“What did you learn about the demon?”
What demon? He’d stumbled across evil cheeses and fairies with fruit. Meanwhile, Bing peered at him.
“That was from a demon?” he asked, gesturing to Bruce’s wounds.
Nero shook his head. “Pixie chicks.”
Yordan’s head snapped up. “That a joke?”
Nero shrugged, but Yordan peered at the burns.
“The chickens pecked at you?”
“No,” Bruce rasped as he shoved his feet into his sneakers. “Pixies pinned me down with burning ropes. Laddin pulled them off me.”
“What does that have to do with chickens?”
Lady Kinstead waved her hand at the men. Bruce had no idea what the gesture meant, but the men fell silent as she stared at him.
“What did you learn?”
That pixies weren’t even remotely cute. That if it hadn’t been for Laddin, he’d probably be dead or turned into a frog or whatever crazy shit fairies did to uncooperative victims. He didn’t learn a damn thing about a demon, but he did figure something else out.
“They want to go to Fairyland.”
She laughed in a mystically beautiful and wholly creepy way, because really, that kind of dreamlike sound shouldn’t be coming from a body as earthly looking as hers. But it did, and it took him a moment to focus on her words instead of her form. “All earth fairies want to go to Feyland.”
He thought it was Fairyland, but whatever. “Why?”
“Don’t you want to go to Heaven? To talk to God?”
Uh, yes, he supposed. He hadn’t ever really thought about it.
“Feyland is their Heaven. They are created from its magic.”
“They want to die?”
She rolled her eyes. “So pretty, but so stupid.”
Was she talking about him or the fairies? Probably him, because she continued to explain.
“Fairies don’t die like you do. They can only go to Heaven if you take them.”
“But I can’t take them.”
“You can if you eat the apple.”
Nero jerked his head around. “What apple? Where?”
“Make it a condition of eating the apple,” the woman said.
Bruce couldn’t believe she was asking this of him. “I’m not helping a bunch of arsonist fairies get into heaven.”
“Not the pixies,” she said. “The demon. Demand that Bitterroot tell you where the demon is before the entire world dies. He will agree. He knows Feyland will be hurt too, if the Earth dies.”
From the opposite side of the barn, Josh banged his fist against a hay bale. “Fucking perfect. First a cherry, now an apple.”
“No!” Bruce snapped. “I am not going to eat more fairy fruit!”
Nero blew out a breath. “You might have to, if it’s the only way to find the demon.” His expression was grave. “We’re facing the end of the world, here. If we can’t stop the poison from expanding into Lake Michigan, the whole continent will be contaminated.”
“It’s not just an apple,” Bruce growled. How the hell didn’t they know that?
“Of course it’s not just an apple,” Nero argued. “But we’ve been looking for weeks and haven’t found the demon. According to the science crew, there’s only a few days left before the dead zone hits Lake Michigan. If we poison the Great Lakes, we poison Canada, the US, and eventually the world. Everything will die.”
Bruce knew that. Fucking hell, it was all over the news, 24/7. They all had this graphic of the lake at the center of an expanding circle. Some drew the circle in red like blood, others in green like poison, as if that made any difference. The point was that everything inside that circle died—slowly at first, but with increasing speed the closer you got to the center of the lake. And that circle was growing every second of every day. Foot by foot, it was expanding, poisoning the land with cyanide and putting some unknown crap into the air that was killing everything on the earth. No one knew exactly how far it had to go until the world ended. But they all agreed that once it touched Lake Michigan, North America was screwed, and the western hemisphere soon after that. The latest projections said they were only days away from that happening. A week at most.
And there was no solution in sight.
But as much as Bruce wanted to be the savior for everyone, he already knew it wouldn’t work. “I’ve asked. Bitter—” He cut his word off. He did not want to call the guy. “He doesn’t know where it is.”
“He must,” Lady Kinstead said. “I have seen it. If you eat the apple, you save the world.”
That sounded like a great idea… not. A crazy beauty tells him to eat the apple and whammo, the world is saved. Right. And yet all the people around him seemed to take her seriously. Worse, her words were an exact echo of what Bitterroot had said to him, which was freaky scary. Especially since he did not know how to save the world!
Then Nero started drawing that same map in the dirt with his boot. “That’s the dead zone,” he said. “That’s Lake Michigan. We’re right fucking here.” He planted his boot at the edge of the line representing Lake Michigan. “A few more feet and we’re all dead.”
Bruce threw up his hands. “He doesn’t know. I already asked. I already offered.”
Josh closed his eyes. “Of course you did.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Bruce said as he rounded on his brother. He wasn’t really angry at Josh, though the guy was being a prick. He was overwhelmed and in pain—and for most of his life, Josh had been his target whenever he felt like shit.
“It means—” Josh answered, but Nero got there first.
“Don’t get into that crap now,” Nero snapped at Josh. Then he rounded on Bruce. “You asked him already?”
Bruce nodded. “The fairy prince doesn’t know.”
The woman crossed her arms in anger. “The fey know,” she said. “Why do you think I am here?”
He had no idea.
She stomped her foot. “Eat the apple! Make them tell!”
Nero grimaced. “Do we call him now?”
She
