tear rolled down her cheek.“I believe Mab is dead, and the mantle of Winter has passed to me.”
“Granny Mab is…” My words trailed off.My grandmother and I didn’t have a complicated relationship as much as a murderous one.Which is kinda par for the course with me and relatives, frankly.But I still didn’t want her dead.And what did this make Mama?Faerie Queen?What did it make me?A faerie prince?I hoped I didn’t have to wear a crown.I’ve got a really big head, and finding a hat that fits is hard enough.I didn’t want to think about how much metal it would take to put a crown on my gourd.
“We don’t know anything yet,” Amy said, taking my hand.I don’t know how she knew I’d be upset, since I didn’t know for sure yet whether I was upset or not.
“We know one thing,” Mama said.“They have declared war on my realm, and whether my mother is alive to defend it or not, this is something that cannot be allowed to stand.”Her face was grim, with the little vertical line appearing between her eyebrows.I hadn’t seen that little line in many a year, not since me and my brother Jason experimented with making grenades out of old glass Coke bottles by pouring vinegar and hydrogen peroxide in them.It meant she was seriously worried about something, and that something was more serious this time than a couple of elementary school kids almost blowing up the abandoned outhouse back in the woods behind our kitchen.
“I know something else,” I said, my voice equally dark.
“What’s that?”Mama asked, turning to me in surprise.
“They ruined my wedding, got my mama and fiancée kidnapped, and forced me to come back to Fairyland, where I never wanted to be again in all my born days.That’s gonna earn them a special kind of ass-whooping when we catch up with these assclowns.”
“Then you should prepare, Robbie.Because I believe the aforementioned assclowns are less than a hundred meters ahead of us,” Mama said, pointing up the snow-covered road.
It was worth the interdimensional travel and putting up with Jarvis for the last few days just to hear my Mama, Heir to the Winter Throne, use the word “assclown” in a sentence.I looked over at Amy, who was already sliding off her horse.“Gear up, sweetheart,” I said.“Time to go to work.”
15
Mama’s assclown radar was on point because even tethering the horses to a low-hanging branch and walking through the snow, it was less than ten minutes before the sound of boots marching ahead of us came through the trees.The Pest Control mercenaries were around the next bend, so I waved Amy and Mama over to the side of the road for a quick strategy conference.
“How do you want to do this?”I asked Mama, keeping my voice low.
“You’re actually planning before you rush headlong into danger?Are you sure you’re feeling okay, Robbie?”
“It’s your world, Mama,” I replied.“I’m just visiting.You want me to rush them guns blazing?I will.You want me to capture them and haul them back to my dimension for prosecution, I bet I can find somebody to make sure they never see daylight as free men again.Your call.”
“And if I want you to stay back here and let me go turn them into donkeys to sell to Titania?Will you let me do that as well?”
Amy held up a hand.“Umm…can youdothat?Did Titania really do that?”
“I don’t know if I can, but I do know that Titania definitely did.It wasn’t just William’s imagination, as fertile as it was.”
“William?”I asked.“Mama, are you on a first name basis withShakespeare?”
“Not anymore, Robbie.He died many years ago.Are you sure you didn’t hit your head in the last scuffle?”
I let out a huge sigh that felt like it came all the way up from my half-frozen toes.“But what’s theplan, Mama?You want me to run in like I usually do and beat them to a bloody pulp, you want to turn them into donkey sex toys for Titania, or somewhere in the middle?”
Mama’s face crinkled up like she’d drank sour milk when the phrase “donkey sex toys” crossed my lips, and she waved a hand through the air like she was trying to fan away a stench.“Let’s just subdue them and find the antidote for whatever disease they unleashed upon Faerie.Then you can take them all home and bury them under a prison.”
“If there is a cure,” Amy said, her voice grim.Mama and I both turned to her and she shrugged.“If the disease only affects female fae, they may not have cared enough to develop a cure.Or they may not have brought any across with them.If the plan was to destroy the leadership of Faerie, why would they bring an antidote?I’m sure their superbug was tested in a lab back in our world, probably at the expense of captured faeries, but they may not have brought the treatment across with them.”
