Time Slipping (12 page)

I scoffed at her. “Gifts? What gifts? We made a reservation! And you accepted it, so that means you agreed to host us for the night and we agreed to pay you for it. The deal was struck and you reneged. Time to pay the piper, Jude.”

She gestured around the room. “You came. You danced. I hosted. Now it’s time for
you
to pay the piper.” She cackled again.

I nodded, narrowing my eyes at her. “Ah-haaa, I get it. Sneaky. I guess we should have read the brochure a little closer.”

She hummed under her breath for a few seconds before responding. “I guess you should have, young fae.”

I hated to pull the Mother card on her, but she was leaving me with no choice. “You
do
know who I am, right?”

She shrugged. “The question is, do
you
know who you are? It matters not what I think about you.”

I shook my head. “You have
got
to be related to Maggie. There’s no way there are two women out in the world as ugly as you are and who are as frustrating as you are, and not be sisters or something.”

She scowled, her voice coming out a little growly. “Do not say that name in my presence.”

“What? Maggie? Maggie the witch?” I switched to my singing voice. “Green things, green things, lovely jubbly green things…”

“Enough!”

I jumped a little, surprised to have someone hating my singing voice so vehemently. I hadn’t even gotten started, really. I had at least three more verses in me.

“I have heard enough! I’m going to bed.” She started to turn.

“Name your price, witch,” I said, leaning on my sword. “And hurry up about it, before my pixie friend gets digested.”

She shrugged, waving her cane out to the side as she shuffled to the door. “You may leave any time you like. But you must retrieve your pixie friend yourself.” She turned her head to the side, enough that I could see her grinning evilly as she gestured with a sweeping arm. “Go ahead, elemental, Mother to the fae, sacrificial lamb for the world. You have your sword.”

I frowned first at the troll and then at her. “I don’t get it.”

She continued to smile, her blackened teeth looking a little too pointed for my liking. She chuckled for a few seconds and then stopped, turning to face me more fully, her smile and humor dropping away in an instant. “You say your pixie is inside the troll?” She shrugged. “Gut him.”

I swallowed with effort. “Gut him? You can’t be serious.”

“The Fates do what needs must. The Mother does as well.” She turned to shuffle out the door, but I wasn’t ready to let her leave yet.

“Wait!” I yelled, running around her and holding out the sword between us to stop her forward progress. “You can’t leave yet.” Hammer time, my ass. It was panic time, and everyone in the room knew it, probably even that troll whose eyeballs were still following me around. I was waaay out of my league with this nutbag.

One of the witch’s eyebrows went up and disappeared into her rat nest hairdo. “I can and I will.”

I shook my head, falling more fully into panic mode. “No. Not until you fix things.”

She stared at me unblinkingly, and for the first time, she didn’t sound entirely evil. “Not all things can be fixed, child. Sometimes we must make hard decisions and leave things as they are. Other times we must upset the balance. You will find yourself at a crossroads many times in your life. Will you take the easy path or the difficult one? Or perhaps take neither and instead retrace your steps?” She paused and sniffed the air before continuing. “Who are you? Who dares speak to me from afar?”

Since I hadn’t yet answered her and figured she was just chatting with voices she heard in her head, I responded to her first statement. “I’ve never taken the easy path in my entire life.” I lifted my chin. “And I’ll never go backwards. Never.”

Her casual expression morphed into something sinister. “Lie.” She narrowed her eyes at me, speaking slowly and carefully. It felt way too much like an incantation for me not to be almost pissing my pants at hearing it.

“Pay the toll with the blood of a troll, or pick the path to stay the wrath, choose the first, and dark days you will find, choose another and be gone from time. The cries of many will weigh you down. The cries of one will bring Lycurgus round. The blood of the Mother will bring them late. The tears of the Father will seal their fate.” And then she disappeared. One second she was there being ugly and pissing me off with her horrible rhyme, and the next, she was fartsmoke, leaving only an evil stench behind.

“Judith!” I yelled out into the room, looking all around. Only my own voice echoed back at me. “Judy! Jude! J-baby!” I raised the volume. “Hey! I wasn’t done talking to you!” I jogged over to her pet troll, holding my knife by his leg. “I’m going to cut him! I swear I’ll do it!” Her rhyme swam around in my head in pieces, disconnected and senseless.
Did she say that I could pay the toll with this guy’s blood? But then what about that dark days thing she said? Did that come from using the blood or not using it?
I should have asked her to write it down. Who the hell is going to remember something that long after only hearing it one time? What a stupid way to deliver a prophecy.

My threat to poke the troll did nothing. Not one thing happened. My friends remained frozen all around me, and I remained stuck in the nightmare where I had to make a choice between killing a somewhat innocent beast to
maybe
rescue my roommate or walk away and let him definitely become troll poop. Talk about being between a rock and hard place. Odysseus had nothin’ on me.

Chapter Fifteen

THE PANIC LEVELS INSIDE MY heart and head were rising to dangerously high levels. The Green bubble surrounding my friends increased in intensity, reacting to my stress. Everyone was still frozen in place, and there were no signs of Tim being among the land of the living. My chest ached with the pain of never seeing him again. I sent several bolts of extra power from The Green into each of my friends, but it had zero effect.
Zombies. All of them. Motherfucker!

“Tim!” I screamed, running over to the entrance of the ballroom, looking down the hallway. Hope had me believing he could be somewhere else in this evil house and not in that troll’s intestines. I even took a few steps outside the ballroom, staring down into the front foyer, hoping to see him there fixing his hair in the mirror. The ogre was gone, and except for a few million sparkles here and there on the tables, chairs, and area rug, there were no pixies in sight.

I went back into the ballroom and walked up to each of my friends, slapping them one at a time, just to see if it would do anything, but nothing happened, and none of them even got a red mark on their cheeks. It was like they weren’t really there; these beings were merely placeholders for the real thing. I even went so far as to kiss Spike on the lips to see if some kind of fairytale, true love’s kiss would make any difference, but nope. Nada. I got no love from my peeps at all.

I next tried sending a message out to the green elves at the compound using my connection with The Green, but found something blocking me. I could bring up my power into this place, but I couldn’t send it out. This one-way communication thing was a new one on me. It reminded me a little too much of the spell I suffered in the public toilets. Somebody was hunting me down and doing a damn good job of it. We were well and truly trapped, powerless. Fucked to the highest degree.

I walked over to the French doors and opened them up, taking a step out onto the terrace, half expecting to be electrocuted with some kind of messed up spell; but my feet passed onto the stone surface, no problem. When I went back inside and searched Jared’s pockets, I even found the keys to the van. They made me feel jubilant and deflated in equal measure. I had the means to escape but not the desire — not without my friends.

Standing there in the middle of that ballroom, I had the worst case of indecision I’d ever suffered in my life. The witch’s challenge kept echoing in my mind, making me doubt myself. I could leave, drive back home, and come back with reinforcements — risking the lives of all my friends in the meantime, because they’d probably either become a troll buffet or lab rats for Judith’s sick spell experiments; or, I could continue on to the portal by myself, which would also risk the lives of all my friends, but at least end up with me fulfilling my duty to the rest of the fae. Oh, and I couldn’t forget the third option, which was just as awful as the first two: I could filet that troll open and at least rescue one friend right now. I pictured that happening and then if I had enough time, me dragging the others out by their arms so I could load them up in the van. I probably wouldn’t make it to the portal on time and would piss off the guardian to the Underworld, which could then make it so that evil is unleashed on the entire world, but I’d still have a shot at having my friends with me, alive and well…

What to do, what to do, what to do?

A flicker of movement near the troll caught my eye. I looked again, and I could swear I saw his stomach move. Running over, I leaned in, pressing my hands against the beast’s lumpy grayish-green skin. “Tim! Tim! Are you in there?” I put my ear to the smelly monster’s skin, wondering if it would be possible for a pixie to speak when inside a troll stomach.

I was almost certain I felt something moving inside its belly beneath my hands. Backing away from the beast, I looked up at it, marveling with a sick kind of fascination at the size of its nostrils and the hideousness of its complexion. My gaze roamed farther upwards, and I noticed for the first time that it had long eyelashes.
Weird.
A lump grew in my throat when some of my mother’s words came back to me as a whisper from the past.

Such beautiful eyelashes.
She always used to say that I had eyelashes like a camel, long and pretty. She hadn’t said it after Rick the Dick entered our lives, but before that day she’d mentioned it often. My heart squeezed in my chest. Did this troll have a mother who loved him? He must have. Everyone had a mom, and while this beast had a face only a mother could love, surely the momma-troll who gave birth to him was out there somewhere or had been at one time, and she’d wanted to have a child like him, held him in her arms when he was born and looked down at him with love. Did she think her boy was handsome? Cute with his long eyelashes and impossibly wide nostrils?

I put my hand on his stomach and tried to speak; the lump in my throat made it really difficult, though. “Tim. I think you’re in there, and I want to get you out, but to do that, I have to kill this beast. And I know that should be an easy decision, but he isn’t doing anything to me to hurt me, so it doesn’t seem right. It seems like … murder.”

A thought that I wasn’t entirely sure was coming from me jumped to mind.
Poke him in the toe. Wake him up. If he tries to kill you, then you have an excuse.

I slowly moved my sword out in front of me, drawing the point closer and closer to an immense big toe that was black with dirt and the trampled remnants of smaller fae, if the smell was anything to judge by. “Just one poke,” I whispered. “That’s not going to hurt anyone, right?” I bit my lip, knowing I was lying to myself. Even one tiny prick from my demon sword could be enough to send someone to the Underworld. As much as trolls sucked, they didn’t deserve to go to Hell any more than any other innocent fae did. As far as I knew, trolls were inhabitants of the Gray. I had no idea what these guys were doing hanging out in the Hotel California, but that was neither here nor there. I needed a plan, and even though I didn’t have one, I wasn’t so desperate that I was going to commit murder.

I backed away before I could do anything I’d regret. Then I sank to the floor and cried, because I couldn’t think of anything better to do.
How lame.

Ten seconds into my crying jag, I started hearing my roommate’s voice in my head. According to my imagination, he wasn’t in a troll’s stomach slowly being digested into sparkly pixie poo; he was literally the little man on my shoulder, acting as my conscience.
Who do you think you are, sitting there on the floor feeling sorry for yourself? No elemental I know. Even Willy on his worst day wouldn’t stoop to these levels. Get off your fat butt and do something productive, or you’re going to have to move out of our room. I’m not kidding. I don’t suffer wimps for roommates.

Tim’s imagined lecture did the trick, and pity parties aren’t really my thing, anyway, so I got over myself pretty quickly, my whimpering and moaning dying down to nothing in a matter of seconds. I got up and wiped my face off with the front of my tunic, talking out loud to myself because it made me feel stronger. “Okay. Enough of that shit. Time to make some decisions.” I walked over to Tony and stood in front of him. His frozen face made me go a little squishy in the middle. Was he going to regret becoming my friend in history class once more? I sure hoped not. “What would you say to me if you were awake right now?” I asked softly.

I listened for the voice of my friend in my head, and I wasn’t disappointed when it came through loud and clear. Another man who loved me, acting as my conscience. How did I get so lucky?

Don’t hurt the troll. He didn’t do anything to you, and you don’t have proof he did anything to Tim, either.

I nodded and moved over to Jared. “What about you, Jared? What do you think I should do?”

Go back to the compound. Talk to the council. They will help you get to the portal.
I patted him on the shoulder before moving over to Sam.

“Samantha, it’s your turn. If you were me, what would you do in this situation?”

I’d gut that troll like a fish, spell this place to keep the witch inside it, and send a message to the compound to come retrieve everyone.

“And what about me?” I asked. “Should I go back?”

Hell no. We’re Blackthorns. We don’t back down. Go to the portal. Talk to the dragon.

I nodded. “Hell yeah, we don’t back down. You’re right.” Her words made me feel stronger, even though I knew they were only imagined in my head.

I moved over to Scrum and Felicia. “What do you guys think?”