Home Improvement: Undead Edition (27 page)

“Get back here!” Danny bellowed, swatting at the pixies that were dive-bombing his head.

“I have a better idea!” I shouted, straightening up and grabbing hold of Quentin’s hand. “Follow those Barghests!” I ran after them, towing Quentin in my wake. May and Danny followed close behind, the pixies diving and weaving around all four of us as they lashed out with their tiny but potentially deadly weapons. The fact that we were running away didn’t seem to be lessening the fury of their attack; if anything, it increased their enthusiasm, since now they were winning.

The Barghests ran through the door and down the hall, making a sharp left after about twenty yards. The four of us followed, speeding up as best we could in our effort to escape the flock of pixies, which seemed devoted to stabbing us. May yelped in pain but kept running. Good girl. When we reached the place where the Barghests turned, we did the same, and found ourselves in a small, rounded room with tapestry-cushioned walls. There was another skylight set into the ceiling, filling the room with cool moonlight.

It was pretty, but I was more concerned with getting the massive oak door shut against the pixie influx. I shoved against it; it didn’t budge. “Danny, a little help here?” I asked.

“On it.” He reached over and gave the wood a small, almost dismissive shove. It swung away from me so fast I nearly fell, and slammed shut with a concussive
boom
that echoed through the entire room. “Better?”

“Much,” I said, and turned to study the others.

Quentin and May were both bleeding from a variety of small cuts, and one of May’s barrettes was missing, making the hair on that side of her head stick out at an odd angle. Only Danny looked relatively unscathed. He leaned against the door, folding his arms.

“You didn’t warn me about the attack pixies,” he said. “I woulda brought a flyswatter. Maybe a can of Raid or somethin’, too.”

“You can’t use Raid on pixies!” said May, looking horrified. “It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“Probably messy.” I shook my head. “I didn’t tell you about the attack pixies because I didn’t know they were
here
. I thought the place was empty.”

“The cliff exit,” said Quentin. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “There was that time right after Evening died, when you fell? Remember?”

“How could I forget? But how do
you
remember? You weren’t there.”

“I told him,” said May. I raised an eyebrow. “What? It was funny.”

“No, listen—the cliff exit didn’t have a door on it. The pixies probably got in that way and decided this was a good place to stay. No one was killing them. That’s sort of an improvement over the way things worked before.” Quentin paused before adding, reluctantly, “Maybe they even saw it as a sort of victory over the Countess Winterrose. She’s gone, and they’re still here.”

“Which also explains why they reacted so badly to us. They think we’re going to start killing them again.” I glanced at the door. “Anybody feel equipped to explain the lightbulb to a swarm of feral, pissed-off pixies?”

“Not it,” said May.

Danny’s Barghests paced the edges of the room as we spoke, their semicanine muzzles pressed low to the ground and their scorpion-like tails wagging. They abruptly stopped, muzzles swinging toward the same patch of wall as they began growling.

When a Barghest growls, smart people pay attention. I straightened, to face them. “Danny . . . ?”

“Iggy! Lou! Daisy! You stop that right this second!” Danny pushed away from the door, striding toward the Barghests. “Behave, or Toby’s not gonna want to take you guys for guard dogs!”

“What—” I began.

I didn’t have time to finish. A spider easily the size of a goat lunged out of the shadows between the hanging tapestries, where it must have been pressed practically two-dimensional in order to stay out of sight. The Barghests yelped, the smallest cutting and running to hide behind Danny while the others held their ground and began to bark cacophonously.

May shot me a look. “Remind me to
never
start another home improvement project with you.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response. I was too busy pulling the knife from my belt and charging forward, toward the massive spider.

The folks at Home Depot definitely didn’t have any pamphlets for this sort of thing.

IF THERE’S AN
art to fighting enormous spiders, I somehow managed to live to adulthood without learning it. The creature seemed to consist entirely of lashing limbs and fangs the size of my forearm, which was enough to give even the Barghests pause. Danny grabbed one of them by the tail, jerking it clear just before it would have been impaled on one massive, hooked forelimb. I darted forward, slashing at the spider’s leg. It responded by hissing and scuttling backward, looking for a new angle of attack.

“We need an exit!” I said, taking up a defensive posture while Danny pulled the other Barghest to safety.

“The pixies are still out there,” said Quentin. He sounded dismayingly calm, given that we were sharing the room with the sort of thing that inspires arachnophobia. Maybe it was the fact that he had a Bridge Troll between him and the giant spider.

“Have you ever heard the phrase
the lesser of two evils
?” I asked, jumping back as the spider took another swing at me. It seemed to realize that this approach wasn’t working as well as it could have, because it turned and raced six feet up the wall, hissing at us. “Open the damn door!”

“It’s your funeral,” said May. She grabbed the door handle, pulling as hard as she could. It didn’t budge. “Quentin? A little help here?”

“On it.”

The spider hissed again, spitting a long stream of something sticky-looking in my direction. I dodged to the side. The sticky substance splattered against the floor instead of against my legs. “Danny! Help them with the door!”

“This day just gets better and better,” said Danny, and leaned over to yank the door open. May and Quentin were swept along with it, the wood shielding them as the tide of pissed-off pixies came boiling into the room. They stopped when they saw the spider, chattering rapidly among themselves in high-pitched voices. They weren’t attacking; that was something, anyway.

I was so distracted by the pixies that I didn’t notice the second spider until it dropped from the ceiling and grabbed me. Then I was being jerked into the air, so rapidly that I lost my grip on both my knives. Something pierced the skin at the back of my neck, sending what felt like liquid fire pumping into my veins. May screamed.

After that, everything went black.

I’VE WOKEN UP
in a lot of strange situations, including “in the Court of Cats” and “halfway to being transformed into a tree.” That probably says something about how much time I spend unconscious. Waking up wrapped from feet to shoulders in a silk cocoon and dangling upside down from the rafters of Goldengreen’s throne room was a new one on me, though.

I blinked, trying to get my eyes to adjust as I strained to see what was around me. More cocoons hung to either side, the heads of my companions poking out the ends. Danny was to my left, with the Barghests behind him, and Quentin was hanging to my right. That just left—“May?” I tried to whisper. My voice still echoed in the empty room. I would have winced, but the cocoon didn’t leave me with that much freedom of motion.

“Worst knowe
ever
,” whispered May angrily. It sounded like she was hanging to my right, somewhere on the other side of Quentin. “I realize that your memory isn’t always totally reliable, but couldn’t you have at least
tried
to remember the giant spiders? That seems like the sort of thing you’d want to mention
before
you came for a visit.”

“They weren’t here before!” The puncture wounds at the back of my neck were a dull, distant throb. I could really get used to this whole accelerated healing thing. “Neither were the pixies.”

“Well, they’re here now,” replied May. “Quentin and Danny are still out.”

“Swell.” I heal fast; May’s functionally indestructible. In this case, that just meant we got to be awake when the giant spiders came back and decided to liquefy our insides for breakfast. I wasn’t sure either of us would survive
that
. “What did I miss?”

“The spider grabbed you, and then two more grabbed Danny, while the pixies herded Quentin and me into the first one. We never had a chance.”

“Hold on—the pixies are working with the spiders?”

“Maybe it’s a tribute thing? They feed us to the spiders, the spiders leave them alone.”

“No, really, hold on.” The spiders
couldn’t
be eating the pixies. Their fangs were too big for that. Any spider trying to eat a pixie would just wind up with a skewered pixie, and no breakfast to speak of. “They’re working together. They have to be.”

“What, we managed to blunder into the middle of the great pixie-spider alliance? Oh, that’s just fantastic. This place gets more entertaining by the minute.”

I tried squirming again. I still couldn’t get any real purchase against the silk, and I gave up after a few seconds, letting myself hang limp. The answer was obvious. It was all but staring me in the face the whole time. I’d just been distracted by its many, many teeth. “They’re not spiders.”

“Eight legs, fangs, wrapping us up in giant snack-pack cocoons—if they’re not spiders, what are they? Pretty pink ponies?”

“They’re bogies.”

There was a moment of silence as May considered my words. Then she groaned. “Oh, crud.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Bogies, like pixies, bridge the gap between the intelligent and bestial fae. They’re shapeshifters. Shapeshifters are pretty common in Faerie, but most shapeshifting fae have a limit to the number of forms they can assume. Bogies don’t. They can take the shapes of a thousand types of creeping, crawling things: spiders and centipedes, scurrying beetles, and even, occasionally, really big frogs. They’re territorial, like their pixie cousins, and they tend to live in large family groups, defending each other to the death.

Danny made a grumbling sound, like rocks grinding together, and the cocoon to my left shifted. “Anybody get the number of that dump truck?” he asked, sounding woozy.

“We found a bogie nest,” I said, without preamble. Best to rip the bandage off cleanly.

Danny was still swearing when Quentin woke up a few minutes later. “Hello?”

“Hey, Quentin,” I said. “Don’t bother to struggle. We’re bogie-caught.”

“. . . Oh,” he said. “That’s new.”

“Yeah, I know.” A distant humming sound was filtering into the room, like the beating of a hundred tiny wings. “Danny, shush. I think the pixies are coming back.”

“Oh, that’s
exactly
what I wanted,” muttered Danny, and went silent.

The pixies brought light with them when they came pouring into the room, their tiny bodies glowing like low-watt Christmas lights. There were at least fifty of them. They swarmed to surround us, jabbing tiny spears and daggers at our faces—but not, I noticed, actually making contact. In fact, except for the bites from the bogies, we hadn’t taken nearly as much damage from the knowe’s inhabitants as we could have.

Maybe the Goldengreen’s new denizens were trying to play nicely. Sort of.

I cleared my throat. “Uh, hi,” I said, to the pixie that was flying back and forth in front of my nose. Pixies don’t hover well. It was a male, maybe four inches tall, glowing with a rich, royal blue tint that didn’t quite go with the scrap of buttercup-yellow sheeting that he was using as a loincloth. “I’m Toby Daye.”

“And now she’s talking to pixies,” said Danny, in a long-suffering tone. “We’re all gonna die here.”

“Danny, shush,” hissed May.

I did my best to ignore them, focusing instead on the pixie. “I think we may have managed to get off on the wrong foot.”

The pixie eyed me suspiciously, not saying anything. That made a certain amount of sense. The language barrier between the small folk and the human-sized fae meant that while he might have been able to understand me, I had no real way of understanding
him
.

“I’m starting to get an idea of what used to go on here, and I’m sorry. I had no idea. The things that Evening—”

That answered one question: the pixies definitely understood at least a little English. The flock went nuts when I said Evening’s name, shrieking in high-pitched voices as they all started flying wildly around us. Almost all. The blue pixie continued flitting back and forth, eyes narrowing with suspicion.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I said, hurriedly. “It’s okay, really! We’re not here to do the things she did. Do you understand me? We’re not here for that at all!”

The blue pixie swooped a little closer, wings buzzing into a blur behind him as he aimed his spear at the tip of my nose. It was difficult to resist the urge to go cross-eyed looking at it.

“My name is October Daye. I’m supposed to be the new Countess here. The Queen sent me.” The pixie shook his spear. “Hey! It wasn’t my idea, okay? She didn’t ask me. But as far as she’s concerned, this knowe is my problem now, and she’s not going to take it well if we never come back out. Do you understand? If we disappear, more big ones will come looking for us.” There was something charmingly perverse about the idea that I was counting on the Queen of the Mists to avenge my potential death; she hates me, after all, and would probably be thrilled if I conveniently disappeared. But form would still insist she send someone into Goldengreen to look for us, and once whoever that was found our bones—and the homicidal local ecosystem—a mass extermination would follow.

“Sweet Maeve, I don’t believe I’m worried about the pixies getting in trouble for killing us,” I muttered. More loudly, I said, “Do you
understand
? We aren’t here to hurt you, but if you hurt us, the people who come after us won’t be this nice.”

“What is she doin’?” whispered Danny. Hearing a Bridge Troll whisper was something like hearing a gravel truck trying to be quiet. It would have been funny under most circumstances.