Faerie Tale by Nicola Rhodes

… well … we’re losing Denny.’
    ‘You’ll think of something,’ he said.  ‘You always do.’
    ‘We’ve beaten Djinn, vampires, gods, even the rotten little clerks in mainframe, and they run the whole universe,’ she said.  ‘I can’t believe we’ve met our Waterloo with a bunch of Faeries of all things.’
    This was bad.
    ‘First of all, we aren’t beaten yet,’ admonished Denny. ‘And furthermore, they may be called “Faeries”, but they have more in common with the old style gods than storybook pixies.  And there are thousands of them too.  So don’t beat yourself up on that account. We may have never faced such an enemy before.’
    ‘You don’t give a lot of pep talks do you?’
    ‘I never had to before.’
    ‘ We need help, Denny,’ she wailed.  ‘ We can’t do this by our selves and if people can’t even be taught to help themselves … it’d be a help anyway,’ she finished off, muttering. 
    Denny knew what she meant.  It was too much to expect them to fight all the Faeries by themselves, but that was just what they were having to do.  Try to do, he corrected himself.
     He took her face in his hands.  ‘We’ll beat them Tam … No one can beat you, I really believe that.  I’ve seen you do some amazing things, you’ll think of something.’
    ‘I just hope I think of something before the world ends,’ she said gloomily.
    ‘Sorry,’ she added seeing his face fall. 
    She brightened up slightly. ‘Maybe you’ll think of something,’ she said.  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
    He smiled.  ‘Maybe I will.’
    She snuggled closer to him.  ‘Denny,’ she whispered softly in his ear.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Talking of doing something amazing…’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Lock the door.’
    Denny raised an eyebrow.  ‘Now?’
    ‘Now!’
    Denny locked the door.  Well, they did have a lot of house guests at the moment.
    * * *
    There had been no sign of the King’s gypsies.  This could be considered unfortunate since they might have made reasonable allies.  Not allies they could trust of course, but at least allies that hated the Queen as much as they did and had definitely got some defence against the Faerie magic, probably learned from Finvarra himself.  This would have been a big help.
    It was a damn shame then that they all seemed to have vanished.  Stiles opinion was that they were all dead by now or defected to the enemy.  He had heard Finvarra himself say that, after all, he was not human when all was said and done.  And, besides, they were still the number one suspects, in Stiles’s opinion, for the opening of the portal.  Stiles still thought they were probably Faeries too, or at least allied to them.  Finvarra definitely was – or had been.  Hadn’t Hecaté said there were only bad Faeries? 
    Tamar was of the opinion that they were still out there somewhere, biding their time. 
    ‘Biding their time until what?’ said Stiles sceptically.
    ‘We don’t know is the point,’ she said and glared at him until he changed the subject.  Tamar hated admitting that she did not know absolutely everything there was to know. 
    ‘Well, we couldn’t have trusted them anyway,’ said Stiles diplomatically.  ‘This is our fight.’
    ‘It’s like a war out there,’ said Cindy.
    ‘It is a war out there,’ said Denny gently correcting her. ‘I heard some of the old folks talking,’ he continued.  ‘They were saying that it’s worse than the blitz.’
    There was a silence at this. 
    ‘B-but old people don’t think that anything is worse than the blitz,’ stammered Tamar. ‘I’ve heard them, even the apocalypse war wasn’t as bad as the blitz, I mean according to them.’
    ‘Wasn’t an apocalypse,’ said Stiles.  ‘I mean we’re all still here, aren’t we?’
    ‘Not for much longer if this carries on,’ said Tamar.
    ‘Worse than the apocalypse,’ muttered Denny. ‘Sounds about right to me.’
    Hecaté, who had been listening in silence