Fairy Bad Day

chapter TWO

Five weeks later

Emma, really, it’s not that bad,” Loni said reassuringly. “Of course it’s that bad,” Emma responded to her friend from the other end of her cell phone. She took out a tiny crossbow, which looked more like something that belonged to Pocahontas Barbie than a slaying kit. “I’m stuck in the mall hunting down a pack of ten-inch fairies, one of whom is wearing an AC/DC T-shirt and leopard-skin leggings. It couldn’t possibly get any worse.”

“You’re joking.” Loni was instantly distracted.

“I wish.” Emma sighed as she glanced over at the fairy in question. When she’d first seen the tiny air elementals just after her sight had come through, she’d been taken with how human they looked (except for the large gossamer wings that protruded from their backs). But now all she noticed was that they were arrogant, vain, and ate far too much junk food.

“But where do they even get that stuff from?” Loni wondered out loud.

“Well, judging by the amount of time they spend in the toy department and the Pets-R-Us counter, I’m guessing it’s a combination of places,” she retorted as three fairies came to a halt by the Sunglass Hut and started to throw ice cubes at her from a Starbucks cup.

Okay, so now it was definitely worse.

She rubbed her arm as three small blocks of ice hit her simultaneously, and she only just managed to move out of the way before another one went crashing into her forehead. It went rolling and bouncing along the marble floor, and a fat woman who was trying on some Dior shades shot her an evil glare as if it was Emma’s fault.

The fairies howled with laughter as they high-fived each other before one of them flew down and hovered right in front of her face. And that was another thing about them; they had no sense of personal space.

“What’s wrong, slayer? Why are you looking so grumpy? We just wanted you to chill out a bit.” It smirked. “Get it. Ice cubes, chill out,” the small creature said as its wings fluttered in a blurry pattern in front of her eyes. This one was wearing cargo pants and a plaid shirt and looked like it had come from the pages of a Gap catalog.

“Emma, are you still there?” Loni asked, sounding alarmed.

“It’s the fairies.” Emma sighed and tried to swipe the creature with her hands, but it lazily flitted out of her way before the other two joined it, just out of her reach. “They’re mocking me.”

“Mocking you?” a second fairy, the one in the AC/DC T-shirt, protested as it once again swooped close to her face. “My brother Gilbert might’ve been tormenting you, but I can assure you he was most definitely not mocking you. Isn’t that right, Trevor?”

“That is correct, Rupert.” A third fairy, wearing a miniature green hoodie and some baggy jeans now appeared. “Because we only save the mocking for those who are a real threat, not some two-bit useless wannabe slayer-girl.”

“But don’t worry,” Emma continued to Loni in a tight voice as she once again tucked her cell phone under her ear and loaded up the tiny crossbow. “Because soon they’re all going to be dead.”

“Did you hear that? She thinks she’s going to kill us. With that thing!”

“Oooh, no. Please don’t hurt me. Last time you used that weapon, you only missed me by a mile.” Gilbert pretended to shake with fear before suddenly scratching his chin. “Or was it two miles?”

“See, definitely tormenting,” Rupert pointed out as he pretended to play some air guitar before darting right up to her face and wagging his tongue at her à la Gene Simmons. “Oh, and FYI, if you can’t even scare Gilbert, then you really are doing a bad job, because he’s the worrier of the group.”

“It’s true.” Gilbert proudly nodded in agreement as he smoothed down his neat plaid shirt. “I guess it’s an eldest fairy thing, because Rupert’s the rebel, Trevor’s the irresponsible one, and me? Well, I’m the worrier. I mean, the world’s a scary place. But at least I don’t have to worry about being shot by a pathetic slayer-girl.” He grinned and then turned and gave his two brothers another high five.

Emma gritted her teeth as she held up the tiny crossbow, but by the time she released the arrow, the fairies had casually flown out of the way before turning so they could all watch the blunt skewer go skittering harmlessly along the marble floor.

“Er.” Trevor gave a polite cough as he swooped down to where the skewer now lay. “I think you dropped something.” Then without another word they all darted off, laughing like a pack of demented hyenas.

Emma reluctantly retrieved the skewer. Not for the first time she wished that the rules weren’t quite so black and white about using lethal weapons when you were slaying elementals in public places.

Of course Emma could see the point of the ruling, since most sight-blind civilians tended to get freaked out when they saw a slayer with a sharp pointy weapon trying to fight what looked like, well... nothing.

It had actually long been a debate within the slaying community whether they should let the greater public know the truth about the elementals in order to make a slayer’s job easier, but since most people refused to believe something they couldn’t see, the idea had always been vetoed. Besides, most elementals stayed away from heavily populated areas, not by choice but because of the ever-increasing series of complex wards that slayers spent a lot of their time planting and maintaining in urban areas.

According to Loni, all elementals were filled with negative electrons and so the wards simply pulsed out positive electrons that shocked the creatures if they got too close. Apparently each elemental had a different shock point, so each ward was triggered to release a different voltage. While Emma didn’t exactly understand the science behind them, she knew that the tiny nickel-size devices worked like permanent invisible force fields.

But, for whatever reason, the fairies seemed oblivious to all the known wards and instead chose to spend 24/7 at the mall. It was less than ideal.

“Seriously, Emma, what’s going on? Did you kill any of them?” Loni demanded, yelling into the cell phone.

“No. How can such stupid things be so hard to kill?” she groaned in annoyance as she ran after the fairies, making sure not to let them out of her sight. They had an uncanny ability to blend into the background—not that she knew how, since between the bad miniature clothing and the glittery wings, they stood out like a sore thumb to anyone who had the sight. Yet the number of times she had lost track of them during her patrols didn’t bear thinking about.

“It’s just a matter of time,” Loni said in a positive voice.

“I’ve had five weeks,” Emma pointed out as the frustration came bubbling to the surface. “That’s five Saturday patrols, not to mention the extra field days that Professor Vanderbilt has taken me on, and not one kill. Even Tyler’s stopped taking bets on me killing one before Induction, and this is the guy who bets on cockroach races.”

“Maybe you could try using the subsonic blaster I just finished making? I used it today, and the low-level frequency knocked out two goblins before they could even unsheathe their claws. Let me tell you, it made killing them a lot easier. I didn’t even get covered in goblin slime this time.”

“You killed two goblins today?” Emma tried and failed not to be jealous.

“Yes, but that wasn’t my point. I just meant that maybe the blaster would work for you too. It’s not like Sir Francis was very specific in how to kill fairies. It might be worth a try.”

“I guess.” Emma let out a halfhearted sigh as she managed to squeeze her way past two women pushing strollers and hurried after the fairies to the food court, before realizing that she’d once again lost them. “They’re gone again. I think I’m just going to call the school minibus and get them to pick me up early. I might as well come back to Burtonwood and get working on my Plan C.”

“Do I even want to know what Plan C is?” Loni checked in a cautious voice, brought about, no doubt, because Emma’s Plan A (e-mail Principal Kessler every day until he changed his mind) had led to a detention and Plan B (ignore the designation and go dragon slaying anyway) had caused her to singe her eyebrows and get another detention. In fact, over the last five weeks there had been quite a few detentions.

“Plan C is to do something big to make sure Kessler knows how good I am before Induction next Sunday,” Emma informed her, not that she was really sure what “something big” actually entailed, but she was confident she would figure it out. She had to since there was no way she could go through life chasing fairies in the mall.

She was Louisa Jones’s daughter. Dragons were in her blood.

“Emma, are you really sure about all this? I mean, if Kessler was going to change his mind, he would’ve done it by now. And then there’s the whole Curtis Green factor.”

At the mention of Curtis’s name, Emma narrowed her eyes. As it turned out, there were two designations that she’d managed to get wrong. Hers and Curtis Green’s. Up until five weeks ago she didn’t even have an opinion of Curtis. He’d first arrived at Burtonwood when he was eleven, which was late by anyone’s standards, and for the last four years he had pretty much kept to himself. And while some of the guys had talked about how good he was at hand-to-hand combat, and a lot of the girls had made noises about his blond hair, dark chocolate-colored eyes, and broad shoulders, Emma had never really paid any attention to him.

In fact, she probably still wouldn’t have noticed anything about him if he hadn’t walked out of Kessler’s office ten minutes after her own life had been ruined, with a dazed expression on his stupid face, and told everyone that he’d just been given dragons.

Even now the memory had the power to take her breath away, and she clenched her fists in annoyance (before realizing that she still had the stupid crossbow, and if she clenched any harder it would probably snap with the pressure).

“Emma? Are you still there? Tell me you’re not doing something dumb like buying a Curtis Green voodoo doll, because I thought we’d agreed that was a bad idea,” Loni pleaded.

“There’s no voodoo doll,” she said wistfully. She had toyed with the idea, but Loni and Tyler had come together (for once) and talked her out of it. “But you’ve just reminded me why I need to get to work on Plan C.”

“Look,” Loni paused for a moment before continuing to speak, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but maybe fairies are where you belong? I mean, for example, when I was trying to find a top to go with my blue skirt last Sunday, I kept going back to that gorgeous green T-shirt my mom got me for my birthday. Anyway, there was no way I was going to wear them together because of the whole blue-and-green-should-never-be-seen thing, but then I checked my horoscope and it said that Sunday was the perfect day for a Taurus girl to take a chance, and so I did and would you believe that it ended up looking awesome together? You even said so yourself.”

“Okay, so are you comparing my life to an outfit?” Emma double-checked, and she could almost see her friend blushing from the other end of the phone.

“Of course not,” Loni hastily reassured her. “I’m just saying that maybe this is a good match for you, even though it doesn’t seem like it right now.”

“But it’s fairies,” Emma wailed as she slumped down into one of the plastic chairs that were scattered around the food court and leaned forward onto the equally plastic table. “And you’ve seen what everyone’s been like at Burtonwood. They’re all laughing at me.”

“I know and that sucks.” Loni let out an empathetic sigh. “But that’s mainly because everyone knows how much you hate your designation and because you’ve talked nonstop about how you’re going to get Kessler to change his mind. But if you start accepting it, then I’m sure they’ll lose interest and go back to concentrating on Brenda Vance’s ridiculous night goggles that she insists on wearing when she’s on patrol.”

“You really think?” Emma said in a hopeful voice.

“I do,” Loni agreed. “If you take the high road on this one and just concentrate on doing the best job you can with the fairies, I bet things will be back to normal before you know it.”

Emma chewed her lip. The idea of giving up on her dragon dream seemed unbearable. But since it looked like it wasn’t going to happen anyway, maybe Loni had a point. Maybe she should just make the most of what she had.

“Okay, I’ll think about it,” she finally said just as she caught sight of a quick flash of green hoodie by the Hong Kong Wong Chinese food counter. “And there they are.”

“You’ve found them again?” Loni squealed in excitement. “That’s great and most definitely a sign. So, are you going to go and try and kill them?”

Emma got to her feet and started to weave through the tables. “Absolutely. These three particular fairies and their stupid outfits have been taunting me ever since I first started patrolling here. And now they’re even starting to bring their girlfriends in on the mocking. Getting rid of them would make me very happy.”

“See.” Loni sounded like she was grinning. “It’s not going to be so bad after all. Oh, but Emma, don’t forget, you’re at the mall, so you can’t use any lethal weapons.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got a few other tricks up my sleeve. I’ll call you when I’m done,” Emma said as she put away her cell phone just as the fairy darted behind the counter and disappeared to the kitchen out the back. Okay, so that might dampen her plan a bit.

After all, it was all right for the fairies to come and go as they pleased at the mall since no one but the sight-gifted could see them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly as easy for a regular-size human to do the same thing. Once again Emma longed to be out in the dark, cold forest hunting dragons instead.

Just before her mom had died five years ago, they had both staked out a troubadour dragon for three nights and hadn’t even been able to light a fire for fear of giving away their location (which, for the record, she bet Curtis wouldn’t have been able to handle). But on the fourth night the dragon had finally slunk out of its lair, and Emma’s mom had instantly shot it through the soft scales at the base of its neck. It was the dragon’s kill spot, and despite cold and tired limbs, her mom’s first shot had been true and the dragon had died instantly, covering them both in thick, stenchy ectoplasm as its body disintegrated.

Right now Emma would give her right hand to be covered in thick, stenchy dragon ectoplasm instead of trailing a pack of belligerent fairies through the food court.

The Hong Kong Wong counter ran from wall to wall, but underneath, part of it was cut away and the countertop lifted up to let the workers in and out. Emma paused for a moment and was just trying to figure out how to get past the slim girl working the register, when suddenly a red-faced man came up and started to complain about the comment on his fortune cookie.

Yes. Thank you, red-faced man with ridiculous over-the-top consumer expectations.

Emma waited long enough for the slim girl to be drawn into his tirade before she slipped under the counter and through to the kitchen. The place was empty, though from a screen door at the back she could hear the soft murmurs of voices and the faint stench of cigarettes, which suggested whoever worked there had gone for a break.

Then she caught sight of about ten fairies all congregating around a large white door that looked like it led to a cold room. They were so busy staring at it, their stupid wings buzzing with rapid movement, that none of them even seemed to notice she was there.

Perfect. She reloaded the tiny crossbow and took aim. Finally she would be able to get some credibility back. Then, without making a sound, she moved slowly toward them and pressed her finger down on the release trigger.

Good-bye, fairies, and hello—

But just as the tiny wooden skewer started to fly through the air, there was a large grating noise. And before she knew what was happening, the white door of the cold room blew open and the room was suddenly filled with smoke and flames and flying debris, which pounded against her face and arms.

Emma screamed and held up her hands to protect herself as the smoke continued to billow into the kitchen. She had no idea what had caused it or what had happened to the fairies, but she knew enough to know it wasn’t good news. Burtonwood had instilled in its students from an early age that it was a slayer’s job to be discreet and fly under the radar, and despite the pounding sensation in her head from where the debris had hit her, Emma was fairly sure that exploding cold rooms did not count as discreet.

Which was why she did the only thing any sane slayer would do. She pressed her hand to her aching face and ran.