Winged Warriors

  "So, is that our plan? Tim's going to fly out and pixelate them?" Scrum did not look convinced that this was our best option.

  "Do you have any better ideas?" I asked.

  He shook his head sadly. "Sorry, but no."

  "Okay, then. I'm going to use my best international diplomacy skills to get them to put their weapons down for a minute; then, Scrum, I need you to create a distraction. And while Scrum has their attention, Tim, I need you to get out, get into position, and then let that dust fly. Spray the entire region with it. We'll deal with the fallout after."

  "Jayne, wait!" Tim said, as I was about to open my mouth and address my misbehaving children.

  "What?"

  "Do you think you could call to my brethren?"

  "Call who?"

  He rolled his eyes. "Call the pixies. Send out an SOS signal. Let them know we need their help." He paused, acting like he was suddenly embarrassed. His voice dropped. "It's just that…I'm not sure I have enough dust for the entire area. Abby and I were getting busy the other night, and, well, I might have used up a lot of it…"

  "Ew! Gross! Do not tell me about your sexy dust!"

  "Well?! What do you want from me? I'm a man of passion, Jayne. I run hot sometimes, and things get out of hand in the bedroom. I'm not going to apologize for being irresistible."

  I sighed in annoyance. "Fine, Mr. Sexy Pants, I'll try to contact your pixie friends, but I think you already saw that these two brats of mine have the compound locked down right now. Nobody can get out." Or maybe it was the witches' protective spells keeping them out of harm's way, but either way, they weren't going to be any help.

  He smiled. "Yeah, well, maybe you hadn't noticed, but the pixies don't particularly like hanging out in the compound, rubbing elbows with a bunch of riffraff…" He looked like he had more to say on the subject, but the leaking of the bubble suddenly became more pronounced, so he stopped talking and gestured at the waterfall. "Go, go, go!"

  I turned around and yelled at the brats. "Okay, my children…,”—Boy, that sounds weird to say out loud—“I’m ready to surrender. But you have to put your elements away so my friend can leave." I was counting on the fact that they hadn't seen Tim with me and that he'd be able to slip away unnoticed.

  When they didn't answer right away, I did something I'd never done before; I ignored the ley line beneath my feet that would have made my connection to the elements much easier to link up to, and I went raw. I used the elemental magic that was in the air around me instead, the extra special stuff that was always waiting to be used by someone who knew what she was doing. I wasn't that person, obviously, but I'd been dabbling with Sam overseeing things, and I knew enough to be able to use it for sending out what basically amounted to a fae smoke signal.

  Pixies in the Green Forest, come to me. Find me. Feel my vibration in the mix. I need you. Tim needs you. Come to me or all will be lost.

  I hadn't realized that I'd closed my eyes until Scrum spoke. "Did you do it? Did you call them?"

  I nodded. "It's done." I looked at Tim. "I hope it worked or we're screwed."

  "Okay. Let me out of this thing. I'm feeling caged in again, and I need to be free!" He was sweating.

  "Easy does it there, Lone Wolf. I need you to stay calm so you don't get caught on your way out." I looked at Scrum. "Do you have a distraction in mind?"

  He shrugged. "I think so."

  "Excellent. I'll wrap you in some protection, but it won't be much because they'll sense it and they'll probably be able to pull it right off you. You have to be quick."

  "Got it. Be quick." He nodded once and then looked out to our challengers.

  "Your friend must be put down," said the male voice—my son.

  Scrum looked at me at the same time as I looked at him. He seemed scared, but I was pissed.

  "What? No!" I yelled. "And I'm going to slap your face for even saying such a thing!" My kids needed more than a spanking, talking about putting my friend down like that. How dare they!

  "We can feel his intentions in the elements. He intends us harm."

  Scrum's expression carried some guilt. "I wasn't going to hurt them permanently," he whispered. "Just tackle one of them."

  "That's perfect," I mouthed the words to him and then raised my voice. "Just pull your elements back and I'll come to you. Don't worry about him. You're elementals right? Badasses of all the fae. What's a little daemon to someone like you?"

  "Flattery will get you nowhere, Mother," said the girl. And boy, she sounded mean. "Come out now. Pay the price."

  I lifted my eyebrows at Scrum. "Pay the price? I must have done something really bad." I almost laughed, imagining what that could have been. Did I refuse to let them go to a concert? Make them clean their rooms before they could go out? Ground them and keep them from going to their best friends' slumber parties?

  The girl screamed. "Stop laughing at us! Come out now or we will destroy this entire forest!"

  I felt the roots of all the trees around us tremble at that. And I felt them pushing back against the idea that an elemental would actually want to harm them.

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't get your panties in a twist. I'm coming." I winked at Scrum and whispered over my shoulder at the pixie who was ready to fly at the speed of sound. "Go get em, roomie. Show 'em who's boss."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  IT ALL HAPPENED really fast. The Green bubble came down, in part because I asked it to go away, but also in part because one of my brat kids blew it to pieces with a ball of flame as big around as a watermelon.

  Scrum rolled to the ground and then got up and sprinted toward my son. Both children spent about five seconds dealing with him, which was just enough time for Tim to disappear into the ether.

  Scrum got hit by a water cannon that threw him onto his back, but before he could drown in it, I managed to slip a sliver of Green between his body and that water, protecting him from the worst of it. He crawled away, headed toward the compound door. The kids ignored him after they realized I was standing there with nothing to protect me.

  The waterfall dropped and so did the fire wall. A girl who looked eerily like me—only with hair—and a boy who looked freakily like Ben, were staring at me. Nobody said anything for the longest time. And then the girl spoke.

  "You're ugly bald." She sneered at me. It was not an attractive look for her.

  I reached up and rubbed my prickly head. "Really? I thought it looked pretty badass. Like G.I. Jane. Have you seen that movie?"

  "Are you kidding? You made us watch it about twenty times."

  She was acting like that was some kind of torture. "It's a cool movie, so I guess that makes me a cool mom." I grinned.

  The boy laughed, but he didn't sound happy. "Yeah, right." He shot a bolt of fire from his hand into the ground halfway between us.

  I nodded. "Impressive."

  He lifted his chin. "Don't try to flatter me."

  I shrugged. "I'm not. Just calling it like I see it." I tilted my head, trying to figure out what their deal was. They looked so angry. They sounded so mad. And so sad, too. It made my heart ache to think that I had caused them to suffer such negative emotions. I knew only too well what it was like to have shitty parents.

  "Stop looking at us like we're lab rats," the girl said.

  "I wasn't. I was just trying to figure out why you're so sad."

  "We're not sad, we're mad," she said. "Big difference."

  The boy glanced at the girl, as if he wasn't sure about that answer. But when he caught me looking at him, he scowled. "Yeah. Because you're an asshole."

  "Hey!" I pointed at him. "Do not use that language with me."

  The girl snorted. "Yeah, right, because you never swear."

  She had me on that one. "Okay, yeah, I do swear. But not at my parents. Not unless it's an emergency situation."

  The girl gestured around us. "And this isn't an emergency situation? You're about to die, dummy."

  I might have believed she meant that
, but her voice tripped over those last couple of words. It was the one glimmer of hope I'd caught since they'd showed up.

  "Oh, yeeeaah," I said. "Riiiight. You're here to kill me. So, how did that come about? Did I ground you a few too many times? Refuse to let you go to prom? Take away your hovercraft?" I really hoped we'd have hovercraft by the time my kids were this age.

  The boy frowned at me. "What are you talking about?"

  I shrugged. "I'm just trying to figure out what I did that was so bad that you'd want to time-slip to the past and kill me while you were still in my belly." I pointed at my midsection. "I mean, if you want to kill yourselves before you're even born, you must be very unhappy kids."

  They exchanged glances before coming back to me. "You're lying," the girl said. "You're not pregnant with us."

  "Now, why would I do that?"

  "Because you don't want us to kill you."

  "Well, yeah, there is that. But I'm guessing you'd know if I were lying, right?" Come on, DNA! Pass that truth-telling gene down for me!

  I waited, holding my breath. The boy looked at the girl again. "Is she lying, Abby?"

  Abby. I named my daughter Abby? Damn, I'm going to be the favorite roommate of all time.

  "Shut up, Tim! Don't tell her my name!"

  "But you just did the same thing!"

  I started laughing. What a couple of dumbasses.

  They both turned on me and yelled the same words at the exact same time: "Shut up!"

  That made me angry. Them wanting to kill me confused me. Them trying to be all sly and tough humored me. But them telling me to shut up just plain old pissed me off.

  "No!" I yelled back. "And do not talk to me like that!" Thunderclouds came rolling in overhead and lightning zapped out and cracked onto the ground between them, making them both jump in fright and causing their hair to stand on end. They threw their hands over their ears.

  My arms went up and pulled the elements in without me even having to think about it. "You are my children and I am your mother. I don't know what I did in the future to deserve this kind of hate from you, but I'll tell you what…I'm not going to let this go down the way you were planning." I was barely holding onto my temper, and this super-seriously-weird parent vibe was zooming through my veins like some kind of drug. I think I was channeling my dead mother.

  "You can't stop us," Little Abby said, trying like hell to pull water to her. She failed because I had taken control of all of it, and I wasn't sharing.

  "We're in charge here," Little Tim said, his face screwing up in concentration as he tried to muster a fireball pie to smash into my face. But that wasn't happening either, because I still wasn't sharing. Not with these two little disrespectful turds.

  "Not right now, you're not," I said. "Not until I speak my piece."

  They looked to one another for answers, but neither of them knew what to do; it was written all over their faces. They were out of their elements and they knew it.

  I let Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire go back to where they belonged. I lowered my arms and walked toward them, not stopping until I was just a few feet away. I stared at them for the longest time. They were so beautiful. So angry. So sad.

  "What did I do?" I asked. "I really want to know. No messing around anymore. Just tell me."

  "You know what you did," Little Abby said. Her tone was softer, but no less hurt.

  I shook my head sadly. "I really don't." I put my hand on my belly and looked down at my little baby-mc-nuggets. "I only recently found out I was pregnant. And I'm pretty sure there are two fathers involved—one incubus and one demon who didn't exactly get permission to be with me. But it doesn't matter to me. I love you both, even though you're only the size of walnuts or pingpong balls right now. And Spike, your incubus dad, he doesn't care about the demon stuff either. He loves you like you're both his. He just told me that, like, hours ago. And we've pledged to love you and teach you right from wrong and be the best parents we can possibly be, no matter what."

  "I guess you forgot the part where you go off and leave us," Little Tim said.

  I looked up in a hurry at that. "Say, what?"

  "Yeah. You just took off and left us with those assholes," Little Abby said.

  I was starting to feel the edges of panic creep in. "What assholes?" I left my children? What kind of mother does that?

  "Uncle Leck and Aunt Malena," Little Tim said.

  I suddenly felt sick. Dizzy. I quickly lost my equilibrium. I took a step to the left and then to the right as the world shifted one way and then the other. I heard a weird sound that made me think of a dying, tortured animal in the Underworld, the haunted keening cry of a banshee. A few seconds later I realized the sound was coming from my own throat.

  My children…

  "Nooo…!"

  Kidnapped by the man who killed my mother…

  "Noooooo…!"

  Raised by demon-loving bastard motherfuckers…

  "Noooooooooo…!"

  They think I abandoned them!

  "Noooooo…! Noooooo…! NOOOOO!!!"

  "What's she doing? Why is she doing that?" I heard the boy ask. It sounded like he was really far away. He also sounded worried.

  "She's just faking it," the girl responded. She didn't seem all that confident in her answer.

  And then another voice came dimly into my head as my vision grayed out. It was someone singing, and he sounded reeeeally pumped. "Dum! Dum! Dum! Another one eats my dust! Da-da-dum, dum, dum…another one eats my dust! And another one down, and another one down, another one eats my dust! Hey! We're gonna get you too, another one eats my dust! Woo hoo!"

  "Come, my pixie brethren! Shake it, but don't break it, because we can make-make-a-make it! Light up the forest with your happy dust! Make it rain that pixie pain! We are running a special today, ladies and gentlefae! Free pixelations for everybody in the Green Forest!"

  My roommate's voice was the last thing I heard before I hit the dirt and completely blacked out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I WOKE UP totally confused. The last thing I remembered was being in the forest hearing the worst news of my life—namely, that I'd abandoned my children to Leck and Malena—and Tim singing, followed by…nothing.

  I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling of my bedroom. Reaching up, I scrubbed at my face with both hands. "Holy shit that was one hell of a nightmare." I reached over blindly to my right, trying to find Spike in the bed next to me. "Babe, wake up. I have to tell you about this nightmare I just had. I think it might have been a vision or something." The bed was empty.

  I turned my head. The covers weren't disturbed over on his side of the bed. "Spike?" I lifted my head, looking around the room. There were mattresses everywhere, but no bodies.

  "Hello, Lellemental!" Willy was suddenly in my face. "You're wakin' up! Wakey, wakey, pancakey!"

  I closed my eyes and let my head drop back down to the pillow. "Yeah, I'm awake. Where is everybody?"

  "They're in the big room."

  I opened my eyes again and blinked a few times. "The garden?"

  "No, the big room."

  "The dining hall?"

  "No, the big room. Can't you hear me? Do you have pollyballs in your ears?"

  I lifted my head to look at him. "I don't know, do I?"

  He shrugged. "Maybe. Or maybe you have some in your nose. I don't know." He looked very sneaky when he said that.

  Note to self: blow nose extra hard today.

  With considerable effort, I sat myself up and swung my legs over the side of the bed. It took a few seconds for my head to stop spinning. "Did I imagine a bunch of crazy stuff going down, or was it all a dream?"

  "What crazy stuff?" Willy asked, flying over to hover in front of my face. He was still wearing his uniform, and the tie was still wonky.

  "Do I, by any chance, have two kids wandering around the forest, raising hell and making general nuisances of themselves?"

  "No." He shook his head.

  "Oh, t
hank goodness." Damn, that was one hell of a dream.

  "They're in the big room."

  My heart dropped like a stone into my stomach. "What did you say?"

  He rolled his eyes and did a flip before answering me. "Geez, Lellemental, I'm telling you, and you are not listening!"

  I held out my hand. "Come here. I need you to say it to me one more time. Where is everybody, and what do you know about my kids?"

  He landed on my hand, putting his hands on his hips. "You're a sleepy head. Wake up!"

  I wasn't getting anywhere with this little bugger, so I decided to try a different tack. "Where's your daddy?"

  "In the big room."

  "Okay, where's your mommy?"

  He sighed loudly. "In the big room."

  "And where's Mr. Dardennes?"

  He threw up his hands and yelled. "In the big room! Duh, Lellemental, dat's where everybody is!"

  "You're not!" I said, probably a little too loudly.

  "Because I'm a ayygent! I'm sa-possa watch you and report back!"

  "Oh, good lord." I tossed him up in the air and scrambled off the bed. Shit was going down and I was sleeping through it. Again.

  "Weeeee!" Baby Bee yelled, doing flips and circles in the air around me. "Throw me again, Lellemental. One more time."

  "No, I don't have time for that nonsense. I have to get dressed." I rushed to put clean clothes on, since the ones I'd been wearing were in a heap on the floor and covered in sticks and leaves. After a quick brush of the teeth and a potty break, I was ready to rock.

  "Are you leaving?" Willy asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

  "Yes. Are you coming with me or hanging back here?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Mayyyybe I'll stay here."

  Alarm bells went off in my head after detecting an evasive tone, but I ignored them. Not my monkey, not my circus. "Okay. Suit yourself. I'm outta here." I opened the door and went out into the hallway. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the little stinker following me, but he was staying really close to the ceiling. I decided to have some fun with it, because even though the stakes were high and I had serious shit to deal with, messing with pixies was still one of my favorite hobbies.