Chapter 16
“Hi, Charlie,” said Roxy, waving and grinning mischievously from where she stood by her motorcycle. “I’m so glad we were able to come an understanding. Now come on quietly, Rowan, unless you want to get these poor people involved as well.”
What is she doing here?! Charlie’s heart thrummed in her chest and her mind raced back to Roxy’s card in her purse. Since her mother had picked her up, she had totally forgotten about her number. But she never called it either, so why was Roxy standing on the edge of her driveway now?
“What is she talking about, Charlie?” asked Rowan, looking at her with concerned eyes.
Charlie stepped to the edge of the veranda. “What are you doing here? I never called you!”
“Oh?” said Roxy, grinning. “Then why is your parents’ number showing up on my cell?”
Charlie didn’t understand. How was it possible that she had received a call from her parent’s number if she had never even taken the card out of her purse? Then, the answer suddenly hit her.
Mom.
Rowan continued to look at Charlie for answers, and through his expression she could see the thoughts of betrayal playing on his mind. She felt sick to her stomach that he might think she set him up. If only she had thrown out that card the moment she received it.
“I know this looks really bad,” said Charlie, taking Rowan’s hand in her own, “but you’ve got to believe me when I say I had nothing to do with this.”
Rowan appeared to be considering whether to believe her or not, but then nodded and slightly tightened his grip on her hand in confirmation to his belief. Charlie silently thanked her stars and then guided him into the house and away from Roxy.
“Oh come on, Charlie!” said Roxy, calling out to them. “You’re so close to ending all of this. Don’t make it harder on yourself now.”
Then, her irritation for that woman reaching its limit, Charlie built up her courage and did something she had wanted to do since that first day when Roxy barged into her apartment. As she and Rowan reached the doorway, Charlie turned around and flipped Roxy the bird.
“Screw you!”
Roxy must have been sure Charlie was going to give up and comply, because the look on her face now spelled out surprise and offense. It pleased Charlie to know she was able to out rightly piss her off, even if she knew she might regret it soon after.
As Charlie slammed shut the front door, her mother came out from the kitchen to investigate all the commotion, and looked out the window to see who was there.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Oh, Charlie, has your friend arrived already? Wow, she’s fast. I only just called her five minutes ago.”
“You what?!” said Charlie, trying very hard not to scream at her mother. “Mom, where did you get her number?”
“Well, don’t be mad at me, because it was supposed to be a surprise. But since Rowan showed up, I thought it would have been nice to have a get together with all your old friends and some of your new ones. So I did some digging around in your purse to see if I could find some of your friends’ phone numbers. The only thing I could find was a white card with the name Roxy on it, and she seemed more than excited to come by.”
“That woman is not my friend,” said Charlie, so angry at her mother that she literally wished to strangle her. “She’s a bad person, Mom, and she’s not here to sample your cheese and crackers.”
While Charlie spoke, worry and concern had begun to build up within her mother’s eyes. She didn’t do well under great amounts of stress, and the notion that Roxy was there to do them harm was starting to make her panic. But then Rowan did something unexpected, and Charlie watched as he walked up to her mother and took her hands within his own. A blue glow pulsed from his hands and just as she had witnessed before, he spoke an incomprehensible word and the effects of a spell had begun to take place. Charlie’s mother’s eyes closed and she collapsed to the floor.
“What did you do to her?” asked Charlie, worried that Rowan just killed her mother.
“Don’t worry,” said Rowan, picking her up in his arms and carrying her to the living room couch. “I just placed her under a sleep enchantment. She’ll sleep through the night without any memory of what happened.”
“Thank God. If she knew about wizards – I mean faeries – and magic, I think she might actually need to be admitted into a psych ward. It’s a good thing Dad’s at work too. So now that that’s taken care of, what should we do about Roxy?”
“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” said Rowan. “I hate to say it, but there’s much else that we can do but run.”
“Can’t we fight her or something? What if you use your magic like last time but stronger?”
“Unfortunately, even that’s only a temporary solution. I couldn’t kill Roxy even if I wanted to because Fae people can’t be killed. To you, it would look like death, but she’d be reborn the next day and would keep coming after me. The best we can do is slow her down and wait until she finds us again.”
Charlie could tell that Rowan was becoming weary of this never ending game of hide-and-seek. She wondered just how long he had been running from her. Twenty years? A hundred years? Five hundred years? She knew that if she were in his shoes, she probably would have given up a long time ago. It must be exhausting continually having to be on the run.
Charlie was about to ask him how they should prepare for their escape, but then she heard a sound coming from outside. It sounded like the pitter-patter of small feet on pavement – a lot of small feet. Initially she believed it to be the rain, only to look outside to realize it wasn’t raining anymore. Charlie cupped her hands against the window and face to try and get a better view of what might be clicking around in the darkness beyond the veranda.
Thump!
Charlie jumped back and screamed as a garden gnome crashed into the window and laughed at her. It stood on the outer windowsill and banged its small ceramic fists against the glass, trying to get inside. Soon there were more thumps and bangs around the house as more and more gnomes besieged her parent’s home.
“What is going on?” said Charlie, the sight of the garden gnomes terrifying and making her skin crawl. “Where did they come from?”
“I’ve got to admit,” said Rowan, “I didn’t expect her to pull this out of her bag of tricks.”
“You mean Roxy did this?”
“Take another look out on your lawn.”
Trying to not let the small gnome who banged on her window unnerve her, Charlie looked outside again to see what Rowan was talking about. That’s when she realized that the gnomes trying to break into the house were the same garden gnomes that her parents had spread all over their yard. Roxy had given them life and turned them into her own little army.
Charlie shuddered.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, hoping Rowan had some get-away-quick magic spell.
“I don’t think we need to worry too much,” said Rowan. “They’re only garden gnomes, so they shouldn’t be able to get inside.”
From somewhere at the back of a house came the sound of glass shattering.
“Okay, I take that back,” Rowan continued. “Maybe their little ceramic fists do pack enough punch to break through windows.”
Charlie felt like she was in the middle of a horror scene. If there was anything that scared her worse than demons, she realized, it was happy killer garden gnomes.
In every room windows continued to shatter and the sound of little running feet, along with mischievous laughter, filled the house. Standing in the living room, Charlie grabbed the closest thing to a weapon that she could find, which happened to be a fire poker. She decided to call it the Destroyer of Gnomes, hoping that such a menacing name may cause them think twice about approaching her.
The first one entered the room. Rowan shot an orb of blue energy from his hand and it disintegrated into dust.
That wasn’t so hard, thought Charlie.
However, she w
ould soon regret those words because suddenly it wasn’t just one or two that ran in next, but what seemed to be over thirty of them, all laughing and ready to bruise some shins.
“How are there so many of them?” asked Charlie, now swinging her fire poker and smashing one gnome after another. “I don’t think my parents had this many!”
“Roxy must be using a multiplier spell!” said Rowan, continuing to cast blue orbs to destroy the tiny hecklers.
“They’re relentless!”
“But they all seem to be coming after me,” Rowan pointed out.
Charlie hadn’t notice this before, but now that Rowan said so, for the most part it did look like they were focusing their attention on him, possibly in the hopes to overwhelm him with their numbers. When they all started pouring into the room, she hadn’t taken the time to analyze the situation, but through panic just started whacking them instead. She jumped out of the way of the never-ending stream of garden gnomes and stepped to the side of the room. Rowan was right; they weren’t interested in her at all. But she knew she couldn’t just stand in a corner and abandon him. So, taking some comfort in the fact that she didn’t need to fear being personally harmed, she re-entered the fray and continued with the smashing.
The problem was that there was just so many of them. They just kept coming, no matter how many were destroyed. Charlie knew she wouldn’t be able to keep up with swinging her fire poker much longer before falling to exhaustion, and taking one look at Rowan, she knew he was feeling the same way. Something had to be done.
“They just keep coming!” said Charlie. “Did Roxy set up a cloning machine outside?”
“Why didn’t I think of that!” said Rowan, “Charlie, you’re a genius! She must be using a source gnome outside that continues to multiply until I’m captured. Do you think you can go and take care of the problem while I keep trying to keep them off me?”
“But what if Roxy’s out there? She’ll eat me alive!”
Rowan looked at her pleadingly, his eyes expressing what words wouldn’t be able to convey. He was in trouble and he needed her.
Charlie took a deep breath and readied herself. She was afraid, but Rowan had saved her life once before and she couldn’t let him down now. Leaving Rowan to fend off the much-too-happy garden gnomes from hell, Charlie hurried out the back door to find the source gnome.
Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to find because Roxy had stood by the gnome beside a tall tree, feeding it magic while it continued to magically multiply every 3 seconds. Charlie walked against the crowd of charging gnomes, gripping her fire poker tightly and holding it in striking position. At that moment, in some weird way, she felt like one of her warrior characters from her online video game.
“So the little hero has come out to play,” said Roxy. “Cute.”
“Stop what you’re doing and let Rowan go,” said Charlie, trying to sound braver than she actually felt.
Roxy laughed, not stopping from feeding purple energy into the source gnome. “What are you going to do? You’re a pathetic mortal with a sorry excuse of a life. Just give up already.”
A burning knot formed in the pit of Charlie’s stomach and she clenched her teeth in anger. She’d had enough of Roxy. She’d had enough of being pushed around. And not just by her, but by those who thought themselves superior just because they had a better job and knew more people. So, sick and tired of listening to Roxy’s condescending nature, she did the only thing that was left to do.
Charlie held her fire poker up high and let loose a battle cry, charging Roxy head-on. Roxy hadn’t expected her to actually go on the attack, and the surprise caused her to flinch and shield her face with her arm. And that was exactly what Charlie was hoping for. Now that her feint had worked and Roxy disconnected her power from the source gnome, Charlie focused her swing on the gnome and shattered it to pieces. When she looked back, she noticed that all the other gnomes had reverted back to lifelessness.
When Roxy realized she had been tricked, she growled in frustration and raised her hand to strike Charlie. But as her arm came down, Charlie grabbed it mid-swing and squeezed her wrist tightly.
“How dare you! Don’t you realize I have the power to crush you where you stand?”
“Then do it!” said Charlie, surprising herself with how much bite was in her words. “If you’re as tough as you say you are, then stop with the threats and actually do something!”
Roxy boiled with anger and yanked her arm free of Charlie’s grip. She stared at her for a long moment, Charlie expecting her to do her worst, but then she backed away. This surprised Charlie, because she was sure she was about to be obliterated into oblivion.
“I guess you’re got more spunk than you let on,” said Roxy. “Fine. Go and tell Rowan he’s off the hook for tonight. But don’t think for a second that I’m through chasing him. I’ll get him eventually.”
Charlie stood there and continued to brandish her fire poker, unwilling to nod or respond, only wanting Roxy to leave and go away. After she left, Charlie hurried back into the house to search for Rowan. However, he was nowhere to be found. The only thing that greeted Charlie was dust and floors covered with pieces of ceramic garden gnomes.