Troll Or Derby, A Fairy Wicked Tale (10 page)

A ferocious drummer lurked behind a midnight black drum kit, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Everything about him was dark—his clothes, his long, scraggly hair, his teeth, his eyes—watching him was like looking into a black hole.

When I finally tore my eyes away, the singer was pointing at me, his eyes wild as his voice soared in what I thought was probably an Ozzy Osborne cover. The language was odd, though. Not exactly English, but a few English words thrown in, here and there.

Moe grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me to a table. “Have a seat, kid. I’ll get us some beers.”

I’m not much of a drinker—I mean, I’m fifteen, you know? But I’ve had a beer every once in a while, sure. After the bonfire from hell, I wasn’t really up for drinking again.

“Is there any way I could get some food?” I asked.

“Frog legs is always good,” Moe said. He smiled, and his tongue peeked out between the gaps in his teeth. He might have been making fun of me, but I was too hungry to argue. I just nodded. He motioned to a willow-thin waitress, and she slid a basket of toad legs across the table, wrapped in greasy wax paper.

I’d snarfed down as much of the delicacy as I could before I started thinking about the slimy green skin of the frogs in my Bio lab. The food, the beer, the near-rape, the escape … it was all catching up to me.

“I’m gonna be sick, dude.”

Moe pointed me toward the back corner of the bar, and I made a run for it. The band finished the last verse of an Iron Maiden song in shrill ecstasy as I hit the dirty swinging door of the unisex bathroom.

A girl lay on the floor in the corner of the restroom. Two guys stood over her, smoking and talking quietly. I didn’t want them to see me puking, but there were no doors on the bathroom stalls, so I did what I had to do.

“You here with Moe?” one of them asked, when I was done.

I shook my head.

“Good guy, Moe. Makes short work of it, too!” the other said. They both laughed.

“Short work of what?” I really didn’t want to talk to them while I blew vomit chunks from my nostrils, but something told me Ms. Manners was out of style in these parts.

“Eh, never mind us,” the first one said. I looked at him closely. No tusks on this one, or his friend. I felt only slightly safer for the knowledge. There was something shifty about everyone in this place that went beyond the setting and their strange company.

“No offense kid, but you look like shit,” said the second. “There’s a shower back there—water’s hot and everything. I’ll go get you a new shirt to put on, how about that?”

“You’re not going to stay and watch, are you?”

They laughed again, and made mocking faces at one another, in imitation of my shock. I was too tired to be angry.

“I just want to lie down,” I said. I glanced at the girl on the floor. I could see her breathing, but she hadn’t moved.

“That’s what she said!” the first man hooted. These two were cracking each other up, the creepy sons of bitches.

“Look, we’re just giving you a hard time.” The second man leaned down and patted the girl on the floor. “Angie. Angie! Get up, bitch. Get up and help this girl here. She’s a friend of Moe’s.”

The girl rolled onto her back, right into a puddle of liquid that I hoped for her sake wasn’t urine. She had on way too much eyeliner, and her hair was the blondest I’d ever seen—practically white, but with no hint of silver to it. Despite the unsanitary bathroom and her heavy makeup, she looked clean. Why did everything seem too clean tonight? I was expecting Courtney Love, not a CoverGirl spokesmodel.

“You two get outta here,” she croaked. “I’ll help Tinkerbell into the shower and get her some clean clothes.”

“Tinkerbell!” The two guys guffawed as they left the bathroom.

In a flash the girl was off the floor and had turned a deadbolt on the door. She moved quickly, graceful as a cat. I hadn’t been expecting that, considering she’d just been passed out.

“You do want some clean clothes, don’t you?” she asked. “Does it matter if they’re a little tight? All we have left are extra small.”

She moved to a closet built into the wall behind the bathroom door, and pulled it open. A moment later she handed me a pair of stretchy black polyester bell bottoms and a bright green tee advertising the Rustic Frog.

“I’m going to look like a waitress in these,” I said.

“They’re left over from the restaurant—before it was the Fog, when it was the Frog. Previous owner left all this stuff.” She eyed my clothes. “Good thing, too, from the looks of it.”

She walked me to the back corner of the bathroom, where a flimsy shower curtain was attached to the ceiling on rusted hooks.

“It’s clean. Sorta clean.” She swiped her hand in the air, quickly, and suddenly the shower area sparkled and gleamed. “Probably better to keep your shoes on while you’re in there, but, you know—chance it if you want.”

She hung a stiff white towel on a nail in the wall next to the shower, and left me alone. I didn’t see any soap, but I didn’t really care.

Just get some warm water on me, wash it all off, wash it all away … The showerhead might have been old, but the pressure was high and the water was hot. I don’t know how long I was in it before I finally let my shoulders drop from my ears.

I was stretching out my neck when I felt a draft. I opened my eyes, and stared right into the black eyes, black face, black hair, and black teeth of the drummer.

“Very nice,” he said, in an accent.
Irish?
I was too dazed to place it. “I think you’ll do quite nicely, Roller Deb.”

Chapter 10.5

The Legend of Biggie Smalls

Harlow

Biggie Smalls isn’t his real name. Honestly, I don’t even know if thunderbirds have names in the sense that the English or the fae do. Best I can tell, thunderbirds tend to communicate telepathically (with the exception of an occasional squawk or death song), and when a creature’s talking straight into your head like that, you don’t really pause for introductions. I never felt right calling him “Big Bird,” which is the closest approximation to how he introduced himself.

Anyway, Biggie and I go way back. My parents and I were camping, out West. The Grand Canyon, maybe. This is one of those memories that’s not totally clear—either because I was too young to remember, or some damned enchantment. I don’t know.

What I do remember was Biggie was separated from his family, only there’s no way I could have understood that at the time. I’d never seen a Thunderbird before, and I didn’t know he was a baby. I was a baby, myself. We played, and he was squawking. When he flapped his wings, lightning shot out in waves. I’ve seen a lot of magic since then, but that was the most beautiful and frightening thing I’d ever seen at that point in my life, and I’ll never forget it.

He lit on my shoulder, and I was carrying him parrot-style to show my mom and dad. I remember my father looked so concerned—and he opened his mouth, probably to warn me—but just then MamaBird swooped in and reclaimed her child, and I was caught in her talons.

She flew us straight up into the sky, leaving a contrail behind the likes of which I’ve never seen again. Like a rocket launch.
Boom
.

The Thunderbirds roost in huge flocks in the sky. I think I’m one of the few non-birds to have seen a T-bird roost up close like that. It’s not a story I’ve heard others tell, anyway.

Well, MamaBird had one thing on her mind—feeding her babies. Biggie had two fellow hatchlings, and I nestled in between the three of them, confused and awed by what I was seeing. Below me, through the vapor, the yawning, snaking maw of the canyon cracked the surface of the desert. I was enraptured.

And I was about to become lunch. MamaBird picked me up and tossed me into the air with her massive beak. Before she could catch me and chew me up, though, Biggie was flapping his wings and squawking, sending thunder and lightning in waves all around us. I landed on top of him—he was surprisingly strong. We tumbled off the edge of the cloud nest, and free fell.

The wind whipped like crazy in my ears. Trolldrenaline coursed through me, and I knew I would fall, heavy and hard, into that canyon floor, to my death. I was never more frightened in my young life.

When my parents were murdered, I think I was in too much shock to feel fear. There are holes in my memory from that day, and I don’t think that can totally be blamed on spells. Humans aren’t the only ones who block out trauma.

But then the flock arrived. They must have been responding to some instinct to protect their young, because they buzzed in like a squadron of WWII fighter jets, shifting through the sky in tight formation, forming and reforming beneath us tighter than a flock of starlings. Lightning and thunder balled all around us, and I deafened to my own screams. Rain showers buffeted us from every direction, and Biggie’s tiny talons dug deep into my shoulder as he so sweetly flapped his wings and tried to pull me upward.

MamaBird caught me on her back. The flock swooped in, and there were wings and rain and flashes of lightning everywhere. In a moment, I was on the ground, in the wet sand, my parents staring open-mouthed from a distance as birds the size of camping trailers circled their only son. Lightning shot upward, into the sky.

Yeah, I guess that was kind of a big deal. Biggie and I have been like brothers ever since. Honestly, I can’t understand what he means most of the time, but he seems to understand me, so I guess that’s enough. Thunderbirds are psychic. They’ve got to be.

When he found me on the side of the road, I grasped hold of his wing at the shoulder-joint, and he rocketed into the sky, straight toward the starlight.

“I gotta catch up with a girl, Biggie,” I said.

He seemed to laugh, a few sparks crushing on the edge of his beak.

“It’s not like that,” I said. “I think we’re connected—there’s some connection—”

He was laughing for sure, then.

“Aw, fudge it, Biggie! I just have to save her, and you gotta help me.”

He dove hard, and I wrapped my legs around his torso as we tumbled through the night. I could see sunlight on the edge of the horizon.

“Sunlight?” I asked. “It’s the middle of the night, how’s that even possible?”

Biggie squawked.

Inhale. I felt the direction in my mind. Telepathy? I may never know, as Biggie’s still not talking. But I followed my impulse, and breathed in, deeply.

A thousand dawns broke inside me. I looked down at my hands, grasping Biggie hard around the neck. My skin glowed as if the sun were bursting to come through my pores. A stray dreadlock whipped across my forehead, and it glowed, too, imbued with light. I laughed, and a little cloud of light vapor rolled out my mouth and washed across my face. It felt warm, tickly, and I felt happy.

“Oh, Biggie, what have you done?” I said. I was overjoyed, and terrified.

To battle darkness, you must bring the light.

“Yeah, thanks, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” I said. He was laughing again, sparks and sunshine of his own bursting out all over. Thunder boomed in our wake.

And then he was landing in a harvested cornfield, across the Wabash from a foggy old place that smelled of leather and motor oil. A biker bar. I knew it well.

I climbed off his back and jumped up and down, the power of that inner light filling me with so much energy, I thought I might go nuclear if I didn’t get it out. I spun in a circle, and a dust devil twirled around me before it took off on its own, headed west.

“She’s coming, isn’t she, Biggie?”

I turned, expecting him to squawk a reply, but he was gone. Typical Biggie.

I ran across the river and into the Fog.

“Harlow, my boy.” The voice sent a chill up my spine, despite the sunshine spell the Thunderbird had filled me with.

I turned to face him. “Uncle Jag,” I said.

Jag reached out, and I did my best not to flinch as he patted my cheek in a false gesture of love. Smiling, his dark and broken teeth loomed closer as he leaned in to whisper something. “Get your ass up on that stage and sing for your supper, you piece of trash.”

I’m sure he thought he was degrading me, but it suited me fine. I was full of spunk and the tiny stage was the perfect position to watch who came and went.

When Deb came crashing through the door an hour later on the arm of some ignorant son of a bitch named Moe, I’d already worked out my plan. I was taking a hell of a gamble on this girl, and I sure hoped she was who I thought she was.

Otherwise, I’d never hear the end of it from Biggie.

Chapter Eleven

Steal My Sunshine

Deb