Black Frost

By

John Conroe

“Would you kill to save a life? Would you kill to prove you’re right?”

Hurricane, 30 seconds to Mars

Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2011 John Conroe

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Books by John Conroe

The Demon Accord Series:

God Touched

Demon Driven

Brutal Asset

Black Frost

www.bearmountainblades.com

Welcome to the home page for Bear Mountain blades.  The blade business is shut down. Instead I’m using the site to get the truth out about the alleged chemical spill in Groton Falls, NY.

Hopefully, this story will go viral. But I suggest you download this blog fast, as I don't know how long it will be before the government shuts it down.

Just so you know…there was never any spill. Sure, the news had aerial photos of a tipped over tanker truck on the main street in Groton Falls. But it wasn’t carrying a restricted nerve agent, and the driver didn’t fall asleep at the wheel. He was transporting chlorine (none of which actually spilled) and he was stung to death. Then partially eaten.

None of the deaths in town were caused by this fictitious, ‘highly experimental’ nerve agent.

Pretty clever though….to leak a conspiracy story in order to cover up the real conspiracy story.

No, the deaths were savage, violent attacks by outside forces.

What actually happened is something the government scientists call inter-dimensional decay, but what I call a Rupture (as in ruptured membrane). Either way it’s pretty much the same thing – a break in whatever separates this world from its twin. See, all those bad science fiction movies about alternate realities and multiple dimensions have a grain of truth in them. Quantum physics is finding that we don’t know as much as we think we do. Here’s the deal – there are in fact other dimensions, at least one of which is very, very close to ours. So close that the solar system in that other place is pretty much a match for this one, although it has ten planets instead of nine. The third planet is almost identical to Earth, inhabited by similar lifeforms, and complete with a sentient species. It follows an orbit around its star that matches our orbit of the sun. Its dominant species have known and visited us for thousands of years. It turns out that the barrier that separates this universe from theirs thins naturally, from time to time. Aging stars give off the right kind of rays and particles, causing it to fail in places. The science types use words like string theory, neutrinos, intersection, and entangled quarks. I don’t really follow too much of that. But I know that this time it occurred at specific sites around the world, almost simultaneously. Places in Ireland, Germany, China, the Middle East, and Easter Island, among others. And if you Google those sites, you’ll find they all had an alleged problem of some type. Reactor leak, hazardous waste spill, outbreak of Ebola, whatever; you get the gist. Some calamity that allowed governments to shut down and cordon off the affected areas. There was no gas leak at Stonehenge, that’s a fact!

I can even tell you what caused this inter-dimensional decay. You may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the largest particle collider in the world – largest machine ever built by man. A seventeen mile circular tunnel carved under the border between France and Switzerland. It was powered up in ’08 but was taken off line for repairs. It came back up in ’09 and has been running on and off ever since.

Before it was turned on it made the headlines by way of dire predictions of the baby black holes and strange matter that it was bound to create. The doomsayers were silenced by its apparent success, but what they didn’t know, what no one knew, was that its effect took time. It slowly wore away the fabric of whatever cosmic firewall keeps old mother Earth separate from her dark twin.  I can’t tell you how it did that, ‘cause I don’t understand it.

But I also can't tell you how my cell phone works, it just does, so I won't dwell on the how, but instead I'll tell you about what came through, here, in Groton Falls.  Because I know more about that than anyone, eggheads included. Who am I? My name is Ian Moore, and I was at ground zero for all of this. My house and knife shop is at the center of one of these sites – these weak points between worlds – so I got a front row seat to everything and now I know more than I should. More than I want. It sits in my brain like a pregnant spider, whose babies are swarming and squirming around in my gray matter. And now I’m gonna share it with you. I think of it as therapy. You can charge me for the sessions if you like, it won’t matter. I won’t be here when you read this. They want me back…on their side. And I’ll go, but not before I leave a little something behind.

You see they've been here before, many times, and we've recorded it and kept track.  No, I'm not talking about aliens, little green men (although some are green and short), UFO's and Area 51.  Well, maybe I am, maybe that’s how we perceived them in this century. But no, the records I'm referring to are far older, mostly passed down by word of mouth, parent to child

But the stories have lost important information.  They've been twisted over time, made gentler, polished and turned into Disney movies.

The reality is far different. You’ll need to know more.   You’ll need the information that I will leave on these pages.  Consider it a survival manual, a primer for our new reality.  ‘Cause they’ll be back and I wouldn’t rely too heavily on old Uncle Sam to contain them. You’ll need to prepare. Kipling had the right of it:

“Gold for the mistress, silver for the maid, copper for the craftsman, cunning in his trade. Good! said the Baron, sitting in his hall. But Iron, Cold Iron is master of them all!”

Ah, that Rudy, he was really clued in.

I don't have much time, so I need to get down to it.  You'll have to be patient and let me tell the story my own way.  And you have a bit of time to read this, because of me. Actually, because of my daughter, but that’s all part of the story, isn’t it? How much time, I can’t tell you. They will be back. Some, the lesser ones, are still here. I'll tell you this…none of the old stories come close, not even the Brothers Grimm.

So grab a seat and buckle up. I’m gonna tell it like it happened to me, fast and bumpy. You can even call ‘shotgun’ if you like (although you’ll probably want to own a shotgun when I’m done).

Oh, and I can tell you the name of earth’s dark twin…..Fairie.

But before I start this story I need you to ask yourself one question: would you kill to save a loved one? Or maybe it should be will you kill to save a life? Make up your mind…fast.

Chapter 1

Once upon a time...sorry, just kidding. I couldn’t resist. As I think back, I can remember the first day I started to feel something was wrong. Standing that morning in my usual spot, I looked down at my GrandFather’s house below me and thought about death. A natural enough thought, given the time of year. Halloween was just past and the last of the autumn leaves were barely hanging on, waiting for a stiff breeze or a cold November rain to rip them off their trees.

Nature was killing off green things in preparation for the long, cold upstate New York winter. Frost glittered on almost every surface that I could see, the sun not yet high enough to melt it back.

A half mile in front of me I could see my daughter Ashley’s school bus turning down Brown Road, following the route that would end at her middle school.

Looking at the skeletal branches, mostly bare, and the distant fields full of stubby shorn brown corn stalks, death was an obvious thought. The two year anniversary of my wife’s passing would be here in January, less than two months time. To be honest with you, I would have thought of death even had it been July and the corn fields were knee high with green. I pretty much think of death every day.

But I’m losing focus, already drifting from the important stuff.

Let me just say that death had played a big role in bringing me to that position, high on the hill we call Bear Mountain that November morning. Death and the recession. To make short out of long, it happened like this. I lost my wife to a sliding snowplow on an icy road. I lost my job as a mortgage originator to the economic collapse, and I lost my grandfather to a stroke.

My unemployment meant that I had to sell our four-bedroom colonial at a fire sale price. I was lucky to get it sold at all. Without a job and with the family home gone, it looked like Ashley and I would have to move in with my parents. But then my grandfather, Robert Moore, Sr, died rather suddenly of pneumonia. Or so we thought.

My father, Robert Moore, Jr., disclaimed the house, barn and forty acres of land, allowing it to pass to me, giving us a home that was familiar and still in Ashley’s school district.

All of which left me here, standing on the top of Bear Mountain looking at my GrandFather’s – now my – home. It’s not really a mountain, just a large hill, a small up-thrust of granite, very common in the foothills of the Adirondacks. My grandmother had christened it Bear Mountain not long after marrying my grandfather.

Grandpa had come running in, excited by finding a black bear track on the hillside, the muddy pugmark of an early spring bear passing through on its way to its summer range. The name had stuck and also became the name of Grandpa’s knife smithing shop.

My reverie on death was interrupted by the lively bark of my companion. Looking at the hill top behind me, I spotted the brindled bundle of energy, quivering and barking at an untidy lump of gray on the ground. Charm was sixty pounds of pitbull mix and my constant shadow during school hours. When Ashley was home, Charm left me like she owed me money. As far as she was concerned, the sun rose and set on Ashley Ting Moore.

But just now, she was making hell’s own racket, an unusual behavior in the once abused dog. I approached her and whatever she had found, the indistinct gray lump resolving into wispy fur and a long ratlike tail. The ‘possum was most thoroughly dead, a condition that would normally delight Charm, who loved to roll in stinky things.

The animal looked deflated, really just scraps of fur, flesh and bone. But the blood on the ground was fresh as was the bits of flesh on the skin, although the body looked like it had been picked over for weeks, not hours. There were no tracks in the bloody mud around it.

Puzzled, I poked it with my utility knife, a four-inch blade of my own design. The cause of death was obvious based on the inch-wide crescent bite marks that had literally hollowed out the carcass.

I’d grown up running these woods in the summers, hunting the hills with my father and grandfather, during deer, partridge and turkey seasons. I knew every track, every predator that roamed this land, and nothing made wounds like the ones I was seeing. Not finding any other clues, I snapped a couple of pictures with the camera in my cell phone, then strolled around the top of the hill to see what I could find. At the very top of Bear Mountain is a granite outcropping that was rounded and smoothed in the last Ice Age. Some force of nature, be it seismic or ice, had cracked the big chunk of rock from the top down. The resulting crevice is four feet wide at the top and about a foot at the bottom, making a natural little chasm on our hill. As a kid I had played cave explorer in that dark rocky nook, able to crawl much farther back than my current size would allow. There was some disturbance in the sandy soil at the bottom of the crack, but nothing as clear as a track. I took one last look around, shivered in the chilly air and continued my morning stroll, brindled dog in tow.

Getting back to the household, I stopped in the kitchen long enough to get a fresh cup of coffee from the breakfast pot, then headed to the barn to check the forge.

School days follow a pattern, as they do in most households. I get up first, dress for the day, then wake Ashley – a job that combines the skills and danger of snake handling with zombie reanimation.

I honestly don’t recall being that hard to roust from bed, but maybe my Father’s drill sergeant approach was just more effective than my own more gentle method.

Once she’s up and showering, I head down, turn on the coffee, feed the dog and start breakfast while watching the morning news. When sleeping beauty finally makes it downstairs, we eat, chat about the day and then make Ashley’s lunch. It’s a team effort, her on sandwich duty while I gather drink pouch, chips and dessert. I’ve offered many times to let her buy lunch, but she always refuses. My guess is that the long wait in the lunch line cuts into chat time with her buddies.

When her lunch is put together, we both head outside; her to wait for the bus, and I, in theory, to light the forge. While I do actually light the fire, I spend more time watching her from the grimy, carbon streaked window to make sure she gets on the bus okay. I’m not allowed to wait with her, as that would leave her so embarrassed that we would have to move to the west coast to make a clean start. Instead I entrust her to Charm’s careful guard while I lurk in the gloom of the workshop, unable to concentrate on anything but her safety. Once she’s on the bus, Charm meets me half-way down the driveway and we begin our morning tour of the property, a ritual that happens rain, snow or shine.

That morning I found the coal burning red, the three-inch billets of stainless steel I had left nestled in the firebox just reaching a dull cherry hue. I turned on the blower, quickly bringing the metal to an almost white-orange, the color of critical, the temperature where the steel becomes nonmagnetic. Then I pulled a chunk of steel from the fire and began the rhythmic work of hammer and anvil that would shape the metal for its future life – in this case as cooking knives for a chef in New York City.

My GrandFather’s forge had been a godsend in many ways. First, when I became unemployed after losing my wife, my grandpa had asked me to help him with the forge. At the time I had been shocked he would do so, as despite his eighty-nine years of age, he was still spry and capable. But looking back it was obviously his way to help me, one proud man discreetly providing financial and mental help to another proud man.

I say mental help, because forging steel into useful blades is a very Zen-like business. You need to picture the metal in three dimensions, then form an image of what you want it to look like. From there it’s a gradual coaxing process, convincing the steel to move where you want it to. The steady work of hands and mind is much different from the stress of originating mortgages; working paper, phone and numbers to get approved loans. The work in the smithy was as therapeutic as it was helpful financially. The old skills I had learned as a boy, hanging with and helping my grandpa came back quickly, tempered and smoothed by age and life experience.

When he died, I took over completely, using the income to supplement the social security death benefits that Sarah had left behind. I had a third source of income that took up time in the afternoons and some evenings, but it was more irregular.

None of this seems important to you, not, but trust me, this back story is important if you’re going to understand what has happened.

About two hours into the morning work, Charm lifted her head from her paws and looked at the door of the smithy, silently announcing a visitor. By habit and lifelong training I put the current piece back in the forge and picked up the fighting ax that was one of the first things I ever made. I moved closer to the door, strategically positioned for when it eventually opened and I got a look at the white-haired head framed in the opening.

“Hi Dad,” I said, noting his slightly widened eyes.

He wasn’t really shocked to find me within his danger space, a modern tomahawk in my hand. He was, instead, pleased, although the only sign of it was a slight quirk at the corners of his mouth, just under the white mustache that lived on his upper lip.

“Hey Ian, how’s it comin’?” he asked.

“Good, I’ve got some roughing out to do on one more blade, then I can come in for a coffee break and help you,” I said. My father had come over to go through some more of Grandpa’s papers.

“Good enough, I’ll get a fresh pot brewing,” he said, reaching down to pat Charm on the head. As he backed out the door, the muscular little dog looked at me, seeking permission to go with him.

“Go ahead, go get him!” I said. Her response… a tail wag, a doggy grin and a brown blur out the door.

Threatening your father with an ax is not normal behavior in most parts of the world. The fact that he approved of my actions is even stranger, unless you know my father.

My grandfather was a welder by trade, but his son, Bob, Jr. spent his entire career in the employment of the U.S. Government working for a little organization with the initials DEA. In fact, he started with the Bureau of Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs ,and then was carried along into the federal merger that created the Drug Enforcement Agency. So I grew up living in five different cities across this great nation. And growing up DEA is quite a bit different than the normal American experience, whatever that is.

DEA households are well kept and tidy, but there is never a name on a mail box, the houses all have alarms that are used faithfully, and there is always, always, always a dog. Could be a little Shih Tzu, a Pekingese or a Great Dane; it doesn’t matter. As long as it has all of its senses.

DEA children are constantly coached in things like situational awareness, household security and never telling anybody anything personal or private. Cars are backed into the garage, ready for an emergency exit. Drug dealers are notoriously unforgiving on both agents and their families.

My father took it further, by having me take martial arts lessons in every city we lived in. When I was six, I knew enough about gun handling to safely unload a weapon, if ever I came across one unattended. At ten I could hit the center ring on a standard target at seven yards with almost any handgun you could name, and I had a lot of practice time as Dad was almost always the firearms instructor for whichever field office he was working out of.

Each summer I would spend three weeks at my grandparents’, helping with the forging although I also roamed the hillside and woods on the little farm. So I grew up with a rather intense education in modern survival, one that would one day be put to full use.

So, now in my middle years, these reactions are pretty much hardwired into me. My wife, Sarah, never really understood it. Conceptually, she got the point but couldn’t really grasp the mindset that I had grown up with. I tried to explain it to her, the fact that I never knew if my father would come home, or if some drug lord would come after me or my mother in revenge. She would nod, but I don’t think she fully got it. I guess you would just have to live it.

I finished the rough work on the blade, then left it to cool slowly. The morning’s work set aside, I headed into the house, entering the kitchen door. The farmhouse is really a collection of add-ons, centered on the original two-story footprint. The additions are all one story. There are two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs in the original structure, a living room and kitchen below. The other, newer parts consist of a dining room, family room, sewing room (which became an office after my grandmother’s death) and a second full bathroom (that’s the one I use).

I found dad in the office, working his way through three untidy file cabinets that we hadn’t tackled yet.

The little room had a small work table with one drawer and a measuring straight edge painted on top, the filing cabinets, a small fireproof safe hidden under a fake cabinet and a tiny end table that we used as a printer stand. My laptop sat open on the table which was as close to a desk as the house had. The sight of it reminded me of the pictures on my cell phone and I immediately sent them to my email address.

Dad had pulled the single chair over to the cabinets; the garbage can nearby already over flowing with throwaways. After waiting a minute or so for the photos to make their way through the digital network, I opened my email service and brought the pictures up on screen.

“Dad, have you ever seen bite wounds like these?” I asked.

He spun around fast, then relaxed when he saw I was referring to just photos on the computer. I’m pretty sure my tone would have been different if the bite marks had been on me.

He frowned as he studied the photos. “Where did you get these?”

“Dead possum I found up top the mountain this morning. Actually, Charm found it.” I answered, reaching down to pat the wide, wedge-shaped head next to me. She was tucked in the corner where she could stay close without getting stepped on. Charm loves my dad, he and I being the only two males she is comfortable around.

“Hmm, I’ve never seen anything like them around here, but they remind me of a Discovery Channel show I saw about the Amazon. Piranha make bites like that.”

Now that he said it, the similarities were obvious. Crescent shaped, cookie cutter bites. I Googled piranha and found pictures that seemed to match.

“What the hell would do that around here?” I asked, baffled. “Unless somebody’s been stocking the brook with South American fish.”

He was still frowning, but after a long pause he stood and went to his black soft-sided briefcase near the door.

“Before your grandfather died, he started to act…..well, strange. You probably didn’t have a chance to notice, with all you went through,” he said gently. “But nonetheless, I thought he was becoming senile.”

He stood up, a leather-bound book in his hand. I recognized it as my Grandpa’s journal.

“I took this the day we found him…I didn’t want you to remember him as crazy or anything, but maybe you should read it. Maybe you should keep an open mind and see what you think. And Ian…” his light blue eyes drove home his serious intent, “I want you to keep your eyes and ears open!”

I snorted, “Dad, I always do…as if I had a choice.”

His mouth twitched in what might have been a smirk, but then straight-lined into serious mode again.

“I mean, keep an eye and ear out for stuff like those bite marks, wiseass.”

“Why Dad? What do you think made them?” I asked.

“I have no idea, but keep a watch and read your Grandpa’s journal. We’ll talk about it some more then.”

“Alright. Listen, why don’t I throw some lunch together. You look like you have this under control.”

I retreated to the kitchen to ponder his words. Dad wasn’t prone to alarmism and completely lacked the imagination that I had shared with my grandfather. That he would react that way to a strange wound on a possum carcass was out of character.

I put together a couple of thick ham and Swiss sandwiches, cracked open cold cans of diet Pepsi and set out some potato chips, all under the watchful eyes of Charm who was hoping for scraps. Dad wandered in at my call. We spent lunch talking about the last pieces of Bob, Sr.’s estate, then dad packed up his papers and headed to the door.

“Ian, where’s your GrandFather’s shotgun?” my father asked suddenly, pausing in the doorway.

I pointed to the coat rack in the little entry way by the back door where we were standing. It was solidly screwed to the wall, hand-crafted of pine, with a rather boxy top and six coat pegs below. I touched the hidden lever on the back and the front of the long rectangular top popped open on springs. Inside the narrow space lay my GrandFather’s ‘social’ shotgun, just as he had left it.

My father reached in, grabbed the gun, and broke the action open, pulling out the round from the top barrel. He handed the shotgun to me, not looking up from his examination of the shell. After a moment he held it up from my inspection.

“Steel shot – BB size,” he said, his white eyebrows arched.

“Steel? Why would gramps use steel?” I asked. I hadn’t looked at the gun or its load of ammo since moving in.

For those of you new to weapons, steel shot is usually used for waterfowl, to avoid leaving poisonous lead in the waterways. Leastways, that’s the old use for steel shot. We’ll have a new need of it now.

Looking at the three inch shell, it was clearly labeled ‘steel shot, BB’.

“That’s a pretty good question, Ian” my father said, then waved as he headed out. I watched him walk to his Ford Expedition, his right hand unconsciously tugging his light jacket down to cover the butt of the .45 he habitually wore, even in retirement. I automatically reloaded the round into the shotgun and put it back in its hiding spot, latching the coat rack lid shut.

I cleaned up from lunch and looked at the clock. There were a few minutes, I decided, to look at the journal before I needed to get back to my knives.

I started with the last entry first. We had found grandpa dead, in his bed, on May 28th. The last journal entry was the night before.

May 27- Was outside this morning , looking up at the house, noticed hole in the guest bedroom mesh. Climbed up on roof and found that they had cut a small opening. Chilled me to the bone. Didn’t think they could get through steel mesh! Don’t know if any got in the house. I repaired hole and reinforced. Checked house, no sign. Pray I didn’t miss one.

It didn’t make much sense, especially the part where my eighty-nine year old grandfather climbed on the roof. It made me wonder if that exertion was the cause of the stroke that killed him.

I have a very clear memory of the day we found him. I was coming over to work on our latest knife order and my father was just coming over to check on grandpa.

When we entered the house, the sense that something was wrong was immediate and palpable. The coffee wasn’t made, and there was no sign he had been up for breakfast. Grandpa was up every day by six’o’clock, day in, day out, for as long as I could remember.

We called to him but there was no answer and the house felt empty of life. Part of my brain was telling me that the worst had happened; while another part was worried he had fallen and broken a hip or something. My father didn’t say anything, but his face reflected similar fears.

By unspoken agreement we entered the bedroom together, immediately seeing my grandfather, in bed, lying on his back, hands clasped over his stomach. His mouth was open, wider than natural, rigor mortis holding that way. Two paths of dried blood trailed down his cheek and chin, pooling in a congealed mass under his head. His eyes were blessedly shut. Death was obvious.

The rest of the morning was a blur. I remember placing the 9-1-1 call, but it wasn’t an emergency, so dad and I waited downstairs for about twenty minutes for a sheriff’s deputy to arrive. Cause of death was determined to be a stroke.

It took two months to clean up the house, and another month to get the deed signed over. I repainted and re-carpeted, seeking Ashley’s input on colors and textures, trying to make it ours. I, of course, took my GrandFather’s room and Ashley got the guest bedroom. It was late August when we moved in. The sale of our old house had closed two weeks before, so we only spent a short time at my parents’ house before taking up residence in the farm. The day we moved in was also the day we got Charm. My father can be a bull in a china shop when he gets an idea, but this turned out to be a stroke of genius. Taking Ashley to pick a dog from the pound had completely redirected her discomfort with moving into the house her great grandfather had died in.

Charm had been a rescue dog, plucked from an illegal breeding mill by ASPCA officers. She was on death row when Ashley spotted her in the kennel. The attendant told my father that she had refused to interact with anyone since her rescue. She told him it was a waste of time for Ashley to try to go in her pen. Ashley proved her wrong in about four minutes flat.

My GrandFather’s writing seemed strange….not outright crazy but odd. Who were ‘they’ and how could ‘they’ get into the house through a screen? Why had he put heavy mesh over every window (something I had been wondering about since I moved in)? Why would anyone bother the old man?

I looked at next most recent entry.

May 26 - Heard noises outside last night. Found tracks of one of the big ones near the kitchen window. Can’t tell if it was the green one or the white one. Sprinkled steel filings all around the house. The tracks never go near the barns where the forge is.

Okay, that was sounding more than slightly crazy. I couldn’t figure out the part about the green or white ‘ones’ and why he would sprinkle filings around the property. I went back another day.

May 25 – Witnessed another aerial fight today. Just at dusk. One of the big flyers was hunting something (mice? Chipmunks?) near the garden and a group of three green Tinks attacked it. Thought the bigger one was dead right there, but it managed to tear apart two before it got stung. Even then it killed the one that stung it before it died. Those teeth are nasty! Bodies gone as usual.

The part about teeth caught my attention. If he had been discussing a bird of prey, he would have said beak. I had no idea what ‘Tinks’ was, but I was hooked. I flipped back through the entries, scanning for the first problems. The first strange entry was in early April.

April 4 – I’m starting to think I’m seeing things. Last couple of days, I’ve been seeing hummingbirds or maybe large dragonflys (at least that’s what I told myself they were). Just quick flashes, never a solid look. Today one of the bug-like ones landed on the clothesline post, the one nearest the garden. I watched it from the kitchen window. About four inches long, green body, tannish brown legs, dragon fly wings. Not a bug! Looked like that little fairy girl in Peter Pan, but not! I probably shouldn’t be writing this down. My son will commit me if he reads it!

The phone rang. Caller ID read ‘Academy MMA’. I picked up, “Hello?”

“Ian, it’s Tom. I wanted to see if you have any time tomorrow? Between ten and twelve?”

Tom Yelos ran a mixed martial arts school in town and from time to time provided me with my third source of income.

“Sure, Tom. I’m clear then,” I answered, looking at the school calendar on the fridge.

“Let’s say ten then. I’ve taken on a new guy and I need the master’s advice!” he said, lightly.

I laughed. “Okay Grasshopper, I’ll be there!”

Tom and I had met at a recreation league soccer game when our kids were six. His daughter Lindsey had been best friends with Ashley ever since. While watching our kids swarm around the ball, kicking like dervishes, we had gotten to know each other. When he told me he ran MMA classes, I had expressed an interest and explained my background.

If you haven’t heard of mixed martial arts, you’ve been hiding, ‘cause it’s the biggest thing in combat sports since boxing. Combining aspects of both striking arts (think karate, boxing, muay thai) and grappling arts (wrestling, Brazilian ju-jitsu), the sport is vastly more exciting to watch than boxing. It’s rapidly sweeping the nation.

Tom had invited me to visit his school and the day I took him up on the offer, he had been training a young lightweight fighter for an upcoming amateur bout. I’m not the best fighter on the planet, I mean I can hold my own, but I would never have made a good professional fighter. But what I can do is identify fighters’ weaknesses at a glance and help them improve. I demonstrated this fact that day as I watched Tom work with his fighter. I pointed out that young Ben’s aggressive forward leaning stance was leaving too much weight on his front foot. When Ben laughingly invited the ‘old man with the big mouth’ into the ring I showed him the proof by foot sweeping him. Then I corrected his stance and he promptly submitted me after four long minutes of sparring. Tom offered me pay for helping him tune up his fighters before bouts. My talents even extended to watching video of their opponents and offering hints on their weaknesses as well.

The day was getting older when I got off the phone, so I left off Grandpa’s journal and went back to the smithy to draw file the mornings’ work. Two hours of filing had the blades in good shape and left me enough time to clean up, grab Charm and head to Ashley’s final soccer game of the season.

Chapter 2

They lost by one stinking point, but Ashley played a great game and was in high spirits as she came off the field with her BFF Lindsey in tow. Ashley plays mid-field, having the right combination of fast and slow twitch muscle fibers to be able to sprint to the action, but endure the endless back and forth running. She and Lindsey make a dangerous pair, the black haired mid-fielder feeding passes to the aggressive blonde forward.

The day had warmed considerably, and both girls were wiping their faces as they laughed about a squeeze play they had put on a particularly nasty player. That girl had been very free with illegal trips, elbows and shoves. The terrible twins had sandwiched her, hard, in one play, putting an end to her fouling.

“Dad, can Lindsey stay over tomorrow night? It’s Friday,” she asked.

I glanced at her blonde buddy, who gave me a huge smile that I didn’t buy for a second.

I narrowed my eyes at both of them in mock consideration of saying no. They already knew it was a foregone conclusion that I would say yes. Hell, I’d give Lindsey my car if she wanted it. Nobody had been more in Ashley’s court when her mother had died than Lindsey Yelos. I literally thanked God daily for giving my daughter such a good friend. I nodded and they laughed and then hugged goodbye.

“What did Coach think about your final game?” I asked.

“She said we played well. Shen school is one of the toughest teams in our conference. Here,” she finished by handing me a slip of paper. There is a never ending stream of such messages from teachers, coaches or PTA members, constantly flowing home. This one detailed the soccer banquet the following week.

I took a moment to study my girl. At thirteen, she stands five feet, two inches tall, just a couple inches shorter than her mother had been. She would likely grow to be five –five or so, according to her doctor. Ashley takes after her mother in looks almost completely, a favor from God perhaps. Blue-black hair, and the Asian features of her mother’s native China. Her eyes are almond shaped, but green like mine, rather than her mother’s dark brown. Ashley is beautiful. That’s not just a proud Father’s opinion, but one shared by anyone who sees her and by every boy in school. It’s the kind of effortless beauty that lowers other girls’ self-esteem on sight.

“Got a lot of homework?” I asked as we trudged to my SUV.

“Yeah, I got slammed!” she admitted.

We loaded her book and sports bags into the back of the FJ Cruiser and climbed in. She was instantly greeted by a frantic Charm, who had had to wait in the car. The school doesn’t allow dogs on its fields. Ashley took charge of the music, plugging in her iPod and picking a Lady Gaga song to blast on the stereo for our five minute drive home.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked when we pulled onto our long driveway.

“I was thinking a grilled steak, potatoes and onions in aluminum foil and…corn?” I said. We grill year round, even in the arctic cold of January and February.

“Italian dressing on the potatoes…and bacon, before you roll up the foil?” she clarified.

“That was my plan,” I said.

“Works!” she agreed.

I took care of dinner while she took a few minutes to unwind and play with her dog. Charm is very enthusiastic about the game of fetch, so while I started the grill and prepared the steak and potatoes, Ash threw her a tennis ball. The steak was searing nicely when I heard Ashley’s yell and Charm’s yelp.

I have no conscious memory of leaving the grill, I was just suddenly running full out with my heart in my throat. I skidded around the back corner of the barn to find Ashley holding Charm, frantically checking her over.

“Ash? What’s wrong?” I demanded.

“Charm got into a hive of some kind,” she said, her hands ruffling the fur under the powerful little dog’s steel link collar. “I don’t think she got stung, it must have just surprised her is all.”

“Where is the hive?” I asked.

“In the crack of the old shed foundation,” she said, pointing at the concrete remains of the old tool building. Under my GrandFather’s close supervision, dad and I had torn down the rotten wooden part of the old shed a year ago, but the cinderblock and mortar footprint still stood.

Approaching cautiously, I struggled to make out anything in the thick shadows. The daylight was fast waning as it does in November. I might have seen a brief flicker of motion deep in the crevice, but it was too dark for details. After observing for a moment or two, I headed back.

“I can’t see anything without a light. I’ll take a look after dinner,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

“I threw the ball and it bounced into the crack. Charm raced over and stuck her nose in, but I knew I would have to get it. But before I got there, she jumped back, shaking her head and yelping. I saw a couple of …bugs, I guess, swarming around her and then they were gone,” she explained.

“You guess they were bugs?” I asked, puzzled at her choice of words.

“Well they were awfully big, but they buzzed like bugs, so they must have been.”

“How big? Like this?” I held up my thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

She shook her head. “No, much bigger! Like this,” she said, her palms held three or four inches apart.”

“What color were they?”

“Dark, maybe a greenish color.”

“Green?” I asked.

“Yeah, maybe, but with lighter legs. I don’t know, it happened fast,” she said, frustrated with trying to remember the details.

Charm didn’t appear any worse for wear, so we trudged back to the house, just in time to flip the steak before it could char. Ashley went inside to start her homework, her furry pal right beside her, while I finished making dinner.

As I pulled the aluminum foil packet of potatoes and onions off the hot grill and onto the same platter as the t-bone, I couldn’t stop thinking about the description Ashley had given and the entry in my GrandFather’s journal. Another thought occurred to me as I entered the house, taking a last look around the gloomy yard…..it was way too late in the season and too cold for bees or hornets of any kind to be active.

After dinner, while Ashley tackled her math, I took a close look at Charm’s neck, struggling to keep the wiggly dog still. I found a particularly good scratching spot on her back and she stilled long enough for a careful inspection of the heavy choke chain collar. Link by link, I looked, checking the thick furry neck underneath as well. Just near the part of the collar that held her tags, I spotted something foreign. At first I thought it was a twig, stuck to the aluminum rabies tag, but then I noticed it was sharp and greenish in color. Grabbing the tick tweezers that we keep handy, I pulled it off and then rummaged in the junk drawer, at last finding my GrandFather’s old magnifying glass.

It resembled a bee’s stinger, blown up about a hundred times. Over an inch long, the black tip glistened wetly, the other thicker end seemingly burned off. I moved to the kitchen sink to catch the better illumination from the overhead light, but fumbled the plastic tweezers, dropping the stinger into a dirty steel colander. It hit the metal, sputtered like a drop of water on a hot skillet and was gone – evaporated into smoke.

“Whatcha’ doing dad?” Ashley asked.

“Er, thought I found a tick on the fur bag over there, but just dirt,” I lied, not wanting to sound crazy to my thirteen-year old. Teenagers always think their parents are nuts, they don’t need any additional proof.

“Oh..well, can you help me with this problem?” she asked, her attention back on her math book.

“Sure, honey,” I replied, looking in vain for any remnant of the stinger.

After getting through her math work, I grabbed a flashlight and a can of Raid Hornet spray. Thinking of my GrandFather’s journal, I cautiously made my way back to the old foundation, approaching slow and stealthy. There was nothing to see, either in or around the crevice that Ashley had pointed to, although the sand at the bottom of the hole was disturbed. Nothing clear enough to call a track or sign, but disturbed, nonetheless.

Shivering for a moment in the frosty night air, I glanced back at our little Bear Mountain. At that moment a greenish light flashed, like lightening, but close to the hilltop, lighting the trees around the crown. Puzzled, I watched for a moment to see if it repeated, but nothing happened. I shuddered one of those full body shivers you get from time to time, the kind that have nothing to do with temperature. My grandmother used to say they were the result of someone walking on your ancestors’ graves. She’d say it in a spooky voice, then laugh and ruffle my hair. Still thinking of my grandparents, strange lights and cold weather bugs, I headed back into the warmth and light of the little farmhouse.

Chapter 3

Friday dawned wet and cold, typical for November in upstate New York. A front had moved through in the night, replacing the frost with rain that wanted to be snow or sleet. Watching Ashley through the shop window, I was struck by how grown up she was looking, despite the hoodie pulled over her shiny black hair and the iPod earbuds. She glanced back my way, probably unable to see me in the dark window, and my heart leapt into my throat. She could have been her mother’s twin, except for the green eyes.

Swallowing the loss I felt every time I thought of my wife, I poked the forge fire a bit, then looked back in time to see the yellow bus swallow my daughter into its steel and glass embrace.

I stepped out the door, took a quick glance at the muddy ground and reached back into the shop for my walking stick. About five feet of straight Ash, smoothed, sanded and oiled, tipped on the business end with a steel spike for traction and wound with baling wire to keep the end from splitting.

“Come on Charm! Let’s make the rounds,” I said.

We walked out to the driveway, turned left and walked the road till we got to the property line. A well worn trail led along a row of posted signs, taking us back down the side of our land. About two thirds of the way along that leg of the property, the trail split left, leading up Bear Mountain, or continuing straight into the pine forest at the back of the property. I had intended to head back to the top of the mountain to look at the possum remains, but for some reason my feet headed straight. Charm didn’t care either way, running just ahead to sniff interesting spots on the trail. A chill drizzle kept a steady mist hanging in the air, forming larger drops of water on the tree limbs overhead. Those fat drips found my head and neck with steady precision, finally forcing me to pull up the hood of my raincoat.

The maple and oak that forest the front of our land gave way to a stand of white pine, whose moisture laden boughs darkened the surrounding forest into a strangely forbidding place. I shuddered, maybe from the cold water on the back of my neck, maybe from a sense of foreboding that suddenly stole over me. The familiar woods seemed hostile and bleak this morning. We trudged on, but I noticed Charm hanging nearer to me than usual.

On the back corner of the property, the trail hooks left in a sharp curve around an ancient pine whose thick trunk was scarred on one side by a decades past lightening strike. Charm was now at my side, her ears pricked forward, eyes focused ahead. I became aware of thudding sounds, dull and erratic. This part of our land was thickly covered in moss and sounds are deadened both on the ground and in the canopy. The hair on my neck went up and I tried to think what could be making those thuds. The possibility of a bear headed to hibernation occurred to me and I gripped my staff tightly as we edged around the giant pine.

What I saw was crazy, so crazy that I paused in shock to try and comprehend.

A tall man, dressed in black, was fighting with three squat shapes that looked like nothing I had ever seen before. Odd details struck me as I struggled with what I was seeing. The man had long white hair bound in ponytail and he was swinging a black stick or maybe a blade, in fast blurring arcs as he moved in a continuous graceful dance. The things he fought with were green, slick looking, with long muscular arms, corded squat torsos and short thick legs. They moved faster than anything had a right to, but their attacks always seemed to be where the man had just been, off by mere inches. The whole fight was only twenty feet away, the thuds being the occasional landing of a beefy body just missing its target. A single green head swiveled our way and I froze at the slitted snake-like eye that glared from a nightmare skull composed mostly of jaws and teeth. The creature turned back to the fight, dismissing us, but the man had noticed its distraction and glanced toward us. His momentary lapse of attention almost cost him his life. The instant his back turned, one of the sinewy monsters leapt at it, one long arm tipped with glittering claws swiping at his neck. He spun and thrust, scoring a hit with his odd weapon that I couldn’t seem to identify.

But that change in the rhythm of the battle put him in a seriously bad place. The one that had glanced at us, leapt forward, its timing perfect to finish the fight…except for the sudden stab of my steel tipped walking stick into its grotesquely muscled back. I don’t recall deciding to move, I just did, my arm going numb from the shock of hitting what felt like a rubber-covered rock. My stick’s point dug in an inch, hardly a telling blow, but the effect was spectacular. The wound sizzled and sputtered like bacon fat on a hot griddle. The four-foot tall thing reacted like I had branded it with a red-hot iron, its back arching in a sudden spasm of agony, its head throwing back and screaming the most God-awful screech I’d ever heard. Like the pterodactyl sound from an old dinosaur movie.

It spun, knocking my stick from my hand, its baleful yellow reptile eyes burning with insane rage. I stumbled backward in an involuntary attempt to put distance between myself and it, my hand fumbling at the hilt of my utility knife.

I make my sheaths from kydex, a thermoplastic that holds the blade by tension rather than snaps or straps. That’s what saved me. That and my dog.

The squatty monster leapt at me, covering the eight feet between us in a blur. The claw tipped arm that was headed for my throat suddenly sprouted sixty pounds of pitbull and then the meaty body slammed into me, but more importantly, into the blade of my knife. Four inches of tempered tool steel was buried in its sternum, sizzling like a welding torch. It jerked its entire body like a defibrillator had just hit it, the spasm throwing it ten feet away, taking my knife with it and throwing Charm to one side like a doll. There it shook and shuddered, the wound around the knife smoking as it shredded the moss in its death throes.

Remembering the man and the other two demon creatures I turned in time to see him split one from stumpy neck to opposite hip, his strange black blade sliding through it like it was made of smoke.

The remaining creature bounded backward, covering twenty feet in an eyeblink. It spun and ran, a green blur. The man in black spared me a glance, nodded when he saw I was alive and then raced after the creature, moving just about as fast.

Shocked, I sat on my ass, staring at the creature that had finally stopped jerking and thrashing. The soggy moss soaked into the seat of my pants, the ice cold water snapping me back to the here and now.

Standing up, I retrieved my staff and checked Charm over, all while keeping an eye on the two bodies on the ground.

Up close details became clearer. The green hued skin was slightly scaled, like reptile skin, but the build was more like a malformed chimpanzee. The head was overlarge, fitted as it was with extra wide jaws. Big open nostrils, large eyes and bat-like ears took up the rest of its face.

The flesh around my knife was still smoking and started to spark little green motes of light that drifted up like tiny fireflies. Charm barked once, startled by the body’s change. I glanced at the one that had been cut in half by the man’s blade, it too was smoking and spitting green lights.

Belatedly, I remembered my camera and fumbled it out of the parka pocket. I set it to video rather than still photos, trying to capture the changes the bodies were rapidly going through. By now, I could see the one with my blade in its chest was deflating, like an air mattress with a rapid leak. Bluish fluid (blood?) oozed around the wound as the little dots of green light whisked up into the air, faster and faster. Both bodies were burbling and melting into the moss. The bisected body was liberally covered with the blue goo that I believed the things used for blood, and that body was disintegrating faster than the thing I’d killed.

My head swiveled around, watching first one body, then the next, then scanning the surrounding woods for more of the creatures. Charm was still extremely agitated, but she was paying attention to the melting corpses rather than the woods, a behavior that lent me some comfort. I was sure my little dog would sense the presence of anything hostile.

The green flesh was mostly gone now, and the dark gray skeletons underneath were starting to erode as well. The camera shook in my hands as I tried to document the bizarre scene in front of me.

When nothing was left but wet, gooey moss, we headed back up the trail as fast as we could, both nervously watching the hostile feeling forest around us.

Back at the house, I headed first for the forge, as it was closest. Charm didn’t seem to feel that anything was inside the smithy, so I opened the door, and failing to get attacked, dropped my walking stick on the floor. I then reach above the door frame, grasped the oak shaft and yanked Shaka from the clamps that hold it in place.

Shaka resulted from a high school paper on the Zulu people of Africa. Four feet of oak handle with thirteen inches of assegai spear head mounted on top. For those of you whose history is fuzzy, Shaka was the greatest leader of the Zulu kingdom, living during the late seventeen-hundreds and early eighteen-hundreds. At the height of his power he commanded over 50,000 warriors, each armed with the devastating assegai spear. The spear head is extremely long and heavy, giving it great shocking power. The long cutting edges can chop as well as spear and with the relatively short handle, a warrior could have both reach and close combat capabilities.

I made my example from a huge old mill file, the finished blade weighing over a pound and a half.

Overall, much more satisfying in my hand than the walking stick.

Charm led the way into the house, her actions giving the all clear. I popped the coat rack front and grabbed Grandpa’s shotgun, locked the doors and sat down to think.

I’ve told you about my training and background, but I had never experienced real combat before and certainly never expected to walk around a trail corner and right into a nightmare. Charm trotted between me and various windows, pausing to listen or sniff, still on high alert. I watched her absently, while replaying the forest scene in my head. The blond man had fought with ridiculous skill and grace, his black weapon still an enigma. It had seemed to be a stick at one point, then a knife, but had chopped the lizard-ape like a sword. Those monsters were right out of a bad sci-fi movie, but their strength and speed had been a shock. Probably weighed between 110 to 120 pounds and maybe four feet tall, but wide and grotesquely muscled.

Remembering my camera, I carried both weapons and camera into the study. Setting the shotgun on the desk top, I then leaned Shaka near to hand and, finally, slipped the memory stick from the camera into my laptop. The footage was there, giving me the comfort of knowing I wasn’t crazy, but the discomfort that real monsters were out there on my land.

I watched the bodies evaporate and melt twice, then saved a copy to the hard drive and to a thumbdrive, then I picked up the phone.

“Ian?”

“Hi Dad. Listen, I really need to see you…it’s about Grandpa’s journal and the stuff we were talking about yesterday.”

“Everything all right? Is Ashley alright?” he asked, picking up on the tone of my voice.

“Yeah, she’s fine, but something really weird happened this morning….I’m either going crazy like grandpa or …..well, just come over as soon as you can,” I said.

“Where are you?” he asked, voice moving into law enforcement mode.

“Home, in the study,” I said.

“I’ll be there in five!” he said, then hung up.

I called Tom Yelos and explained I couldn’t make the morning workout. I gave him some excuse about the furnace needing repair, then settled in to wait for dad. I replayed the scene in the woods in my head, struggling to remember details. The only thing new that came to mind was my final mental image of the blond man. When he had nodded to me and turned to bolt away, the long hair on the left side of his head had swung back, just for a moment. I decided I was misremembering the moment, but the impression stayed with me…..the man’s ear had a point like Spock from Star Trek.

Dad pulled in the driveway a few minutes later and I met him at the door, shotgun in hand, watching the farmyard on either side and behind him. I was concerned about the remaining green troglodyte.

He noticed my attention, even while keeping his own careful scan, his right hand near the butt of his .45, his steady gaze taking in the spear and shotgun in my hands

“Glad you’re here, you can be the one to commit me,” I greeted him.

“Tell me what happened,” he ordered as I led him to the little study.

I took a deep breath, considered that my ultra-conservative, federal agent father would never buy the tale I was about to spin, and then launched into it.

He stayed quiet through the whole story, not even making a sound when I played the camera footage on my laptop. His expression was locked down into what I used to call his ‘agent man’ face.

“Describe the man,” he directed.

I had spent hours as a child, playing description games with my father. The information rolled off my tongue without much thought.

“Six feet, maybe six- one. Platinum blond hair, long, bound in a pony tail. Athletic build, but not bulky. Whippy, sort of. Maybe 175 pounds. Eyes are extremely light blue, slight epicanthic fold, almond shaped. Skin color, dark tan or even brown hued. He was dressed in black leather…of some type,” I frowned as I tried to recall more about his clothes. “Unknown impact or blade weapon, also black. Angular facial structure with high cheekbones. Left ear deformed.”

“What’s your problem with his leather?” dad asked, picking up on my hesitation.

“Well…it was oddly patterned. Some sort of geometric design or something.”

“Impact or blade? The vivisected body on the video seemed clear enough,” he asked.

“Yeah, well it was tough to get a handle on. Like one moment it looked like a bowie-style blade, the next tanto or katana-ish, and at least once like a baton.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just kept his gaze steady and evaluating. I was used to that look, having seen it my whole life. When I failed to shift my description, even a little, he grunted and then asked his next question.

“Deformed ear?”

This one was uncomfortable. I just met his gaze and nodded. He sighed.

“How was it deformed, Ian?” he asked.

“It’s ahh…pointed. On top,” I said as evenly as I could.

“Pointed? Pointed? Like, what? Vulcan?” he asked, his eyes widening slightly.

I watched a lot of the classics growing up, but this felt like the part where he was going to stop believing me. I sighed, then nodded. “Pretty much! Also his teeth were odd.”

“Odd?”

“Pointed kind of, sharpish looking,” I said, really uncomfortable.

“Fangs?”

“No, just pointed, like someone who had their teeth filed or something.”

His left hand reached up and stroked his moustache absently while he processed that.

“So…he was tall, thin, but athletic, with long white hair, almond shaped, ice blue eyes, dark skin, high cheek bones, wearing black leather, had pointed ears and sharp teeth?”

“Yeah, that’s about it. But when you say it like that, it sounds like he escaped from Lord of the Rings or World of Warcraft,” I said, protesting the lameness of my own description.

He started at bit at that statement, as if something I’d said had triggered a connection in his orderly cop mind. He grabbed Grandpa’s journal from where it was sitting on the desk and flipped through the pages, looking for a particular entry.

“Here, read this one,” he said shoving the book into my hands.

May 11th – Starting to think my grandmothers stories were accurate. Too many similarities to the flyers with the teeth, which seem to be on the same side as the squatty white monster (goblin? troll?), the smaller green ones teamed with the lizard man. I remembered that pixy in Peter Pan was Tinkerbell, maybe these things were her inspiration. Hell, they may be at the bottom of the whole fairy/pixy legend.

I looked up at my dad abruptly.

“Lizard man? That sounds a lot like the thing I saw. And something was buzzing around the old foundation last night. It scared Ash and Charm,” I said, musing. He harrumped, his eyes narrowing immediately.

“Oh they’re fine, but I found the oddest little piece of bug on Charm’s rabies tag. Only it evaporated when it hit the colander in the sink,” I said.

“Would that colander be steel?” he asked. I nodded.

He took back the journal, flipping through another couple of entries till he found one.

May 17th- They don’t like steel or iron, particularly iron. Just like the legends. In fact it’s as poisonous to them as the Tinks are to anything from this world. Hit one of the big bird-like ones with a full blast of lead pellets. Killed it. But also hit another with four or five pellets and it just flew off. Hit one with just one steel #4 and killed it dead!

I started to call time out, thinking it was getting too crazy, but then the image of the green goblin-thing sizzling on my knife blade and staff point popped up.

“Ahh Dad? What legends is he referring too?” I asked, although I had a sneaking suspicion.

“He talking about the sidhe and the unseelie sidhe, if I’m not mistaken. The fae, little folk,” my father said, perfectly seriously.

“Ah, that’s crazy! Isn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he looked out the window and spoke.

“Ian, your grandfather was the most grounded, practical man I’ve ever know. But in the last two months of his life, he covered all his windows and chimneys with steel mesh and started loading his shotgun with steel shot. He was acting weird at the end, and I’ve been thinking he was suffering from dementia, but he never forgot a thing,” he paused to glance at me, then continued. “But now we have a carcass killed by something with piranha teeth, but able to not leave tracks and kill on a hill top. We have a highly credible eyewitness of known observational skill and a piece of video evidence that I know you lack the skill to fabricate.”

I’m past forty years old, but I was still thrilled to hear my father describe me as a highly credible witness. Bob Moore, Jr. was a hard man and there were many times in my past that I had felt his disappointment with my decisions.

“Dad, this is America, not Ireland. The legends you’re talking about all come from Ireland.”

“Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, Belgium, all of the Scandinavian countries, and pretty much the rest of the world. Every country on Earth seems to have a legend of little people, gnomes or some sort of goblin-like creature,” he said, matter-of-factly.

We both looked at each other then he shook his head and stood up.

“Come on, I want to see the crime scene,” he said.

I wasn’t super excited to go back out there, but I wasn’t going to say that to my dad.

“Let me grab my Sig and I’ll be ready,” I said

I only own one handgun and one rifle, plus Grandpa’s shotgun. My dad is the family gun nut, and while I certainly felt comfortable around them, Sarah hadn’t been too thrilled to have them in the house.

I grabbed my .40 Sig Sauer from the locked pistol safe under my bed, picked up Grandpa’s little shotgun and was ready to roll. My father was out at his SUV, opening a rifle case in the back.

“How long have you had that?” I asked, indicating the Chinese made, semi-auto version of an AK-47 he was loading.

“A couple of months. I don’t like it as much as my Russian version, but it’ll do. I got it loaded with some cheap steel cased ammo,” he explained.

A lot of foreign made ammo uses steel jacketed bullets instead of copper. Steel is cheaper to find in many cases, but doesn’t shoot as well and can wear out a barrel faster. In this case, it would be better than expensive, domestic stuff.

He pointed at my shotgun. “You still got those BB loads in?”

I shook my head. “No I switched them for what I thought was buck shot from the cuff, but now I think is steel as well.”

Grandpa’s ‘social’ gun had begun life as a plain jane, Belgian made Browning over/under shotgun. That’s a double barrel where the barrels are stacked on top of each other, rather than side by side. The fella that owned it first had somehow managed to crush the ends of the barrels. Grandpa bought it for fifty bucks, cut the barrels off at twenty inches, re-crowned the muzzles and did some minor cosmetic work on it. The resulting gun was three feet long, had a nylon shell cuff on the stock that held six more rounds and was handy as hell. It’s biggest drawback was the two shot limit.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, the fridge magnet sticks to them, and they’re lighter than lead buckshot, plus I found steel three-eighths inch slingshot ammo in Grandpa’s reloading stuff,” I replied.

We headed out, with Charm on point, my father insisting on taking a different route. I hadn’t thought of ambush, but that’s what comes out of a professional’s mind.

I’ve never looked at the woods on my land like a hostile territory before. I didn’t like it. Every shadow, every bush could harbor a squat killer. I felt like we were being watched the whole time we were out there.

The shredded moss and gooey residue were still there, although the rain was washing away the goo at a pretty good clip. My father pulled an evidence kit from his coat pocket, and proceeded to collect some of the viscous crud before it could all disappear, while I watched the forest uneasily. He took some pictures, had me walk him through the action as best I could remember and measured distances and angles. I remembered sitting in his car, about nine years old, watching through the rain streaked glass as he walked the scene of a drug buy gone bad.

When we got back to the house, he headed straight to the work bench in the cellar of the house, where the reloading equipment was. I showed him the steel slingshot ammo, he merely grunted, instead interested in a set of glass baby food jars of what appeared to be iron and steel filings.

“I’m gonna take the iron filings, I got some things I want to put together. What are you going to do?

“I think I’m gonna finish reading the journal, then check the house over. Make sure it’s tight. Then I have a project in the forge I want to try while I wait for Ash’s bus,” I replied, my mind whirling from the surreal nature of our discussion.

Chapter 4

With a sharp screech of brakes and a cloud of diesel exhaust , the bus pulled to a stop at the end of the driveway where Charm waited to collect her human. She got two for the price of one, as Lindsey got off the bus with Ashley. It took a second for me to remember, but with everything that had happened I had forgotten that Lindsey was staying the night. I panicked for a moment as the girls trudged down the driveway, laughing at their own jokes followed by Charm who was beside herself with excitement. Having another teenage girl in the house doubled the safety risks. But after a moment’s thought, I realized it might be beneficial.

I met the pair outside the forge shed, wiping iron dust and rust off my hands with a rag.

“Hi girls, how was school?”

“Hi Mr. Moore!”

“Hi Dad. School sucked as usual, but now it’s over!” Ashley supplied.

“Sorry to hear my tax dollars are being wasted,” I said.

“You sound just like my dad,” Lindsey said, surprised.

“Yeah well, someday you’ll sound the same way! Listen ladies, there’s a skunk running around here and I think it might be rabid, so I want you both to stay inside and keep Charm with you, okay?”

This lie had a dual purpose; it would do to keep the girls inside and it explained the holstered Sig on my hip that Ash had been eyeing.

Ashley gave me a look, glanced at my gun again, then rolled her eyes.

“Whatever. What do we have for snacks?” she asked.

“Lots of apples, oranges, bananas and grapes,” I said, flatly.

She stared at me for a moment then we both started laughing. Lindsey smiled, but then protested.

“Hey, I like that stuff!”

“Yeah and I wish you would plant that idea in your buddy’s head, ‘cause you’d think fruit was toxic to her,” I said. “There’s some new bags of chips and pretzels, popcorn and a few of those Little Debbie brownies left,”

“Sweet!” Ashley replied, grabbing her pal’s hand and yanking her toward the door.

That would keep them for an hour or so, then their teenage metabolisms would demand dinner. I went back into the shed and cleaned up from my project, taking two cardboard boxes out as I locked the door.

As I walked across the driveway to the house a black shadow flickered by on my left side. I spun and crouched, struggling to get one of the boxes out of my gun hand. Still fumbling I realized it was just a crow, winging over the bird feeder, but unwilling to land with me right there. Good thing it was only a bird, because I would have been toast. The bird flew on by the house and landed in the old oak tree that shades the barn. Oaks take forever to drop their brown leaves and this tree was still thick with them. The crow disappeared from view into the dead foliage.

I berated myself for having a box in my gun hand. Going to have to retrain myself. Dad would never have let that happen to him.

A squawk sounded from the hidden crow, then the dry leaves that hid it started to shake and flutter in a frenzy of sound, as if a huge bird fight was happening just out of sight. The region of uproar moved up and around the tree, getting even more frenetic, the crow squealing in distress, then suddenly stopped.

I was frozen, my hand on my gun, completely unnerved by the energy of the violence that I could hear but not see. Motion caught my eye, two black feathers floating down to the ground. My eyes automatically tracked their fall, but were drawn back upward by three sudden streaks zipping out of the tree in different directions. Gone before I could lock sight on them, just an afterimage of dark blurs flashing out of the brown leaves. The hair on the back of my neck was standing at full attention, and I suddenly realized I was holding the unholstered Sig in my right hand, with no memory of the draw. My hand was so tight that the Crimson Trace grip laser was painting the base of the tree with a dancing red dot.

Taking a deep breath, I backed into the house, dumped the boxes on the little entry table that holds my keys, and slammed the door shut. Only then could I force my hand to loosen its grip and re-holster the gun.

After a moment or two, I chided myself to man up, go out and find out what happened to the crow. First, I reloaded the Sig’s magazine with ammo from the shoe boxes I had brought in. One box held a hundred and fifty rounds of .40 ammo, just basic Winchester hollowpoints from Wal-mart. I had spent a couple of hours in the shop, cutting tiny cylinders of iron from five-sixteenths rod stock I had out in the forge. Each tiny cylinder was just long enough to fit inside the cavity of the .40 hollowpoint, where it was super glued into position.

The second box held a hundred rounds of .44 magnum ammo, similarly doctored, but with three-eights rod sections. This would make my little Winchester lever-action rifle toxic to whatever roamed my woods.

With the new ammo in my Sig, I went back out, put a ladder against the tree and climbed up. Inside the brown leafed limbs of the oak, I found a spherical region of mayhem, blood and black feathers spattered around a foot and a half space. Draped over one thick tree limb was the shredded, empty husk of the bird; the skull and feet barely attached by fleshy threads. Thoroughly spooked, I slipped the carcass into a zip lock freezer bag and beat feet back down to the ground.

The sun was setting as I headed inside, putting my gruesome plastic bag into the bottom rack of our chest freezer.

Distracted by the crow’s violent demise, I could only concentrate long enough to make grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for the girls, which they happen to love. They ate at the counter, and for once I was glad that their teen-aged self absorption eliminated the need for me to help carry on a conversation.

Dinner over, they disappeared back into Ashley’s room, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the evening news while I cleaned up.

-Scientists in Switzerland report that the Large Hadron Collider is running smoothly at half power and they plan to gradually increase to three-quarters power over the next month. The largest machine ever built by man has been running continually for five and a half months, producing millions of collisions per hour. The information generated by this awesome project has already filled the equivalent of four hundred college libraries.

Despite the enormous controversy over the safety of this massive particle accelerator, the project has an unblemished safety record. Hans Vorst, PR director for CERN, the multi-national organization that built the Collider, reports that not a single black hole or other catastrophe has resulted from the LHC’s operation, much to the chagrin of the doomsayers who predicted world ending events when the machine was switched on. The LHC is considered by many to be science’s best chance to discover the elusive Higgs particle, the so-called God Particle. Reporting from Switzerland, I’m Roger Novac. Michelle, back to you-

-Thanks Roger. Our next story is much more disturbing. In the last three weeks, the six children have gone missing in four different states, prompting an unprecedented number of Amber Alerts. And several of these recent disappearances occurred inside the children’s own homes.-

“Dad, I can’t get the printer to work!” Ashley said suddenly from behind me. Water splashed across the countertop and on the window over the sink as I jumped at her voice. Turning I gave her a look.

“Did I scare you?” she asked with a smirk. Ashley loves to try to surprise me, but usually fails. She was loving this.

“Yeah, thanks for taking ten years off my life!” I replied. “What’s the matter with the printer?”

“Weellllll, it’s not working!” she said, still smirking.

“That’s not overly helpful,” I pointed out, wiping my hands on a dish towel. She already held her laptop, so it only took a moment to check the online status of our wireless printer. Being able to take a laptop anywhere in the house is great, but for some reason, the wireless handshake between the printer and the two computers we have gets sketchy. The strange code interactions that take place inside our increasingly complex computers had suddenly changed and the result was the printer was no longer the default choice. Since we don’t have any other printer, I don’t have a clue what would have been the default, but I didn’t have the mental energy to try and chase down that logic path. I fixed the pathway and handed her back her laptop.

“There, that should work. Getting your homework done early?” I asked.

She laughed. “No Dad, we’re printing out pictures of the football team and drawing on them.”

Then she laughed at my expression and went back upstairs.

I really wasn’t going to handle the whole boyfriend thing well.

I went back to the sink to finish the dishes, but a movement out the window caught my attention. The automatic yard light had not yet come on, but it was almost dark enough to trip it. The kitchen window looks out into the driveway and in the gloom by the base of the lamp post a tall man was standing and staring at me.

Chapter 5

He was on the old sandstone walkway, dressed in black, with white blond hair and dark skin. Looking me in the eyes through the time warped glass of the kitchen window, he nodded once. Ignoring my racing pulse, I paused to think. Both girls were upstairs, with Charm. The house was locked up and I was armed with more than a utility knife. Mr. Tall and Foreboding was standing very still, his demeanor non-threatening. Didn’t mean much. I had seen him fight; he was very, very fast.

Coming to a decision, I dropped the dish towel and moved to the front entryway, pausing to get the shotgun. Grabbing my house keys, I glanced out the window to make sure he was still there, armed the house alarm, unlocked the door, and stepped out, relocking the door behind me. The house alarm would kick on after twenty seconds. If tripped it would ring to the alarm company, who had instructions to call the police, then my father.

He hadn’t moved an inch, staying eerily motionless as I glanced around to make sure nothing was sneaking up on me from either side.

I stayed on the porch, shotgun in both hands, barrels pointing at the sandstone block at his feet.

His eyes, which were an icy blue, catalogued my every motion, and his head moved ever so slightly in what might have been a nod of…..respect?

His right hand came up, palm facing me, his other hand open by his left leg. A black heavy bracelet was wrapped around his right forearm, a carved animalistic head near the back of his hand.

“I am Greer,” he said in an even tone, his sharpish teeth flashing white against his dark skin. His accent was a soft burr, something between Irish and Scottish.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He nodded again, acknowledging my abrupt manner.

“You intervened – in the forest – when you had no need to,” he commented. It was almost a question.

I shrugged, but kept the gun centered on the walkway in front of him.

“Seemed the thing to do,” I replied.

His head tilted to one side, his expression quizzical, as if trying to understand something foreign to him.

Greer was a shade over six feet, lean, but not skinny. The term ‘whipcord’ popped into my head as I automatically evaluated him as a fighter. Dangerous and deadly fast. His face was angular, with high cheek bones, and when he suddenly shifted weight from one foot to the other, his pony tail swung into view, hanging to the middle of his back.

“It was not a logical thing to do,” he said, even closer to a question.

Part of me was getting angry that he was questioning my intelligence in helping him.

“Not logical to help a person in trouble?” I questioned.

He smiled suddenly, a real smile, making him slightly less menacing.

“Oh, don’t be thinking I’m not happy you did, because I am! It’s just not something my people would be likely to do,” he said.

The way he mentioned ‘his people’ was odd, as though he spoke of a separate race. Then he flicked his hair absently with one hand and a pointed ear poked through. Separate race indeed.

“I find myself in dettis onach,” he said, his tone and expression a mixture of disbelief and resentment.

“What?” I asked.

“It is a concept of my people – a life debt of sorts. You risked your life for mine without a logical reason to do so. We are not related, we do not work together and we have no prior obligation to each other,” he said.

“Yeah well, ‘my people’ call it lending a hand. But who are your people?” I asked.

He smiled a little at that, then paused to look at the security light, the car in the driveway and back to the gun in my hands.

“There have been many changes since I was here last,” he commented, continuing to sweep the house with his gaze. “Not here, actually, I’ve never been here. I mean here on this world.”

“Ooookay, I’ll play this game. If I had’t seen the green ape things I’d figure you for a Lord of the Rings wannabe or maybe a Mr. Spock impersonator,” I said. “So I’ll throw it out there…..you’re an elf?”

His eyes widened momentarily, then he laughed a short sharp laugh.

“Your people remember us!” he said.

“We have legends, but nobody really believes them. I’m not sure I buy it even now. The ape-lizards could just be genetic experiments and you could just be a dozen cards shy of a full deck.”

“Your ancestors would have called them goblins. We call them t’oorcs. The ones I fought belong to Summer.”

“Summer is long gone,” I pointed out, confused.

He shook his head again, smiling. “I’ve not had a conversation like this in some time. I mean that the t’oorcs, the goblins you saw belong to another faction of my world; Summer or the Green Court. I belong to Winter –the White Court.”

“And just where is this world of yours? And how did you get here?” I asked, my head reeling from the surreal conversation. Maybe the guys in white coats would show up soon to collect their escapee. But oddly, part of me wanted to believe the story.

“I don’t have the words to explain everything, I’m not a Watcher of the Veil. But our worlds are closer to each other than the others that circle your star. They are just….kept separate,” he shook his head in frustration. “We come here when the Veil that separates them thins enough. Some of my people, myself included, have enough….,” he paused, scratching the tip of one pointed ear while he tried to think of a word. “talent.....ability… to make the leap.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I had a grip on the next proper question.

“Why? Why do your people come here?”

“Ah well now Mr. Ian Moore, that’s just it then, isn’t it?” he said. “We come to gather.”

“You gather here? Like in a group?” I asked, lost.

“No we gather as in collecting,” he answered, his tone just slightly ominous.

“What do you collect?” I asked.

“Children,” he said, simply.

I almost shot him right then, just out of reflex, but I managed to control the impulse. Nonetheless, his sharp eyes read enough of my body language to get a hint at my thoughts. He held both hands up quickly.

“No fears Ian Moore, I am not a Hunter. They all belong to Summer. I would not take children, that’s not my role,” he said.

“You better explain real quick and just how the hell do you know my name?” I questioned.

“Your name is printed on the metal container on the post. The one that printed messages go in,” he said, pointing back toward the mailbox at the end of the driveway. “I am a Guardian, I protect the gateways,” he said, although it seemed like he had wanted to say more but held back.

“Why does Summer take children?” I asked, struggling with the anger building inside.

“To save our world,” he said with a sad smile.

I raised my eyebrows and motioned with the shotgun for him to continue.

“We,” he motioned back and forth between us, “are related, at least enough that our people can interbreed. My people don’t produce offspring..children frequently. Not like you do. And our race is much, much older than yours. Our bloodlines have thinned, weakened. To survive as a race, we need fresh stock. So when the Veil thins we cross over and Gather new blood. The Green Court does the searching, as the talents needed to find the right children have all concentrated in Summer’s bloodline. The White Court guards the gateways and keeps Summer honest.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but he had basically confessed to kidnapping, or at least being party to kidnapping. As someone with a kid, I wasn’t fond of the concept, not one bit. Before I could properly express my feelings about that, I saw his eyes look past me and widen. I risked a fast glance over my left shoulder at the door.

Two faces were framed in the glass. I shot my head back around to see if he had moved, but he was standing still, his eyes evaluating the girls behind me.

“Ashley! Get away from the window!” I yelled, alarmed to my core.

Greer tilted his head sideways, still looking at the faces behind me.

“Dad? What’s going on? Why do you have a gun pointed at that man?” she asked. Then before I could answer, I heard a noise that scared the crap out of me. The rattle of the lock as Ashley started to unlock it.

“Ash, no!” I yelled, skipping back a step and reaching with my left hand to hold the door closed. I kept my eyes on Greer, even as I locked my grip on the twisting door knob.

“No fears, Ian Moore, I will not harm nor allow harm to come to your child. But that will not be easy,” he said. The door started to pull open and I exerted myself, slamming it back shut, twisting around to glare at Ashley. She let go with an angry look and I spun back to check on Greer. He was gone, completely. A really, really fast individual could possibly have made the trees or the corner of the barn in the short time I had looked away. Possibly, but the implications of that kind of speed were chilling.

Chapter 6

Ashley had that sullen glare thing going, the one teenagers get when they feel they’ve been wronged. I love Ashley with all my heart, but at that moment I didn’t like her very much.

“When. I. Tell. You. To. Get . Away. You do it! Understand?”

“Who was that man? Why did you point great Grandpa’s gun at him?” she sputtered, attempting to control the moment.

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” I shouted. Rarely is my voice raised to my daughter, but there are times.

Both girls jumped. Lindsey looked stricken, like she would rather be anywhere then here. Ashley was still glaring but it had slipped a little, as if just maybe she had begun to realize how serious I was.

“Yes,” she said finally.

“I don’t know who that man is, but he’s dangerous! If you see me with a gun pointing in someone’s direction that should be your clue that they’re trouble,” I said.

“Grandpa says never point a gun at anyone or anything unless you are ready to kill them!” Ashley said, her tone petulant.

“Grandpa is exactly right!” I said. It took a second for her to realize my meaning. Her tan face went white.

“But who is he? He wouldn’t hurt anyone or at least he doesn’t look like he would,” she said in a rush. Something in her voice gave me pause and I replayed Greer’s image in my mind’s eye. Tall, lean, dressed in black, exotic hair, exotic coloring and vivid ice blue eyes. Crap!

“Girls, you need to listen to me. You cannot judge someone’s intentions or ability to harm based on how they look! Most serial killers are attractive, well mannered people right up until they hit you in the head, duct tape you and toss you in their van.”

Both sets of eyes were wide, both heads nodded, but deep inside a part of me was quailing at the thought of them meeting Greer without me present.

“His name is Greer, I don’t know what he wants, but he is very, very dangerous. You are not to talk to him, never go near him and never open the door for him. I don’t care how good he looks or how smoothly he talks to you. Got it?”

They both nodded again.

“Listen, he’s gone, so why don’t we put on a movie or something and get settled in for the night. Okay?”

“Alright Mr. Moore.” “ Kay, Dad.”

I turned on the tv and handed Lindsey the remote, then headed into the kitchen to make popcorn, while I thought through the last ten minutes of my life.

It took two bags of microwave popcorn to get things lined up in my head to the point where I could start to organize them. When I did, I had a list of thoughts to process.

One, I had witnessed Greer fighting with a pack(?) of vicious green apes that he said were goblins (t’oorcs).

Two, he had fought insanely well with a weapon I couldn’t begin to identify.

Three, the green goblins melted into goo when killed and reacted to steel or iron like it was acid.

Four, he said he was from another world and entered this one to steal or supervise the stealing of children.

Five, he said he owed me a life debt.

Six, something small, fast and nasty was killing animals and birds around the farm.

Seven, my dear, departed grandfather had covered every window with steel mesh and loaded his shotgun with steel shot.

Eight, there were at least two factions to Greer’s world, one green (Summer), one white (Winter).

I picked up the bowls of popcorn, a bottle of orange soda, and three cups, taking them all into the living room, where the girls were playing some teen show that Ashley had DVR’ed the night before. I grabbed Ashley’s laptop and settled into the leather chair, taking note of Charm, who was snuggled on the couch between the girls. Then I opened the browser and Googled the word ‘elves’, pausing once to glance at gramp’s shotgun where I had leaned it near the door.

***

I was up early the next morning, dressed, armed and very thoughtful as I checked the household. My sleep had been spotty to non-existent so I started a steady intake of coffee to compensate. Everything looked secure, even outside, where the sun was starting to rise on a cold, clear November morning. Frost glittered on every surface.

My research hadn’t told me much, although folklore about the Fey as some called them was extensive. The Irish had names like sidhe, unseelie sidhe, and leprechauns, while Wikipedia told me that elves were Germanic and Norse in origin. Wights, goblins, hobgoblins, pixies, fairies, brownies, dwarves, trolls, ogres, gnomes, sprites, the list goes on and on.

Every nation on earth, every race of people have legends of little people and strange, almost magical folk. Legends that go back hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

Jittery and jumpy, I left the house, locking the door behind me and checking it twice. Then I headed to the old part of the barn where the horse stalls used to be. Still are, but they’ve been modified a bit. One of the two stalls is now my weight room, having enough room for my Olympic set and a decent bench. The other, slightly larger space has a heavy bag suspended from the ceiling. I took off my jacket and tightened my belt. I wasn’t really dressed for a workout, but my baggy cargo pants and long sleeve tee shirt wouldn’t bind me or slow me down. Plus it’s not a bad idea to train as you are, wearing what you would possibly be wearing if a street fight, mugging or other scenario developed. I left the gun on my hip as I jump roped to warm up, slightly awkward in hiking boots. After a couple wind busting sets of rope, I slipped the bag gloves on and went to work. Pounding the heavy bag is about as therapeutic as forging. You slip into a rhythm, and your brain can run free while you work combinations and footwork. I immediately started to run through what I thought I knew.

Greer had implied distrust of the Green Court, but also that there was a tenuous working relationship.

White guarded the gateways (?) which implied one was near; while Green hunted for gifted children. Gifted how? Intelligence, athletic ability, artistic? But he had also mentioned talent and gifted in relation to those of his people that could cross to this world. So talented might imply something else.

I had read enough fiction in my youth and have seen enough bad science fiction movies to make a guess about what ‘talented’ might imply.

“You move well,”

I jumped one foot up and three back, struggling to get my right hand glove off and my gun out. Greer was leaning against a post about fifteen feet away, arms crossed, with an interested glitter in his frosty eyes. He grinned at my awkward spaz attack, holding both hands up to indicate no ill intent.

I got my hand on my Sig, but stopped, as he obviously could have killed me while I wasn’t looking.

“What the fuck!” I demanded, mad and embarrassed in equal parts.

“It was not my intention to alarm you. You were lost in thought and I might have some blame for that,” he said. “I thought to talk some more.”

My heart was jumping damn near into my throat, adrenaline racing through me, but I managed to get a grip on myself and avoid getting smacked by the heavy bag as it swung back at me.

After a moment he pointed at the bag and commented again.

“You move well for a human. Heavy on your feet, but with power. T’oorcs fight like that, although they are fast,” he supplied, moving around the bag as I moved opposite him, keeping the bag centered between us.

“My people are built lighter than yours, by and large. Our fighting techniques favor speed, agility and flexibility,” he lectured. “Many of my people would tell you it’s a superior method of fighting, but the better fighters know that there is no best way. My partner, who is without a doubt the best fighter of our generation, feels that warriors need to train in a way that maximizes their strengths and strengthens their weaknesses.

“Partner?” I asked.

“Guardians generally work in pairs, each pair assigned to a portal. Summer’s Hunters work in triads,” he explained.

“So there is a portal nearby?” I asked.

He nodded, pointing up and behind the house.

“On top of Bear Mountain?” I guessed.

“It is a smaller node, off the path of the larger, more established portals. Which was why my partner questioned our placement here,” he explained.

“So you are saying there’s a backwater portal atop the hill behind my house? And you and your partner feel slighted?” I asked trying to grasp the situation.

“Slighted? Maybe not slighted. Puzzled might be a better term. Neeve and I are considered the first team among Guardians. We are usually sent to the biggest, most important nodes,” he said. “We wondered what was different about this one.”

“You said ‘wondered? Like you’ve now figured it out,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

He nodded. “Hunters seek children of Talent. These children are interspersed between the two courts and bred back into the blood lines. Guardians protect the portals, but mostly we seek to maintain the balance between the courts. Occasionally a child is found who is gifted to such an extent that it would throw off the balance between the courts. As Summer’s hunters invariably find these children, Summer would most likely benefit.”

I held up my hand to stop the flow of words.

“What are these Talents you refer to? Just so I’m clear,”

“Millennia ago, your species hunted to survive and were in turn, hunted. As an animal, you were handicapped by using two feet instead of four. Your natural weaponry was pathetic, and your senses weak. Yet you thrived. Why?” he asked.

“Our brains?” I answered.

He nodded. “Your intelligence allowed you to modify your environment to better your odds. My people did the same. However, while we chose to modify the living forms of our environment, you chose the nonliving avenue, fashioning weapons and tools from wood, stone and hide. You still faced the problem of senses, one that we overcame by improving our night vision, olfactory and auditory abilities through our ability to manipulate the code of life. But your people didn’t. Yet they were able to detect and avoid predators, find or lure game, coordinate hunts to take down large prey. How?”

I shrugged, figuring he would answer quicker if I kept quiet.

“Your ancestors developed and used abilities that have gone latent in most of your population.”

“Like what? Psychic powers? ESP? Telepathy?”

“I think you refer to powers of the mind that are beyond the normal senses?” he asked. I nodded and he continued. “These mental abilities gave your people the edge they needed to outwit predators and find prey.”

“And you and your partner think there is such a child here? In Groton Falls?”

“There is,” he said with a grimace.

“And?” I asked, waiting for the other shoe to fall.

“She is your daughter,” he said.

Shoe? More like a giant’s boot.

“What?

“I don’t know what her abilities are, but even I can recognize the signs of raw talent. Plus there is the mystery of the pucks.”

“Pucks? What the fuck is a puck?”

“You may have noticed them, small very fast fliers with big teeth. They are part of the White Court, just as the Green Court has what you might call ‘pixies’ or maybe ‘bug’,” he said with a slight smile.

“You know the word bug?” I asked.

He looked puzzled. “Yes it is an old word from your ancestors’ lands.”

“My ancestors? You mean the Irish and the Scots?”

“’tis a Gaelic word. But the point is they are also fliers, but smaller and green with lighter legs,” he said.

“Oh, the big hornets?” I asked. He nodded. “Okay, so what about the pucks? I have noticed something is eating animals around here,” I added.

“The pucks serve my Court, yet the ones here on your farm refuse my orders to leave. They tell me they must guard, but they are very….limited. They can’t or won’t tell me what they guard. Now I have figured it out….they guard your daughter.”

“Guard Ashley? From what?”

“Anything that would threaten her,” he said.

I froze, almost completely baffled by his words. He stared at me silently, giving me time to process my thoughts.

“You’re telling me that Ashley has some gift or another – something that makes her valuable to Fey?”

He nodded.

“And a pack of killer fairies with huge teeth are here to protect her?”

“Both Courts have allies or….soldiers. The White Court has Pucks and dieg t’oorcs…er..that would translate as ice goblins. The Green Court has the shiavrih and drut’oorcs, which are the small poisonous horn- nets…, and the green goblins,” he replied. “White Court creatures all obey the orders of Guardians, just as Summer’s foot soldiers obey Hunters.”

“Sooo, you’re saying the piranha thingies should do what you say? But they don’t ‘cause they’ve decided to…what…defect to Ashley?” I asked, part of me wondering if I would wake up in the mental ward at any moment.

“Defect? That’s pretty close to the right idea, although I doubt they would disobey the Queen if she were here or even Neeve for that matter,” he mused.

“Neeve is your partner?” I asked.

He looked up and nodded, a strange emotion flickering across his face. Something about what he had just said had made him uncomfortable, like he had said too much.

“So I need to get out of here? Is that what you’re saying? Pack up Ashley and head to Florida or California or something?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Running won’t help. Portals to your world open all across this land. In fact, if my grasp of the layout of your country is correct, there are major portals in the two locations you named. Haven’t been there myself you understand, but scouts from both courts have gone through over the last fifty years or so.”

That triggered another question. “How does this veil thing work? How does it thin? Why?” I asked.

He paused for a moment, visibly gathering his thoughts.

“I don’t fully grasp it, not like a Watcher does. But there are more levels of existence than what we see and hear, feel and touch. This world occupies a place in the Great Web of the One. But that web has more….layers? levels?” he shook his head in frustration. I tried to help out.

“Dimensions? Are you trying to say there are multiple dimensions or universes or something?” I supplied. I had a feeling the Great Web was the universe or cosmos.

He face brightened into a big smile and he nodded vigorously. “Yes, those are the words I lack. Our worlds are separate in distance, but close in dimensions. The layer that separates us gets lighter from time to time, as the stars age. But this time, the Watchers say it was your own people who thinned the Veil. Some vast machine of your scholars,” he said.

The news story from the night before flashed into my head.

“The Collider? You’re talking about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland!” I said, excited that some piece of the puzzle might actually fit.

He nodded again. “I guess that is the one. It has thinned the Veil all at once, rather than just in places. That has allowed us to come through every portal. My people are ready to Gather as we have never done before.”

“And they are all looking for Ashley?” I said, flattened by the weight of what he was telling me.

He shook his head. “Not yet. The Hunters are drawn to children of Talent, as are their minions – the green goblins and small flyers. That’s why your Father’s father was plagued by the poisonous ones. They would have scented the Talent in him and perhaps you as well. The goblins I fought were drawn to your daughter. But no Hunters have scented her….yet!”

“Wait, I’m not Talented and neither was my grandfather, or even Ashley for that matter. We don’t read minds or predict the future or whatever,” I said.

He smiled at my disclaimer. “Talents vary much more than those. Yours, I would guess, are tied into your affinity for crafting metal, as was your GrandFather’s. I’m sure it caused the minions of Summer no end of difficulty in dealing with a Crafter of death metal.”

“So iron and steel are poisonous to your kind?” I asked.

“Extremely, as you no doubt saw with the goblins we fought,” he said. “It is a modification that my people choose to make eons ago, one that aided our survival, allowing us to better sense and meld with our world. But iron disrupts all that, causing our bodies to break down. Of course, we had no idea your race would learn to mine and use iron,” he said, a look of chagrin flashing over his dark features.

“So wait, back to the question…what Talent does Ashley have?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I have no idea. It may not have manifested yet. Some abilities appear when children are young, but the most powerful tend to come to females and arrive about the time a girl becomes a woman.”

I figured that one out quick. Ashley had had her first period just about six months ago. God had granted me the boon of having it arrive when she was with Lindsey and her mother, saving me and Ashley both.

“If you don’t know what her Talent is, how do you know she has one at all?”

“It is a feeling we get, kind of a pull toward those that have it. Your daughter’s friend has a touch too, but Ashley is like a powerful lodestone, drawing every denizen of my world in her direction. I can’t tell you what she’ll be able to do, but it’ll be big when she does it!”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. I don’t think I believe any of this!”

“You fought the goblins and you still doubt?” he asked. I didn’t say anything, trying to come up with a theory to explain the squatty monsters. Maybe some government black ops lab created them.

He watched me for a moment then tilted his head to one side and took a breath. His mouth pursed into a whistle shape, but when he blew out there was no sound. He paused and listened, then repeated the strange action. Suddenly, a loud whirring filled the air and a dark blur flew through the air, making me duck in reflex. The blur flew past his outstretched hand and alighted on the edge of the half wall that separated the two stalls.

A six inch tall figure with flickering wings stood looking at the two of us. Long prehensile toes with talons clung to the wood with a solid grip. The body was humanoid, but covered in silky, dark brown fur that looked soft and warm. A pair of muscled arms folded across a broad chest designed to pump the still moving wings at speeds too fast to be seen. The head was round, like a little brown gourd, with big round eyes, bat-like ears and when the mouth split open – teeth that would make a shark jealous. The eyes were green and sparkled with intelligence as it looked back and forth between us.

Greer snorted softly to himself and lowered the hand he had raised for the creature to land on.

“This, Ian, is a puck. He came to my call, but as you can see, he wants nothing to do with me,” Greer said. Then he spoke in a twittering, high-pitched voice that I couldn’t follow and the puck listened, its wings never ceasing their motion. When he finished, the tiny creature trilled back at him, like it was actually speaking to him.

“This is the Prime of the clan, the leader if you will. He says he and his clan were early scouts sent ahead by the Watchers of the Veil when the barrier first thinned. They didn’t travel far from the portal as they found a nest of shiavrih had taken up residence around the old one who lived here. The Summer flyers were also scouts and as I said earlier, were drawn to your grandfather. When you and Ashley moved in the shiavrih grew very aggressive and triggered his clan’s interest in Ashley. Now, he offers me honor as a Guardian of Winter, but he must protect the solan.”

I was struck speechless, unable to form words in the face of this madness. But as the small face turned in my direction, studying me, I was able to get out a question.

“What is the soul on?”

“Solan is our word for light. He is using it to name Ashley,” Greer explained. He sighed, rubbed his head, then shook his head, a quick look of resignation crossing his face. “They’ve chosen your daughter.”

“What does that mean…’chosen’?” I asked, hand back on my gun.

“It means they will protect her from Summer’s Hunters, just as I will, although they don’t have a dettis onus. They’ve just been drawn to her….potential.”

“So what do I do?” I asked, pretty sure I shouldn’t be seeking advice from an alien who admitted his people wanted to abduct my child.

“For now nothing, just stay put, although you might want to feed the pucks. They thrive in cold, but need meat to live. As far as your daughter…Summer hasn’t found her yet. He tells me that his clan has slaughtered the nest of shiavrih that were drawn here, and between you and I, we killed off the goblins. I’ve been called back to report, but I’ll be back in less than a day. My partner will remain on site, but you won’t likely see her. At least I hope not,” he said.

“Why don’t I want to see your partner?”

“Because she is usually only seen just before she kills. She doesn’t share my life debt to you, and she is the Queen’s top Guardian, so we don’t want to call any attention to you and especially not Ashley,” he concluded.

“How would I know her, if I did see her?” I asked.

“Oh you would know her…she bears a close resemblance to me,” he responded.

“Related?” I asked.

He paused for a moment then nodded. “She is my sister.”

“So you are part of an alien invasion force, here to abduct our children, only you owe me some debt of honor or something. My daughter is the top pick for both nations of your world, you’re headed home, your sister is the best killer of your nation and I need to avoid her while keeping Ashley away from the hunter people, while a group of piranha looking pixies protect us from poisonous bugs? That about it?” I asked.

He stared at me for a moment, perplexed, then slowly nodded, grudgingly. “Maybe not as I would describe it, but essentially true. One thing to remember is that Summer’s people may approach you directly, as I have, trusting that you will not realize or believe them to be other than people of your own world. Many Hunters are Gifted at illusion, able to mask features such as these,” he said, pulling his hair away from one pointed ear. “I must go, Ian Moore, but I will be back in less than twenty-four of your hours. I doubt Summer will make an appearance in that time, especially as the pucks,” he waved at the strange, toothy little man perched on the stall, “have destroyed their scouts. Nonetheless, stay alert and take no chances.”

No sooner had he finished his sentence and he was moving, so smoothly that the speed of his departure wasn’t obvious for the second it took him to disappear out the doorway.

Chapter 7

I stared at the little creature gripping the stall wall and he stared back, his little head tilted to one side. I was seeing him, but also trying to process the past few moment’s conversation.

The little flyer yawned, his impressive teeth sparkling white in the bluish light of the compact florescent bulbs that lit the barn. That sight reminded me that Greer had mentioned I should feed the pucks. I’ve always agreed with the notion that it’s a bad idea to feed wildlife, but this creature seemed too smart, too people-like to categorize as an animal. And I didn’t want his flock or clan (?) eating every animal in sight as that might include Charm or even me. Shuddering while thinking about what twenty of those things could do to a person, I moved deeper into the barn to the old chest freezer.

Some old timers can venison, grandpa always preferred to freeze it. The freezer was so old its white coloring had yellowed to almost tan, but it still worked well. I can’t begin to tell you how many packets of butcher-paper wrapped venison had seen the inside of this box, it was a lot. I hadn’t hunted this past season, but Bob, Jr. had and his deer was wrapped and frozen in professionally wrapped cuts. Even the ribs were packed and frozen, as we sometimes barbequed them in the summer months. I grabbed the six big packs of ribs, which included two years worth, and pulled them free from the frosty chest, noticing the zip lock bag with the crow carcass as I did.

Turning around, I jumped at the sight of the puck hovering two feet in front of me, his glittering eyes fastened on the white packets of meat. Moving carefully, I dropped to one knee and pulled my knife to cut the wrapper. He hissed at the sight of the steel blade, his hovering form swooping back two feet in a split second, but then he calmed as I sliced all six packets open, leaving them open on the straw covered concrete floor. The ribs were meaty and, even frozen, the smell of venison filled the barn, causing the toothy fairy to chitter and squeak with excitement. When I backed away from the frozen meat offering and sheathed my knife, he looked me over for a couple of seconds, then put his head back and screamed a silent scream…silent to me, that is. Instantly I could hear Charm barking furiously inside the house, the pitch of the puck’s call obviously within his audible range.

A thrumming flutter filled the air, the sound of rushing wings and high speed bodies, and the broad open barn space was suddenly filled with dark blurs, diving and swooping. I ducked instinctively, but the fast moving shapes converged on the chunky ribs, two or three pucks hauling them into the air while others slammed into the meat, then fell away with a cubic inch or more of flesh clenched in trap-like jaws. It was exactly like underwater footage I had seen of piranha attacking a chicken carcass, except this was in open air and perhaps more violent. Thirty or forty seconds later the shattered bones lay scattered around the barn floor and twenty-three furry fliers of various sizes perched around the open space with visibly distended bellies. The leader landed nearest me, his stomach pushed out in what Ashley and Lindsey would call a ‘food baby’. We looked each other over, while the flock or pack or what have you studied me with glittering predator eyes. The smallest ones were obviously children, the slighter built adults having decidedly female curves. The clan appeared to be evenly split between males and females, but I could only identify eight adults, the rest ranging from almost adults to a pair of very young females. The leader was one of the biggest, but there was one male bigger than him, who was perched just slightly behind the leader’s left shoulder. Fur ranged in color from almost black to a light straw color on one little female.

“Damn!” was all I could say. I had thought the meat might need thawing, but that was obviously not the case.

“I hope that’ll hold you for awhile, ‘cause that about wipes out our extra meat. I’ll have to buy more at the butcher shop.”

I was rattling on by reflex, not expecting them to understand my words in any way, but shaken by the sheer violence of the feeding.

The leader’s self important poise reminded me of the bandit leader in Blazing Saddles. “Badges! We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” ran through my head, delivered in a bad Mexican accent.

“Listen, I’ve got to call you something, so let’s go with Pancho?” I said, watching him watch me.

Charm’s frantic barking suddenly stopped and twenty-three miniature heads swiveled along with my own to look at the house. Ashley must have gotten up to calm the dog, so that was my notice to get going.

“Look, don’t eat my dog or anything, alright? I’ll get some more meat today while I’m out,” I said, heading for the door.

Pancho tilted his head to regard me, then uttered a shrill command. Instantly the air was filled with furry flying bodies and then they were gone. The leader still looked at me calmly.

“Ah, I can’t make the same noises that Greer can, so how about I whistle when I’ve got more food?” I asked, simultaneously pondering my own sanity while whistling out a five note tone. Pancho’s eyes widened at the whistle, then narrowed in what I could swear was understanding. He gave me a tooth filled grin and then jumped backward off the wooden beam he’d been gripping with his taloned feet, hummingbird wings pulling him out and away with a ballet dancer’s grace. I turned and headed into the house, my mind reeling from the feeding frenzy.

Chapter 8

Inside the house, I found Ashley and Lindsey looking one-half awake and the other half annoyed.

“Dad, what’s with your stupid dog! It’s way too early for us to be up!” was the greeting I got when I opened the door. Despite her harsh words her left hand was rubbing the ears of the brindled bundle of fur that was wedged between the girls on the couch.

“Well, she musta heard or smelled something,” I said, getting an eye roll that said ‘duh!’.

“How about breakfast? The usual?” I asked in an attempt at changing subjects. Their low blood sugar worked in my favor and they nodded, so I set about making chocolate chip pancakes, which is the standard breakfast for sleepovers.

I think it must be an unwritten rule somewhere that if you’ve given someone a free night by having their teen-ager for a sleepover, then you are obligated to return said teen in a sugared-up condition that will provide a short, intense burst of irritating activity, followed by a sugar crash and semi-coma. Not willing to break the rule, I cooked up a big batch of pancakes, spotted with chunks of chocolate, smothered in butter and rivers of real maple syrup.

The girls trudged to the table, barely awake, but with eyes fastened on the food. I sat down with them, my own plate carrying a slightly smaller batch of griddlecakes. Lindsey noticed and spoke.

“You almost never have pancakes, Mr. Moore?” she questioned. I usually ate far lighter fare than the girls did, having long ago lost my teen-aged metabolism.

“Well, what the hell, Lindsey? Sometimes you just gotta live a little, if you know what I mean?” I said.

She laughed at that, but Ashley just snorted and looked at me with narrowed eyes. The truth was I was in a weird place, trying to keep a semblance of normalcy while the rest of the world around me went mad. Sugar-rich pancakes seemed like a small thing in the face of a worldwide invasion by creatures that could have escaped from Wes Craven’s idea of fairy tales. Nightmare on NeverNever land.

“What time are your parents picking you up, Lindsey?” I asked. She was texting on her cell phone and didn’t bother to look up when she answered. “Dad said around ten.”

“Okay. Ash, you and I are going into town later to run some errands, okay?” I asked.

“Can’t I stay home with Charm and just a hang out?” she asked. Oddly, despite her issues with losing her mother and the massive changes in our lives, Ashley had no fear of staying alone in the old farm house, as long as she had her dog.

“No, I want you and Charm with me. Plus, I think we’re gonna drop in on your grandparents,” I answered. “And if I show up without you, your grandma will skin me alive.”

She grinned, obviously picturing my mother giving me hell for not bringing her granddaughter to visit.

“Why don’t you two get ready? It’s nine twenty-three already,” I suggested.

They agreed, taking their syrup smeared plates to the sink before heading up to Ashley’s room to get dressed.

***

Lindsey’s dad, Tom Yelos, pulled his pickup truck into our driveway at three minutes to ten, the rumble of his diesel powered Chevy vibrating my small house.

I called up the stairs to the girls, then walked outside to say hi. Tom powered down his window and shook my hand with a grin. “Hey buddy! How’d that furnace turn out?”

It took me a split second to remember the lie I had used to get out of the fight evaluation, but I don’t think the lag was too noticeable.

“Well I have heat, so that’s all I can ask for right?” I forced a laugh.

“I thought you heated with wood?” he asked.

“We have a wood stove that keeps most of the house warm, but the furnace is needed for really cold weather,” I explained.

“Yeah, well, from the weather pattern so far it looks like we’re in for a bitch of a winter!” he said, rubbing his bald head with one calloused hand. “In fact, I think we got an early snowstorm coming next week!”

The thought of Greer and his ‘elven’ people flashed through my mind. “Yeah, a storm’s coming alright,” I agreed. Suddenly struck by a fear for Lindsey and her family, a new thought raced through my mind. “Hey listen….would you do me a favor and take this assegai with you? I’m hoping you can adapt some kata for it… when you get a chance?” I asked, pulling Shaka from inside the doorway. Tom stepped out of the truck, stretched his six foot frame and then took the five and a half foot length of spear in his right hand. Feeling its balance for a moment, he suddenly whirled through a spin, slash and jab technique. Tom had black belts in karate, jiu-jitsu, and kung-fu, and practiced many weapons forms. But somewhat surprisingly, despite his occupation and training, he was extremely adverse to guns. He had no issues with people owning them, just didn’t like them himself. I wanted him to have some type of steel weapon at hand, if the Hunters of the Green court came calling.

“I’d sure hate to be on the wrong end of this bastard!” he said, laughing as he admired the thirteen inch steel spear head.

“Yeah, no shit!” I agreed. “But the extra spear head length changes the balance, although it does give you chopping and slashing options that most spears don’t have. That why I thought you might have some insight.”

He looked from me to the spear, scratched his head, then nodded. “Yeah, I’ll do some research too…see if there’s any videos or written information on Zulu technique,” he said, giving me a slightly puzzled look. “I thought you made this in high school? Why the sudden interest?” he asked.

I shrugged. “It’s been something in the back of my mind for quite some time,” I answered, which was true enough. “Something made me think of it this morning, so….it just seemed like a good time to ask,” I finished, trying to be nonchalant. I had another of those all over body chills that have nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with instinct. Tom put the spear behind the seat of his truck and we both turned as the door opened and the girls came out.

“Hey pumpkin, hey Ashley,” Tom greeted the girls.

“Hi Dad” “Hi Mr. Yelos” chorused back at him.

He grabbed Lindsey’s book bag which had her school clothes stuffed in it. She was wearing a set of Ashley’s pajamas with her own coat over them. The girls exchanged clothes like they had one big co-owned closet. “Thanks for letting me stay over Mr. Moore,” Lindsey said.

“Lindsey, please! Me casa you casa!” I said.

She laughed. “Your Spanish is pretty crappy Mr. Moore.”

“Lindsey!” he father admonished.

I just laughed, “You can’t fault the girl for telling the truth, Tom.”

Ashley pretended to slap her fore head with the palm of her hand. “That’s why I’m failing Spanish!” she exclaimed.

I narrow my eyes at her. “You’re failing? I better schedule a meeting with that Miss Connors and find out what we can do about it.” Miss Connors the Spanish Teacher was young and very pretty.

“Oh wait, now I remember, I have a ninety-six in Spanish. No meeting necessary Dad!” she hastily corrected.

We said our goodbyes and the big pickup rolled out of the driveway as we headed back inside.

***

An hour and a half later we were cleaned up, loaded into the SUV and headed toward town. The village of Groton Falls is small and quaint. Located north of Albany, it lies just outside the boundaries of the Adirondack Park. The town is very old, originally settled to make use of the fast flowing Killross Creek that flows through the hilly terrain. The creek had once powered mills and small craft shops in the community’s early days, which then became brick and mortar factories. When manufacturing moved out of state, then out of the country, the town underwent a painful decline. But the last five years had seen a quiet rebirth, as art shops and restaurants filled in the vacant store fronts. Groton Falls became what some call a ‘strolling village’, the kind of place that tourists, drawn to the nearby Saratoga horse track, like to spend time and money in.

Ashley stayed in the car, head down and texting about five friends simultaneously, while I hit the farmers market and then the bank. My last stop before visiting my parents was the drug store to pick up a refill of Ashley’s allergy meds. Ashley decided to come into CVS with me, mumbling something about eye makeup as she tried to walk forward while texting Lindsey. This whole texting every minute of life thing got on my nerves, but it seemed to be universal and my wife’s voice spoke from deep inside me, telling me to pick my battles.

After steering Ashley safely inside, I left her in the strange and formidable (if you’re a guy) makeup aisle and headed to the back of the store where they keep the pharmacy. After waiting in line for ancient Mrs. Oldman to count out her change and harangue the pharmacy tech about the cost of her medicine, I finally got my hands on the allergy meds.

Coming around the corner of the aisle where I had left Ashley, I immediately spotted her talking to a young woman I didn’t know. Dressed in black tights with calf high boots and a short black leather jacket over a rich blue sweater, she definitely stood out in Groton Falls. Not every woman can wear the uncovered tights look, but this girl was rocking it. I noticed long corn-yellow hair that hung in gently curling tresses and the exposed skin of her neck was a summer tan color that had disappeared from most upstate New Yorkers skin by this time of year.

Ashley was obviously discussing makeup with the young woman and when she noticed me approaching she looked up with a big smile. “Hi Dad!” she said, her cheeks slightly flushed. “Come meet Eirwen!”

The young woman turned to look at me and I was almost struck dumb by her appearance. Have you ever unexpectedly come across a person who is so immediately attractive to you that you almost lose the ability to use language? I was able to say hi to Ashley, but that’s probably because the neural pathways for those particular words were so well established. The rest of my thoughts fled at the sight of the girl’s forest green eyes, full bee stung lips and even white teeth.

She smiled instantly at me, the greeting someone gives when they want to make a good impression on a new friend’s parent. But the look in her eyes changed to one of interest even as she said “Hi” in a clear bell toned voice and held out one slim tan hand to shake. Her grip surprised me; there was a lot more strength in her than you might guess. “ How do you know Ashley?” I asked, wondering at how calm my voice sounded.

“Oh, I just met her. I’m new in town and when I saw such a beautiful young woman in the makeup section, I couldn’t help but ask for her advice,” she laughed easily. Someone else saying the same sentence might have sounded condescending and insulting, but Eirwen managed to express admiration for the teen ager who was looking at her wide eyed, all while poking fun at herself.

“That’s sooo not true! She helped me pick out this eye liner that makes my eyes POP!” Ashley said in a gush.

“Well thanks for that, because there’s no way she’s gonna get that kind of help from me!” I said, caught up in the rush of emotion that had struck almost on sight.

I looked over at Ashley who was watching our exchange. A whole slew of expressions flashed over her face. The first was a small amount of awe, directed at the beautiful blonde shaking my hand. I could understand that as I felt a similar if different impact from Eirwen. The second emotion I read was surprise which was followed by calculated interest, and instantly I had a flash of insight. Ashley was somehow misreading the situation. Eirwen was all of twenty-five…if that. I was long past my fortieth birthday. The realization that Ashley was reading more into this simple exchange was like a bucket of cold water, shocking my brain back to earth.

“Where did you move from?” I asked. “Obviously some place warm and sunny,” I added, gesturing at her tanned hand. “California, maybe?”

She laughed, sending a shiver through me. “California’s certainly sunny enough,” she agreed. The plastic blister pack of makeup she was holding suddenly slipped free from her fingers and I reflexively caught it before it hit the ground.

She took it back from my outstretched hand, her eyes round with surprise. “Wow, you are fast! Great reflexes!” she said admiringly.

“Dad trains MMA fighters!” Ashley interjected. Eirwen looked surprised and a little confused at that statement, not recognizing the term.

“She means mixed-martial arts, you know…like cage fighters?” I explained. She still looked confused, slightly shaking her head, but caught sight of my watch.

“Is that really the time?” she asked, concerned. “ Oh, goodness, I really have to run. It was nice to meet you Ashley, and very nice to meet you Ian,” she said, putting the makeup back on the display and moving toward the door.

“It was nice to meet you too, Eirwen,” I said, noticing that she looked as good going as she did coming.

It wasn’t till we were checking out about five minutes later that I realized she had known my name without either Ashley or I saying it. She also hadn’t ever said where she was from. The checkout clerk was taking forever to install a new roll of register tape, so I glanced around. Our register was nearest the glass front doors and I watched cars roll by outside. Suddenly a lithe figure in black tights crossed the street right in my view. Needless to say Eirwen was more interesting to watch than the cars so I saw her reach the far side just as three men moved into sight and met her. Tall, lean and also blond, they could have been brothers and as they crowded around her any momentary fantasies I’d had evaporated. They all appeared her own age as they listened to her talk, but when she pointed back at the drugstore and they all followed her gaze, seeming to look right at me, a chill chased down my spine.

Chapter 9

My mother answered the door when we arrived at my parents’ house; carefully unlocking the twin deadbolts to let us in. Max, my parents’ Doberman, greeted each of us with careful dignity, which he promptly lost when he exchanged butt sniffs with Charm. The two dogs led us further into my mother’s kitchen where lunch was in its final stages of assembly, the odor of chocolate chip cookies foretelling dessert. The fact that four places were set at the kitchen table was not unusual as we often visited my parents on Saturdays, but the certainty of it all told me that mom had been tipped off.

“You texted Grandma?” I asked Ashley.

“Of course, Ian,” my mother answered for her. “Somebody has to keep me informed!” she added with mock outrage. Joan Moore’s hair was still blonde after more than six decades, but I was pretty sure it owed that color more to chemicals than nature.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“Down in his lair,” she answered, handing a bowl of grapes to Ashley who automatically started to help her grandmother organize lunch.

I headed down the basement stairs, hearing my mother ask Ash for updates on teen life.

The initial section of my parents basement is finished into a theatre room, but if you travel through that, you come to a regular-looking door set in the wall. Only when you open it do you realize it’s steel and equipped with a Medeco deadbolt. The door to my Father’s combination den and workshop was open and I could see it was fully lit by the overhead fluorescents. Dad looked up from his workbench when I came in, started to turn back to his project but did a double take when he saw me close the door behind me.

He raised both eyebrows and waited. “I’ve had two visits from the man in black,” I said as casually as I could. His eyes widened and he put down the tube of epoxy he held and straightened from the bench. He had been gluing the open ends of hollowpoint cartridges that sat in a tray. They looked like .45’s and there were at least three stacked trays behind the one he was currently working on. Maybe two hundred cartridges althogether.

Distracted from my story I bent over and looked carefully. Each gaping hollowpoint cavity was filled with iron filings and Dad had been epoxying the open ends. “Clever,” I said. He was creating rounds that would spray iron particles throughout the bodies of anything they hit. I nodded in appreciation, but when I noticed the vein bulging on his forehead I realized I had better get on with my story telling or he would kill me himself.

I filled him in on Greer’s two visits, the politics of his world as I understood them, and the feeding incident with the pucks.

“Sooo, that’s about all I know, although remind me when I leave that I have to stop by the meat market on the way home. They should have some of those beef bones they keep for dogs that I can use,” I finished.

He had listened to the whole thing in silence and now sat twiddling with his mustache, trying to deal with the load of incredible information I had dumped in his lap, staring at the concrete block wall behind the workbench. While he thought it through I looked around his man cave for anything new. As always it was neatly organized, everything in its place. A twenty-gun fireproof safe squatted in the corner of the room, taking pride of place. Two stuffed chairs and a loveseat were arrayed in the opposite corner around a forty-two inch flatscreen. That was football central. The other two corners of the room were filled with the opposite ends of the workbench that ran the full length of the wall. This bench was solely dedicated to gun related work, as the garage held his wood working tools. A big Dillon reloading machine took up space on half of the bench, bracketed by a Lee single stage reloader and a big vibrating brass case cleaner. That side was the reloading center, the other half of the bench set up for gun smithing and cleaning. The only thing new that I could see was a heavy duty steel cabinet with a push button electronic lock on the door. It was obviously a gun cabinet but that seemed rather redundant with the fire safe.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the cabinet. Dad looked up and grunted. “Ready rig, I’ll show you later. Combination is the last two numbers of your birth year and Ashley’s…in that order.”

I studied him from the corner of my eye while pretending to still look at the metal cabinet. He was off…way off his normal pattern. His eyes were looking everywhere but at me and he was fiddling with his mustache in a nervous way. This was not my father. Then it hit me…he couldn’t wrap himself around this situation. It was too weird, too science fiction-come-to-life.

I had never seen this before, my father, the federal agent, unable to cope with a situation. This was the man who had been in running gunfights with hardened drug lords, the man who had single handedly stopped a convenience store robbery with a can of beans and a display rack of potato chips.

“Ah Dad? Do you believe me?” I asked, first checking his faith in me. He looked up and nodded, but the fear in his eyes threw me. “It’s the whole elf, goblin and fairy part, isn’t it?”

His lack of answer was answer enough. I had another flash of empathy. I had felt much the same way when the pickup truck with the arrow headed plow blade had slid through a stop sign and crushed my wife to death right next to me. Waking up from the walking nightmare that followed had taken weeks. Trying to figure out what to do and being at a loss for answers. Dad and mom had helped me through that by breaking it down into small pieces, small decisions.

“Dad, stop thinking about this as elves and think about it as illegal aliens from rival gangs or intelligence agents from China and Russia. They think Ashley has the plans to a secret new weapon and will stop at nothing to get it. No one will believe us if we try to warn people. So it’s up to us, although we have a double agent on our side and have turned one of their biological weapons against them,” I said, trying to use terms he was comfortable with.

“Now I plan to stay at home with Ashley for tonight. The house is sealed in steel mesh, the pucks are there and Greer will be back in six hours or so. I also think the Summer elves, er agents are already in town, poking around. But I need more plans and I need your help securing Grandpa’s house,” I said, meeting his now firm gaze. “I’m thinking booby traps or something.”

His expression had changed during my little speech and I could almost tell you the moment when his brain reengaged the problem and started to plan.

“Booby traps? Actually, I’ve already got some ideas on that, Ian,’ he said, moving toward the workbench. He picked up a seven inch section of two-by-four that had things attached to it.

“Here, see I screwed one of these new mouse traps to the two-by-four, drilled a one inch hole through the wood and fitted this little section of steel pipe in it. Then I fastened a little strip of steel to the jaws of the trap and put a nail out on the end of the metal. You just slide a twelve gauge shell into the pipe and its primer is all lined up with the nail. Set the trap by pushing down on this lever and when this string gets yanked the shell goes off.”

It was deadly simple. He had used those new type plastic mouse traps, the kind that are much easier to set than the old wooden ones. He showed me how he would set one up by using a drill to screw it solidly into position, the tube of the pipe aimed at a doorway or some other narrow space.

Pausing, my father looked over at me. “Chinese and Russian agents?” he questioned, eyes glinting in the overhead light.

“Listen, don’t let the sci-fi part throw you. A lot of science fiction ends up coming true and in this case us human types built the Large Hadron Collider, which started all this,” I said.

“That big accelerator thingy in Switzerland?”

“Yeah, it wore away whatever separates our worlds naturally. So now we have illegal aliens within our borders, intent on child kidnapping. They have advanced biological weapons and can hide among the local population. And they’ve done this all before when the stars were right or the astrological alignments were in order or something,” I said.

His mouth had thinned to a flat line of anger at the words ‘child kidnapping’ and he gave a sharp nod of agreement.

“In fact, I find it hard to believe that some obscure government agency doesn’t already have some knowledge of them, like the guys at Area 51 or something,” I wondered.

His head snapped up. “I’ll check into it,” he said, his tone determined.

There probably wasn’t any such group, but it would give my dad something to do. He had contacts in almost every part of the federal law enforcement establishment. I doubted it would help our situation or stop the storm I could just about feel approaching Groton Falls, but what the hell, it was better than seeing my father not knowing what to do.

He showed me how to put the shotgun shell traps together and we made four more, placing them into a cardboard box.

“Here, take these as well,” Dad said, handing me an electronics box.

“Cameras?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s a two camera security system I picked up at Walmart. Each camera on a remote control and wirelessly connected to the monitor. It was on sale and I thought I’d try it out. Put one camera under the eaves of the shop so it looks at the whole outside of the house and one on the ceiling of the porch. Should give you pretty good coverage and the cameras have infrared ability.”

The setup seemed pretty simple to use. The cameras either plugged into a socket or ran on batteries. I could think of two easy places to plug them in. The base monitor also had dual power sources so you could move it room to room.

“Now what did you do to your ammo?” he asked, his mind fully engaged in the problem at hand.

I pulled up my sweat shirt and grabbed the spare magazine of ammo I carry in front. It slipped out of its kydex carrier and I showed him the round of .40 S&W that was visible at the top.

“You sectioned rod?” he asked. At my nod, he went on. “How did you hold it in?”

“It’s actually a pretty tight fit, but there’s a drop of super glue in there to make sure.”

“Hmm, it’ll be a deep penetrating mother won’t it?” he mused.

“Yeah, those goblins were pretty densely built. But your filing design will spread the iron quicker. I’m not sure which is more effective,” I said.

“Generally, I prefer penetration over expansion, but we’ll just have to see, won’t we? What did you do for the cowboy assault weapon?”

Dad nicknamed my deer rifle when I first got it. I only ever hunted deer on Grandpa’s land, which is thickly wooded with no real open shots beyond a hundred yards. So when I bought my first rifle it was a Winchester Trapper .44 magnum. With a sixteen inch barrel it’s a short, light handy little gun, perfect for our land. Dad had laughed at it at first, but after seeing me shoot ten fast shots of heavy .44 rounds he had gotten a thoughtful look on his face. The short barrel is still longer than a revolver’s so the bullet picks up speed, bringing up the kinetic energy of the round. At anything under 125 to 150 yards it’s deadly. My father had promptly borrowed it and when I got it back it had custom peep sights, a smoothed and tuned action and a buttstock ammo carrier that held ten more rounds. It also had a mount for a flashlight for investigating bumps in the night.

“Same thing, but bigger diameter rod,” I answered.

“Alright then….what’s your plan,” he asked.

“Well for the next day, we stay at the house, you know, shelter in place. Grandpa did a good job securing it and I have some help out there, especially when Greer gets back,” I said. “After I talk to him, I want to see what my options are for getting out of the area, what might be a safe spot to go to till this gathering or whatever it is ends.”

“What about staying here? Two of us are more capable than one!” he said.

“Yeah, well I don’t want to drag you into it,” I said.

“Bullshit! Bullshit!” he spat out. “Your mother and I were ‘in it’ the moment you were born. In it a second time when Ashley was born! Maybe sheltering at home is okay for the moment, but at the first sign of trouble you get your asses here! Got it!”

“Dad, I don’t want Mom getting hurt!” I objected.

“Listen to me, mister! Your mother has dealt with death threats, drug gangs and PTA. We already talked about it and she knows all about this, so you just get that line of crap outta your head. We’re your parents….would you let Ashley deal with this all on her own even if she was grown up? I don’t think so!”

I hadn’t thought about it that way. If Ashley was grown and in danger I would do everything in my power, spend everything I had including my life, to help protect her. Mom and Dad felt the same way about me. I suddenly felt like Sarah was looking over my shoulder. It happens pretty regularly, at least weekly since she died. I’m facing a problem or decision and suddenly feel like she’s there, watching. Then I immediately try to think how she would handle it or what her input would be. The answers come quickly, not from anything supernatural, but just from my own knowledge of my wife.

The answer came just as quickly this time. To protect my daughter I should use everything and everyone I had to.

Chapter 10

Ashley poked her head into the man space about then and informed us that lunch was ready, giving us each a questioning look. My daughter is observant and I could tell she had picked up on my behavior as well as our body language. The look in her eyes told me that we would be having a conversation in the car on the way home and I had better come clean. Ashley and I have a policy, one we created while rebuilding our lives after Sarah died. We don’t keep important things from each other, no secrets.

Lunch was chicken salad sandwiches, chips, pickles and homemade vegetable soup. Mom kept up a steady chatter as we ate, while I mostly thought about what I would say in the car.

“Ian, Ash tells me you met a young lady today?” Mom suddenly threw my way.

I almost spit my diet soda all over the table.

“Eirwen?” I looked at Ashley who was grinning.

“Come on Dad, she’s gorgeous!”

“Yes, Ash, she’s a gorgeous twenty-something year old. Way, way too young for me,” I answered, giving her a WTF look.

“Well, it’s just that I got a serious vibe off her, you know, that’s she was very interested in you,” she replied.

That absolutely couldn’t be right, we were worlds apart in age and background. I was dumbfounded that Ashley had even thought that way at all. I had my hands full with raising her and trying to eke out a living, save something for her college and rebuild our lives. Women were nowhere on my horizon.

“Yeah, not so much. She might like some of the younger guys at the MMA dojo, but I’m afraid your radar is off this time.”

My mom looked at me speculatively for a moment then changed the subject, asking Ashley about her final soccer game, which my parents had missed.

The rest of lunch dragged a little, slowed by the invisible tension of the crazy, ridiculous danger hanging over our heads. My father and I exchanged numerous glances, some of which mom noticed, although Ashley didn’t appear to see any of it. My brain kept slipping gears, leaving the conversation to think about piranha toothed fairies, killer goblins and homicidal elves, always returning to the central question….what was there about Ashley that could draw them?

We finally finished up and got ready to leave, a process made more difficult by my mother’s suddenly obvious anxiety and overly affectionate hugging.

My father came up to me while I was putting the box of booby traps and cameras in the back of the Toyota, his arms full of butcher paper.

“Here, this is a bunch of meat from the bottom of the chest freezer, stuff we just haven’t gotten to in the last year or so. It should be fine to feed to the…the…you know,” he said, suddenly at a loss for what to call them.

“Pucks, Dad. Greer calls them pucks.”

“Yeah, pucks. Listen, at the first sign of trouble you get back here. Leave your car facing the road. Is the gas tank full? Maybe you should take an extra gun?” he babbled, uncharacteristically nervous.

“Dad, we’ll be okay. Got plenty of gas, I always park facing the road, don’t need any more guns, and, yes..we’ll come right here if needed.” I could see Ashley inside the SUV craning around to watch my father and I, her expression curious.

“Right, well, call me when you get home and let me know everything is okay,” he ordered, his normal attitude reasserting itself.

“I will,” I answered.

We had no sooner turned onto the main road when Ashley turned to me, a determined set to her face, and demanded, “Spill!”

I had known we would be having this conversation; my daughter was just too sensitive to any changes in our fragile lives. Despite that foreknowledge I still didn’t know quite how to broach the subject. How do you tell your thirteen year old daughter that the fairy tale monsters that lived under every kid’s bed were real and that they did, in fact, want to steal her away in the night?

“Ash, I’m gonna tell you some things – things that might make you doubt your Father’s sanity. But I promise you that it’s all real, that your grandfather knows all about it and even he believes it,” I began.

“Then, when we get home, I’ll show you proof. Alright?”

“Dad you’re starting to scare me,” she said.

“Well, I’m not going to lie to you, although I’m really, really tempted to,” I said, glancing away from the road to her face. Her wide eyes told me that she understood how serious it was if I was tempted to lie to her.

Taking a deep breath, I started my story, right at the beginning, with the possum carcass, Grandpa’s journal, slowly working my way to Greer and the goblins in the forest.

“Dad, you’re serious?” she asked, when I got done recounting the fight in the forest.

Instead of a verbal answer, I just pulled up my sweatshirt on my right side, letting her see my holstered Sig. I virtually never wore my gun anywhere, so the sight of it was as uncharacteristic of me as my father being without a sidearm would be.

She took a sharp breath in at the sight of my handgun, but didn’t say anything else, so I continued on with the tale. I told her how Greer had come back last evening, when she and Lindsey had seen me talking with him at the point of a shotgun. And again this morning in the barn. I told her what he told me – about the world of Fairie, the two Courts, the Hunters and Guardians, and the struggle for control of their world. How they had taken children of Talent for untold centuries from this world and how our own technology had created the opportunity for an even greater invasion.

“Dad, if that was true, you would be calling the police or the FBI or someone!”

“And tell them what? That elves, fairies and goblins were coming to steal our children? How long would it take for Social Services to arrive to cart you off?” I asked, ruthlessly applying one of our greatest fears. My glance at her found un-spilled tears in her eyes, her lip trembling. I pulled over immediately, set the hazard lights flashing and hugged her hard.

“Listen, Ash, just because I can’t call in the troops without sounding like a loony doesn’t mean we aren’t working on it,” I said.

“Grandpa?” she asked, snuffing back her tears.

“Who else do you know that can reach any department in Homeland security from his cell?” I said.

“Dad is going to quietly see if there is any department that might possibly handle strange things like this.”

“Like Fringe?” she asked.

“Well, this is certainly wacky even by that’s show’s standard. In the meantime, you and I are going to lie low and keep a watch on things, till Greer gets back.”

“But wait…if they only take kids with Talents or ESP or whatever, they’ll ignore me right? So we got nothing to worry about right?” she asked, suddenly hopeful.

I didn’t answer right away which was the wrong way to answer.

“Dad? I don’t have any psychic powers or anything so they should leave me alone?”

“Honey, Greer says that you do have some ability of some sort, something that just hasn’t manifested yet,” I answered, being truthful and hating myself for it. I could hear Sarah’s voice from deep inside my brain, yelling, “Are you fucking stupid! Why would you tell her all that!”

She surprised me then, my daughter did, by sitting up straight and wiping away her tears. “Well, he’s obviously wrong then, because I failed the online psychic test that Lindsey and I took. The only person’s mind I can ever read is Lindsey’s and that’s just because I know her so well!” she said with conviction.

“You may be right, but until then we have to be very careful and watchful,” I said.

“Like you had to be growing up with grandma and grandpa?”

“Yes, very much like that,” I agreed.

We continued on in silence till we pulled into the driveway. The farmhouse and barn looked quiet in the early afternoon sun. Ashley helped me unload the stuff from my father as well as the packages from the farmers market and CVS. Charm basically got under foot and barked excitedly at the meat she could smell in the packages dad had given me.

Unlocking and disarming the house alarm reassured me that it was all clear, backed up by Charm’s quick inspection with her nose and ears. After putting the food away, I grabbed the box of boobytraps, cameras and frozen meat, then called Ashley to me.

“Come on, I want to show you something,” I told her.

We marched out to the barn where I put most of the meat into the chest freezer. Then I opened the last three and put them on the floor in the middle of the room. Corralling Ashley and Charm over to the doorway, I took a firm grip on Charm’s collar then whistled my five note call.

“Hey that’s the music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind!” Ashley said. What can I say, we watch a lot of sci-fi in our house. For a moment nothing happened, then a familiar dark blur sped into the room and alighted on the side of the door frame, sharp talons gripping the barn wood with ease.

“Ohh!” was Ashley’s response, her eyes as wide as I’ve ever seen them.

“Ashley, meet Pancho,” I said. Pancho’s eyes were as big as Ashley’s as the two looked each other over. Charm growled at the little flyer, surging against the choke collar, yanking my arm hard.

I admonished the powerful little dog, but she ignored me, until Ashley turned, tapped one finger against the dog’s nose and said “No!” Charm settled back with a whine, giving her master a reproachful look.

The puck watched the byplay among us and then made an impassioned little speech in his twittering voice, ending it with a strange bow.

“Pancho, here’s some more food for your hungry mouths as promised,” I said, pointing at the meat.

He looked where I pointed, finally noticing the food, then made his silent screech, which had the effect of making Charm whine and growl at the same time.

Seconds later, dark blurs filled the open air and Ashley ducked behind my back reflexively. This time the pucks alighted around the barn instead of immediately attacking the food. The frenetic action slowed to just the rustle and whir of several pairs of wings and the clan looked from their leader to me with gleaming eyes. Ashley leaned back around me and gasped at the furry little people arrayed around our barn. The pucks all locked their gazes onto her and went motionless, big eyes widening even further.

“Ash, these are pucks,” I said, immediately realizing how obvious that already was. Such was my daughter’s shock that I didn’t even get a “no duh!” look from her. The puck family suddenly unfroze, all at the same time, rustling excitedly and starting to come closer, which made me push Ashley behind me by reflex. The little leader, Pancho, noted my actions and twittered loudly, the effect of which was an immediate cessation of forward motion by his troops. I nodded my thanks to him, my protective reflexes not yet ready to let them all over her. I pointed to the meat, but he just looked from me to Ashley, who was once more peeking around my side.

“Ah, Ash, I think he’s waiting for you to give the okay,” I suggested. She looked at me uncertainly, then moved farther out from behind me and closer to the meat.

“Not too close, their feeding time gets pretty violent!” I warned.

She froze her motion, then waved her hand to include all the pucks and pointed at the meat.

“Go ahead, ah, dig in!” she said, uncertainly.

Pancho gave her a tiny little bow, which the rest of the clan immediately attempted to copy with varying degrees of success. Then they hit the meat like a furry cyclone.

An astonishingly short period of time later it was over. I wiped a tiny speck of spattered meat from Ashley’s shocked, pale white cheek. “See what I mean?”

One of the littlest fliers whirred over, hummingbird fast and hovered in front of Ashley. My daughter looked at the little puck in wonder, then instinctively held out her right hand, palm up. The tiny puck, a girl I think, landed softly on her hand and the two looked at each other in silence. Suddenly, the rest of the clan darted forward and before we could fully react we were both covered in furry bodies that plucked at our hair, touched our skin and even rubbed a shivering Charm.

Ashley giggled, while my reaction was to release my hand from my Sig and try to will my stomach to unclench as well. The pucks were just curious, although the thought of their flashing razor teeth never left my mind as they checked us out. Ashley was more comfortable than I and was literally swarmed with small furry bodies. Then two of the young ones started to fight over the right to sit on her shoulder, teeth were bared and the whole situation headed for hell. But it never got that far. Ashley stiffened, Charm growled and I started to speak, but it was Pancho who intervened with a sharp yip. The two youngsters immediately broke off fighting and were both displaced by the little leader who claimed the coveted shoulder spot for himself. Then he launched into a high pitched tirade, lecturing the clan for almost a full minute. When he finished, the adults all took to the air, the males heading out to where ever they all lived in the barn, the females and older children wrangling the youngest. Pancho was the last to leave, standing gravely at a kind of military attention till the others were gone, then giving bows to Ash and I, in that order. Then he too was gone.

We both stood still for a few moments, than I moved forward to pick up the paper and bone scraps. I looked back at my daughter, her face bemused. “Wow!” she finally said.

“Yeah, I hear ya,” I said, dumping the refuse into a garbage can. “Ash, you realize you can’t talk about this with anyone but me or grandpa and grandma, right? Not even Lindsey, right?”

She nodded at the first part, but looked up ready to protest at the mention of her buddy. Whatever she was going to say died on her lips. “Nobody would believe me would they?”

“Not likely, or worse, someone might!” I said.

She looked at me confused. “Ash, these aren’t Disney characters, these are killers! The pucks are razor toothed predators who have killed most of the small animals around this farm. The goblins are something from a horror film, basically engineered killers. And the elves, both Summer and Winter kinds, are hell bent on kidnapping any suitable child they can find,” I explained, holding up one fragment of deer rib from the morning’s frenzy. The bone was riddled with teeth marks.

Her face went a little white and she nodded, then dropped down and hugged her dog.

“Come on, let’s go,” I said, pointing toward the house.

Chapter 11

Charm and Ashley went back into the house while I worked on setting up the two cameras that dad had given me. I mounted one under the eave of the barn roof, leaning out the hayloft door to screw it into the old wood. An extension cord run up from below gave it steady power, although it had a battery compartment for back up. From that angle I could remotely turn the camera to look over most of the house’s back and side. The other camera went under the porch roof, with a power cord from the exterior outlet my father had wired up fifteen years ago when electric bug zappers had been all the rage. Thinking of the bug zapper caused me to go looking for it, finding the insect encrusted light stored in the garden shed. I brought it back into the house to ponder how it might help against the poisonous Tinkerbell looking fliers, finally plugging it into the same outlet as the camera and hanging it in front of the kitchen exhaust fan. It covered the opening, hopefully frying any curious Tinks.

Then I spent a half-hour lining up Dad’s shotshell traps and mounting them with a couple of wood screws each. I used all five inside the house, covering the stairway, doorway from the foyer, the kitchen and the dining room. I put a steel-shot 12 gauge shell in each, set up hooks for the fishline I measured out, but left the traps unarmed. My thought was to protect the center of the house and the doorway to the basement which would be our retreat of last resort.

I powered up the little handheld monitor for the cameras and spent some time toggling between cameras and using the remote control to swivel each one through its complete range of motion.

Next I got my deer rifle from its locked case in my bedroom closet and loaded the magazine with nine steel modified rounds. The gun case also held the high powered gun light that dad had given me for it. The little unit had both a high lumen light and a red laser to help target attackers. It snapped onto the mount attached to magazine tube under the barrel. Ashley came along while I was finishing with the rifle and immediately picked it up from the table I had it lying on.

“Chamber is empty, hammer down, nine in the tube, ten more on the stock,” I said, watching her handle the little gun. Growing up with Bob Moore, Jr. as a grandfather guaranteed that she already knew a lot about handling guns. But she had shot my little rifle quite a bit. I could handload light powered loads pretty cheaply and the two of us had spent many an afternoon shooting old milk jugs and cans.

Ashley levered the action open to check for herself, a habit that both dad and I had trained into her. The chamber was empty, but the magazine had fed a round to the loading ramp, ready to slide into the chamber when she closed the action. I watched as she tilted the gun sideways till the open breech pointed at the ground, her free hand cupped underneath to catch the loose round when it rolled out and dropped for the ground, all while keeping the muzzle pointed up and away. She closed the lever, lowered the hammer and fed the loose round back into the magazine, then looked up at me in challenge. “Perfect,” I pronounced, smiling as her face lit up in triumph.

***

I headed out to the forge with another project in mind and had only been at it for a few minutes when Ash and Charm appeared in the doorway. I wasn’t overly surprised.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked.

“I’m making caltrops from sheet steel,” I answered, without looking up from the forms I was cutting out with power shears.

“Cal what?”

“Caltrops. Japanese weapon, actually Ninja I think. They look sorta like the old kids’ jacks that grandma and grandpa used to play with. You throw them on the ground and they always have at least one point up. Drives right into your enemies feet. I’ll harden these in the tempering oven…who knows they might help,” I said.

“Dad, how do you know about all this stuff?”

“Well pumpkin, I was raised by your grandfather for one thing. And my grandfather always encouraged me to make new weapons and blades, so I did a lot of research in school. Most of my Social Studies papers were on ancient weapons of one form or another.”

“You’d get expelled for writing about weapons now!” she said, the look on her face telling me she was imagining it.

“Yeah, no doubt, which is really stupid. But anyway, the police use modern versions of these to blow car tires,”

“Oh,” she said, distracted. “Dad?”

I looked up at the uncertain note in her voice.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked, the fear coming through.

I didn’t have a good answer. But not answering wasn’t an option. “I’m not sure kiddo, but whatever happens we’re going to stay together, got it?” I assured her.

“Charm too?” she asked, hugging her dog.

“Of course!” I answered. “Now help me carry these over to the vice so I can bend the points up, jack like.”

“Dad? Do you know what I think?” she asked suddenly. I shook my head.

“I think they’re really, really stupid!”

“Who honey?”

“The elves! They’re stupid to think I have some power or something, and they’re really dumb to come after the daughter of a knife and weapon maker who was trained by grandpa, especially when they’re allergic to steel! Dumber than Mack Enders and he’s on his second try at eighth grade!”

“Well I don’t think I would say they’re stupid, but I’ll tell you what….they’ve got their work cut out for them,” I answered.

She helped me shape and harden a couple dozen caltrops, each made from two inch square patterns of heavy gauge sheet steel. I wasn’t sure how useful they would be, but when I stepped on one it held my full weight and even bit into the bottom of my hiking boot. Only the steel shank in the sole kept the point from punching through my foot.

After cleaning up our mess, I packed the caltrops into a cardboard box and we headed inside to make dinner and hunker down for the night. Ashley volunteered to make a pizza, using a package of frozen dough from the local pizza shop.

I checked the house over, positioning some of my handmade weapons around the house. The old storage room in the back of the kitchen had a door out that we almost never used. I noticed it as I checked on Ashley in the kitchen and realized I had forgotten about it as a weak point. After thinking it through, I took down one of the shotgun shell traps from another part of the house and positioned it to aim at the door. Then I rigged it to trip from both a line to the door handle and a tripwire ten inches off the floor. Lastly I put eight or nine of the caltrops on the floor in front of that door, then closed the inner door warning Ashley that the trap was armed. I had shown her how to disarm them quickly if needed, each trap having a flat piece of broken yardstick to shield the shotshell primer from the nail.

The afternoon was rapidly fading into dusk as I completed my rounds. The Winchester rifle was propped up at the archway between the kitchen and the family room. Grandpa’s shotgun was out of its hiding place and propped near the entry to the front door foyer. Various bowies, axes and a machete that resembled a short sword were stashed all about the house.

Ashley was humming a pop song to herself as she worked on the pizza fixings. I turned on the camera monitor and clicked on camera one, panning it in its position under the porch roof to scan the barn and yard. All clear. I clicked over to number two, panning it first right to look over the house, then left. The picture jerked and shuddered when I panned left but was smooth on the right side. Trying the left again I got the same result, a rabid jilting of the picture, like the camera was hung up on some old nail or something.

“I gotta go unstick the barn camera,” I said to Ashley, who glanced outside then nodded. It was still light out, but the shadows had grown deeper and more abundant.

Checking to make sure my Sig was secure in its holster, I grabbed my beat up Carhart work coat and headed out the door. Wane sunlight washed the porch of the house, the sun hanging low over the barn roof. Standing under camera two, I couldn’t penetrate the little pocket of shadows it was in, but something seemed to be near the lens. Entering the barn, I clicked on the lights then climbed the steep ladder to the hayloft, which did not have electric lights.

Enough daylight entered the open hayloft door to see well enough and I felt comfortable crossing the wooden planks and leaning out the loft hatch to peer at the camera. A black rod was stuck in the wood to the left of the camera, effectively shortening its turn radius. Grabbing the slick metal rod I yanked it back and forth till it popped free them pulled myself back into the hayloft to examine it. About six inches of round, lightweight rod, sharpened at both ends to wicked needle points. Made from some metal I couldn’t identify. About then the hackles went up on my neck as I realized someone had stood underneath and thrown it sixteen or so feet straight up to block the camera. It didn’t interfere enough to render the camera useless so the only reason to do was to lure….

A heavy weight hit my back hard enough to almost pitch me out the open loft hatch. My hands automatically dropped the spike and grabbed the doorframe, then I spun back to face behind me. Three men stood arrayed before me, wearing green clothes and nasty grins. They were blond, lean, all six feet tall or better and tan. Their clothes were a leather-looking material similar to Greer’s, but forest green, rather than black. Each elf had a harness strapped across their chests with more of the spikes and sword hilts poked over their shoulders, along with something that looked like a quiver filled with very small arrows and a wooden something attached alongside.

I slammed my hand under the coat, grabbing for my gun. The pistol was just clearing the holster when one of the elves flicked his hand and a sharp pain lanced through my right hand. The Sig clattered to the wooden floor and then fell out the hatchway, clunking to the ground below. The closest elf darted my way, but ran into my open left palm against his sternum. His chest was hard, like it was made from plywood. He grunted as my palm-heel strike stopped his forward momentum, then grunted again when my right fist crossed his chin. Lightning bolts shot through my wounded forearm, telling me that arm wasn’t going to be much further use. The other two were amused at their companion’s pain, but the gleam in their eyes was cold as each reached up for the hilts over their shoulders.

Fighting is an athletic skill, and like any other athlete, a good fighter develops instincts and ingrained muscle memory. It’s like a zone, where part of your mind takes over the action, making choices and plans at mental speeds far greater than the everyday level of thinking most of us use. My fight brain took over, slowing my perceptions and moving me backwards and down. I dropped to one knee, placed both palms on the edge of the hatch and kicked my feet out and down. Hanging for a split second from my hands, I let go, falling the last six feet of the twelve foot drop to land awkwardly in front of the barn. Immediately three figures flipped out of the door above me, landing lightly on their feet twenty paces from the barn before spinning toward me, blades in hand. My gun was a little more than a yard in front of me, closer to me than the elf I had punched. His two pals had landed closer to the house, their amused faces watching the fun.

“Dad!”

My heart thudded into my feet at the sound of Ashley’s cry and all three elves spun to look at my daughter in the window of the door, her face panicked. Charm was barking frantically as Ash started to unbolt the door.

“Ash NO!” I screamed.

The two pointy-eared thugs further back turned and started to head for the house, I jumped for my gun, the calculator in my head telling me I couldn’t beat the remaining elf to the prize. I had already failed, lured into a simple trap, out maneuvered and outfought, but I was going to kill at least one of them, even as I died. That simple plan in place, I dove for the Sig, grabbed it and rolled to my feet, startled that I had succeeded. The reason was instantly obvious. My elf was swarming with pucks, his head and body covered by at least ten, swiping at them ineffectively with his blade.

The other two were almost to the house and I couldn’t fire as Ashley was directly behind them. One elf was slightly ahead of the other, and he was inches from the porch when a white blur took him off his feet and slammed him to the ground fifteen feet away. The white goblin tore the elf’s left arm off at the shoulder before slamming his misshapen jaws shut on the doomed Hunter’s face. About the same height as the Summer goblins, this one massed a great deal more, maybe more than two hundred pounds, and its power was awful, except that it was killing my enemy.

The remaining Hunter bounded to the porch, ignoring the fate of his companions, intent upon the prize. Ashley’s fear gripped face backed from the window as the elf approached the door. Two yards from the door, she appeared, resolving from murky shadow like a ghost. One moment the porch was empty except for the Hunter, the next instant a quicksilver form wearing black was gliding from the dark corner, her night inked blade slicing the elf from waist to opposite ribcage, cutting without resistance.

Her platinum hair was pulled back in a ponytail like her brother’s, but shorter, and her eyes were locked on mine as she ignored the suddenly dead Hunter lying in chunks at her feet. Unlike Greer, her irises were silver, the glittering silver of expensive flatware or bullion coin.

A flutter of activity from the nearest Hunter took my attention to him just as he shook off the cluster of pucks. It appeared that their razor jaws couldn’t penetrate the odd leather of his suit, but his face, neck and hands were a mass of bite wounds. They looked horrifically painful, and he grimaced in pain, but still reached up behind him to the quiver on his back. The wooden something he pulled from the quiver snapped open and he was now holding a short, powerful looking bow. He didn’t get any farther though, because I shot him. My gun had locked itself to him without thought, the red dot of the laser hovering on his torso. I automatically triple tapped him, two to the chest, one to the head. The old Mozambique drill. My dad had taught it to me when I was fifteen. A rapid reaction drill designed to produce immediate stops to attacking hostiles. It worked as advertised, dropping him like a sack of manure.

My attention swiveled back to my daughter, who was now five feet from what Greer had described as the most dangerous fighter of his generation, separated by just a wooden and glass door. Her name popped into my head….Neeve. She studied Ashley for a moment, then looked back to me, her dark face expressionless. Then she moved off the porch, her motions fluid and eerie silent, sliding into the shadows by the corner of the house, her eyes locked on mine till she disappeared around the edge. The white goblin snarled once at the remains of the Hunter in its blue bloodied hands, met my gaze with its gleaming red eyes, then bounded after the Winter Guardian, covering the distance in three awful leaps. My pucks chattered and squeaked to themselves as they hovered over the body of my kill, taking turns delightedly flying through the greenish motes of light that had started to rise into the air like sparks from a fire. The other two bodies were also sparking, as well as melting into bluish goo. The leather clothes stayed intact, as did the silver metallic blades.

Ashley unbolted the door and ran to me, Charm a barking brown blur at her feet. Automatic training took hold and I dropped the hammer of my Sig back to double action mode, using the hammer drop.

I then reloaded the gun with the spare magazine at my waist, the partially used mag going into my coat pocket. All my actions were by rote, ingrained from childhood by a man who had trained countless agents to stay alive in drug wars.

I caught my daughter in my left arm, not yet willing to holster my gun, till we were safely inside. The pucks provided an aerial escort as we quickly moved back to the house, then they flew off into the twilight, Pancho in tailguard position, giving us a little midair bow before streaking after his clan.

Chapter 12

We got back inside, and I locked the door behind us. Then I armed all the gun traps, the house alarm and settled near the kitchen and the old cellar door. Ashley brought me a big glass of orange juice and when I looked at her with raised eyebrows she explained.

“I read somewhere that sugar can help with shock,” she said, then gasped loudly.

“Dad, your arm!” she said pointing.

My long sleeve shirt was black and that had helped hide the blood from my puncture wound, which I had ignored till now. It had throbbed before, but adrenaline and the threat of imminent death had pushed the pain into the background. Now, brought fully to my attention it started to really hurt. I grabbed some kitchen scissors and, with Ashley’s help cut the shirt sleeve from wrist to mid-forearm where the wound bled deep red. Dad’s voice started to play in my head, lecturing on how to clean a puncture with running water, disinfect and cover lightly when the bleeding stops.

“Ash, grab the first aid kit from my bathroom will you?” I asked, hoping the task would keep her just busy enough to dull her worry. While she darted out of the kitchen to get it, I ran cold tap water over the puncture which washed away the older blood along with fresh as it cleaned the wound. Washed up, the puncture didn’t look like much, just a small hole less than an eighth of an inch in diameter. The depth of it was probably a quarter inch or so, but the skin and muscle had sprung back, making the hole smaller.

I patted the spot dry and when a pale Ashley returned with the kit, I used a gauze pad covered in Neosporin to disinfect it. That done I covered it with a self adhesive pad from the first aid kit and flexed my right hand experimentally. I won’t lie, it hurt, but function was unimpaired as my triple tap had proven.

“Not too bad, kiddo, but it aches a little. Would you grab a couple of Motrin for me?”

She nodded, calmer after seeing how small the wound really was.

When she brought the pills I gulped them down, then drank half the glass of orange juice.

“Dad, what happened out there?”

“What happened Ash, was that I got suckered out of my house by Hunters…elves of the Green Court. Then the pucks attacked one of them, what I think was an ice goblin attacked another, and Greer’s sister killed the last one. Then I shot the one the pucks were fighting with.”

She just looked at me, her face pale and I gathered her into a hug. But while her face was buried into my neck, I examined the fact that I had just killed a sentient being. The goblin I had killed in the woods was a monster, not much different than killing an attacking dog. But the Hunter was a person, and I had shot him down. I was sorry I had had to kill him. But it really didn’t bother me that he was dead. Weird huh? See, the thing was that I was more upset that some group had decided to attack us, had decided that killing me and kidnapping Ashley was the proper action for them. My actions to protect my daughter and myself were clear and justified in my head. At the heart of it, I was more disturbed that his decisions and those of his companions had resulted in their deaths than I was concerned with the manner or delivery of their deaths.

Reading the paper or watching the news had provided daily examples of one person attacking another, but until it happened to us personally, it had all been abstract. Arms length…a tragic story, but not immediately compelling. Now we were neck deep in a story that would headline every news outlet in the world and the idea that we were the targets was equal parts scary and surreal. I rapidly alternated from fear to anger and back to fear.

A sudden loud beeping made us both jump and whirl around to look in the direction of the sound. It was only the oven, announcing that Ashley’s pizza was done. We looked at each other and laughed a little, both ignoring the slightly hysterical tone in our voices. I took my hand off the butt of my gun and pulled the pizza from the oven. Then I looked at our well lit interior and the blackness of night out the window.

“We’re gonna eat by candlelight tonight, pumpkin,” I announced starting to turn off lights. Ashley immediately joined in, killing the lights in the family room, while I turned off the foyer lights and turned on all the exterior lights. Now we could see out, but looking in was harder.

My mind returned to the fight scene and something new occurred to me.

“Ash, I think I’ve seen those men before – earlier today. I saw that girl, Eirwen cross the road by the pharmacy and meet up with three men. I’m pretty sure they were the same ones.”

“So…you think Eirwen was one of them?” she asked, eyes wide.

“Yeah, I do. Listen, here’s what I want to do. Let’s eat some pizza, ‘cause we need the energy. Then we’re gonna hunker down for the night. I think we’ll sleep right down here. Greer told me he would return soon and I need to ask him what is going on and what our options are. At first light, we head to Grandpa’s, okay?”

“Should we call grandpa or go there now?” she asked, her tone and body language telling me she would really like to head there immediately.

I shook my head. “If we call Grandpa, he’ll insist on heading over here. I don’t want him out there in the dark. The elves all have really good night vision according to Greer. Same for us leaving to go there…too vulnerable getting from here to the car, although if we had to I would. Plus, I really need to talk to Greer, he’s the only one who can answer my questions.”

She nodded, then picked at her pizza absently.

“Listen, we’re gonna figure this out!” I said as confidently as I could. Meanwhile I was trying to find any ideas for how I was gonna make that happen. Only two ideas presented themselves. One, that I could somehow negotiate through Greer, and two, that maybe my Dad’s federal connections could protect us.

Examining both, I found more questions than answers. Did Greer have any clout with his Court? Would anyone in his world listen? Would the US government believe any of this? Could they even protect us? And who would protect us from our own government if they thought Ashley really had any of these Talents or powers or what have you.

***

We made a sleeping area on the floor of the family room, near the door to the cellar. The couch cushions made for okay temporary mattresses, covered with a couple of Ashley’s old comforters. I found myself staring at Peter Pan and Tinkerbell on the one that was wrapped around my daughter. Charm was curled up next to her, but while Ash was asleep, the little pitbull was on active guard duty, watching and listening to the night. I kept an eye on the monitor, the cameras showing the lit up exterior to good effect, but frankly, I had more faith in Charm’s biological alarms than the electronic ones. The heat from our woodstove, the pizza and the aftereffect of the fight lulled me to sleep. I woke suddenly, when Charm’s head came off the floor, the low growl in her chest bringing me awake with awful suddenness. The cable box by the television showed twelve sixteen. I checked the monitor in my lap and my heart froze at the sight of a male figure moving about my yard. A second later I recognized it as Greer’s form and my blood pressure dropped measurably. He was inspecting the remains of the Hunters, holding up the leather uniforms and gathering their blades and bows. When he had them all together he rolled each blade and bow in a green suit and stacked the bundles on the porch, then he looked directly at the camera on the porch, his expression expectant.

I slid carefully out from under my own comforter (Winnie the Pooh) and whispered “Stay!” to Charm, who chose to listen to my command. I could swear that dog understood her job was to protect the child-woman curled next to her.

Disarming the alarm and cradling my Winchester, I eased out the door, gently closing it behind me.

Greer watched me without a word, studying me as I in turn studied the night around us. It was all quiet, cold and frosty.

“You’ve been a bit busy,” he said when I finally met his gaze.

“I had help,” I answered, which sent his eyebrows up.

“I did notice that only one had bullet holes in it,” he said, gesturing at the bundled leather by his feet.

I nodded. “They had me dead to rights, but the pucks distracted one, a white monster that looked like two of the green goblins put together killed the second, and your sister chopped the last one in half,” I said.

“Dad?” a worried voice called from inside.

“It’s okay Ash,” I said back, loud enough to carry through the door. “Why don’t you come inside and I’ll give you the run down?” I said, making the decision to let him in.

He nodded and followed me into the house, his movements cautious and careful. At first I was confused by his defensive posture, but then it occurred to me that he was carefully avoiding contact with the steel door, the nails in the door frame and any other piece of iron or steel in the house.

I caught Charm’s collar as she rushed the intruder, her powerful lunge almost pulling me off my feet. Leading her back to Ashley, I made sure my daughter had hold of her before closing the front door and finding Greer a stool to sit on, far from any iron object. He picked it up and moved closer to the door, away from the woodstove, and the steel littered kitchen area.

When he settled I explained everything that had happened, walking him through the action as I had been taught by father.

“That was a most complete report,” he noted at my story’s conclusion.

“Why do they disappear?” Ashley suddenly blurted. “Why do the bodies evaporate or whatever?”

I had wondered the same thing, but that question was much farther down my list.

“They belong to my world, Fairie. So when we die on your world, the smallest bits, the tiny specks that make up all of us, return to our world and place in the Web of the One. If humans die on my world, they return here, or at least their essence does,” he answered with a furrowed brow, not fully happy with his own explanation.

“I think Greer means that our atoms or electrons or something return to their proper dimension when we die,” I offered, glancing his way to see if I had it right. He nodded and Ashley’s expression indicated her understanding of the concept.

“Why did your sister help me?” I asked.

“Neeve was protecting your daughter from the Hunters, keeping her out of the hands of the Summers. The ice goblin you saw was Groll, my sister’s dieg T’oorc. Each Guardian has a….familiar would be the only word that comes close…gifted to them by our Queen,” he explained. Then he frowned and looked at the ground in thought for a moment.

“What?” I demanded.

“Well, it just that Neeve left you alive. She didn’t take Ashley, but left her here with you. That’s not how she works,” he said.

I shrugged. “I don’t have any answers. She just killed the Hunter and slid away into the shadows, watching me the whole time,” I said with a shudder. “Then that toothy ape of hers followed her like a bouncing rubber ball.”

“Do you have an ice goblin?” Ashley suddenly asked.

Greer gave her a little smile and shook his head. “No, I have Coel….he’s a bit different and I found him myself when he was a cub. He’s a mathuinaana – I am uncertain what animal that is closest to him in this world. I think it’s a form that died off many eons ago here.”

“Extinct?” Ashley supplied.

“Yes that seems right. Anyway, you will meet him, shortly. He’s patrolling the farm, looking for any problems.”

“What if he runs into....Groll?” she asked, worried for the mysterious Coel.

“They know each other and even Groll isn’t silly enough to fight Coel,” he said with a certain pride.

“Greer, do you a young woman named Eirwen?” I asked.

His eyebrows shot up as high as they could go. “How do you know that name?”

“We met her…in the drugstore. Actually, she came up to Ashley in the makeup aisle. Who is she? I saw those same Hunters with her that died here tonight,” I supplied.

“Eirwen is the Princess of Summer, heir to the Green Court,” he said after a moment, his expression grim. “She is the best Hunter they have.”

“She didn’t have the pointy ear thing going on?” I questioned.

“She is skilled at glamour – illusion to cover her differences. Try holding steel or iron in your hand the next time you look at one of my people and you’ll see through their masks.”

“The fact that she found Ashley in the store means the whole Court will know where to find her, so we need to leave now,” he added, already standing. He lifted his right arm and the black arm bracelet that was wound around it suddenly slithered – changing form and flowing into his open hand. The night black metal morphed into a two foot blade in a split second. Greer glanced our way and saw us both frozen, mouths and eyes wide open. He glanced back at his blade. “It is my siooc dubhh sginna…my Black Frost blade. Only Guardians of the Winter Court carry them.”

“But the Hunters have bows like that?” I questioned.

He shook his head. “Those are made from a kind of wood….you might call it memory wood, as it ‘remembers’ two different forms.”

I replayed the action in my head and realized that the bow had snapped open more like a switchblade than the liquid flowing metamorphosis of the Frost blade.

“The arrows seemed awfully small?” I asked.

“They are grown by a type of shellfish. They are very hard, light and filled with a toxin that the shellfish produces. One arrow will paralyze a man your size, two will kill immediately.”

I shook myself and turned to Ashley. “Grab the bag you packed after dinner, and mine too!”

I scooped up a shoulder bag I had prepared. Made from ballistic nylon, the dark green bag was small enough to not be a burden, but roomy enough to hold extra ammo for my rifle, some extra mags for my Sig, a small first aid kit, flashlight, and assorted survival goodies, including the caltrops. I slung the rifle across my back and then picked up Grandpa’s shotgun. It was loaded and had five extra shells in the stretchy nylon buttstock carrier. I threw another handful of shells into the pocket of my jacket and looked for Ashley. She had slept in her navy sweatpants and a long sleeve tee. Now she had a black and yellow hoodie over the tee and a soft shell jacket over everything. She pulled her Ugg boots on, grabbed a small bag in each hand and was ready to leave. I noted that her bag was the Aeropostale duffle her mother had given her for Christmas less than a month before she died. Ashley hadn’t had time to use it before Sarah’s death and had chosen not to use it since. I didn’t think the choice of her mother’s gift tonight was random.

Greer nodded in approval at our speed, then led the way to the front door.

“It’s unlikely that more Hunters have gotten here yet, and Coel hasn’t alerted me to anything, but we need to be ready and alert. Ian, it will be painful for me, but we need to ride in your vehicle – it’s the fastest way,” he said. “The only thing is I do not believe I can handle the door without burns.”

I glanced at Ash. “I got it!” she said with a nod, her face reflecting both fear and determination.

“Let’s go,” Greer said in a quiet voice.

I opened our front door and he ghosted into the night, blade up in his right hand, left hand cautioning us to wait. He paused to listen and look, then nodded to us and we followed.

The hair was up on the back of my neck and I tried to look in every direction at once as I unlocked the FJ Cruiser with my key fob. I opened my door and the rear door behind it, allowing Ashley to gesture Charm into the back seat. I scooped up the end of Charm’s leash and shut her door, while Ashley hustled around to the other side, opening both passenger side doors.

Greer paused to grab the three bundles of green leather and metal and wood, then slid around the car with that ridiculous grace of his. We all jumped into the car, and closed our doors, the inside plastic handle apparently enough protection from the car’s steel body for Greer to use. My two long guns were tucked, muzzles down, between my left leg and the door. Highly illegal, but I wasn’t very concerned about little things like laws at this point.

Chapter 13

I started the car and we took off. Greer huddled in his seat, crouched over the leather in his lap.

“What are those for?”

“These uniforms as well as the ones that Neeve and I wear are rather special. They’re made from dragon skin and only Royals wear them. If we keep these with us, they won’t know what happened to the Hunters. It’ll keep them guessing. I’ll return them to Queen Zinna or Eirwen another time.”

“Does that mean you’re royal?” Ashley asked from the back seat.

“I guess it does. These three were cousins of Eirwen’s, which actually makes them distant cousins of mine as well.”

“Let me guess…you and Neeve are the children of the Winter Queen?” I threw out.

He nodded, alternating between looking ahead and behind us, still tucked in his painful looking position.

“Queen Morrigan is my mother – Neeve is my older sister.”

“So you’re a prince?” Ashley asked.

“Technically, but it doesn’t mean anything on our world. The Courts are matriarchal, only women rule. Neeve is heir to Winter. Should anything happen to her, Mother would pick another female as heir.”

“And yet your mother, the Queen, will risk her heir for missions to kidnap children?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yes – for several reasons; first, Neeve is the best at this job, by a large margin. Second, it’s an incredibly important job, which is why Eirwen, heir to Summer, handles the Hunters. Last, if she fails, then she’s not the right person to be the next queen,” he said with a shrug.

A motion in my side mirror caught my attention. A brief blur in the air. Nothing there…but a moment later it was back – a puck, flying to catch up.

“Ah Greer, the pucks are trying to catch us,” I commented.

He turned and looked behind us, then nodded. “Yes, I just saw one fly to the roof of this vehicle, but I didn’t see it again. They’re trying to keep with Ashley. They know she’s under threat.”

Ashley crawled in back and looked out the rear window. “Dad, I think they’re trying to hang onto the roof rack.”

“It’s made of aluminum so I guess that would work,” I said, slowing the Toyota down to thirty-five.

“Ohh! Here come the rest!” Ashley said, excited. “Dad, slow down a bit more, the little ones are having trouble!”

I dropped to thirty miles an hour and suddenly heard multiple thumps on the roof.

“Okay, I think that’s all of them,” my daughter said with a little laugh. I found a moment to be amazed that she could laugh in the face of all this threat, violence and fear.

“Will they be alright up there?” I asked Greer.

“It would seem so. Pucks are tough and very adaptable, something others of my world often overlook.”

“How about you? You don’t look like you’re alright?” I asked.

“I won’t lie. This much steel is painful, even if it’s not touching me. But I’ll get through it. Just don’t dawdle!” he answered. “I’ll try to answer more of your questions…it helps keep my mind off the discomfort.”

“You said ‘dragon skin’. They’re real? You hunt them?” I asked.

“Oh they are very, very real, but no one hunts them!” he answered. “Dragons are a power to be reckoned with on my world. On rare occasions, dragons will molt, and from time to time the dragon elders have gifted the Queens with cast off skins. They are better than armor and last virtually forever.”

“Forever?” I asked.

“These in my lap came from a dragon that molted fifteen hundred of your years ago,” he replied. I glanced at the pile in his lap. Other than a faint bluish wetness, they looked new.

“How about your blade?” I asked.

“Only the Guardians of Winter have them. Their creation is one of my Court’s greatest secrets.”

“What kind of metal is that?” I asked.

He laughed. “They’re not made of metal at all. They are living creatures bred from our own bodies, bound to each Guardian. They have no will of their own, but take whatever shape their Guardian decides. “

“They flow like the liquid metal in Terminator 2, dad,” Ashley noted, watching as Greer held up his blade and had it change shape from form to form. She was right, it was the same thought I’d had.

“How can they cut so well if they’re made of living flesh?” I asked, slightly horrified at the concept of a morphing weapon.

He shrugged. “How can your canine have teeth and claws that are hard enough to rip and tear? How can a crab’s claw or an ant’s jaw bite through skin? Just different arraignments of…atoms, is it?” he said.

“So this creature can rearrange the structure of its cells to form whatever you want?” I asked.

“It is said that the wielder of a Black Frost blade is limited only by his or her ability to imagine,” he said, watching the weapon morph from a two foot spike to a cleaver-ax to a spear.

“How do you fight something like that?” I asked with a shudder.

“From a distance is best, they are tough to match at close range. Hunters try to use projectile weapons and avoid close combat whenever possible.”

We were into town now so I glanced at the rearview mirror, meeting Ashley’s eyes. “Why don’t you call your grandparents and warn them we’re coming,” I suggested. A tiny pair of legs appeared on the back hatch window where a puck was hanging from the rear of the roof rack. Ash looked where my eyes were focused and laughed out loud at the puck’s antics.

A long dark shadow loped across the road behind us, moving too fast to identify. In an instant it was gone into the woods on the other side, leaving me with just a chill as we sped through the dark, frosty night.

Chapter 14

Dad met us at the door, Les Baer .45 in his right hand, a hard look in his eyes. My mother hovered behind him, holding Max’s collar tightly as the big dog’s growl indicated he might bite Greer. He would have to get in line behind Dad though, based on the intense stare my father was directing at the tall elf.

After a tense introduction, I explained the events of the night, my words focusing my parents’ worry and attention onto me. Mom had sort of collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table, one arm around Ashley who was leaning against her. One hand over her mouth in horror, my mother listened to my description of the fight, forgetting for a moment that she was sitting across from Greer who was now petting Max. My father alternated with checking the windows and watching my face as I talked.

“What now?” my father asked into the silence when I finished.

“Well, we think we can meet with both Courts, or at least their ranking representatives to try negotiating some sort of deal,” I said, glancing at Greer who nodded.

“What’s to keep them from just killing you outright?” Dad asked, ignoring my mother’s gasp.

“Neither Court wants the other to have control of Ashley’s potential,” Greer answered. “My sister is Heir to Winter and Eirwen is Heir to Summer, both having enormous power and influence on my world. Also, your son is, I believe, of interest to both princesses,” he added. That was news to me.

“Huh? How do you figure?” I asked.

“My sister has never left a human witness alive before. It got me thinking about why she killed the Hunter and then left you alone and I’ve developed a pretty strong theory,” he said. “But first let me ask you a question, and I’m afraid it will be rather blunt. Where was Ashley’s mother from? Who were her parents?”

Okay, I never saw that one coming. Not being prepared for sudden shift in the bizarre conversation’s direction, I was silent for a moment.

“Mom was born in China, but she was adopted by my other grandparents when she was a baby. The Chinese didn’t value girl children,” Ashley said in a quiet voice.

“We don’t know anything about her natural parents. Just that Ting is some type of family name, so it became Ashley’s middle name when she was born,” I added.

“Okay, that mystery will remain unsolved. But it doesn’t change my basic theory. Ashley has potential that arrives maybe once every two or three of your generations. That potential, whatever it is for, is the result of her genetic heritage from her mother AND from her father. Talent from a single parent is often passed down, but major Gifts are always the result of both parents’ contributions. You, Ian, have obvious Gifts with metal and maybe weapons. Now that I’ve met him, I can tell your father has a Talent for weapons and I even think your mother may have a trace of Gift,” Greer said. “So you see why each of the Princesses could have an interest in you.”

“I thought they only took children,” I replied.

“Jeesh Dad! He means they want you to have a kid with them,” Ashley said, exasperated.

I started to object but Greer was nodding his head.

“Ian, both Eirwen and Neeve have very strong Talents. A child produced from the union of you and either of them would have an extremely high chance of high strength Gifts,” he said.

“So, because they want Seabiscuit here for stud services, they’ll keep him alive?” my father asked.

“I don’t know what a seabiscuit is but if you mean Ian, then yes,” the platinum haired elf answered.

“So how do you set up a meet?” Dad asked.

“If Ashley will lend a hand, I think we can use one of her pucks to carry a message.”

“What the fuck is a puck?” my father asked.

***

Five minutes later he was staring wide-eyed as Pancho and his clan finished off a beef brisket that Mom had been thawing in the fridge. Then the little leader landed in front of Ashley and listened as Greer spoke at length. Pancho seemed to agree after looking at Ashley, who gave him a nod. Then it got a bit weird.

Greer kneeled on both legs and closed his eyes, hands on the tops of his thighs in meditation. After a minute, eyes still closed, he raised both hands, palms up in front of him. A small ball of blue light, about the size of a jawbreaker gumball, popped into existence over his outstretched hands, hovering an inch over his palms. Greer opened his eyes and spoke at length to the ball, which pulsed in time with each word. Finished, he looked to Pancho who called his second in command, the biggest puck, as well as another male forward. They both flew to Greer, hovering on hummingbird wings in front of him expectantly. Greer lifted his palms and moved both hands apart, the glowing ball of light suddenly splitting into two identical orbs. Then he shoved his hands at the pucks and light floated right into a puck, passing into their chests and disappearing. The jet black puck didn’t even blink, the other brown one rubbed his fur over his sternum then seemed okay. Both pucks gave little hand waves at their boss and then in Ashley’s direction, then blurred off into the night.

“What the hell was that?” Dad asked, bluntly.

“It is one of our methods of communication. It takes training and Talent, but does not rely on your metal science,” Greer answered.

“How does the blue ball thingy get back out of the puck?” Ashley asked.

“It is called out by the recipient, in this case my sister and Eirwen. They will send a reply back with each puck.”

“How long?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Not too long. Maybe a quarter or half of one of your hours. They will feed the puck something high in sugar content to replenish the energy of the flight then send them back.”

“Pucks like sugar?” Ashley asked.

“Yes, they eat a lot of protein and fat, but they love sugar.”

Ashley looked at her grandmother who raised one eyebrow, then both headed into the house. I looked at Dad who just gave me a shrug and looked as perplexed at I had. A few moments later the two ladies in my life came back out with a couple of tubes of cookie dough.

“We were going to make some early Christmas cookies, using the easy way out, but I think the two of you could forgo some sweets,” my mother explained. Mom used the scissors in her hand to open the tubes and shear the dough into chunks which she handed to Ashley who handed them to the suddenly excited pucks. Pancho claimed the first piece then sat on Ashley’s shoulder and supervised the handouts. Whirring bodies swooped and blurred around the yard to the barking of both dogs. I had Charm’s collar and my father held Max to keep them from the sugary frenzy.

Greer cleared his throat and spoke when we all looked his way. “I forgot to mention that they get a little….drunk when they eat sugar. Like a human on ale.”

Sure enough the pucks’s flight paths began to get erratic and several of the adults crashed into each other, falling to the ground where they sat for a minute or two, looking all the world like St. Patty’s day revelers at the end of the night.

“How will the messenger pucks find the princesses?” Ashley asked Greer.

“The same way they found you – they are attracted to Talent. On this world, at this time there are just the three main sources, Neeve, Eirwen and – you.”

“I don’t understand all this talk of gifts and talents, I mean Ashley is an extraordinary girl, but what power is it that you think she has?” my mother asked, snappishly.

“Talents or Gifts are many and varied. One person’s ability to produce beautiful song with their voice or art with paper and brush are Gifts, albeit minor ones. The abilities most sought after by my people are the ones your older cultures called Second Sight, witchery, and sorcery. Now, in this age, you call them psy-kick,” Greer said.

“Psychic. The word is psychic,” I supplied. “But Ashley has never shown any ability to read minds or bend spoons or guess the Lotto, except with Lindsey, but that’s cause they’re so close.”

He shook his head, smiling slightly. “See you are wrong. Lindsey, who has some Talent of her own, and Ashley actually do connect on a level beyond just knowing each other’s behavior. It amazes me that you people ignore what’s right in front of you with such steadfast determination to be blind,” Greer said. “It happens to people on this world thousands of times and no one notices. You pick up your communication device to contact your friend or family member and they’re already on it, calling you! Husbands and wives complete each other’s sentences, mothers know when something is wrong with their children who are nowhere near them at the time, people feel something present in an empty house then laugh it off as nerves. It happens every day all over the world, but in Ashley’s case it hasn’t manifested yet,” he said. “On this planet, without guidance, Major Gifts are often not fully realized. Sometimes it takes training or a specific stimulus to bring them to the surface. My people specialize in that kind of training.”

“So what is a Major Gift?” Mom asked.

“Eirwen is a strong user of glamour, able to completely change her appearance or hide a small army from view. My sister can communicate with and inspire obedience in almost any individual animal, so much so that Summer’s Hunters won’t bring their familiars near her for fear of corruption. She has a second major Gift for combat. Mother, Queen Morrigan, has the Gift of Command. If she orders you to do something you would find yourself doing it, unless you were one of the very few who can resist. Queen Zinna has the Gift of Change, able to mold and form the very life code of living things.

“DNA? She can change DNA?” I asked.

“If D-N-A is the code that each organism carries inside it than yes.”

“What is this crap about a gift for combat?” my father asked.

“You have it..to a degree. So does Ian. My sister has it in spades. It is difficult to explain, but it is a kind of synthesis of the senses and reflexes that allows the gifted to make more of the right moves and choices in combat. To see openings in an opponent’s defenses, to change from attack to defense and back to attack in the same motion. To sense attacks from behind, to know at an instinctive level how to defeat an enemy.”

“Humpfff!” was my Father’s only reply. Not quite ready to buy into it fully, he was still not scoffing either. In fact, my pragmatic father was handling this entire situation much better than I would have thought possible. My thoughts must have reflected on my face as he raised one eyebrow at me.

“What?” he demanded.

“I’m wondering how you are dealing with all this?” I said.

He shrugged, looked a little uncomfortable, then came to some kind of decision.

“I’ve seen things, Ian. During my career, I’ve been all over the world and been in all kinds of situations. Some things defy explanation. We tried to question a person of interest in Louisiana once. The locals feared him, claiming he was a voodoo practitioner. When we caught up with him in an old warehouse, he gave us the slip, disappearing from a locked room. And as we chased him through that building, things happened. Doors slammed shut on us, boxes and crates suddenly fell in front of us, and objects were thrown at us by no one,” he said. “I try to live in the black and white, concrete world, but I’ve seen a bit of the gray. This, though, takes it to a new level.”

“Greer, how come Summer didn’t swarm us with Hunters at the farm house?” I asked.

“This machine of yours, the thing in Switzerland, it opened most of the pathways to this world, all at once. The queens covered all of them, making this the largest Gathering we’ve ever had. They sent the bulk of their resources to the bigger, better known sites,” he said.

“But they sent their best teams here? To this backwater site?”

“The queens are sisters, and the ability to glimpse the future runs in their bloodline. Both must have felt a strong pull to this location. Mother wouldn’t have sent her Black Frost otherwise.”

“I thought your weapons were called Black Frost blades?” I asked, confused.

“Mother refers to Neeve as her Black Frost….her killing frost.”

“Oh!” was my only comeback.

My father had perked up at the mention of weapons so I asked Greer to show him the blade. The lanky elf held up his right arm and pulled back the sleeve of dragonskin to reveal the siooc dubhh sginna wrapped around his wrist. It flowed into his palm, moving slowly this time so I could see more of its action. There were two small dots of blue blood on the underside of his wrist.

“What are those from?” I asked.

“The weapon is a living creature, made with my own D-N-A as you call it. It needs my blood to stay alive, thus it is always bonded to me.”

“How can it cut so easily through flesh?” I asked. Dad was enthralled, watching as the Frost blade formed from a spear to a knife to a sword to a club with first multiple spikes, then one big spike.

“It changes the structure of its parts…its makeup,” he said.

“Molecules?” Ashley threw in.

“Maybe that’s the word. They change their mole-e-cules to something similar to gemstones, at least on the outer edge,” he said, holding up the Frost blade, which reformed, lengthening into a long thin blade.

Turning the newly formed sword blade sharp side up, he pointed at the gleaming edge. “The siooc dubhh sginna shapes itself to its Guardian’s will. With practice it becomes second nature for me to have it form its blade edge to less than razor thin.”

He flicked the midnight black sword at the dead, dried stalk of a plant in Mom’s flower bed. The plant hardly moved as the tough fibrous stem was cut, the dead blossom taking a second to fall as if it was the last one to be informed of the cut.

Dad picked up the cut blossom and looked at the stem, whistling in appreciation at the smoothly shorn stub. Then he glanced at me. “Tough to get close to a fighter with something like this,” he noted, one eyebrow arched.

“I think the answer is that you don’t!” I said, patting the rifle slung across my back.

He snorted and nodded his head in agreement.

A sudden whirring filled the air and Pancho’s second in command was back, hovering in front of Ashley, then moving toward Greer. With an oddly formal gesture of his hands Greer somehow pulled a cold blue orb from the puck’s chest. Immediately the glowing ball of light began to pulse in time to a female voice speaking Elfish that emitted from its center.

The puck flew back to his place by Pancho and Ashley rewarded the tired flier with one of the last pieces of cookie dough she had been holding in reserve.

“Neeve agrees to a meeting to discuss the situation, she suggests the flat space outside of your local education building,” Greer translated.

“The school sports fields?” I asked. He started to nod but was interrupted by the second puck flying in.

This one produced a greenish orb before claiming his sugary reward from Ashley.

“Eirwen also agrees and suggests the same place, although she specifies the field with the metal cages at each end, far away from the amphitheater.”

‘That sounds like the soccer field and the amphitheater would be the football field,” Dad said. “What about terms of safety?”

“They both agree on their honor that Ian will be safe,” Greer.

“And that means what to me?” Dad asked, scornfully.

Greer looked offended. “Honor holds meaning on my world, even if it has been lost here,” he said angrily.

“Listen, I believe you,” I said hurriedly. “Let’s plan this out!”

Chapter 15

The princesses had both agreed to meet in thirty minutes time. We were ready in fifteen, hoping to arrive a few minutes early to scout. While we were getting prepped, Greer’s animal partner, Coel arrived.

Our first warning was both Max and Charm going crazy barking at the back edge of Dad’s property. There is a little strip of trees separating his land from the guy behind him and both dogs were focused on those trees.

“It’s Coel. You’ll want to maybe put them inside so he doesn’t kill them,” Greer said in a matter of fact tone.

Dad and I exchanged glances. Charm was no pushover at sixty pounds and Max was a solid hundred pounds of highly trained Doberman. Nonetheless, we corralled both canines and got them inside with Ashley and my mother.

Greer nodded in approval then waved one hand toward the trees. A pale bulk emerged, plodding toward us with a rolling gait. Three feet high at its heavy shoulders, it was all white except for a band of black across its face. Something about that distinctive walk triggered a sense of recognition in me. I had seen it’s like or close to it, before. It closed rapidly to twenty feet or so, its black eyes focused on my father and I like prey. The white fur was long and thick, the body heavily muscled, four limbs each ending in long curved claws. Then it struck me…Coel looked like a giant, white wolverine, one that weighted about three hundred pounds. His five-gallon head was sweeping back and forth, snuffling the ground, but his black eyes stayed locked on us. Surprisingly quiet, he was almost at our feet before I heard him, even then it was a soft snort, rather than any footfall or rustle of the dead, frozen grass.

Greer was wearing a fond grin as the black faced monster loomed in front of us. His thick back was as high as a picnic table, his body about five feet long if you ignored the bushy tail. A musky odor rolled off him, strong but not overpowering.

“This is Coel – I raised him from a cub,” Greer said, squatting in front of the beast. He waved me over, but it took a second for my feet to get the instructions to move. Hesitantly, I stepped toward Greer, who was ruffling the thick white fur. The coal black masked swiveled up to stare at me as I approached.

Have you ever stared into the eyes of a predator? At the zoo, have you stopped and made direct eye contact with any of the big cats, bears or wolves? Have you been privileged enough to see a coyote, bobcat or mountain lion in the wild and meet their gaze?

Suddenly, you realize that you’re not always the top of the food chain, and in fact, maybe you never were. It’s a shock to the psyche, the kind that spears straight through your digestive tract to weaken your bowels.

Coel’s gaze was direct, unworried and confident, and perhaps a bit hungry as well. I stopped and squatted next to Greer, keeping the thin elf between me and the loveseat-sized carnivore. Coel had found the spot where Mom’s pot roast had met its demise, tiny shreds of fat and meat the only evidence. He licked the ground in a few choice places than lifted his head to regard me like maybe I would be next. Greer laughed to himself.

“He’s a wolverine,” I said, nervously.

“I am not familiar with that word, but his ancestors once roamed this world. His species is one of a handful that was able to find their way to Fairie and thrive there. Of course, he is much changed from the ancestor species.”

“Hey Dad, wanna meet Coel?” I asked.

My father had one hand on his gun and now he raised his left palm out toward us. “No thanks, I’m good!”

“He looks pretty hungry,” I noted.

“Coel is always ready for a meal, but he found a deer carcass by the road on his way here. It had apparently been struck by a vehicle.”

“Ah, roadkill…good stuff,” I said.

Greer looked at me sideways, a slight grin in place. Then he grabbed the big toothy head in both palms and swiveled it to make direct eye-to-eye contact. After a moment of staring he let go and stood up.

“He will head over now, to scout the meeting site,” Greer said. “You may bring weapons but only you may come. Everyone else must stay here. We leave shortly.”

We all spun around at the sound of the back door slamming open, me just in time to catch my sobbing daughter. Both Dad and I spun back to the giant white wolverine to see how he was going to react, my father almost drawing his .45 while my hand sought the grip of my Sig-Sauer. Oddly, the ghostly monster sniffed the air in Ashley’s direction, shuffled from side to side in obvious anxiety, then backed up four or five feet. Satisfied, if somewhat puzzled by Coel’s behavior, I looked back at my daughter.

“Ash, what’s the matter?” I asked. My mother appeared in the open door way, her expression dismayed at losing Ashley out the door. Mom heard my question and gave me look that said ‘what do you think is wrong, dummy?’

A tear-streaked face looked up at me and I read her fear. As much as I was worried about losing her to the interplanetary fairies, she was worried that I wasn’t coming back.

“Sweetheart, I’ll be fine! Right Greer? You said I had safe conduct for this meeting, right?”

Greer looked perplexed, completely unable to fathom Ashley’s behavior.

“Yes…yes, Ashley, your Father’s safety is guaranteed by the laws of my people. Neither Eirwen or Neeve will hurt or detain him,” he said, his tone odd. Wiping her tears on my shirt, Ash turned her head to look at him. “You promise?”

Puzzled, he nonetheless nodded. “On my honor!”

Her sadness suddenly flashed to anger. “You better take care of my daddy!” she shouted at him, stepping forward and jabbing her finger in his direction furiously.

The confused elf stepped back, the toothy monster behind him flattening itself to the ground as a sudden cold wind blew from behind us and ruffled Coel’s fur and Ashley’s hair.

“See! The princesses have agreed to a peaceful meeting. But honey, I have to go, to negotiate your safety. But I’ll be back in short order, ‘kay?” I told her.

She bit her lip and then ducked back into my arms, burying her face in my sweatshirt. I patted her back and hugged her tight while my heart wound tight in my chest.

Ashley hadn’t called me daddy in years, not since her mother had been killed. I had been so worried about her safety I had forgotten that she would worry about mine. Greer was completely confused, but my Father’s eyes told me he understood completely and I had a sudden eureka moment. My father must have felt the same way I was feeling now, all those years he headed off to face drug dealers and gangs.

I held her tight for a moment more, then kissed the top of her head and moved her into the protective shadow of her grandfather. Mom rushed over to gather Ashley in her embrace and I backed toward the car. Greer moved with me, his animal partner loping into the night in the direction of the school.

As I pulled out, I noticed the pixy-like pucks darting around my parents house and it struck me that I had completely ignored them for the last fifteen minutes or so. Amazing what you can become used to.

***

My heart was in my throat as I drove the familiar roads that would bring us to the school complex. My chest felt hollow and I was more alone than I have ever been in my life. Beside me, Greer was tapping his fingers on his leg, looking out the window of the Toyota in obvious thought about something. After a moment he spoke.

“Your daughter was very upset,” he noted. I glanced at him sideways, wondering if I had gotten stuck with the slowest elf on the block.

“Well yeah! She lost her mother two years ago, now aliens from another planet want to abduct her and her only surviving parent is leaving to face them. She’s scared as hell!”

“But she, herself, is not facing the danger?” he asked, confused.

“She’s not scared for herself, she’s scared for me and of losing me, which I guess is being scared for herself, in a way,” I said. “Haven’t you ever been afraid for your sister or your mother?”

He turned my way, glacier blue eyes gleaming and shook his head. “No. We are different. Apparently much more different than I thought,” he said with a note of wonder. “Your people have always been more closely tied to each other than mine. We don’t have those same feelings of protectiveness that you do. We are more….independent. Each plots their own life’s path. Sometimes there is mutual support, but sometimes we conflict.”

“Well, that certainly happens to us as well. But it usually occurs among truly dysfunctional families, ones that are so screwed up that there is little love. But among most normal families, members will fight and die to protect each other,” I said, glancing sideways at him.

His eyes widened in disbelief.

“Are you telling me that your mother, the Queen, wouldn’t put herself in danger to save you?” I asked.

He shook his head. “That’s not our way – that’s just not how we are. Mother is fond of me and Neeve, but not to the point of self sacrifice. What of your parents?” he asked.

“What of them? Both would do whatever they had to for Ashley or myself. If you doubt me, just try and break into that house back there. My old man would waste you in a New York second!”

He sat back, clearly troubled.

“Oh, before I forget. If you hold steel in your hand, either hand, while facing the Heirs, it should prevent their glamour from effecting you. Eirwen is particularly tricky with illusion. They will try to sway you, distract you and avoid telling you what you want to know.”

“What about lying? The legends all say that the Fey, or whatever your people are, cannot lie. Is that true?”

“It is more that we do not lie, not that we can’t. We may not have the closeness that your people have, but we have more honor. Only the lowest toodar would ever lie, but, that doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to avoid telling you what you want to know. You must be very careful in how you phrase questions, you mustn’t lie yourself, and you must never, never thank one of us!”

“Why not?” I asked, even as I remembered hearing some legend that you should never thank the Fey.

“Because it is an admission of debt, and my people will always capitalize on a debt, and it will never be to your benefit.”

We were pulling into the school complex at this point and I turned my attention to our surroundings. In Groton Falls, the high school and middle schools are combined into one sprawling complex. The athletic fields are mainly located behind the buildings, so I turned down the side access road and followed it to the parking lot.

“What do I expect? From your sister and cousin?” I asked, suddenly aware that I’d never really formulated a plan. Busy night, I guess.

“Hmm, winter is in ascendance and summer is waning so that’ll be important,” he said thoughtfully.

“Ahh, what?” I asked.

“Our Courts are tied to the two seasons we represent, spiritually and actually. Our world has the same seasons as this one and our nations reflect that. The White or Winter Court occupies the Northern hemisphere of the planet, Summer occupies the tropical middle latitudes, there is nothing at the Southern pole but ice, which mother chooses not to rule. As the seasons change so do the powers of the respective courts. As winter approaches here, so it does on Fairie, and my mother’s power grows. As spring begins to change to summer, my aunt’s power takes a greater role. The winter solstice marks the height of Morrigan’s power, the summer solstice, the height of Zinnia’s.”

“So you’re saying your sister will have greater power at this meeting?” I asked, extremely confused.

“Yes, something like that. Eirwen will be much less comfortable than Neeve, both temperature wise and also Gift wise. She will be less likely to take chances or start something. Neeve on the other hand may feel confident in pushing things,” he said.

“What would she push?”

“You…to see how you react to provocation. She will keep the peace…until you don’t. Both of them will be inclined to test you…see if they can anger you enough that you attack. If that happens, they will be clear to take whatever action they like, as they would not have broken the peace..you will have,” he said in warning.

“So they’ll push my buttons – get me to attack, than what? What if I killed them, that wouldn’t help their plans much?”

“Neither of them truly believes you are that much of a threat. If you attack, they can take you themselves.”

I spun to look at him, but he held up his hand. “We have been on your world for this gathering for only a few days. While our scouts have gathered information on the changes in your culture, planet and weapons, my sister and cousin are much too arrogant to fully grasp what this might mean. I don’t think they understand your particular background enough to know you are a threat. You must realize that three-quarters of this nation’s population are ill prepared to deal with my people?”

I thought about the average citizen of the U.S. and realized that was likely true. People today freaked out when I used a three-inch folding knife to open a package. Use of weapons is pretty limited to video games and flyswatters for most people.

“I on the other hand, see that you were raised by a warrior, and are, yourself, a weapons smith. Neeve and Eirwen were last here when firearms were just appearing, and swords were more common. They think you, as a people, are less equipped to deal with Hunters and Guardians than your ancestors were.”

“Wait till your Hunters try to break into a crack house, or some redneck’s trailer,” I commented.

“Tis truth to your words, Ian,” he nodded. “The Courts need to control Ashley with the ideal being that neither gets her. Both Courts want her to tip the balance in their favor. Summer will fear that if Winter gets her it will allow my mother to take control year round. Mother fears much the same.”

“So the best thing is that she stay here and no one bothers her!” I said.

“Ah, but then she will always be there like a sword lying around for the first warrior to pick up. Ian, the alternative that the Queens will face is to remove her completely,” he said quietly. I froze, chilled completely. “You mean kill her?”

He nodded.

The Toyota was now parked, facing the soccer field, the moon full and silvery bright in the sky over the tree line. Frost glittered on the grass, the chalk dust lines easy to see in the moonlight. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had been at this field watching Ashley play her last soccer game less than forty-eight hours ago.

I turned off the engine and lights, glancing at the time. We were five minutes before the anointed time. I looked at Greer. He didn’t show much expression, ever, but over the last day or so I had started to learn to read it. Something bothered him, made him uncertain.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Emotion flashed through his eyes and was gone. He smiled thinly and shook his head. “Just trying to think of options.”

Somehow I didn’t think that was the whole of it.

Chapter 16

We climbed out and headed to the field. I left the shotgun in the car, but slung the Winchester over my shoulder. Greer had said I could keep weapons with me for this meeting and the steel receiver of the little carbine would be under my hand, supposedly helping me to see through illusions.

About two-thirds of the way to the center of the field, I saw movement at the edge of the trees that lined the school’s property. A slim figure in black, with white hair that gleamed in the moonlight, stepped out onto the frosty grass. A squat, powerful white form jumped to her side, then ambled just behind her.

At the opposite corner of the field, almost directly across from Neeve’s position, another figure appeared, this one with yellow hair, a long, slinky cat form following beside her.

Greer and I made it to the big center circle of the soccer field and together watched as his sister and cousin closed in on us. Another form appeared at the back of the property, about midway between the princesses’ entry points. The white bearlike shape shambled toward us, pausing to sniff the ground every so often. Coel had arrived.

Nervous, I keep my right hand wrapped around the lever action of the rifle, holding the strap tight against my shoulder by pushing down slightly on the gun. Watching both women, I began to notice the differences between the cousins. Neeve moved with a controlled grace and power, the mark of a skilled martial artist. Eirwen’s curvier figure was also graceful, but more like a dancer. The blonde elf ran one hand through her hair and a pointed ear was briefly exposed. On a hunch, I let go of the rifle and the ear immediately rounded itself. Eirwen was dressed in the green dragonskin uniform of the Hunters, although she wore it much better than the three who had died. She evoked an image of a female action doll, with her fuller figure – elf princess Barbie, maybe. The creature that prowled at her side was the size and general build of a Bengal tiger. Its ears were more tufted though, like a lynx and its fur was both striped and spotted, black on green. The fangs in its big head seemed larger than the tigers I had seen at various zoos, but who knew, maybe theirs would have looked just as big if they were out of their cage and six feet away.

Neeve wore black, but it was a dress of sorts, rather than her standard jumpsuit of dragon hide. Cut high on the leg and low in the front, it exposed an awful lot of dark, moonlit skin to the freezing night air. She was absolutely comfortable though, not a hint of shiver. Eirwen was beautiful in a familiar way, in the manner of a handful of the most attractive Hollywood starlets, but better. Neeve was, on the other hand, truly exotic. Her platinum hair, silver eyes and dark skin (much of it naked to the eye) set her apart from almost any woman I had ever seen. The only image that came close was a memory from the Xmen movies of Halle Berry as Storm, but even that was only a slight resemblance. Black frost blades wound around both arms, oddly appropriate accessories for her little black dress.

The two women and three animals met us at the center of the field, all of us stopping on the white line of the circle as if waiting for a ref’s whistle.

Both women watched me, Greer receiving just a glance from his sister and a brief nod from Eirwen. He stepped over to his blonde cousin and set three bundles of green leather at her feet, then stepped to the side of the circle, leaving me facing the Heirs at equidistant points on the line. Eirwen looked at the bundles for a long moment, her face difficult to read.

From what Greer had said, the three suits of dragonskin marked the demise of three of her own cousins, yet her face reflected more careful calculation than anything else. Her gaze, when it returned to me, was a touch more wary, as if she might be reevaluating the equation that Ashley and I represented.

Neeve, for her part, just stared at me, raising one eyebrow slightly when I met her silvered irises.

She raised both hands, palm up, in question. “We are here….what do you want to say?”

Good question. What to say, other than ‘No, you can’t have her!’.

Years of working with the public and their finances came to my rescue. My mouth opened and I just started to speak, part of me just as interested to hear what would come out as the others were.

“Greer tells me that your people have an interest in my daughter – some great supposed Gift or Talent that will change the very balance of power on your world. Yet he can’t tell me what that power is or when it will manifest itself or even if it ever will.” I started, making more it a statement, followed by a pause.

Eirwen snorted, breaking the momentary silence. I arched both eyebrows at her and waited.

“What you doubt, we see. Ashley’s Gift is so bright that she fairly glows with it!” she stated, flatly.

“So my daughter glows, but you don’t know what that is? For all you know that’s the extent of it, a human nightlight for elves!”

She shook her head, annoyed. “Hers is one of the Major Gifts…’tis plain obvious to elves. Which of the Majors it is, I cannot say, but it will be big…the biggest in many Gatherings, and it will be soon!”

Neeve and Greer continued to look on, interested but not involved.

“So…you’re willing to kill me and take her…kill Winter’s Guardians, all to give your Court an unknown power?”

“You know nothing of our world, our politics!” she began, heatedly, but suddenly took control of herself. Then she grinned at me and it wasn’t a pleasant grin. More of a sly, skin-the-cat kinda grin. “You are desperate! Why? Seeking to benefit from Ashley’s ability yourself? What’s the human phrase? Cashing in?”

My anger surged like a red wave, my hand on the rifle wanting to spin the barrel forward and fire at her. Greer’s head moved in a slight side to side motion and I caught my anger by its collar and choked it down. His warning that the Heirs would seek to push me off balance came back to me.

I took a breath and considered.

“Hmm, you’ve been doing this a long time, right?” I asked her, then continued on without a response. “Your ability to find Talent is unmatched, so I’m told. But you don’t understand us…do you?”

Both her eyebrows went up, but she still didn’t say anything.

“We feel differently about our children than you do…..we will die to protect them. And Ashley? If she does have this massive power or whatever, will likely use it against you, not for you.”

Eirwen smiled grimly, then glanced at her fingernails (which I noticed were more claw-like than nail like) while speaking.

“You think your daughter is the first human child we’ve ever dealt with? Granted she’s older than most, but that’s how it sometimes goes. But she’ll see our way, they always do! We’ve had centuries to learn to manipulate human children.”

“And what does the White Court do during all this? Allow the Green to take a Major Gift?” I asked Neeve, who had been watching avidly.

She studied me for a moment, her eerie silver eyes cold and calculating.

“Actually, the White Court thinks it would be better if she was held by neither Court, but rather by a third party. And frankly, Ian Moore, we would prefer it if you were with her,” she said in a surprisingly soft voice.

Eirwen’s head snapped around to stare at her cousin. “You didn’t? The salgairee?”

Neeve just smiled back at her, but it was a cruel smile.

I glanced at Greer who looked uncomfortable. “What’s the Schal-ga?”

Eirwen answered before he could. “There is a third power block on our world. It is not as powerful as either of the courts but strong enough to remain independent. Your ancestors knew it as the Wild Hunt, or just the Hunt. Its members are not beholden to either court, they’re mostly outcasts. On our world it occupies a territory in the mountain range that cuts across our primary land mass.”

Greer gave her a cold look then picked up where she had left off.

“Ian, the Hunt takes in the unfortunates who cannot make it in either Court. Sometimes they’re outsiders because they were born differently….damaged. But more often, they are the dregs of our societies…what you would call criminals. All have a chance with the Hunt, but it’s not an easy life. The whole group is led by a male, an elf. Gwyd.”

“What’s this Gwyd have to do with Ashley?” I asked, an awful feeling beginning to form in my stomach.

Neither Neeve or Greer said a word, but after a moment Eirwen spoke.

“You seem to know some about us, listened to your peoples’ stories, Ian Moore. But tonight you learn an important lesson.”

The cold spot in my gut felt like a lead basket ball and a cold sweat was starting to form on my brow.

“We live by our word, but our word is very literal. When your dettis onach said you would be safe and that we-” she pointed to herself and Neeve, “-would grant you safe passage for you and temporary respite for your daughter, he was truthful….as far as we’re concerned.”

Her manner was very matter of fact, but the pain I felt inside wouldn’t have been any worse if she’d been cruel. The truth exploded behind my eyes and I panicked. Just for a moment, but the panic was full blown, raw and awful. Then the anger replaced it, white hot. I whipped the carbine off my shoulder, spinning the stock up and around, the strap sliding down my arm as the butt of the weapon met my shoulder. My right hand thumbed back the hammer just as the sights settled on my target. It was fast, very fast, the end result of years and years of Bob Moore’s relentless training. Greer had said that the princesses were hoping to punch my buttons, but neither of them got in more than a jump back before the muzzle of my rifle was pointed where I wanted it….right at Greer’s chest.

“You…you set this up! The Hunt or whatever it is at my Father’s house at this moment, isn’t it?”

Unlike Eirwen and Neeve, Greer barely flinched, instead he just stood there, hands open, palms forward.

He didn’t say anything, but the truth was reflected on his face along with another emotion that I didn’t believe – regret.

“Dettis onach requires that I do everything I can to save your life, until such time as my debt is paid. Had you stayed at your Father’s house, you would have died. It seemed obvious to me that Ashley would be alive and so would you. But, Ian, I realized as we got here just how different our people are from one another. I realize now that you would rather have died along with your family.”

My awareness tunneled down to a narrow focus, just a circle of vision that centered on the elf who had just destroyed my life. My ears were filled with a buzzing sound and all I could think of was my family.

I started to shoot him then, started the slow squeeze of my right index finger that would send a heavy slug through his heart.

But just at that moment, something snagged the barrel, wrapping around it just forward of my left hand. A black tentacle looped once all the way around – immediately starting to sizzle. The black strand pulled the muzzle off Greer, but its grip was slipping as it burned where it touched steel.

The buzzing was gone and my vision expanded to include the others, including Neeve and her transfigured frost blade, like some alien whip. Time slowed. Eirwen was moving backward, pulling her big cat with her. Neeve’s white monster, Groll was crouching, heavy muscles flexing for a leap in my direction. The muzzle of my rifle crossed the squat ice goblin’s form just as he prepared to launch. Without conscious thought my finger squeezed the trigger, the heavy concussion of the rifle blasting across the clearing. I felt no recoil, didn’t notice the roar of the gun, instead concentrating on the results.

Some will tell you that a handgun cartridge fired from a longer barrel is no match for most rifle rounds. I gotta say that’s mostly true. But under a hundred yards, the blunt, beefy .44 bullet, fired at the higher velocity of the carbine barrel, is rather impressive. The bullet itself weighs four times as much as a 5.56mm round fired from an M-4 assault rifle.

The steel filled round hit Groll high on his right chest, punching through his pectoral, probably perforating his lung (if they were in the same place as ours) and blowing a big blue-blooded hole out his back. The ape-like monster spun to his right, even as the tentacle of the frost blade slipped free, still burning. My reflexes, honed over many years of deer hunting, automatically levered a new round into the chamber just as my follow through brought the muzzle to Neeve.

The deadly elf maiden was just slightly off balance from the release of her whip and now under my muzzle. Her eyes were equal parts surprised and angry, but I had her dead to rights and she knew it.

Logic told me to pull the trigger on her, but an even colder, more calculated thought told me to leave her alive. Killing her would upset the balance between courts…something I wanted to keep in place while I went about the business of retrieving my daughter. Because getting Ashley back was suddenly the core focus of my entire existence – my sole reason for being.

With that thought my rage coalesced into a ball of ice, located where my heart had been a moment before.

I backed to the SUV, my gun covering the frozen Greer, angry Neeve and shocked Eirwen. Groll had collapsed to his haunches, growling in pain. He started to get up, but his mistress stopped him, her angry silver eyes never leaving mine.

The fast walk backwards got me to the car and I took my eyes off the elves long enough to hop in. My glance back showed only Greer standing there, Coel by his feet. Nope, that wasn’t right. Something else was there, flashing through the dark night air in my direction. As the blur got closer, far too quickly, I could see it was a group of small creatures flying my way. My hand grabbed for the door handle, an action that should be the easiest part of driving, but of course, now, tonight, it had to be a fumble. Realizing my increasing danger, I finally got hold of the damn thing and slammed the door shut just as a swarm of venomous green and tan fairy fliers smacked into the safety glass window hard enough to rattle the door.

I got the keys out of my pocket, ignoring the Tinks for the most part as they moved around to the front windshield and beat themselves against the glass. Shoving the key into the ignition, I cranked the engine while staring at the little poisonous monsters outside. My hand hit the windshield wiper switch by accident, but part of me was thrilled when the wiper blade caught and crushed one of the Tinks into a foul looking paste.

No more time for play. Shoving the gearshift into drive, I floored the gas and raced out of the parking lot, not bothering to keep the FJ Cruiser on the pavement, but cutting across the dying grass, straight to the road.

Chapter 17

The Tinks held on till the Toyota reached twenty-five miles an hour, then blew off. I ignored them, my thoughts centered on the image of Ashley in my parent’s window and the sick feeling in my stomach.

A white blur streaked from the passenger side of the car, the rough shape of an ice goblin just recognizable as it bounded onto the hood of the SUV, its taloned feet tearing into the steel hood. Apparently, ice goblins weren’t well versed on cars, as it immediately shrieked in pain, its feet bubbling on the steel. Losing its footing it smashed into the windshield, the nightmare skull of teeth and red eyes facing me. Realizing it was right on top of its target, it pulled back its left hand and punched the windsheild, the blow knocking a fist sized hole in the tough safety glass. I fumbled for the rifle while slamming on the brakes to dislodge it. The end result of that maneuver was the rifle falling to the floor and the goblin hanging tight to the car. By luck, my Grandfather’s shotgun also slid forward, the butt almost under my right hand.

The car had just about stopped, so I didn’t feel bad letting go of the wheel to use both hands grabbing the old over/under shotgun. The horror movie face in the windshield was now tearing the glass with both hands, as the gun spun in my hands. Shoving its face forward through the opening it had torn in the glass, the goblin met the steel barrels of Grandpa’s gun. My thumb pushed the safety off and the bottom barrel fired first as my finger pulled the front trigger. The steel slingshot balls tore out of the short tube at over 1300 feet per second and removed half the goblin’s head. Still it clung to the glass, its remaining red eye shocked at the sudden turn of events. Pulling the second trigger removed the other half of the demonic face, taking the body and eye with it.

My car was half on the road and half on a front lawn. Flooring the gas and wrestling the wheel to the right brought me back on the road, freezing night air streaming into the open windshield. Ears ringing from the gunshots, I glanced around the village street to see if I had woken the town. I hadn’t really paid much attention to where I was, but now the street was recognizable, Tronten Ave, a wide neighborhood street lined with old Victorian houses and even older maple trees. Lights were coming on here and there, but it was quickly apparent that the town was facing its own troubles. Dark figures, some squat, some tall and lean, slithered through the shadows cast by the leafless limbs of the big trees.

The elves and goblins gathered around just two houses on the street, but I had lived in this town for all of Ashley’s life, and I knew those two seemingly random homes had young children inside.

The cold, hard part of me that raged to get to my daughter wanted to ignore the monsters that gathered in the shadows around those homes, arguing inside me that I should just get to my Father’s house as fast as possible. But a different part of my psyche argued right back that Ashley had Bob Moore watching over her, while these families didn’t even know there was a problem.

I broke the action of the shotgun, letting the extractors pop the empty shells over my shoulder, into the back seat. I dropped two more shells from my jacket pocket into the chambers and closed the breech. Lining both the shotgun and my rifle on the seat next to me, I accelerated the SUV down the road. A green goblin bounded in front of me, clearing half the street in one leap, its oversized jaws hissing at my oncoming car in warning. My car wasn’t impressed, but the goblin was when the reinforced bumper struck its shoulder and knocked it under my knobby offroad tire.

I highly recommend an FJ Cruiser equipped with BF Goodrich Mud-Terrain T/A KM2 mud tires for running over goblins. The combination of power, weight and tire construction is pretty ideal for crushing blue blooded alien monsters.

Ignoring the sticky blue paste under my car, I leaned out the driver’s window and unloaded both barrels of the shotgun, tagging one more goblin and a lone Hunter, who paused to glare at me. “Shoot and move, shoot and move”. My Father’s words echoed in my head, heard a hundred times in my youth as he instructed agents. I gassed the car, lurching forward just as spinning darts struck the window and door panel behind me. Gotta love modern power windows with the one touch window drop feature. The passenger window slid obligingly down, making it easy to line up the rifle as I drove to the opposite side of the road where figures had paused in their silent assault of the other house. Leaning sideways, I shot the rifle one-handed, scoring a leg hit on another Hunter, who didn’t grasp modern firearms effectiveness. Letting go of the wheel for a moment, I levered a second shell into the chamber and fired again, hitting nothing, but further alerting my fellow citizens and maybe keeping a few alien heads down. A glance in the rearview mirror showed people coming out of their houses. A fast moving squatty shape flashed in front of one concerned citizen, its arm swipe leaving his stomach open, intestines falling in a clump at his feet.

The other vicious denizens of Fairie scattered into the dark, disappearing like smoke. Keep moving, get to Ashley! That’s all I could concentrate on. The fastest path home popped up in my head as part of me prioritized at computer fast speeds. Turning onto Masters Street, another wide, tree lined road, I sped up.

My thoughts centered on Ashley, I didn’t realize I was driving past the Yelos household till I was almost on it. The two story brick home where Tom and his wife, Tina, raised Lindsey and her little brother has a wide, mahogany porch which currently was dripping with two elven Hunters and at least four green squatty goblins. The lights upstairs were on, and I could make out Tom’s brawny silhouette in the center second floor window, struggling with a goblin. A sparking green hulk, splashed with blue fluid, was pinned to the lawn by the thick shaft of the spear I had lent Tom.

The memory of Greer explaining that both Ashley and Lindsey had Talent, flashed through my mind.

The choice was automatic, my actions immediate. Whipping the wheel sideways, I drove up on the lawn, just missing Tom’s pickup, slipped the gearshift to neutral, and bailed from the still moving car, which rolled to a stop in Tina’s garden bed. Shooting and levering as my feet hit the ground, I put a heavy bullet through the blonde head of one hunter, then a second round through a goblin’s chest as it leaped from the porch roof in my direction. The second hunter spun to me and threw a dart which snagged my Carhart jacket but failed to stick my still moving body. I fired twice at him, but he jumped from the roof to the ancient cedar tree that grew at the corner of the house. I fired the last three shots at two of the remaining goblins, scoring a grazing shoulder wound on one, but missing the second, which jinked and jumped with a wicked speed that just wasn’t fair. Dropping the empty rifle, I immediately transitioned to my Sig, another set of muscle memories pounded into me by Dad.

My pistol was still at waist level when I started to fire at the monster that was almost on me. Dad calls it a ‘speed rock’ when you draw, lean back and fire from the hip at an attacker who is so close you can touch him with your other hand. I got off two shots before the bundle of scaled muscle slammed into me. Since I was already moving backwards a step, the goblin’s momentum knocked me away from him as we both hit the ground, its claws scrabbling at the cold earth. Ground fighting skills kicked in and my left hiking boot reflexively shoved against its chest as the wounded hell-ape fought to get at me, its claws sinking into my calf. The Sig was still in my hand, so I poked the muzzle into the spike toothed maw that snapped at me and fired five fast shots, which ended the disagreement.

Standing up painfully on my torn leg, I looked up at the porch roof. The goblin Tom had been fighting with was lying on the shingles, sparking green motes and bleeding blue goo. The head and shoulders of the carcass were oddly misshaped, flattened somehow. I met Tom’s gaze and we gave each other a nod that said we were basically okay. He backed into the room and a moment later the dark form of a wooden dresser was shoved in front of the broken window, effectively blocking it.

I dropped the partial magazine from my Sig, replacing it with a fresh one from my belt. Then I picked up the Winchester and started to thumb cartridges into it. Dad says the problem with my rifle and most shotguns is that while they shoot effective rounds (meaning fight stopping), they require too much manipulation, as in slow, time intensive reloading. I could see his point. My handgun was fully reloaded in two seconds, but the rifle took the better part of a minute to get nine rounds into. Slinging the reloaded rifle over my shoulder, I went to the truck, put it in park and grabbed the shotgun from the front seat. Reloading it, I walked over to the pinned goblin, pulled Shaka Zulu from its decaying chest and continued to the front door. Tom opened it about the time I reached the top step, a single blue spattered fifteen pound dumbbell in his right hand. Tom is old school, his weights are all cast iron, a fact that had just served him well.

He opened the door and I handed him both the spear and Grandpa’s shotgun. Then I dug all the remaining steel filled shotshells out of my coat pocket.

“Stay inside, keep out of sight, shoot anything that tries to get in. They’re after Lindsey. They’re also highly allergic to steel and iron,” I explained.

He looked at the spear in his hand and then looked up, realization dawning in his eyes. “You knew! When you gave me this spear, you knew!” he accused.

I shook my head. “I suspected, so I needed to give you something to defend your family with.”

“You could have explained your suspicions!”

“Yeah right! Hey Tom, I think elves, fairies and goblins are coming for our kids..use this spear to fight them off. That would have been believable,” I said with a sarcastic snort.

He thought about that, then nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, I guess that wouldn’t have gone over well.”

“I have to go…they want Ashley most of all,” I said, than continued when his eyes questioned me. “She’s with Dad, but there’s a whole mess of them headed his way. Stay safe, I think Dad called some government types to get help on its way, but I have to go!”

Inside the house I could see Lindsey and her mother holding each other, eyes wide with fear. I nodded to them both, holding Lindsey’s eye for a moment before turning to leave.

“Remember, anything iron is lethal to them, but they are fast as hell!”

We both paused as the sound of a police siren cut through the air, then Tom closed and bolted his door.

Then I climbed back into the FJ Cruiser and left.

***

I was turning onto Grove Street, when a loud thumping got my attention. It took a second for the deep bass sound to register but then I realized it was a helicopter, coming fast over the village. Glancing up through the foliage I just caught the shape of a military chopper flashing by overhead, hauling ass for the center of the village. If the government responded quickly enough, it could save the town, but I somehow didn’t think they would be of much use to my family.

As I approached my parents’ part of town, I started to see more movement in the surrounding streets. Shadows and slinking shapes, all slipping deeper into the cold, dark night. I glimpsed a squat gobin, the broken body of what might have been Mrs. Steeker’s tabby cat in its clawed hand. It stopped to stare at me and I noted with a start that it was neither green or white, but instead striped with black and red. The yellow eyes were the same though and after meeting my gaze, it vanished into the gloom.

Lights were on all over now and as I turned from Grove to Cottage Street, I spotted a police car, lights flashing, in the driveway of a house further down the street. Shots rang out and I saw a figure with a light and a gun stumble backwards, pursued by a goblin shape. The officer kept firing at the goblin, but never saw the tall lean silhouette that stepped out the dark and slashed a gleaming silver edge at his head. The officer’s outline changed shape, a round object flying off his shoulders and the suddenly shorter body falling to the ground.

My path took me the other direction and I accelerated an urgent need in the pit of my stomach. Mom and Dad lived one street over and as I turned the final corner I saw their house lit up by Dad’s security lights. For a moment I felt a flash of relief, but then I started to see details and my heart fell to my feet.

The front picture window was smashed and several lumps on the lawn appeared to be sparking green light. Inside the house was mostly dark, but what light there was flickered intermittently. A long lean shape rose to its feet on the front porch as I drove straight up. My headlights illuminated a huge black canine, easily seven feet long, its body hairless, but gleaming black, its eyes yellow. Huge jaws lined with shearing teeth held the limp dead form of my Father’s Doberman, Max, and the front door behind it appeared to be missing.

Chapter 18

The giant black dog growled as I slid out of the car, like some oversized, furless Irish Wolfhound that had been dipped in coal tar. Around its neck was a thick leathery collar that was striped in red and black, and tipped with black thorns. The hell hound lowered its head, still holding Max in its jaws, ears back. I shot it. Twice in the head and once in the chest for good measure, the iron tipped .44’s penetrating the length of its body, blasting blue ichor across my parents white porch.

Jumping past the shuddering body I clicked on the light fixed under the barrel of the rifle, as the flickering lights left the interior shadowy and disorienting like a strobe light at a dance club.

The front door was torn from its hinges, thrown sideways against the hallway closet door. Blue blood was spattered everywhere, the various clumps showing how many of the Hunt it had taken to get past Bob Moore. I found his Remington short barreled shotgun, his house gun as he called it, lying on the living room floor, underneath a floor lamp. The slide was back, the gun empty, the sidesaddle ammo holder exhausted as well. Then I found my mother, in the kitchen, where she must have made a last stand to protect the back door. Her .38 was lying near the broken door, fallen where she had likely thrown it against the first Fae through the door. Mom, herself, was backed up against the stove, her favorite chef’s knife clutched in one hand, a line of blue viscous fluid staining the steel blade. The angle of her neck and the bloody handprint on the side of her face told me the cause of her death but the angry grimace on her face told me how she had died. That and the sparking pile of goo in front of her. She was beyond my help, but I paused to close her eyes and lower her to a flatter, more natural position, before continuing my careful progress into the house. Fairies, elves and goblins had been unbelievable, but my mother being dead was unreal, despite the proof I had left in the kitchen behind me.

My father was in the dining room, his legs trapped under the wreckage of Mom’s beloved harvest table. Something had broken the stout table in the middle and it had in turn crushed my Father’s legs. His favorite .45 was still in his grip, the slide locked back on an empty chamber. Empty magazines, fat brass cartridge cases and the blue goo outline of at least four lean bodies indicated the price he had made the Hunt pay for admission to his party.

A bloody spike protruded from his stomach and his left arm was severed just below the elbow, most likely when he had used it to block a blade stroke. I moved closer, crouching, and his eyes suddenly opened, flickering with effort.

“Dad?” I asked, shocked he was still alive, sudden hope flaring in my chest.

“Ian,” his voice just a whisper. “Ash….they’ve got Ash,”

I dropped the rifle and looked around for something to bind his arm with, but his right hand dropped the empty pistol and clutched at my sleeve.

“Dad, it’s okay, I’m here, you’ve got to calm down,” I tried to assure him. Instead, he coughed up blood in a foamy spray and gasped out one more thing.

“Ready riggg…”, then died, in my arms, along with a big portion of my heart. I sat for a moment, holding my father, crying for my mother, wanting my daughter back, till I heard a sound. Just a little sound, a tone really. The barest beginnings of a whine. Gently laying my father back down, I shined the light from the rifle around the corner of the dining room, the beam coming to rest on the wreckage of the grandfather clock at the entry way to the family room. A brown paw was poking out from under the detached face of the ancient clock.

Pulling aside the broken wood and gears, I found Charm breathing weakly, her muzzle stained blue. I cleared the space around her and checked her over, her tail beating in short, feeble strokes against the floor.

“Easy girl, it’s okay.”

She whined again, stronger this time, her brown eyes looking guilty and sad.

“We’ll get her back, Charm,” I told the dog as well as myself, suddenly reenergized by the little canine’s fierce will to live. Her breathing improved and her motions got stronger as I checked her over for wounds. There didn’t seem to be any, which led me to believe she had been knocked unconscious when she had been thrown through the clock. After getting her some water, I left her for a moment to head into the basement to Dad’s man cave. In contrast to the rest of the house, the finished basement was pristine, ready to receive company, while the upstairs was destroyed. Dad’s gun safe was unlocked, but I ignored it for the smaller gun cabinet next to it. Punching in my and Ashley’s birth years triggered the lock and the door swung open to give me a look at what Dad called his ‘ready rig’. Studying it with wide eyes, I whistled in appreciation. The attack must have come very suddenly, catching my father with just his .45 and regular house shotgun. If he had gotten hold of this, the fight might have gone differently.

Inside the cabinet, hanging from an ingenious rack was the best equipped assault rig I’d ever seen. Professional warfighter quality body armor in an olive drab assault vest. Attached to the front of the vest at chest height was a kydex holster at a cross angle that held a Glock 21 .45 with additional thirteen round mags in the four pouches right under it. Three flashbang grenades were hung on the right side next to multiple magazine pouches. The flashbangs, likely a leftover from Dad’s career, had duct tape wrapped around them, which in turn was studded with small iron nails, making an improvised elf grenade. A kydex sheath strapped upside down on the right chest held a handmade bowie of D2 steel that I had crafted for Dad one winter break between college semesters under Grandpa’s watchful eye. Nine inches of incredibly tough, razor sharp steel.

Leaning next to the vest rig was Dad’s choice of long gun, a fully automatic, highly illegal H&K UMP .45 submachine gun. This one had an Aimpoint electronic sight mounted on top, a twenty-five round mag of iron tipped rounds and a fire control selector that allowed single, two round burst or full automatic fire.

Where he had obtained that lethal piece of hardware, I would likely never know, but I didn’t waste any time in gearing up with it and its vest. I bound my torn leg with gauze from the shop first aid kit, then pulled on a pair of tactical pants from my Father’s stuff, our sizes being identical. Inside the gun cabinet I found an unopened box holding chainsaw chaps of all things, like he had just purchased them. Made from Kevlar, they were designed to bind and seize the cutting teeth of a chainsaw, preventing the loss of a leg. It looked like a recent addition to the cabinet, but it made sense. They would, hopefully, protect my femoral arteries from the teeth of the Fae.

My own boots and then the vest with all its gear, my own .40 Sig still in its hip holster.. It wasn’t till I was just about done strapping the vest in place that I found my Father’s last surprise. Two surprises actually, tucked in round little pouches that the military had designed just for their like. Studying the lethal gifts from my hyper prepared parent, I felt like I had a serious chance of getting my daughter back for the first time since I entered the house, or if I failed in getting her back I was going to take a hell of a lot of elves with me.

Charm appeared at the doorway to Dad’s room, her tail low, but her eyes bright.

“Yeah, just about ready, girl,” I said, checking the big pouches to assure myself that they held more submachine gun mags. I grabbed two baby food jars of iron filings off the workbench and called it done. “Let’s go get Ashley, Charm,”

Chapter 19

We stepped onto the front porch, Max’s body lay next to a seven foot smear of goo, and Charm stopped to sniff him one last time. Shots rang out around town mixed in with screams of terror punching through the cold air. Dawn wasn’t far off, but I couldn’t tell if Groton Falls would live to see the new day or not.

Freezing air blasted my face through the smashed and spider-webbed windshield, making my skin ache and my eyes tear up non-stop, as we drove away. My thoughts were focused on Ashley, the picture in my mind of a horde of black hounds and red-black striped goblins bounding alongside some alien hellish steeds that carried Ashley and her elven abductors. My parents front lawn had been torn and shredded with tracks like nothing I’d ever seen. But I felt pretty strongly that I would soon get a look at what made them.

We headed straight back to the farmhouse at the foot of Bear Mountain, driving down deserted roads past familiar houses and farms. The silver disc of the moon still hung in the sky, although it was getting lower by the moment, the sky in the opposite direction getting brighter as the sun got ready to make its appearance.

We finally pulled into our own driveway, but drove straight past the house to the rear of the property, bouncing the off-road vehicle over the uneven ground. Sliding to a stop at the base of our little hill-mountain, we slid out of the car. Rechecking the HK I glanced at Charm who was sniffing the air and looking up the hillside with perked ears. I clicked my tongue at her, breaking her intense concentration. She glanced my way than turned back forward and began to move cautiously up the trail. We hadn’t gone more than fifteen feet when she growled at the trees in front of us. Instantly, I dropped into a crouch, the sub gun at my shoulder, finger on the trigger. Charm rushed forward and flushed the black-clad Guardian, who flipped acrobatically over her and the bush he had been hiding behind, landing lightly on braced feet with his blade in one hand, while simultaneously throwing a spike with the other. His aim was dead on, but the deadly spike bounced off the hardened ballistic plate covering the center of my chest, and I grimly noted his shocked expression as I feathered the trigger. The HK was set for two round bursts and my two fat slugs clocked him in the center of his chest, while the butt of the HK thumped my shoulder like an old friend. The big .45 bullets did the job they were designed for, mushrooming on contact and spreading their deadly load of iron as they punched through the tough, but thinly build alien.

Charm’s canine sensors routed the next Guardian, who was rushing to join our party on silent feet. He was coming from behind us, but the tough little dog pegged his presence, barking loudly, and I spun, dropping to one knee and tapping the trigger twice. Three of the four rounds hit him, in the right leg, stomach and upper left shoulder just as he entered the path. Two down. I swapped the partial mag for a full one and we headed further up the hill.

A quarter mile from the top, a white form bounded onto the trail in front of us. Bringing my gun on target, I was suddenly bowled over from the side by what felt like rubber covered steel. The second ice goblin had flanked us, fooling even Charm’s senses. Black tipped needle claws raked down my left arm as we spun to the ground. In ground fighting, being on your back with the opponent above you is not always a bad spot…if your opponent is human. Wrapping my legs around a four foot bundle of muscle, razor claws and flesh shredding teeth did not seem like a winning tactic. Keeping my legs up, boots pointed at the goblin, I struggled to get to my Glock. I wouldn’t have made it, but Charm chose that moment to fasten her own rather formidable jaws between the goblin’s legs.

All thoughts of finishing me fled from the creature’s face as my dog savaged his groin. That gave me just enough time to fumble the big pistol free and blast the goblin with three point-blank shots to the face. Sitting up I unloaded four more into the onrushing form of the first goblin, then got knocked flat as its momentum carried it over and past me.

The goblin that had run me down was thrashing around in agony, his fellow goblin dead from steel tipped lead on the brain. Suddenly it flipped back to its feet, mortally wounded, but still a deadly monster and it fastened its hate filled eyes on me. I double tapped its head, not wanting to wait for it to die on its own, as it looked pretty serious about taking me with it.

I reloaded the Glock, then wiped up the blood on my arm with a disinfectant towel from the professional first aid kit I found in one of the vests many pouches. I slapped a pre-medicated, self-adhesive bandage on the worst of the gashes, more to block the smell of blood than anything. Reloaded and ready, I looked at Charm who was waiting impatiently for me to get my act together. “Be a lot faster if you could do it on your own, huh?” I asked her, getting a face lick in response, along with a whine to get moving.

The trail up the hillside was torn and muddied, the tracks a monster-movie mixture of clawed feet and paws. My left leg hurt, my right forearm was throbbing and the gashes in my left arm stung like hell. But I decided the pain was good, a reminder that I was still very much in the game. From what Greer had said, I was thinking the portal between our Earth and Fairie was at the very top of the hill, probably in or near the cracked granite summit. Climbing the muddy trail, I noticed how light the sky was getting, the sun getting ready to come up on my right side.

When we got to about a hundred yards from the top, the woods fell away, the summit became mostly bushes and grass. Dawn was just about fully on us, the light strong enough to see well. And what I saw ahead made me stop and tuck back behind one of the last young pine trees on the slope.

The granite top of Bear Mountain was visible, the crack at the back of it not. Eight to ten shapes waited quietly, most facing our way, alerted by my gunshots . Dad’s vest had an eight power monocular in one of the utility pockets. I used it to study the group occupying the mountaintop.

Three wore the black of the Guardians, and they watched the surrounding area with careful focus. The rest were black and red, either wearing it as clothing in the case of the elves or, in the goblins situation, having fur or skin that was banded in those colors. I realized now that the goblin I had seen in near Dad’s had those same colors. The monocular gave me enough detail to decide that the goblins’ fur was stained or dyed, and after a moment, it was apparent that some had scaly skin rather than fur. Two of the nightmare hounds were lying on the ground near the feet of elven Hunt members, red and black collars at their necks. This had to be the tail end of the Hunt, and its members appeared to be outcasts from both Courts, which would explain some goblins being scaled and some furred. The careful, almost disdainful way the Guardians avoided looking at the scarlet and ebony horde told a story about the politics involved. The Hunt members were acting belligerent and cocky, the Guardians professional and aloof. Neither group liked the other, but open battle was apparently out. The Guardians all had their bows in hand, short seashell-colored arrows nocked in place. At least two of them were looking in my direction, the earlier gunshots giving them plenty of warning.

Charm pressed against my leg, trembling, but I didn’t think she was afraid, just eager to get to Ashley, no matter who or what she had to go through.

Time was running out and I wasn’t going to get Ashley back standing here. Unhooking two of Dad’s modified flashbangs, I straightened the pins, then set them on the ground at my feet. After checking my submachine gun over, I pulled a handful of the homemade caltrops out, and placed them at my feet. Looking everything over I took a deep breath and decided we were as ready as we were going to get.

I pulled the pin on the first elf grenade, transferred it to my left hand then pulled the remaining pin with my left hand index finger. An armed flashbang in each hand, I took a deep breath then straight armed first one, then the other, up over my tree and into the middle of the mess of aliens. Crouching down and grabbing Charm, I shielded her ears as best I could. The two blasts came a second apart, the concussive waves pressing on my skin, hair and clothes. Charm jumped in the shelter of my body, but that was it. She was pretty used to shotguns, having sat through our family skeet blasting episodes.

Jumping to my feet with the HK, I took in the scene at the summit in a glance, while tossing the pile of caltrops out onto the trail in front of us. All of the Fae were shocked, although more than half were screaming in pain from the toxic iron brads that had peppered them. Greer had told me that his people had much more sensitive hearing than humans, it made sense then that the stunning blast from two concussion grenades would have even more impact on elves than humans. Two of the Guardians had dropped their bows, one holding his bleeding ears, the other rolling on the ground, beating his hands on the burning iron wounds in his legs, butt and back.

The remaining Guardian still had his bow, but looked disoriented. I shot him, two quick pulls of the trigger which was set for semi-automatic. The most alert of the elves in the Hunt group got the next four rounds, dropping them before they could get their bows into action. It was a good theory, but the reality was that the goblins and hounds were tougher than the elves. The two dogs and three goblins rushed my way. Startled at their speed, I rushed my shots, missing the first hound, but hitting the second, as well as one of the goblins. Thumbing the selector to full auto I fired the remaining rounds in the magazine in three quick bursts, killing one of the two remaining goblins outright, but only wounding the second.

Then the surviving hound was on me. Seven feet long, it had to weigh over two hundred pounds. Its elongated jaws gleamed with razor edged slashing teeth; weapons designed to remove flesh from running prey. Somehow its feet missed the field of caltrops as it sprang in one giant bound that covered fifteen feet. My HK was empty and my transition to my hip holstered Sig was too slow. But once more my dog wasn’t.

Charm tops out at sixty pounds, less than a third the weight of the monster that was hurtling toward me like a toothy freight train, and in a straight fight she was just too small. But the hound was focused on me, and Charm’s leap was perfectly timed, her reflexes honed by hours of Frisbee catch. Her blocky jaws slammed shut on the monster dog’s throat just before the two of them knocked me ass over teakettle.

Scrambling to my feet and yanking the Sig from its holster, I concentrated on the remaining goblin, who was having a really bad day. My last burst from the HK had wounded a leg, the same leg that came down on an iron caltrop as it landed from a bound. The leg gave out even as its foot started to sizzle from the twisted piece of sharp iron embedded in its sole. Five rounds of .40 caliber steel-filled lead ended its pain.

Twisting back to the dog fight, I found the hell hound on its feet, its head thrashing from side to side trying to dislodge the brindled bundle that was choking its life out. The hound had been bred to hunt and kill by masters of the biological arts. Had it been a fight in the open it would have gone much differently. But Charm was the end result of generations of pit fighters who had survived by ignoring pain and physical abuse, while keeping their jaws locked on their opponent and she had found her advantage in a split second of distraction. The fairy hound was shaking her from side to side like a toy doll, but she hung on with a fierce tenacity and her suffocating bite was having a noticeable effect on the monster, its movements slowing and losing power. The huge black dog fell over, its front claws raking at my dog and digging awful furrows in her flesh, but still she hung on. Not wanting her ripped to shreds, I rushed over and ended the battle with a bullet to the head of the hound. Charm watched me, still fastened to its throat, her eyes accusing me of stealing her victory.

“Good girl, Charm, you did great!” I said to the little dog who had once again saved my life. That’s when I felt the sharp pain in my lower back, but before I could twist to look at it I locked up. Every joint and limb froze in place, leaving me to fall face first onto the hell hound. I bounced on impact and came back down with my head looking at the hilltop – and the last of the elves who was nocking a second arrow into his bow. Paralyzed, every muscle rigid, there was nothing to do but watch him kill me. All I could think was that I had failed my daughter. My parents sacrifice was for nothing, I had failed to get her back.

He had a cruel grin on his face, pointed teeth exposed, as he pulled the short bow to full draw. His eyes met mine and I could see the moment he made the mental decision to release. I could also see the white furred form of a giant wolverine burst from the cluster of small pines behind him. Coel lunged on his back legs, his brutally powerful front legs open in a claw- bristling embrace that crushed the elf back against him and brought the long vulnerable neck in range of his jaws. Regular wolverines have enormously powerful jaws for cracking bone and getting the marrow inside. Coel’s were another order of magnitude stronger, his single bite making a loud snap like a tree limb breaking. The elf’s head fell sideways, held in place by a loose flap of skin, his arrow and bow smacking together and falling uselessly to the ground. The giant white wolverine landed on his front paws, the broken, dead elf hanging from the remains of his neck in jaws that would make a hyena proud. Coel shook the elf once than dropped it in a boneless heap. He looked my way, then his head tracked something outside my vision.

Chapter 20

Black clad legs and feet moved gracefully to my side then squatted to reveal Greer’s calm features.

“Looking a bit locked up, ehh?” he said, evenly. His long, mocha colored hand pulled a small, flat box from a pocket of his dragonskin shirt; slim fingers twitching it open and deftly selecting a long bonelike needle from inside.

“This will take a few seconds to reach full effect,” he said as he jabbed it into my back near the arrow which he also pulled from my flesh, the pain from both sharp.

He waited, crouched on his heels, looking around the clearing at the dead and dying Fae.

“You realize that we’ve haven’t lost this many elves and goblins in a Gathering in five hundred years?” he asked conversationally.

“Listen, I have some things to say to you and now is as good a time as any,” he went on. “In all likelihood, you’ll want to kill me when you get up, but for now I’ve got your attention.”

He took a deep breath, stood and started to pace around the clearing. “I didn’t understand, but how could I really? We are very different people, yours and mine. So my decisions, even now, are logical by the values of my culture. Save your life, your daughter wasn’t going to be harmed, everything’s good. But it isn’t is it? Not to your kind of thinking? You would rather give your life to protect your daughter than both live, if the lives lived were unknowable and different. If you stayed on Earth and she was taken to Fairie, as it were. So, while I don’t truly understand it, I get it. And therefore, I fouled up.”

Feeling was coming back to my limbs, a frustrating pins and needles feeling like you get when your foot goes to sleep. I still couldn’t move much, but my body parts were at least twitching when I tried.

Greer watched me for a moment, then strode out of my vision toward Charm. I heard her whine, which frightened me enough to make a monumental effort. The resulting body twitch was enough to turn my head, bringing Greer and my dog into view. He glanced my way. “You should let the counter-toxin do its job. You could hurt something if you force it too much now,” he said, opening a pouch on his hip and pulling out a tiny jar. Opening the little container, he scooped a brownish cream onto on finger and began to spread it in Charms gashes and scrapes. She finally let go of the dead hell hound’s throat and turned her head to sniff the salve, but then lay back down.

“It’s remarkable that she killed a Hunt Hound on her own. Your ancestors called them Barghests and Black dogs. They were created at the commission of the Hunt Lord, many hundreds of years ago. Nasty brutes,” he wiped his hands on the dead hound then stood up and turned to look at me. More feeling was coming every second, bringing with it an awful twitchy need to move. I started to shake and flinch, then got my right arm underneath me and tried to push to a sitting position. It didn’t work. A couple of minutes later I tried again. This time I managed to get up, sort of. A few seconds of rest and I was able to stand up, although I almost fell right back down. Wobbling a bit, I moved over to check Charm, who was now sitting up, tongue lolling. She looked awful, claw furrows wet and angry looking. But even as I watched, the brown salve hardened into a crusty, scabrous coating that sealed off each cut and tear. Charm looked tired, but her eyes were bright and she licked at my hand when I checked her over. Dad’s vest had a hydration unit in it, one with a drinking tube that I used to squirt water into my little dog’s mouth. She lapped up what I could get into her, then I took a sip myself and set about reclaiming my weapons.

Greer was sitting on a rock, his huge wolverine at his feet, watching us.

After reloading and holstering the Sig, I swapped a new mag into the HK, checked to be sure a round was chambered and safed the weapon.

“I only have one goal…get my daughter back. I’ll use anyone and anything to achieve that, so if you want to help, great. But I will kill you if you endanger her in anyway. Got it?”

He nodded.

“I’m younger than my sister and cousin, so I haven’t had as much contact with humans, just the two previous Gatherings I’ve been on. What I knew came from records of older Guardians and my teachers. They have always said that humans have a weakness for their children, one that the Fae do not share. I am beginning to believe that my people have grossly underestimated both your technology and this bond you have with your offspring.”

He waved at the bodies on the ground, which were already melting and sparking. “Between you and your father, more of us have died than probably any other single Gathering. Any three Gatherings! ”

“Listen, bub, I’m not even a soldier. My dad was federal law enforcement, but there’s a big difference between DEA and combat troops. Wait till the President orders special ops troops to deploy backpack nukes to your world or with a big enough gate, a division of armored tanks. And we’re just one country. This planet has over six billion people on it. Word gets out that aliens are stealing our kids and all hell will break loose.”

His eyes widened at the numbers and the dark face paled noticeably.

“Ian, I do not know what a ‘back-pack nuke’ is, but the Queens control living weapons that would sweep through your people in their entirety.”

“Hmm, yes…biological weapons…plague and disease right?” I asked. “You’re right. I realize that your people use biology as we use technology. But I also know that no biologic agent is one hundred percent effective. Out of six billion some would survive and eventually rebuild. But let’s talk about nuclear weapons. You are familiar with the forces that hold things together? The binding of the smallest portions of matter – atoms we call them?”

He looked blank for a moment then nodded suddenly. “Yes, of course.”

“Our nuclear weapons split those forces apart and create a chain reaction that continues to split apart atoms releasing all the power at once.”

He thought about that for a moment, then frowned.

“That’s an abomination! It would render vast areas toxic to life!”

“Yes it does. We used them to end our last global war, but we have enough of them to basically sterilize our world…or yours.”

He now looked horrified.

“I do not believe you.”

I pulled my phone from my pants pocket, pulled up youtube and found a video of a nuclear explosion, then passed the phone to him.

He watched the video, his face bleak.

“In truth, I do not believe we had any idea how big your numbers had become or the change in your weapons.”

“ A lot changed in the last one hundred or so years. Oh, I have no doubt that it would be a mutual slaughter, but we have the numbers, and if our kids are involved, absolute ruthless disregard for anything that threatens them,” I said, before continuing.

“We’ve spent the last hundred years learning to kill each other in ever greater numbers. We’ve had two global wars and countless smaller ones. We spend more money on weapons than food, and as you are beginning to find out, we have a trip wire instinct to protect our children at all costs.”

A pair of military helicopters flew across the horizon of the new day, moving from the west toward the center of town, the thumping beat of their rotors pounding the cold air around us. They were probably coming from Fort Drum in Watertown, but who knew for sure. I watched Greer watch them, new realizations dawning on his face.

“Look, I need to get moving.”

Greer nodded then led the way to the top of the mountain, stepping over the mostly disintegrated bodies in the path and a gray bundle of scrap fur that I recognized as the possum carcass that I had found just days ago.

We came around the hilltop to face the cracked granite summit and I got a shock when I saw it. The mini-chasm was not visible, the opening of the crack filled with a quicksilver surface that covered the split from side to side, top to bottom.

“The Pathways between worlds usually form surrounded by rock; very old, very stable rock.”

I didn’t say anything, speechless at the sight of the mirror-like surface of the open topped cave.

“If you climbed on top of the rock and looked down into the crevice it would look normal, except for a paper thin line at the front. The plane of quicksilver you see has no depth in this place, but has great depth between worlds,” Greer said.

“What do we do?”

“With a weaker portal we would need a source of power, either an object or a person of Talent. I can usually get through fairly weak gateways, but this one is so strong that we require none of that. We simply step through,” he said, then he looked at Coel and spoke in his own language. The great white wolverine was sniffing at the bluish remains of the elf he had killed, but looked up at Greer’s call. Then he shambled forward at that deceptively fast, almost awkward looking gait that was peculiar to wolverines. He sniffed at a cowering Charm, then simply ran through the portal and was gone.

“I will go next. Once I’m through wait for a handful of seconds then step through. You may need to carry your dog.”

I nodded my understanding, checked over my gear and was ready. He was watching me steadily and when he saw me look up, he swung around and stepped forward. Two strides of his long legs and he too was gone.

Charm looked at me and whined, her tail low, her expression uncertain. I scooped her up, settled her in place and walked straight at the mirror-like wall. I closed my eyes at the last moment, the feeling of being about to run into a solid surface too strong to fight.

Stepping off my left foot, squirming dog in arms, submachine gun banging on leg from its single-point sling, I felt a cobwebby sensation all over my face, hands and body. Then my stomach threatened to leap out of my throat as I was pulled upside down, sideways and backwards. It was a bit, a very little bit, like taking an a waterpark slide that spins your tube backwards, up and over bumps, faster and faster till you flip ass over ankles into a deep pool. A little like that. But it went on and on. I opened my eyes, but immediately slammed them shut almost sick to my stomach. Can’t quite describe the images I saw in that brief glimpse. A nauseating, swirling, blot of light and dark, moving in all directions at once. Then my right foot struck ground and I was standing (well, wobbling) under a reddish sun that was all wrong, on a plant covered hilltop in the middle of an endless plain.

Greer caught my elbow, keeping my wobble from becoming a complete collapse. I took a step, but my foot collided with something soft. A woozy look down revealed an unconscious Guardian, his hands bound with plastic cable ties like an electrician would use. I looked at Greer, who was tucking the plastic bag with the remaining cable ties into his shirt pocket. He shrugged.

“I found them in one of your barns….pretty brilliant really,” he said. He seemed to be spinning in place but when I blinked a few times he slowed down.

“There is a considerable amount of disorientation at first,” he said, noting my condition.

“Ya think?” I muttered, letting Charm down. The little dog promptly heaved up what little was in her stomach, then lay down and looked at me with accusing eyes.

“Yeah, I know how you feel!” I said, giving her a squirt of water from the Camelback in my vest.

“Believe it or not, it helps to eat a small amount after transitioning the portals,” Greer said, handing me a piece of dried meat from his belt pouch. He tossed a couple of pieces to Charm, a handful to Coel and chewed one himself. Not sure what kind of meat it was I gamely popped it in my mouth and bit down. Not bad. A bit like beef but more gamey. I swallowed and took a sip of water. “What is it?”

“Goblin,” he said, matter-of-factly.

My gorge rose all over again, but I clamped down and after a moment my stomach settled.

“More?” he asked.

I quickly held up both hands. “I’m good, thanks”

“Never thank one of my people,” he replied immediately. “It implies a debt, to be collected at random.”

“Okay, , I forgot,” I answered.

He moved away from the Portal which was much more defined on this planet, but still on a hilltop. The opening was a more uniform arch, intricate carvings worked into the black stone.

Turning back, Greer waved for me to follow, so I heaved myself upright and staggered after him. The path he was on moved down slightly and to the left, taking us out onto a rock ledge that opened up the view considerably. A vast plain spread out before us, and revealed that ours wasn’t the only hill in sight. There were at least fifteen small hills arraigned in a roughly semicircle, each with a basalt black mound of rock on top. Our hill was almost at the end of the arc. One lone one was off to our right, the last one on the semicircle. The arc faced the rising red sun in what would be east back home. Looking across to the other end of the line of gates I saw a heavy forest that met the plain and ran to each horizon. A glance behind us in the opposite direction showed a another similar line of vegetation, but this one more tropical than the other.

Greer caught my eye and pointed down into the center of the semicircle to something I couldn’t see. I moved up to the edge of the ledge, the scene below suddenly coming into view.

Arrayed below us was a huge gathering of Fae, looking at first like a jumbled mess of elves, goblins and strange looking steeds. A moment more revealed a certain order to the crowd. The group of elves closest to the forest side were all in black, white goblins mixing in and around them, small dark, flying objects hovering over the white tent- like structures at the center of them. Across from them was another gang of elves and goblins that wore green, with mottled brown and green tents that looked almost like military camouflage. A third group milled about on bizarre horse-like creatures, their backs to our position. At first appearing to be a jumbled riot of red and black, it became apparent that what looked like confusion was just constant motion; side-stepping steeds, milling hounds and goblins, all under the supervision of elves, both mounted and on foot. A closer look at the horses showed more reptilian features than mammal. Instead of hooves, each foot ended in a three clawed lizard paw; the head long and predatory; heavy jaws filled with sharp teeth. The ears were oddly horse-like and a mane of fur ran down the muscular, scaled neck.

The two Courts were faced off against each other as well as the Hunt, all three warily watching the others. Each of the other hilltops was occupied by at least two Guardians, all of whom had their attention focused on the tense meeting below.

The Hunt had obviously just come down from our hill, several stragglers still moving down the trail, the rest facing away from us.

Three of the lizard horses moved together at the center of the Hunt horde. I looked through my Father’s monocular to get a better look. This biggest beast was ridden by an elf that looked almost like an ordinary human, if you discounted the antlers erupting from his head. The hunter in me automatically counted the points on his tines; thirteen. He was facing our position, conversing with two other elves. Antler boy was the obvious leader of the Hunt, the other two his seconds. Then I noticed a small hand grasping his side and I focused on the saddle behind him. His body blocked my sight until the big black beast under him cantered sideways, exposing a black haired girl in sweats – Ashley.

I recognized her expression, which was part anger and part fear. I had seen it on her face and many more times on her mother’s. I had long ago labeled it ‘resigned determination’. Sarah had worn it when things were out of her control yet she was focused on bringing them back on track. Ashley had, in her short life, brought it to a whole other level, the result of the Moore stubbornness coming through mixed with her mother’s tenacity.

Her face was streaked with tears, dirty with a mud streak on one cheek, but she looked whole and unharmed. The cold lump in my gut melted at the sight of her, but refroze harder when I concentrated on the leader’s back.

“His name is Gwyd, he is the current Hunt Leader and he is what you would call a ‘prick’, I believe,” Greer said.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“The Hunt was sent after your daughter, commissioned by both Queens. It allowed the Princesses to meet with you without breaking their word. They were not the ones to go after Ashley, so technically they didn’t cause you or yours any harm.”

I didn’t answer, too angry to speak. After a moment, he continued. “The other children Gathered around the world are being held in that large tent further out,” he said, pointing at a large earth colored pavilion set up a tenth of a mile away. I hadn’t paid it much attention before, but now I could see that it was ringed with elves, positioned in pairs, one Hunter and one Guardian in each set.

“It looks as if the Hunt is attempting to renegotiate the deal they had with the Queens….bold, not necessarily smart, but very bold.”

I studied the layout of the terrain between me and Ashley, the position of the red and black Hunt and the two opposing Courts. The trail down to their position started to my right, crossing under our ledge and then making a series of switchbacks till it straightened out and led to the flat area where the monsters of the Hunt milled about. Arrayed over about a football field-sized area, there were something like a hundred to a hundred-twenty elves, goblins and hounds, mixed in with ten or so lizard-horses. Because our hill was so far out at the end of the arc, the Hunt had, by necessity, traveled closer to the Summer Court then they appeared to like, the thick bunching of guards on both sides indicating a lack of trust by each party.

“They are just about at the beginning of negotiations. Each Queen will attempt to out bargain the other.

When that fails, as it most likely will, there will be a fight. Our best opportunity to get Ashley back will be around that point in time. Do you have any more of those objects that you threw at the Guardians and Hunt on your side?”

“I have two more of the flash bangs and a couple of other, even better surprises, as well. How big a fight will it be?” I asked, looking out at the large encampments of both Courts.

“Well, since each Queen is backed by her army, both of which are camped out of sight, it has the potential to be huge. But what will likely happen is that there will be a Queens Challenge, a fight between champions. Mother has several but I suspect that she will call on Neeve to fight for her,” he answered. “This will be our only real chance to get Ashley back. The Hunt will hold her, waiting for the outcome of the challenge, then whichever Queen is victor (most likely Winter) will lay claim to your daughter. Once surrounded by her army, it will be virtually impossible to get near her, even for me.”

“Then let’s get it done now!” I answered, staring down at the Hunt Leader and the small girl riding behind him.

Chapter 21

We planned out our assault, as much as we could, then began to sneak closer to the meeting point. Greer told me that our chances weren’t great, probably less than forty percent, but that this was our only shot. Whichever Queen ‘won’ Ashley, would quickly transport her to their most secure location and begin a time tested brainwashing technique to inculcate complete loyalty to that Queen. He seemed pretty certain his sister would win whatever contest she fought, telling me that Queen Morrigan rarely used her daughter for challenges, but that Neeve had never lost.

Our plan, such as it was, was extremely simple, a fact that may have lent some small measure of potential success to its odds. We would circle around behind the Hunt, lining up on the straightest path to Ashley, then Greer would move a bit closer to the Winter Court’s position, letting himself be noticed in the process. When the fight started, he would create a side diversion, then I was to throw my flashbangs and stir things up even more. At that point, I would drive directly to Ashley, killing everything in my path, while Greer did the same from his angle. Once we had Ashley, we would beat feet back to the gate and jump through. Like I said, not much of a plan, yet Greer felt that each Court would think the other was starting something and the Hunt would suspect both Courts of foul play. He handed me several elven throwing darts he had picked up and explained how they might help our plan.

At the base of the hill the terrain was choppy; natural erosion had cut channels deep enough to provide concealment. This environment was mostly dry, but from the look of things it got pounded occasionally by torrential rains, like the Sonora Desert back home. The runoff channels fed together eventually forming an arroyo type of river bed that headed toward the rising red sun. The flat section where the elven courts were gathered was higher than the drainage basin we were in, which gave me hope that we could actually sneak around behind the preternaturally alert elves and their minions. Coel led the way, with Greer next, then Charm and myself. We followed the basin for quite some distance before climbing out of it and creeping through the scrubby vegetation that covered the ground. Pausing to observe the elves, I noticed movement at the Winter tent. Pulling Dad’s monocular I watched carefully, Greer moving up next to me to see as well. Two armored elves stood to either side, long glittery halberds held before them, while a female elf in white pulled back the curtained door simultaneously falling into a deep bow. The opening was almost immediately filled by an enormous, black form. The creature was easily eight feet tall, shaggy and immensely muscled, and very familiar looking.

“That’s a sasquatch!” I hissed to Greer, who was watching as well.

“Is that what you call them? Your ancestors knew them as trolls. They have a unique ability to travel the Paths between worlds, not needing the same energy to get to your world that we do. So they move back and forth, even when the Veil is strong. They mostly live alone, but sometimes in family units. It’s rare for one to be associated with my people, but Mother raised Torg and he is to her what Coel is to me.”

The giant raised its heavy browed head and looked carefully around, its actions uncannily like a human bodyguard’s would be. Apparently satisfied, it strode forward, revealing Neeve and her goblin just behind. The elven princess was wearing a white wrap around robe thingy that showed how lean she was. Her long platinum hair was unbound and flowed around her neck and shoulders, cascading down her in waves. The robe left her muscled arms bare and unadorned…till you saw the twin Frost blades wrapped around her forearms in miniature dragon shapes. She moved gracefully forward, her feet sheathed in silver sandals that matched the color of her exotic eyes. The elven princess slid over the ground like she was floating, her ugly white ape-goblin shambling beside her. An off color patch of some type of poultice on his shoulder was the only sign that I had wounded the ugly goblin. A moment later another woman appeared in the tent door. At first I thought her a cousin to Neeve, a slightly older cousin, as there was an unmistakable resemblance, but a glance at Greer showed a mixed expression of respect, fear and resignation. He glanced my way and nodded. “Queen Morrigan…mother.”

She was almost the same height as Neeve, maybe an inch shorter. Her hair was the same bleach platinum blonde as her children, piled in thick twists on her head in an intricate style, but her eyes were black, inky pools in her dark skinned face. She didn’t look much older than her son or daughter, but if Greer was to be believed, she was over fifteen centuries old, maybe more. Queen Morrigan, Ruler of the Winter Court, wore a diaphanous gown of crystal that sparkled and shone in the reddish light. It should have been see through, but try as I might (and I did try) it wasn’t. Still it hinted at the shape underneath, tantalized till it was impossible to glance away. Her face reflected no expression, just a regal aloofness and when her head moved slightly in our direction I caught sight of a single massive gem surrounded by smaller grape-sized gems, all woven into her hair, forming an integral tiara. The twin guards stepped up behind her forming the precession’s rearguard as they all moved toward the open ground where the Hunt Lead waited with my daughter.

The mottled green tent of the Summer Court twitched, then its flap was pulled aside by a flying troop of the insect-like venomous fairies. Eirwen and her big cat came through first, the Summer Princess wearing a short, tight fitted gown of sky blue that showed how much curvier she was than her northern cousin. Gold sandals that wrapped around her calves and a thin tiara of glimmering gems were her only accessories and her hair was carefully styled to leave her long neck and pointed ears bare. The overall effect reinforced my mental image of elf-maid Barbie, right down to the impossibly small waist. She wore a smile that was almost shocking in its wattage, but never touched her green, green eyes.

The woman who followed was obviously her mother, Queen Zinnia, Ruler of the Summer Court and sister to Morrigan. Her gown was the exact shade of newly grown leaves and her hair was worn short, in a shockingly contemporary Earth-type style, cut to hang around her face, the strands longer in the front and shorter in back. I had seen human women wearing the same cut and style, but none that I had seen matched the Green Queen’s shocking beauty. An honor guard of elves formed up around the Queen and Heir, the warriors each sheathed in a crystal-like, form fitting suit of almost organic looking armor. It looked like it had been grown on them and I could see it flexing with their movements, hardly impeding their motion in any way.

Both royal parties moved, almost at the exact same time, toward the Hunt. Representatives of both Courts had been talking with Gwyd and his lieutenants. The elven ambassadors or whatever they were, bowed lowed as their queens approached, then backed away to allow them to come directly before the antlered bastard who was holding my daughter. Actually, an armored elven woman was holding Ashley by her upper bicep in a grip that looked painful. Ash looked overwhelmed and exhausted; the sight of her leaving me equal parts enraged and painfully sad. I wished there was some way to let her know I was coming.

A small dark form flashed over Ashley and her captor, moving so fast it was just a blur. The woman guard swore and slapped her free hand to her neck. When she pulled her hand away, she was holding a thorn and a thin trail of blue blood ran down from a tiny puncture wound. Ashley’s mouth quirked in a small, quick grin as the elf bitch yelled at the guards around her. Pancho (at least I assumed it was him) was long gone by the time the Hunt troops looked around, most shrugging and flashing nasty glances at the elf woman, who snarled and swore at them.

So, at least we had a few small allies among the horde surrounding my daughter.

“As I said, most of my race tend to underestimate the pucks, which is a mistake. Their loyalty, once given, is almost a match for your beast’s,” Greer commented with a nod at Charm, who was pressed up against my legs.

“How many do you think there are?”

He shrugged. “No way to know, but I would guess that at least a handful survived.”

That made me think about the little flyers families and young. Unaccountably I was saddened by the idea that some of the little ones had met their deaths trying to help my Ashley.

Greer glanced back my way. “They are a fierce race, the pucks. Most young do not make it to adulthood. Too many natural enemies.”

Gwyd glanced back at the ruckus, narrowing his eyes at the female guard, who straightened up, grabbed Ashley by the arm and returned his gaze cooly.

The leader of the Hunt turned back to watch the Queens sweep up to the ring of onlookers, which had grown as members of both Courts followed their respective queens.

Eirwen and Zinna greeted Gwyd with blinding smiles, the kind that dull men’s wits. Neeve and Morrigan simply tilted their heads and gave regal nods of acknowledgement. Gwyd, for his part, swept into a courtly bow, like something from an old Errol Flynn movie. But the smile on his face was calculating and smug. They spoke, in what I presumed was Elfish, then the Hunt leader turned and indicated Ashley, who became the immediate object of intense scrutiny. After that the haggling started. I couldn’t understand it, but I knew without a doubt that’s what it was.

“They’re done with the pleasantries, now they’re bartering for your daughter,” Greer said. “This will go on for a while, but it won’t work out. Not for as big as prize as Ashley. Once his price is reached, they will both agree to it, then it will come down to a fight. No one wants a war, sooo, a Challenge will be issued. Then a fight…which Neeve will win. At that point things will be tickley?”

“Ticklish,” I supplied.

“Yes, that’s the word…ticklish. Anyway, that will be the best time to attack. With any luck at all they will suspect each other of trickery and a real fight will start. So here’s what we do..” he said, then went on to explain his plan in detail. We went over it twice, then he slipped out of the riverbed and moved in a circular path around the back of the Hunt and into the fringes of his own Court. Even watching him, it was hard to follow his progress. He would evaporate into the vegetation, then reappear much further on, pause for a moment, then do it again. All the while the Queens and Gwyd were deep in negotiations.

Charm whined softly against my leg, so I gave her more water from the Camelback unit in Dad’s vest, while I made some preparations of my own. One of the HK mags in the vest had a clamp on it that allowed a second mag to be fastened to it upside down. Once I had rigged it to the mag already in my gun I would be able to reload by just pulling the empty out, spinning it around and sliding the full one in. Then I prepped my last two flashbangs along with one of Dad’s surprises, drank a little water myself, split a granola bar with Charm and waited.

Twenty or thirty minutes later I heard the Hunt Leader voice change from clipped contentious tones to something that sounded congratulatory; it sounded like an agreement had been reached. Looking at the scene of the negotiations, I saw him nodding and bowing to Morrigan, who smiled in victory. Zinna’s beautiful smile twisted into an ugly snarl and she rapidly spat out words that made Gwyd smile and bow. The antlered elf then bowed and backed away, watching as the two Queens and their daughters squared off. The troops assembled behind each tensed up, gripping weapons and lowering helmets. Flights of poisonous fairies and shark-jawed pucks swarmed into the air, ready for aerial combat.

Morrigan swept her arm across in front of her and a cold wind blew over the assembled armies, getting everyone’s attention. The blast of icy air was strong enough to move my hair when it finally reached my position, and the smell of it reminded me of snow.

Morrigan spoke loudly, her words carrying as if she had a microphone. I guessed it was something along the lines of ‘I challenge for single combat!’

Queen Zinna drew herself up and nodded once, then both sides drew back into separate huddles, like high school football teams.

The Summer Court ranks parted, allowing a giant of an elf to stride through. He was well over six and a half feet, armored in blue crystal with a white sword whose gently curving blade reminded me of a Japanese Katana. He swung the gleaming weapon with fluid ease and if his armor weighed on him it wasn’t noticeable.

The Winter group opened to reveal Neeve, stripped to what looked like a white sports bra and shorts made from leather, her hands empty but twin frost blades wrapped around her wrists. Her sudden appearance gave the Summer Court pause, although from my angle it looked like a ridiculous match up. A giant armored warrior versus a small, athletic woman. But looks were deceiving. Greer had said that his mother rarely chose to risk Neeve in Challenges, but when she did, the slim Guardian always won.

If Eirwen looked like elf-maid Barbie, with all the requisite curves, then Neeve looked like an Olympic athlete elf. Her midsection was extremely defined, arms and legs jacked with lean, functional muscle. Through the monocular I could make out a curving scar on her right thigh; one that wrapped around from the inside up to the leg-hip socket. Like someone had tried to clip her femoral artery, if in fact she had one. She had a series of slashes on her left forearm and what appeared to be tooth marks on her left bicep.

Gliding out to the open area that would apparently serve as the fighting circle, she first stretched lithely, then flowed into some type of empty hand kata; something that looked like fast motion tai chi mixed with gymnastics. Her flips and airborne twists seemed weightless, as if she were lighter than air, the impact of her feet landing on the ground hardly making the dust rise.

She had yet to draw her blades, yet I could see the elves recalculating the odds and not liking the results. Finally, she came to a slow stop, raised her head then moved nearer her mother; her warm up completed. The giant she faced twisted a sneer on his face when she sketched an open handed salute in his direction, but I could see the uncertainty that was now lurking in eyes of his fellow Summers.

The surrounding elves, with goblins, steeds, hell hounds and one bigfoot-troll, were assembled by affiliation in rough thirds around the circle. The soldiers of the green realm were all boisterous, cheering on their champion, the white elves quiet and self-assured. The members of the Hunt, were the loudest, calling out short sharp sounding words in Neeve’s direction and making strange hoots like a band of demented owls. It was alien and familiar at the same time. Inhuman and, strangely, humanlike as well. The goading and catcalling (owl calling just doesn’t have the same ring) would be expected of humans, yet the odd stiffness and strange tones made it very, very weird. A sudden moment of culture shock hit me – the realization that I was standing on a strange planet of aliens watching two of them fight for possession of my daughter. The cold pit in my stomach hardened to titanium ice and I locked away the disorientation. Then I rechecked my weapons, patted my dog and generally got ready to kick ass. Greer estimated a fifty percent chance of success, my own estimation was much lower, but I would give it everything I had and probably die trying. How Charm would react, if she would live, I didn’t know. Ashley would probably ask why I hadn’t tied her up to wait for us, but I couldn’t do it. Charm was a hundred and fifty percent Ashley’s dog and she deserved the chance to help her as much as I did. Leaving her tied up where she would likely get killed by the first hell hound or goblin to come along wasn’t right. Let her go down fighting like me.

Chapter 22

By now both Champions were in the makeshift arena, a circle that was about sixty or seventy feet in diameter. The Summer warrior was buckling on a wicked looking shield, which was also made of crystalline looking material. A long straight spike protruded from the center of the disk, giving the round sheld an offensive aspect. It was at least three feet in diameter, but looked right in scale when wielded by the giant elf. Between the broad coverage of the shield, the long reach of the sword and the tank-like protection of the big warrior’s armor, it appeared to be a one-sided fight.

Neeve , still stood with empty hands, looking relaxed and calm, tiny in comparison with the Green Court’s champ.

Despite the uneven matchup, the Summer crowd didn’t seem too certain of the outcome; the onlookers studied the athletic looking Guardian with serious expressions. The black clad Guardians and troopers of Neeve’s Court seemed professional and unconcerned as they stood quietly behind her.

Suddenly, heads from both courts began to turn, looking back in the crowd where a disturbance moved forward, parting the elves like Moses and the Red Sea. Stepping between the gap that marked the division of Winter and Summer, came a little old lady elf, by far the oldest I’d seen. Every elf in the vicinity treated her with respect, bowing and backing from the tiny crone, who for her part, pretty much ignored them all. Instead, she moved directly between the groups to the center of the circle and waited, head down.

Both queens, with attendants and their chosen fighters hurried to the hunched figure in the center. When both had arrived and bowed to her, the old elf raised her head, looking at neither side, but straight ahead at the Hunt Leader and Ashley.

Gwyd sketched a bow in her direction, but she ignored him, instead studying my daughter with green sparkling eyes that were bright with life and intelligence. Then, oddly, she turned her head slightly to look my way, almost as if she could see my head across the hundred and fifty yards or so that separated us, through the scrubby plant that I was using as cover and right into my open right eye where it peered through the monocular. But that wasn’t possible.

The moment passed before I could more than draw my breath, and the old woman spoke, first in Elfish, then in English.

“You agree that the outcome of this Challenge will decide your respective claims?” she asked.

Morrigan and Zinna glanced at each other in puzzlement, then Morrigan spoke, using the Elfish language. She asked a question from the sound of it.

“Yes, I speak her language,” the old elf answered with a hand gesture in Ash’s direction. Her voice carried easily to me, which seemed odd, but maybe there was some natural acoustic effect from the ring of little hills around us. “You fight for possession of her life, you should at least speak in her language,” the wizened female said.

“Very well, Caillach, we will speak the humans language,” Morrigan agreed.

“And you both agree to abide by this contest?” the crone asked.

“Yes Mother,” “Yes, Mother” the two queens intoned within a split second of each other.

Mother?

The old elf was the mother of the Queens? Maybe that was the reason for all the respect and bowing the onlookers had shown her, although talk about dysfunctional families! Two daughters that each had their own countries and armies, always at the edge of war. Even Dr. Phil wouldn’t be able to help this crew.

“Be it so,” the old one intoned, then retreated from the circle with a grace and speed that belied her obvious age.

Without any further ado, the Summer elf leapt forward, his sword slashing horizontally at Neeve’s middle; a fight ending blow that would leave two halves of one princess…if it had landed.

The lithe female warrior simply bent backwards in a Matrix-like move, letting the huge blade flash by overhead.

I bet she never met a limbo contest she couldn’t win!

Instead of using either hand to touch the ground and stabilize herself, she simply shoved her right hand forward, a flash of liquid black filling it and forming a gaff-like hook that she used to snag her opponent’s leg. With a sharp pull she sent herself spinning horizontally over the ground, while causing the giant elf to almost lose his balance. Her move landed her to his right side, which was still twisted to the left in the follow-through of his strike. Her left Frost blade stabbed out into a long thin spear point that the Summer elf just barely deflected with his shield.

The two pulled apart and circled, the big warrior glancing down at the newly scarred surface of his shield. Neeve looked unruffled, but both hands were now filled with black blades that were slightly blurry to the eye. The blades seemed in a state of constant change as she swung both arms in easy graceful arcs.

The big elf struck again, swinging from overhead, but shortening the stroke at the last instance, moving from a massive woodcutters swing to a close to the body downward slice. It was like a Major League hitter switching to a bunt instead of the fence clearing smash that everyone expected.

Neeve didn’t fall for it though, even as she moved inside what would have been the arc of his false swing; a move that should have brought her into the slice he had switched to. Instead she floated to his right side and without bothering to swing her own arm, changed the Frost blade in her left hand to a needle like spear that shot out under its own power and punched a small hole in the Summer elf’s torso armor.

He twisted to protect his side but she was past him, chopping an ax shaped blade into his right calf armor on the way by.

The fighters separated, the big elf shrugging off the damage which was apparently minor, yet the crowd was quiet, perhaps disturbed by liquid ease with which Neeve had drawn first blood.

Limping ever so slightly on his wounded leg, the Summer warrior spun his heavy sword lightly in his hand, eyeing his slim opponent with a glare. Neeve watched him back, her gaze more studied, coldly analyzing her enemy. Suddenly , she slid forward, dropping to her knees for a flickering moment before bounding backward in a very inhuman manner. I couldn’t follow her arm movements, but when she stood up her left hand weapon was formed into a nasty looking brush hook with blue blood dripping from the point of the blade. I glanced at the Summer fighter, who was looking wobbly, but couldn’t figure out his wound. Then his good leg gave out and he fell to his knees, his hand clutching the back of his thigh. That sudden move combined with a billhook shaped weapon had severely cut the elf’s back leg, perhaps severing a tendon or two. The fight was over, for all intents and purposes. The big Hunter tried to spin on his wound knee to keep the mongoose fast princess in sight but he couldn’t keep up and she was suddenly behind him, her blades scissored together and his head jumped from his broad shoulders in a geyser of blue blood. Just that fast the fight was done.

The noisy Green Court elves went dead silent, while the onlookers from the White Court thumped their left hands to their right chests in applause.

For her part, Neeve simply flicked both blades clean, then let the living weapons flow back to her forearms before rejoining her mother. Morrigan nodded once in satisfaction then turned to Zinna and spoke in Elfish. Her words were meaningless to me, but the tone was crystal clear, ‘I won, give me the girl!’, or something like that. When I glanced in Ashley’s direction, I noticed Greer standing on the far side, almost exactly opposite me with Ash in the middle. He was staring in my direction and I suddenly realized that I had almost missed my cue.

The two silver spikes were poking out of the hard, red river bank in front of me, waiting their part in the play about to happen. Greer had collected them from a Green Court Hunter and one of the Hunt’s members, neither of whom had any further use for the pointy weapons.

Pulling the spikes from the dry desert-like sand, I hauled back my right hand and let fly with first one, then the other, throwing as hard as I could. They went farther than I expected, the first landing only ten feet from Greer who didn’t have to fake the shock on his face. ‘Didn’t know the human could throw that hard did you?’

The second spike, which was from a Hunt body, actually bounced once and hit a green clad Summer elf in the leg, but did no damage as it hit flat. He yelped and jumped in surprise and that’s when Greer yelled in Elfish. The plan was to make it seem that the Summers and Hunt pack were each trying to renege on the deal. Whatever he said worked because suddenly all hell broke loose.

Chapter 23

The Summer warrior whose leg had been slapped by my thrown dart, whipped his bow off his back, nocked an arrow and let fly in one continuous motion, hitting a Hunt fighter in the stomach. Before he could get another arrow, a red and black goblin had leapt at him, knocking him down but getting stabbed by another Green soldier in the process. The dart that landed near Greer was carved with Summer insignia and Greer launched himself at the nearest Summer fighter, who happened to be between him and Ashley.

Grabbing Charm with both hands, I heaved her up the dry riverbank and clambered after her. By the time I made it to both feet, the three armies were embroiled in combat, every side fighting for itself. The Queens were pulled back by their bodyguards, but Morrigan’s protectors only managed to get her a couple of dozen feet back before the angry queen stopped and turned back to the fight with a scream of outrage. She yelled a command to Neeve who stepped forward and began to carve a path toward Ashley, cutting down Summer and Hunt elves without much effort.

Gywd had started to pull back toward me, the woman holding Ashley dragging my daughter by her arm, while several Hunt members surrounded them.

I noticed most of this peripherally, as my mind slowed down and focused on Ashley. Charm took off and my HK came up, the red dot of the Aimpoint sight centering on the chest of the nearest Hunt member. A two round burst thudded my shoulder, both fat .45’s hitting the red and black clad elf. Moving in short controlled steps, the HK glued to my shoulder, I kept both eyes open and began to service targets like I had been taught. Elf, elf, goblin, elf, all down and dying in four or five seconds time, the goblin getting a double burst of slugs to end its life. Charm blurred forward, ignoring everything in her path as she cut a straight line to Ashley.

The chaos of the melee worked to cover my approach for a few seconds but then one of my targets shouted as he fell, and both Gywd and the woman holding Ash became aware of my attack on their rear. Gywd leapt to the back of the steed nearest him, then reached down for the female elf to hand Ashley to him.

Charm arrived at that point and sank her teeth into the female’s thigh, yanking her off her feet.

Without active thought, I flipped the selector from burst to full auto and emptied the rest of the mag into Gywd and his horse-thing. Flipping the double clipped magazine over I was reloaded and bearing down on my daughter when the arrow hit my left leg. The pain and shock of the impact stopped my progress, but the venom did nothing to me as Greer had given me a second dose of antidote before leaving to get in position. I was good for several hits before my protective anti-venom would be overwhelmed.

The archer was a Summer elf who was closing in on the teenaged girl that was everybody’s prize in this battle, and he died from lead induced iron poisoning as soon as I spotted him. Ashley shook free from the elf bitch and started to run my way. Charm had switched bite points from the thigh to the woman’s throat, ending her participation in the contest.

I became aware that both queens were pointing my way and yelling at their troops to stop me, but now I was too close to Ashley for them to fire arrows or spikes. Greer was suddenly there, cutting down a Summer elf and a red/black stripped goblin.

His deadly sister was almost there as well, sliding through both Hunt and Summer fighters like an NFL running back through a defensive line, but infinitely more graceful. And pro-football players don’t generally leave a trail of dead bodies behind them either. Her twin black blades were morphing too fast for the eye to follow as she killed two and three people at a time.

Dropping the sub-machine gun on its sling, I grabbed both flashbangs and pulled their pins, throwing them into the crowds of Summer and Winter elves that were now headed my way. I tossed them far over the front runners to provide protection to Ash from the iron brads. Both went off and dropped large numbers of elves, but did nothing to slow Neeve’s approach or keep back the closest oncoming fighters.

Ashley reached me and I grabbed her with my left arm and one handed the HK, burst firing from the hip till that mag was finished. Then I again dropped the HK and grabbed one of my Father’s dying gifts.

The little green baseball sized sphere was immediately recognizable to anyone who had ever seen a war movie. It was a M67 fragmentation high explosive grenade, and its secondary safety, called a jungle clip, had already been pulled off, so when I pulled the pin and threw it into the crowd of rushing elves it proved to be far, far more effective than the flashbangs.

I’d never handled a frag grenade before, but I could recall reading a book my dad had about military weapons. If I remembered right, the M67 killed people within about five meters and severely wounded out to fifteen meters. Apparently those numbers would need to be amended for elves, because when the dust settled on my back where I crouched over Ashley, the steel fragments had killed dozens out to at least twenty meters and left a thirty meter circle of writhing, wounded elves that had to number at least twenty.

The explosion and subsequent pile of bodies slowed up the tide of attackers somewhat, but didn’t stop it all together. A Hunt elf in red and black got close enough while I was ducking the explosion to swing his sword. I blocked the stroke with the HK, then dropped the gun when its sling got tangled up in the blade, instead grabbing the bowie knife from my vest and stabbing the elf in his stomach. I left it stuck all the way to its hilt in his abdomen and pulled Dad’s Glock .45, making the best use of its fourteen rounds that I could.

Greer had fought his way to my side, concentrating his efforts on Summer and Hunt pack elves leaving me to deal with Winter’s soldiers. A black clad Guardian morphed his black weapon into a spear, but I triple tapped him, two to the chest and a final round to the head. I popped off several more rounds, each finding a target in the mass of attackers, still shielding Ashley with my left arm.

Lining up my sights I suddenly felt a tug on my arm just as a shell white arrow punched through it. Dropping the Glock I pulled the last M67 with my left hand and struggled to get the pin out.

Neeve was almost to us, Eirwen was lowering the bow that had pin cushioned my arm, and the two queens were closing fast. Charm streaked to our sides, huddling with Ashley.

The arrow must have been lying on a nerve because one half of my right hand was numb, the fingers useless and the other was on fire with pain that flared to my shoulder. I ignored it, blocking it out, just as I blocked out the whirl of combat around us and concentrated on getting my right index finger through the safety pin on the grenade. Fumble, fumble, slip, then I got it, yanking the steel ring clear and holding the armed grenade up in my left hand for the elves to see. They saw…and stopped. Some recognized it as the twin to the one that had just taken out close to fifty elves, but the rest froze because the queens both yelled commands when they laid eyes on it.

The battle came to a sudden screeching halt, all eyes on the round pound of steel death in my clenched left fist. I twisted to shield as much of Ashley as I could, putting my armored body between her and the hordes around us.

“You can’t win with that, Mr. Moore,” Queen Morrigan pointed out in an Irish accented tone.

“ It depends on your definition of winning. If I take most of you with me, I’ll count that a victory,” I replied. My left hand was feeling the strain of holding the grenade upright, trembling just a little.

“Maybe I can’t rescue my daughter, but I’ve sure raised the cost of getting her haven’t I?” I continued, gesturing at the battlefield strewn with bodies. There were well over a hundred dead elves lying about, some killed by each other, but I think I had accounted for the most. “By now my world will be piecing together reports of what has happened. Security cameras will have captured enough footage to give our governments enough information to form defenses. I don’t know how many people you have, Queen Morrigan, but if you spend this many each time you Gather our children, you’ll be extinct before long.”

Her eyes flashed red…really, I swear, they actually flashed red, and her perfect features twisted in a rictus of anger.

“Don’t speak to us of extinction, human! Look to your own uncertain future!” she snarled. Behind her Zinna’s face matched her sister’s for anger.

Morrigan raised her arms and a great cloud of black rose into the sky behind her. Thousands of pucks, tiny wings humming, filled my sight, all of their predatory eyes locked on me.

Zinna made a similar motion and a matching cloud of smaller green and brown Tinks lifted into the air, glittering compound eyes aimed our way.

Note to self: taunting the Queens of Fairie equals bad idea.

I looked a Greer whose dark skin had gone pale, his eyes bleak, then I glanced back at Ashley.

“I love you!” I said.

“I love you too Daddy!” she said sobbing, her eyes filled with tears.

Then I tucked her behind me, forced my wounded right hand to the butt of my still holstered Sig and tossed the grenade straight up over the heads of the Queens.

All eyes followed the little sphere as it left my hand and lofted into the sky. Time slowed as it tumbled over, the arming lever snapping out to ignite the primer. Game over.

An M67 has a four second fuse. Not very long, but long enough for some.

Neeve responded even as the other elves watched the grenade with uncertain expressions. She slid forward half a step, thrusting her right arm skyward, the black coil around her arm flowing out into an impossibly long, needle sharp shaft. The grenade was only ten feet overhead, so I had a clear view of what happened. The needle tip of her frost blade speared the grenade almost dead center, and I could see the midnight black material begin to burn and melt even as it made contact with the steel body of the bomblet. For a split second the deadly elf was left with a ten foot long lance of black, tipped with a green grenade. Then the tip of her weapon melted from the steel and the little orb of death fell to our feet where it sat without blowing up. Certainly she had overabundant amounts of skill and ability, yet her luck had to be its equal for her weapon to hit and sever the fuse running down the inside of the grenade, before the it could burn to the detonator charge. The odds of anyone hitting the fuse channel in a grenade are too large to be worth calculating, yet she did it.

We all looked at the dead bomb, even Ashley who had refused to remain behind the dubious shelter of my body. I looked from the bomb to Neeve in time to meet her eyes. My damaged hand fumbled to draw the Sig, but she simply extended her left hand and the glittering tip of her other Frost blade was a centimeter from my eye.

Ashley screamed “NO!” in a voice loud enough to deafen everyone in a five foot radius, even as Neeve looked to her mother for the command to kill me.

Morrigan had just started her nod when the sky went pitch dark and an enormous wind blasted over us.

The pucks and Tinks tumbled from the sky, washed away by the hurricane gust of wind that came just before the sun disappeared. All eyes shot skyward as an immense form floated over us, so large that it took seconds for me to understand what I was seeing. The body was black and as long as tractor-trailer with batlike wings that stretched out a hundred feet or more to each side.

Then it roared and the sound was a hammer pounding everyone and everything on that field flat to the dirt. The huge wings back flapped once, twice, pushing another great wind that sent the pucks and Tinks tumbling across the field.

Gargantuan feet, like bridge supports with claws, slammed into the ground with enough force to bounce all our bodies several inches into the air.

Dragon.

All previous concepts of the word fled before the reality of what I was seeing. Immense, black, bat-winged, with a long tooth-filled head that would make a tyrannosaur cower. Teeth like sharpened zucchinis and eyes as big as trashcan lids. Eyes that glowed yellow.

The dragon turned its gaze down upon the little group huddled between its feet and brought its head down till it was only fifteen feet over us. The mouth was so big that it could have eaten Morrigan’s bodyguard Sasquatch in one bite.

No one moved, all eyes locked on the angry monster whose body blocked the sun.

“He says to stop!” Ashley said, looking at the Queens.

The sisters gaped at the tear streaked girl who was suddenly standing and facing them, unconcerned with the monster overhead. They stared in disbelief for a second then glanced back to the dragon.

“He says he’s been waiting for me for centuries and he will kill everything that threatens me,” Ash said with a note of wonder in her voice.

“Ash, what are you talking about?” I asked, not taking my eyes from the monster overhead.

“I can…hear him..sorta…in my head. His name is Gargax and he could hear me from miles away. He calls me Speaker?” she directed the last bit to the two queens whose faces looked to be in danger of freezing in permanent disbelief.

“There has not been a Speaker for close to a thousand years!” Greer said incredulously.

“What is a Speaker?” I asked him.

“They speak to dragons,” he answered with a shrug. “No one else can. Dragons are not native to our world, their biology is very different, yet we have lived with them for all of our recorded history. Occasionally, there comes among us one who can communicate with them, mind to mind. Those individuals allowed us to work out the treaties that kept dragons and elves from fighting. But we have lacked a Speaker for most of Mother’s and Aunt Zinna’s reigns. Relations have degraded to the point where we avoid each other to prevent any unfortunate incidents.”

“And Ashley is a Speaker?”

“Apparently,” he said, nodding at the immense carnivorous bulk above us.

“Gargax heard me when the red and black elves had me and started this way. He called others of his kind and they will be here shortly,” Ashley said, her expression equal parts wonder, exhaustion, and defiance. “He is very angry with all of you for hurting me and my ..sire,” she said to the queens before looking back at me puzzled. “Sire?”

“That’s me. Another, older term for father,” I explained. “So, I’m gonna assume that this changes things.”

Greer nodded, eyes still locked on the dragon, “Oh yes, Ian, this, as you say, changes everything.”

Chapter 24

The dragons kept arriving for the next three days. First there were tens of them but by day three there was well over a hundred, all immense, all anxious to meet and speak with Ashley. They came in different shades of black, grey, green, brown and bronze. Some were all one color, others a mix of shades, but all were enormous. The smallest was about the size of Ashley’s school bus, the biggest approached a hundred feet in length. They all had a similar body shape. A long flat head, like a crocodile mixed with a barracuda, connected to a sinuous snaky neck. A deep chest supported the front bat-winged forelegs and powered their impossible flight. Bat-like also described their ground locomotion, at least for the front half of their bodies, the rear portion was very dinosaurian in construction. Huge, powerful back legs, like a Spinosaurus or T-rex, and a long spine tipped tail.

Their heads had horns and a boney crest and they all had the same gleaming yellow eyes.

Our treatment had changed the moment Gargax touched down. The elves of both courts treated us with a very differential VIP status, Ashley in particular. My impression was that the elves really, really did not want any part of a conflict with the dragons. Watching Gargax send a gout of fire a hundred and fifty feet into the air helped me grasp their concern. The dragon biology allowed them to separate and store volatile chemicals from minerals they regularly chowed down on. Sacs, like a rattlesnake’s venom glands, stored the chemicals apart until the dragon sprayed them. When the chemicals mixed, they ignited in a napalm stream that burned with tremendous heat and vigor.

The elves treated our wounds (mostly mine) with salves and ointments that would be worth a fortune to the pharmacy companies on earth. My worst cuts and punctures healed completely in less than twenty-four hours, leaving a spidery web of silver scars. In addition, they fed us a compound that allowed us to process the excess oxygen in Fairie’s atmosphere. I hadn’t noticed it in the short time before Gargax’s arrival, but Greer assured me the oxygen content was too high for me to breathe for any longer period of time without treatment.

Greer had been assigned to be our liaison, due to his dettis onach. His mother was not particularly pleased with his actions to help me, yet his culture demanded he do nothing less than he had. I had a feeling that we would be meeting with the queens and their advisors a lot, but the initial days were spent with Ashley meeting each dragon, escorted by a small group that consisted of myself, Charm and Greer, as well as one of each queen’s advisors. We did meet Caillach, who was mother to the queens. She had known the last Speaker as he’d been a cousin of hers and lived during her reign as Winter Queen. The ancient elf had known Ashley was a Speaker and had even felt my thoughts when I watched the events in the field. But she had long removed herself from the machinations of the Elven Courts, except those times when she was called to mediate, so she had kept her silence.

So the stream of aircraft sized dragons continued. Each dragon had a long unpronounceable name that Ashley would shorten to something she could use out loud. She told me that her conversations occurred completely inside her head, which I believed as my own head felt a buzzing sensation, like bees in my skull, whenever she was speaking with them. The dragons, for their part, could sense my mind from some distance, but that was it. I was deaf and mute in their world, yet we each could get the others attention mentally. The elves were very interested in this non-ability of mine and felt that it was the origin of Ashley’s Speaker Talent.

Once the dragon introductions were complete, we got down to brass tacks. The order of business, though, was the status of the children still being kept as prisoners near the portals. The elves pled racial extinction, the right for survival as a people and every other card they had. But we were adamant that the children of earth be returned home. The queens were very old and very crafty, but they met their match in Ashley’s stubborn will, which was like iron once she’s made up her mind. It was fun to watch these ancient aliens bash their heads against the granite of my daughter’s will, which was backed by hundreds of tons of fire breathing dragons.

So it was that six days after our violent arrival on Fairie, I stepped back through the portal on Bear Mountain, immediately raising both hands as I faced a forest of rifle barrels. My little part of earth had changed drastically. The cleft granite of the summit was now the focus of several machine gun nests and about thirty or so soldiers. Even as I tensely waited with my hands in the air, I could hear many heavy vehicles down around my GrandFather’s house and barn.

The extremely serious looking soldiers in front of me held me at gunpoint for several minutes till a six wheeled Polaris ATV came bouncing up the hill and discharged an elderly looking gentleman in a black suit complete with black cane. He was white haired and white mustached, with extremely sharp eyes and the slightest limp in his left leg. Accompanying him was an extremely fit looking young woman with brown hair and dark serious eyes wearing black military battledress. She didn’t carry a weapon, but I knew immediately that she was really dangerous, didn’t need a weapon, and would kill me dead if I threatened her boss. Just an intuitive hunch, the kind I get watching fighters and simply understanding their strengths and weaknesses. What I understood was that she could kick serious ass.

The older gent walked up to where I waited, a smile on his face.

“Mr. Ian Moore, I presume?” he asked.

I nodded, hands still up, but arms trembling from the effort.

“Relax Mr. Moore. Master Sergeant Cooper, I think you can have your men stand down. I don’t think Mr. Moore is going to raid his own property, besides, we have lots of questions and I’ve never been a fan of answers made under duress,” the gent said, waving his hand absently at the blocky sergeant.

The troops lowered their weapons but none of them took their eyes off me either.

“Mr. Moore, my name is Nathan Stewart and this is my assistant Adine Benally,” he continued with a nod at his assistant, who was watching me with cold eyes. “The President employs me to handle odd situations like this one.”

“If you would be so kind as to ride down the hill with us, maybe we could get a cup of coffee in your comfortable little home? I feel that you have much to tell us,” he suggested.

I cleared me throat, belatedly dropping my hands. “That would be fine, Mr. Stewart, but before we do that I’m gonna need help with the children,” I said.

He looked at me with raised white eyebrows for a moment. “Children?”

I nodded, then spoke. “Yes, the children that were taken when the Fairies came through.”

“Fairies?” he asked.

“It’s a long story Mr. Stewart, one I will be glad to tell, along with a whole slew of information on their world, culture and what they want from us and what they have to offer. You see, I’m back as something of an ambassador, although that’s not an exact fit for my situation. But before we delve into that, I have all of the children that were taken waiting to come through,” I explained.

“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “How many children were taken here in Groton’s Falls?” he asked, although I suspected he knew the number as well as I did.

“Seven, but I have two hundred and seventy- four children waiting to come through. That’s the total that was taken everywhere.”

He looked at me blankly for a moment and even his poker faced assistant showed a glimmer of surprise.

“Taken everywhere?” he echoed.

“I think you know that the incursions occurred in many locations around the world at the same time. The children taken were specifically targeted and even though they were selected from all over Earth, there is only a few of them. I would like to bring them back here and then maybe we could get them to their home countries?” I asked.

Nathan Stewart stared at me for a full fifteen seconds, the persona of affable old gent gone, replaced by one of an analytical government agent. Then he came to some decision, nodded once and the good old guy was back, a big smile on his face.

“I think we can take good care of the children. How do we begin?” he asked, curious. His badass assistant was still giving me the cold stare.

“Like this. Pancho!” I said. The puck leader loyal to my daughter, let go of the webbing on the back of my assault vest where he had remained hidden from view, dropped into the air and immediately backwinged through the Portal.

“What was that?” Nathan exclaimed, real interest in his eyes. I was raising my hands again, as the puck’s exit had startled the combat troops who brought up their rifles again.

“That was a messenger,” I replied, not taking my eyes off the rifle barrels.

Agent Stewart waved his hands in a down motion at the soldiers and they lowered their weapons.

“Mr. Stewart, can I ask if your troops are carrying M855 ammo in their M4’s or the newer heavy bullets?”

Stewart turned and looked at the Master Sergeant, eyebrows raised in question.

“77 grain ammo Sir,” the tough looking soldier replied.

Stewart looked back at me, eyebrows still raised.

“The old 855 ammo will be more effective against elves and their allies. Most of the species of their world are allergic to iron and steel,” I explained.

“So that old myth was true?” Stewart asked.

“Yes sir. Those claymore mines set up there will be extremely effective with their load of ball bearings, and fragmentation grenades work wonderfully,” I said, now having everyone’s interest.

“You would appear to have even more information than I hoped for,” Stewart said.

“Sir, you have no idea. And I’m fully prepared to disclose it all, when the children are taken care of,” I said, just as the first of the kids, a Groton Falls child, stepped through the Portal.

“I would have thought your daughter would be first through?” Stewart asked, obviously aware that the girl coming through was not Ashley.

“She won’t be coming over Mr. Stewart,” I replied to his astounded expression. “But that tale is part of what we’ll talk about.”

“I look forward to it,” he replied, eyes watching the steady stream of children that were now coming through the interplanetary gateway behind me.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, as promised. I spent three days debriefing with Mr. Stewart and an ever increasing number of government types, sending a steady stream of messages back to Ashley through Pancho. I met with a ton of federal people; State Department, Department of Defense, FBI, CIA, NSA, SEALs, Marine Recon troops, biologists, physicists, astronomers, hell even IRS. There was a lot to tell. These pages were copied from my written statement, but I doubt the government will take long to find it.

It doesn’t matter. They won’t be able to cover this up for long. It’s too big of a story, the biggest in fact. First contact with aliens. Well not really first, but rather first official contact. They’re already part of our folklore.

But you need to prepare. Because the governments of this world will be wheeling and dealing, fast and furious with Fairie. The biological knowledge they possess will change our world. Cancer will be cured, damaged organs regrown in place, Alzheimer’s, dementia, autism, diabetes, and even old age is as good as gone, or will be in the next five years. But to get this knowledge, we’ll have to trade. And what they want are children. So don’t deceive yourselves into thinking our government or any other government won’t empty its orphanages in exchange for knowledge. Oh, they’ll call it exchange programs, or inter-dimensional training, cross cultural learning or some other happy horseshit. But in the end it’ll be legalized trade in children of Talent. And the good, kindly folks of Fairie will be here in large numbers as well (please note for those of you who aren’t following, that was sarcasm). They will have their own agendas, seeking power and knowledge from us. They’re faster than we are, very savage and have been trained for decades if not centuries in fighting skills. Tackling them one-on-one is a bad idea. Instead, you need to prepare, arm yourselves, seek out training, accumulate ammunition (steel tipped) and supplies, and above all, keep your children close. Read to them from this story if you like, maybe it will scare them into behaving safely. After all, that’s what our original folktales were for, too bad we forgot to pay attention.

For myself, I’ll be heading back over to Fairie, to Ashley. There’s nothing left for me here and no one on that planet, elves or dragons, is interested in letting my daughter leave. I’ll have a chance to influence events as father of the new dragon speaker and, of course, I’ll be there to protect her….as I will do till my last breath.

End Blog

Acknowledgements

One of the fun parts about writing novels is all the cool stuff you learn along the way. The internet has sure helped with the research side of things but you still need smart people to keep your facts straight.

On this book, Marty Munson filled that role admirably, particularly on the topics of forging knives and military hardware. He’s also a hell of a proof reader.

Bob Braun continues to be a major help in telling me when I’m writing too many words and when I’m writing too few.

The town of Groton Falls is loosely based on Ballston Spa, NY but otherwise fictitious. I couldn’t bear to damage the real thing.

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is, on the other hand, entirely real and providing science with a true shot at proving that the elusive Higgs particles are real. All references to it are my own and therefore any mistakes belong at my feet as well.

My brother Scott continues his support of my writing habit, while helping control my bad writing habits.

Finally, I have to thank my wife and daughters for putting up with my odd thoughts and odder writing habits. Dad’s not crazy girls, but it’s better for everyone if he gets the stories out of his head and into written words.

For more information visit the author at: www.johnconroe.com

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24