The Accidental Fairy, page 8
“Bah! Do you not think I’m using my magic, Alfrigg? She resists!”
When her eyes adjusted, she saw a sprinkle of colorful dust floating around her head. Dust that made her cough and gag as Freddy began to growl and nip at the air.
Prim shot upward in the chair, swatting at the dots with wings as she gasped for breath through the haze of dust. “Who the fuck are you? What do you want?”
Her words sent their tiny wings into overdrive, buzzing madly as they launched balls of color at her that served to do nothing more than burn her eyes.
She felt like she was in the middle of a goddamn evil Disney movie gone wrong.
Jumping up, Prim swished her hands in the air in an attempt to catch them, grasping and reaching to no avail.
“Stranger-daaanger!” someone called out as she stumbled around her room, tripping over boxes and the beanbag on the floor, trying to catch the fluttering dots of light.
They flitted about the room, darting at her head, shooting dust balls of color that zigzagged through the air in dazzling swirls of light.
Freddy began to snarl and bark, biting at the air in an attempt to catch them. One of them lobbed a huge ball of color at him, zapping his hind leg and making him yelp in pain.
“You son of a bitch! That’s my dog!” Prim cried out, diving for one of the buzzing dots.
Out of nowhere, Carl came rushing into her room, crashing through the door with a poker from the fireplace in his hands. “Baaad!” he bellowed, climbing on the bed and swinging the poker at them like a bat.
They went straight for sweet Carl’s eyes, inciting Prim as a rush of rage sizzled up her spine. He was just a kid. A weird green kid, but a kid. One she kind of didn’t mind nearly as much as she did the women.
He’d brought her, of all things, a head of broccoli to eat with her grilled cheese. According to Nina it was one of his favorite foods, and that he was sharing it with her was a gift.
A zombie who ate broccoli, not brains. The irony didn’t escape her, but she’d be damned if she’d let someone hurt him.
The colored dust had an effect on him that it didn’t appear to have on her. Carl began to sputter and shake. He dropped the poker, letting it clatter to the floor as his limbs convulsed.
“Carl!” she screamed, plowing over top of the bed as the two buzzing entities launched their fire at him.
Prim threw herself over his body to protect him when she heard a low growl—a snarl so menacing, so frightening, she was afraid to look up.
But Prim did look up.
Hail Mary full of grace…
That was all she could remember of the prayer in the height of her fear, before her mouth fell open and her eyes went wide at the sight of Nina, her face a mask of absolute rage.
“Get the fuck away from my kid or I’ll wipe your ass from the face of this planet!” Nina hollered, her fangs in full view as she lunged for the two tiny dots with a roar of fury.
She lashed a hand out and successfully managed to hit one of them before actually catching it in her hand. She began to squeeze, her eyes bordering on blood red before she yelped, “Motherfucker!” and let go.
Prim clung to Carl, his body quaking and twisting as she stroked his hair and held him close. “Carl, hang on. Just hang on. Help is coming,” she whispered, rocking him, trying to soothe him.
Her bedroom window shattered as Nina burst through the glass, chasing after the two dots, the loud crash splitting the air while glass skittered across her littered floor.
Marty and Wanda flew into the room in their bathrobes, running to where she rocked Carl.
Marty took him from her arms. “What happened, Prim?” she cried, cradling Carl.
She licked her dry lips, still unclear herself what happened. She only knew Carl was hurt, and he was hurt because of her.
This had to be because of her, right? Those annoying-AF buzzy things had to be fairies, and they were here because they wanted her. She’d heard them say it.
Carl was hurt because of her and she didn’t know what to do to make it right. Tears stung the corners of her eyes as she tried to put together a full sentence.
But all she could manage was, “I’m sorry, Carl. I’m so sorry!”
Without warning, Prim found herself overwhelmed with emotion. She almost never cried, hadn’t shed a tear in a long, long time—not since she’d left home after graduation. But seeing Carl looking so helpless, his eyes red, his limbs no longer convulsing but limp and boneless, a rush of tears assaulted her, streaming down her face in fat, salty drops.
“Prim, honey? What’s going on?” Rafferty asked, his voice gravelly from sleep as he reached for her arm.
And she didn’t resist. Not even a little. Rafferty was so kind. So handsome. Blond, blue-eyed, tall, muscular, but not overly so. Strong thighs, arms meant to hold a girl, a wide chest, ruddy skin.
There’d never been anyone in all these years since they’d parted ways who made her heart flutter the way he did. Who made her want to rethink spending her life with someone. But she couldn’t.
Except for in this moment of terror.
She couldn’t be sure what came over her. Maybe it was sleep deprivation, maybe it was the insane events of the day mingled with fear for Carl, but she threw herself into Rafferty’s arms and began to sob.
“Fairies!” she howled into his chest, her words muffled by his sweatshirt as she clung to him and all his yummy muscles. “I think the fairies came back for me and they were throwing colored balls of dust and they hit Carl and I think he’s hurt! Fuck, what if he’s hurt because of me?”
Her words came out in a rush of muddled thoughts, partially because she didn’t know where to start and partially because Rafferty’s arms around her felt so stupid good, she could have stayed in them forever.
“Shh, honey. Slow down. Take a beat.”
But Prim shook her head. “They hurt him, Raff! It’s my fault.”
Rafferty held her close, his hands rubbing soothing circles against her back as he tilted her chin up. “It’s okay, Prim. Look. Carl’s okay.”
She lifted her head to see that Carl was, in fact, all right. He rubbed his eyes, but he smiled that lopsided grin at her. “I…I…am okay, Prim. Promise.” He lifted his hand to give her a scout’s honor, but if fell off his wrist and rolled to the floor.
Without a thought, Prim ran to the kitchen where she’d last seen the duct-tape and grabbed the roll off her chipped countertop. “I’ll fix it, okay?” she sniffled, leaning down and scooping up Carl’s hand from the floor without even thinking about the fact that she was about to tape this boy’s hand back onto his wrist.
She yanked a strip from the roll and ripped it off with her teeth and began to wrap his wrist, trying to control her shaking. “I’m sorry, Carl. I’m so sorry. They were here because of me. This is all my fault.”
Carl reached over with his good hand to cup her cheek and shook his head with a smile, his dark hair falling over his pale green forehead. “No. No fault. Okay. I—am—o—kay.”
Tears began to fall from Prim’s eyes again, his gentle words a balm to her heart as she taped him up, all the while fighting this unexpected onslaught of emotion.
Marty and Wanda straightened up her room and gathered Freddy and Katy as Darnell’s heavy footsteps rang in her ears, signaling his entrance, his eyes wide as he sniffed.
“More fairies?”
“Yes!” Prim shouted, not bothering to question Darnell’s uncanny sense of smell. Seriously, who smelled fairies? But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Carl was okay. “I don’t know how they got in or why they want me, but they want me! I heard them say so!”
He put a gentle hand on Prim’s shoulder as she frantically tried to reattach Carl’s hand. “Prim, slow down. Tell ol’ Darnell what happened and lemme see if I can help.”
Letting her hands fall to her side when Darnell took over fixing Carl’s hand, she blew out a breath before she spoke.
“They woke me up. I was asleep on the chair right by the window and they started throwing colored dust balls at me. I mean, I think they were dust balls, but they didn’t do anything to me but make me cough.”
Darnell nodded sagely. “Fairy dust. It’s magic. Can do all sorts of things, some good, some bad. Strange how it didn’t bother ya, though.” He paused a moment before he slapped another piece of tape on Carl’s wrist. “They say anything to ya?”
Before she could answer, Nina returned via the broken window, her eyes glittering, her mouth a thin line. “Motherfuckers got away!” she spat as she climbed over the shards of glass on the window frame, brushing splinters from her footie pajamas. Then she aimed her wrath at Prim. “Who the fuck were they?”
Wiping the tears from her cheeks, Prim straightened, her eyes narrowed. “I…I don’t know. I didn’t ask for their profiles and stats. I was too busy trying to keep them from hurting Carl!”
Finally, her backbone had made an appearance.
Rafferty placed himself between them and held up his hands. “Okay, let’s talk about this before we get too heated. It’s not Prim’s fault they showed up out of the blue, Nina.”
Wanda, her eyes puffy from sleep, nodded when she put a hand on Nina’s shoulder. “Relax, Elvira. She doesn’t know who they are any more than we do. Everyone’s all right. Carl’s fine. Prim stayed with him to protect him. That’s all that matters. Please stop being an overprotective beast and help us clean up.”
Nina huffed her aggravation, but she began turning over nightstands and scooped up a broken lamp when she grunted and held up something shiny, no bigger than the size of a needle.
“What the fuck is this?” she asked, just before she pointed it at them so they could see what she held between her lean fingers.
“Boss! Nooo!” Darnell roared a warning before he launched himself at the group of women to cover them with his body. “Y’all better duck!”
Rafferty tackled Prim seconds before there was a loud explosion, sending sheetrock and old paneling rocketing through the room in raucous crashes to land on the floor in heaps.
Her heart thrashed against her chest as she squeezed her eyes shut and clung to Rafferty until there was nothing but silence.
When the dust settled, and the old bones of the house stopped creaking, Prim pushed her way out from beneath Rafferty to assess the damage.
She winced.
The entire outside wall of her house, where her favorite window was housed, now sported a ginormous hole.
A ginormous glowing hole.
It was then she wondered if Chip and Joanna Gaines still did consultations.
Because this definitely classified as a Fixer Upper.
Chapter
Nine
“Holy shitballs,” Nina muttered, gingerly placing the needle-like instrument on what was left of her nightstand and backing away with care.
Yeah. Holy shitballs.
Her house had exploded. Not that it didn’t need some demolition—it was in pretty rough shape, after all, but if it had been hard to keep the cold air out before? It was going to be an icy hell now.
Yet, as Prim stood up, the glow surrounding the hole mesmerizing her, she noted it didn’t feel at all cold. In fact, it was warm as a summer’s day.
Walking toward it, her hand out, she felt compelled to touch the singed area where the sheetrock had exploded off the wall, but Nina slapped her hand. “Don’t do that, dipshit! We don’t know what the fuck it is, for Christ’s sake!”
Prim snatched her hand back, but she had to clench her fists to keep from touching it.
Weirder still? The hole didn’t lead to the backyard the way logic deemed it should. It led to a long passageway that called to her, tugging at every cell in her body. A vortex of lights swirled and danced before her eyes, and if she listened closely, she heard someone calling her name.
“Primrose,” the dulcet voice whispered like a siren song, making her lean closer to the hole, a yearning deep within her, pulling at her.
Rafferty was right behind her, his eyes fixed on the enticing glow. “What—is—happening?” he asked, his words stilted, his beautiful blue eyes glazed, but he appeared to have the wherewithal to know something very strange was taking place.
Darnell was the first to answer, standing in front of them and holding up his large hands. “Best I can guess, it’s a portal. Y’all gotta stay away from it no matter how tempting. You understand?”
Marty inhaled, pushing her pink eye mask back up on her head. “A portal? To?”
“The Hollow,” Prim provided before shaking her head and shivering. How had she known that?
“The what?” Wanda asked, tightening the belt of her robe around her waist. “How do you know that, Prim?”
She flapped her hands, trying to remember what the two buzzing dots had said. “That’s what those things said when they were trying to do whatever the hell they were doing to me with those dust balls. They said they had to take me back to The Realm of the Hollow before he knew I was missing. Doesn’t it make sense that if this is a portal, it leads to wherever they came from?”
“Aw, hell,” Darnell said on a heavy sigh. He scrubbed his hand over the top of his head, his eyes worried, his brow furrowed. “This ain’t good. We need to board this up now, Boss. That’s a whole ’nother world we don’t know nothin’ about. A world I only heard stories about. Till we know more, we can’t let what’s in there out here.”
Prim blinked, breaking the spell the portal had on her, and backed away. “What do you know about this Hollow place?” she asked Darnell.
He lifted his wide shoulders beneath his flannel robe. “Not a lot. I just know fairies dwell there. The Seelies.”
She frowned. “But those are the good fairies, right? That’s what you said. If they’re good fairies, maybe we should go through the portal and find out what they want. What this all means.”
“Yeah, they’re good, but that don’t mean there aren’t bad ones along the way, Prim. Good fairies don’t kidnap innocent humans. And we don’t know for sure this leads to the Hollow. That means, you don’t go nowhere near that hole.”
Marty nodded her agreement. “And if they were good fairies, why were they shooting their magic at Prim? What are they trying to accomplish? I don’t like this. It’s suss at best. You both stay put.”
“So what is that?” Rafferty asked, pointing to the needle with a frown.
“That,” Darnell said, placing a stray shoe box over it, “is a magic wand. Y’all need to stay away from it for obvi reasons, too.”
Yeah. Like blow-off-the-side-of-your-house reasons.
Wanda held out her hand to Prim with a smile. “I’ll make us some tea and then I want you to tell us everything those fairies said to you. Every single word.”
An hour or so and a warm cup of tea later, Prim’s story left everyone shaking their heads.
Nina clucked her tongue, crossing her feet at the ankles from her seat on the couch. “So we got a deadly, Barbie-sized fucking wand, a coupla vicious gnats with wings who want to take the newb fairy to their leader, and a big hole the size of a crater in the house that leads to another realm where fairies live. Jesus and shit.”
“And they were trying to use their magic on you, but it wasn’t working?”
Prim nodded at Wanda. “I think so. They said they had to change me to take me back to him—or something like that. What I don’t get is why the fairy magic didn’t work on me the way it did on Carl.”
“Prolly ’cause you a badass fairy now, Prim. Sorry ’bout my cussin’,” Darnell apologized. “I think whatever they did to you was big and they were supposed to keep you there for a reason. But when you got away from ’em, it screwed up their plans.”
Prim let a long sigh blow from her lips, trying to make sense of this newest clue to what was happening to them. “But why? Could it be any more random? Who the hell am I to them? I’m a nobody. And what plans? How could they have plans for me? None of this makes any sense.”
“Maybe they didn’t just screw up your abduction?” Raff theorized. “Maybe they did something to you they weren’t supposed to and they had to bring you back to this Hollow place to fix it? They did say they were using their magic and it wasn’t working, right?”
“They did,” Prim murmured, her eyes grainy as sand. “They said they had to bring me back to the Realm of the Hollow before he finds out I’m missing, or they were going to be severely punished. They said they had to bring me back before he found out they’d made a mistake. So who is he?”
“Tell me the names you heard again,” Marty encouraged, covering a yawn.
Prim rubbed her eyes and hugged Freddy closer. “Alfred? No, Alfrigg…something like that. And Cosmo. I totally remember Cosmo because my stepfather used to drink them all the time.”
In fact, he drank them until he was a belligerent, violent, verbally abusive fucking dick of a human being.
Sighing, she shook off the bad memory and waited to see what these gurus of the paranormal had to say.
But as she gazed at them all, hoping to glean some kind of supernatural wisdom, it appeared what they had to say was a big fat nothing.
“How is it, that after all these years, we don’t really know any fairies, Marty?” Wanda wondered out loud, rubbing her temples.
She frowned, but then her face brightened. “We did meet a couple when we were trapped in Troll Hill with Sten, didn’t we?”
Troll Hill. God, she couldn’t take one more single reference to a place that sounded like it came out of the mind of R.L. Stine.
Marty slapped her thigh and smiled wide. “Yes, of course! I’ve been racking my brain about who to ask for help—who we could reach out to that knows something--anything about fairies.”
“You mean other than your husband’s best friend’s sister’s uncle at her paint-by-number class?” Prim asked, her tone dripping playful sarcasm
But Marty gave her a pointed look. “I’m going to ignore that little jab at my insider gossip and move right along like the adult I am.” She turned to look at her friends. “He took us through a fairy village when we were helping Murphy and Nova. Remember?”
