Page 72 of Tooth and Nail

Eoghan glanced over at him, noting how he’d slung the twenty-pound umbrella packs over his shoulders effortlessly. The sixty pounds he carried in three packs hadn’t started weighing him down yet, but he hoped they wouldn’t have to walk forever before reaching their destination. They were headed toward an area of flattened ground in the center of a circle of trees. Back in the office, Eoghan’s friend Night had identified the clearing as being the most likely gathering place for space fairie orgies in satellite photos and transmitted the coordinates to them.

“I don’t think there’s any point in trying to sneak up on them,” Eoghan said. “I don’t know about you but the closer we get to this place, it’s like there are eyes on me.” He looked up from his phone which showed they were about three hundred yards from the pad, just on the other side of a thick grouping of redwoods which looked as if it blocked further access into the woods from that direction. “You will promise to be careful, right, Ari? This is dangerous.”

“As you’ve said a thousand times, Eoghan.” He looked at him and sighed. “But I promise I will be careful. No looking them in the eyes, no lying to them.” He sent Eoghan a cocky grin. “Besides, I have big plans for us when this is over and done with. Let’s just rescue Ariel and Umbriel and get them back to dear old Mommy and Daddy.” He snorted. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

Eoghan smiled and then checked his phone again before using the device to point with. “It’s just up here, beyond thosetrees.” As he said it, he heard something and reached for Ari, pulling him to a stop. “Hang on. Do you hear that?” The forest quieted around them as his partner came to a halt right beside him. He looked up, noting the bright blue of the noon sky through the tops of trees. Leaves fluttered down from above and yet there were no visible birds or even insects in the sky. There were no squirrels or any other types of animal activity as he’d experienced when hiking in the forest on the times he’d gone camping with his family. It was as if the only living things in the forest, were the trees around them. And yet, underneath the silence, was a low-level hum which thrummed through the air.

When he glanced back down, Ari was frowning deeply. “Is that humming?”

Eoghan nodded. “I’d say so, yeah. It’s fucking creepy too.”

Ari nodded. “Should we keep going?”

“Yeah,” he said hesitantly, silently communicating his urging for Ari to be careful. “But first, let’s get these ready.” He let the packs of sugar netting drop to the forest floor and then unzipped the first one, pulling the covering away from the sticky mess. Every time he saw the disgusting stuff, it never failed to remind him of extracting a honeycomb from a jar of honey. The covering of the sugar netting came away with long strands of stickiness. It was messy stuff, and he knew he was going to get the crap all over himself. By the end of the day Eoghan had no doubt he'd looked like he’d rolled in a vat of honey.

“Ugh,this stuff is sticky,” Ari said, extracting the netting from his first cover.

“Really sticky and unfortunately, once we uncover them, we’ll have to carry them over our shoulder. If we lay it on the ground, it’s gonna pick up every twig on the forest floor.”

Ari was examining the handle, looking at a row of buttons. “What do these do?”

“Don’t touch them until you’re ready to launch it,” Eoghan said.

“Launch it?” Ari looked confused as he turned the thing over and over in his hands. The sticky substance ran down his arms, coating them.

“When you push the button, the net will propel out of the unit like you’re shooting a speargun.”

Ari turned to stare at him. “Fire it? That’s cool.”

“When it gets about twenty-five feet high, it’ll open like an umbrella and come down, covering everything in a twenty-foot diameter. If there’s a fairie under it, they’ll become distracted and start licking it.”

“That…is so gross,” Ari said. He turned his head as if listening. “The humming is getting louder.”

“Let’s go.” They walked closer to the row of tall trees and with every step they took, Eoghan began to realize that the sound he was hearing wasn’t humming at all. He stopped ten feet from the wall of trees. “It’s chanting.”

Ari came to a halt beside him, carrying two nets over his back and one in his hand. Just like Eoghan, he’d taken the covers off all of them, and sugary syrup ran down his back, sticking to his clothes and making a total mess.

Eoghan swallowed hard, deciding it was best to get this shit over with as soon as possible. “Let’s go.” He started forward, coming up to a break in the trees. Bright, white sunlight filled the clearing beyond and when he actually got a glimpse of what was set up in the open space, he felt his stomach do a mighty heave, giving a lurch. He instantly regretted eating the omelet because he was mere seconds away from losing his entire breakfast right there on the ground.

Two tall stakes had been driven into the ground by some unseen force and the stakes, clearly fashioned out of materials which had been gathered from the forest themselves, didn’t stand there bare. Instead, tied to the stakes with some unknown binding material, were what was left of Ariel and Umbriel. At Ari’s outraged gasp from beside him, Eoghan nearly dropped his burden of sugar netting. They were too late and judging by the condition of the corpses, they would’ve been too late to rescue the offspring if they’d been here the very first night they’d vanished from the clearing.

“Well, you have to say one thing about them,” Ari said calmly, “the shits don’t waste any time.”

Eoghan couldn’t agree more. Ariel’s remains resembled what the I.S.R. files on her had described as a sylph, also known as an air spirit or in the famous ballet—La Sylphide—a lithe and nimble ethereal creature, waiflike in its beauty. He stared at the gruesome sight wishing he’d approached her from the opposite side of the clearing…where his mind would have been tricked for only a split second into thinking that her corpse was whole…and not the horror hanging, half-eaten, from the stake.

Her sibling, Umbriel, looked a lot like his description, a gnome—small, humanoid, ugly, gnarled—and also missing half his body. What was left of him also hung limply from the stake. As Eoghan looked him over, he realized he wouldn’t have to worry about the danger of this one seeing either him or Ari staring at him. Both of his eyes were gone, just like his sibling.

“What the fuck?” Eoghan sighed, still aware of a hum in the air. He glanced around the clearing, suddenly wary that he’d taken his eyes off their immediate environment with all the horror in front of them. He searched the surrounding forest for any signs of what had killed the siblings, wonderingwhat on earth they’d have to do to get away from the clearing without being noticed by whatever had done this.

“Did you see that?”

Eoghan was immediately on guard as he turned toward his partner who was watching the strung-up corpses in the center of the field with fascination. He turned and followed Ari’s gaze, not immediately seeing anything of note, surely not any space fairie creatures like Oberon or Titan—

And then he saw it. “Oh, my God!”

In front of Ariel’s stake an undulating, shimmering form lay low to the ground. As he stared, Eoghan realized that it had begun to take shape, rising from the ground in what could only be described as a pulsating wave of millions of tiny reflective creatures moving in perfect unison. As the form rose from the ground, it coalesced into a more solid body rather than individual pieces of a whole. The form it took began to look human but as the creatures twisted and turned in the sunlight, it could only be described as dancing into what appeared to be a shimmering replica of…Titania, the triplets’ mother.

Eoghan watched in abject horror as another shape rose from the ground beside her, twisting, turning, coalescing like the freakish Titania replica but with an important difference. This one wore the James Bond tuxedo they’d seen Oberon wearing at the Flying J only the day before. It appeared to be made up of millions of tiny reflective creatures just like the undulating form beside it. As the two forms solidified and turned to face them, the humming got louder until it was nearly deafening in the clearing.

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