Why the hell had he ever thought fairies were cute?
“Get that shit off him now!” he commanded.
“We have beaten the Windy Wolf in fair combat,” a tiny voice said.
Laddin looked, but he couldn’t see the speaker. What he did see was a dozen lights gathered in a mass at the far side of Bruce’s head. He was trying to sort out some sense of form from the bright things, but it was like picking out individual lights in a firecracker explosion. They moved too fast and were too bright for him to catch. And then suddenly, a glowing ball soared through the air and exploded in bright blue color like a firecracker above Bruce’s chest. It was really pretty, except it burst with real force. Two more launched, and Laddin tried to bat them away. He got the red one quickly, tossing it up toward the ceiling to burst in brilliant crimson. But he couldn’t get to the second one in time, and it exploded against his hand with vicious pain. “Stop that!” Laddin ordered.
“We defeat the Windy Wolf!”
And again, more firecrackers launched. Laddin hit them away as fast as he could, but it was a losing game. There seemed to be no end of firecrackers, and he couldn’t sit here and play defense the whole time. Especially since he was getting the shit burned out of his hands. Every impact felt like a bee sting, hot and sharp on his palm, but at least they weren’t exploding on top of Bruce.
“Stop it!” he yelled again. “Why are you doing this?”
“Acknowledge our win!” the voice said again. “We have beaten the Windy Wolf!”
Finally he found the speaker—a beautiful fairy woman wearing a flower hat larger than her entire body. In fact, it was hard to see her face because she had tilted it so far back to look at him, she should have toppled backward. Except normal physics didn’t seem to apply to fairies.
“Sure, sure. You win—”
“No!” Bruce grunted from the floor. “Find out the forfeit first!”
“What?”
Bruce rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything about betting? You can’t let someone win without knowing what you lose.” He blew out a breath. “I thought you went to public school.”
Apparently not the same kind of public school as Bruce. He took a breath and tried to focus. God, he needed coffee. Obviously this wasn’t a simple barroom bet over favorite teams. This was fairy bargaining, and Bruce was right. He couldn’t agree to anything without understanding the terms.
“Stop the… uh… game. We will discuss terms.”
“We discuss!” the female fairy said as she grabbed her flower hat and threw it hard onto Bruce’s belly.
Bruce groaned as the hat seemed to explode. The resulting welt on his belly grew red and hot right beneath her feet.
“Stop that!” Laddin snapped. He was pissed off now, and damn it, Bruce couldn’t take much more of this. And his own hands were already swelling. “What’s your name?”
“I am Dollarback Erin Rodger-Dodger! I run back and fall forward, I rush for yards, and I am in charge of the Superest Bowl there is!”
Well, that was a mashup of random football terms. And even he knew that Aaron Rodgers was male. But again, that wasn’t the point.
“I hail you, Rodger-Dodger. What are you trying to win?”
“Power! Glory!”
In the background, the fairy lights all jumped up and down and cheered.
“Okay—”
“And passage to Fairyland.” She stepped resolutely up Bruce’s chest and hopped onto his chin. “The Windy Wolf has lost. He will give us passage.”
“He doesn’t know how.” Then he looked at Bruce. “Why do they think you can?”
“I have no idea!” Bruce grumbled.
Meanwhile, Erin Rodger-Dodger held up a glowing light—another firecracker. If she spiked that down on Bruce’s eye, he’d lose it. “We will throw fire until he does,” she cried.
Bruce growled in response and strained his head, but those white ropes lay across his chin and neck. His head was pinned down, and the more he strained, the more it burned hot lines into his skin.
“That’s enough!” Laddin said, slapping the fairy away. It was surprisingly hard to do, given her tiny size, and the firecracker exploded against his hand, making him clench it in pain. But as long as he was bigger than them, he would break Bruce free if he had to burn the shit out of both his hands.
