“I cannot enchant our mounts again.The strain would kill them,” Mama said.
“You got a teleport spell up your sleeve then?”I asked.
“No,” she replied.“We shall have to hope that our horses can catch up to Burke’s.”
“I’ve always found that I can motivate a horse pretty well,” I said, turning and heading back to our mounts.
“Yeah, by promising it that if it runs like hell, you’ll never make it carry your giant ass again,” Amy said, walking alongside me.
“Motivation is motivation,” I said, grinning.“Now let’s haul ass.”
16
Burke’s trail would have been simple to follow even if he hadn’t been riding straight down the main road to Mab’s castle.He left deep hoof prints as he pushed his horse, and there were several dead fae lying off to the side of the road in pools of blood to mark his passage.Mama’s eyes grew colder with every body we passed, and I was starting to feel a tiny bit bad for Burke when she caught up to him.Then I saw a dead dryad leaning against the bole of a massive oak, a bullet hole in her forehead, and all my sympathy vanished.This guy was leaving a trail of destruction behind him with complete disregard for life.He had to be stopped, and we were the only ones close enough and powerful enough, so it fell to us.
Again.
Most of my adult life has been a string of calamities that only I and my friends can handle; a series of threats to one world or another that are so far beyond what a giant redneck from North Georgia should be dealing with that it’d be funny if it wasn’t so goddamned tragic.And what was happening in Fairyland was absolutely tragic.So many dead fairies and other critters that didn’t want to do anything but live their lives, all cut down because of somebody’s grudge against anyone or anything a little bit different.I’d seen it my whole life, especially walking next to Skeeter, a gay Black man in Georgia, but it still pissed me off.We should be better than that.And those mercenaries, falling for some ridiculous story about inter-dimensional Communists threatening their way of life?Just stupid, hateful little men easily swayed by somebody giving them a gun and pointing them at someone to hate.The more we rode, the madder I got, until finally I was pushing my horse as hard as he could go, and Mama had to reach out and grab my reins.
“Slow down, Robbie,” she said, raising her voice over the sound of hooves sloshing through snow.“If you kill your horse, it will slow you further.”
I backed off a little.“Yeah, okay.I’m just pissed.”
Mama raised an eyebrow in her universal sign for “keep going,” so I did.“It’s bullshit,” I said.“I get that Pest Control is pissed off that Oberon wanted to murder all the humans.But that started after those dickheads we fought in D.C.wanted to murder all the paranormals.Which probably came after some asshole cryptid or monster tried to kill a bunch of humans.Why can’t people just let people be?Why can’t we learn anything?”
Mama gave me a sad smile, then shook her head.“People, be they human or fae, fear that which is different.All of these people are afraid of anything unlike them.For these men, the fae are an easy target.If they weren’t attacking us, they’d be attacking humans for some ridiculous difference or another.I saw it when I lived there, and I see it here every day.The human-seeming fae look down upon the more ‘monstrous’ among us, and those who don’t look even a little bit human look down upon those of us who do for ‘selling out,’ despite none of us choosing our appearance.Not our real appearance, at any rate.”
“Yeah, and we’re the same way,” I said.“If we can’t find another species to go after, we go back to hating each other.It’s stupid.”
“Yes, it is,” Mama agreed.“But that’s not what we can stop today.All we can do today is stop this Captain Burke and try to keep my mother alive so that all of Faerie doesn’t fall with her.”
“Could that happen?”Amy asked from a little behind us.“If something happens to one of the Queens, would Faerie really…what?”
“If there is no Queen, there is no Winter or Summer.And without that balance, Faerie cannot sustain all the various fae that live within our domains.Many Winter creatures cannot live in Summer, and the same goes for Summer fae.We need our realms to keep our people alive.We are all intimately tethered to the magic of our Courts, and were one of them to suddenly disappear…well, I don’t know what would happen, but it wouldn’t be good.”
“Speaking of not good,” I said, pointing ahead.The gates to the capital city stood thrown wide open, and a quartet of faerie knights lay off to the side of the road, their armor punctured with bullet holes.“Looks like Burke is using cold iron rounds,” I said.“He’s playing for keeps.”
“So are we,” Mama said, her eyes hard.“So are we.”
* * *
We found what I assumed was Burke’s horse tethered outside the entrance to Mab’s castle, with two more bloodied faerie knights lying by the raised portcullis.There was no sign of Burke other than the bodies and a discarded magazine for an AR-15.We dismounted, and I swung my own rifle around.Mama didn’t even pause as she passed the dead knights, just swept through the portcullis, a wingless avenging angel bent on destruction.
“Burke!”she yelled at a man walking up the steps to the castle.He spun around and raised his weapon, but a gust of frigid wind plucked it from his hands.The assault rifle tumbled end over end until it crashed into the stone wall.“Halt in the name of Winter!”
Burke pawed at a holster on his hip, but a shot rang out and he collapsed, clutching his thigh.I turned to see Amy standing a step behind me, smoke wafting up from the barrel of her purloined pistol.Burke let out a scream like a scalded dog and writhed in pain on the marble steps, his blood spreading crimson against the crystal-white snow that blanketed the palace and courtyard.
Mama’s pace never wavered.She just stalked across the courtyard, implacable, unstoppable, inevitable.She was Thanos mixed with Michael Myers, a nightmare of fury and vengeance, and all I could do was follow along in her wake and hope that when her fury burned itself out, that I’d be able to bring her back from whatever dark place she was living in right now.
She mounted the steps and stopped two steps below the screaming mercenary.“Shut up,” she said, her voice low and dangerous.
“That bitch shot me!”Burke yelled.
“I said, shut up,” Mama repeated.“I will not ask again.”She waved a hand, and shackles of ice formed out of the snow and clamped down on the man’s ankles.Another flick of her wrist, and his right upper leg froze solid, cutting his screams off with a sharp gasp.
“There,” Mama said.“It doesn’t hurt now, does it?”
I’d made it up to the same step as her, so I could see the wicked smile dance across her lips.This wasn’t my mama, the woman who’d kissed my skinned knees and talked to me about girls when Linda Abernathy wouldn’t go to the middle school dance with me.This was Ygraine, the Princess of Faerie, and she was perfectly capable of being every bit as vicious and her psychotic mother Mab.As Captain Burke was quickly finding out.
