Pixies.
He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to calm his racing heart. “I told you I’d give you answers at dawn. It’s not fucking dawn.”
“These aren’t the same fairies,” Bruce said. His voice was low and filled with tension. Laddin blinked as he focused on his lover, only to see what the problem was.
Bruce was roped down like Gulliver had been by the Lilliputians. Slender stripes of white light lay in even lines across his naked body. Extra layers pinned down his far wrist and ankle, and all of it seemed to sizzle slightly. Oh crap! When Laddin sniffed, he smelled burned flesh. The only part of Bruce’s body that was free of the burning white ropes was where Laddin’s arm had stretched across Bruce’s upper torso and neck. Since Laddin had been in a bedroll, he’d been protected. But Bruce had fallen asleep lying on his back, completely exposed.
Holy shit. He had to get those ropes of light off of Bruce. He reached forward, but Bruce quickly stopped him. “No! Look at your arm.”
He looked, and sure enough, there were white lines like string cheese causing a low-level burn that hurt like hell. The only thing that had protected him was the bedroll. He tried to pull off the line from his arm, but the stuff wouldn’t budge, and it burned his thumb and forefinger where he grabbed hold.
It didn’t matter. He’d freed himself when he shoved himself upright. There had to be a way to haul that shit off Bruce. So he grabbed his discarded T-shirt, wrapped it around his fingers, and tried to pull one of those ropes off Bruce.
It didn’t work, though he kept pulling, even when his T-shirt disintegrated where it touched the ropes. Worse, the more he tugged, the brighter and hotter the ropes became. And hell, the hair on Bruce’s chest and—shit—at his groin was smoldering now. Laddin patted the flame out, but he doubted that would prevent the next spark.
Why the hell had he ever thought fairies were cute?
“Get that shit off him now!” he commanded.
“We have beaten the Windy Wolf in fair combat,” a tiny voice said.
Laddin looked, but he couldn’t see the speaker. What he did see was a dozen lights gathered in a mass at the far side of Bruce’s head. He was trying to sort out some sense of form from the bright things, but it was like picking out individual lights in a firecracker explosion. They moved too fast and were too bright for him to catch. And then suddenly, a glowing ball soared through the air and exploded in bright blue color like a firecracker above Bruce’s chest. It was really pretty, except it burst with real force. Two more launched, and Laddin tried to bat them away. He got the red one quickly, tossing it up toward the ceiling to burst in brilliant crimson. But he couldn’t get to the second one in time, and it exploded against his hand with vicious pain. “Stop that!” Laddin ordered.
“We defeat the Windy Wolf!”
And again, more firecrackers launched. Laddin hit them away as fast as he could, but it was a losing game. There seemed to be no end of firecrackers, and he couldn’t sit here and play defense the whole time. Especially since he was getting the shit burned out of his hands. Every impact felt like a bee sting, hot and sharp on his palm, but at least they weren’t exploding on top of Bruce.
“Stop it!” he yelled again. “Why are you doing this?”
“Acknowledge our win!” the voice said again. “We have beaten the Windy Wolf!”
Finally he found the speaker—a beautiful fairy woman wearing a flower hat larger than her entire body. In fact, it was hard to see her face because she had tilted it so far back to look at him, she should have toppled backward. Except normal physics didn’t seem to apply to fairies.
“Sure, sure. You win—”
“No!” Bruce grunted from the floor. “Find out the forfeit first!”
“What?”
Bruce rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything about betting? You can’t let someone win without knowing what you lose.” He blew out a breath. “I thought you went to public school.”
Apparently not the same kind of public school as Bruce. He took a breath and tried to focus. God, he needed coffee. Obviously this wasn’t a simple barroom bet over favorite teams. This was fairy bargaining, and Bruce was right. He couldn’t agree to anything without understanding the terms.
“Stop the… uh… game. We will discuss terms.”
“We discuss!” the female fairy said as she grabbed her flower hat and threw it hard onto Bruce’s belly.
Bruce groaned as the hat seemed to explode. The resulting welt on his belly grew red and hot right beneath her feet.
“Stop that!” Laddin snapped. He was pissed off now, and damn it, Bruce couldn’t take much more of this. And his own hands were already swelling. “What’s your name?”
“I am Dollarback Erin Rodger-Dodger! I run back and fall forward, I rush for yards, and I am in charge of the Superest Bowl there is!”
Well, that was a mashup of random football terms. And even he knew that Aaron Rodgers was male. But again, that wasn’t the point.
“I hail you, Rodger-Dodger. What are you trying to win?”
“Power! Glory!”
In the background, the fairy lights all jumped up and down and cheered.
“Okay—”
“And passage to Fairyland.” She stepped resolutely up Bruce’s chest and hopped onto his chin. “The Windy Wolf has lost. He will give us passage.”
“He doesn’t know how.” Then he looked at Bruce. “Why do they think you can?”
“I have no idea!” Bruce grumbled.
Meanwhile, Erin Rodger-Dodger held up a glowing light—another firecracker. If she spiked that down on Bruce’s eye, he’d lose it. “We will throw fire until he does,” she cried.
Bruce growled in response and strained his head, but those white ropes lay across his
