Lu and I rode with Keir up the mountain while Zev and Linda made their own way there. I wasn’t sure what I expected. The cute little guy in green on the front of a Lucky Charms cereal box or the fun Irish gnome-looking dude sitting on a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow every St. Patrick’s Day. I was quickly disabused of either notion.
Leprechauns are not cute or fun. They are assholes.
When we pulled into the driveway, the late afternoon sun highlighted the shit show taking place on Keir’s lawn. Pixies zipped all over the place. Zev was hurling fireballs, and Linda was popping up all over the yard, taking down leprechauns in a reverse game of whack-a-gnome. By the time Keir got out of the car, he was in complete pooka form, including super pointy antlers, five points each jutting from the top of his skull, and arms the size of tree trunks. He snarled at the invading force on his property, saliva dripping from his frightening maw of razor-sharp teeth. He clicked his black diamond claws, then took off in a run to meet the ensuing battle head-on.
Luanne, heaven help her, was grinning from ear to ear as she slid a knife from a belt strap. She winked at me. “Let’s have some fun.”
Her idea of fun and mine were two totally different things. Even so, I retrieved Michael’s baseball bat from where I’d thrown it into the back seat and tested it against my hand.
Lu’s grin widened. “Right on,” she said. “Batter up.”
I tried to steel my nerves, but all I could think about was all the times I really messed up. I shook the doubts from my head. Leprechauns first. Doubts second. “Let’s do this.”
An hour into the fight, we were no closer to getting rid of the invaders than we were when we started. The truth was, we were getting our asses handed to us by skinny, old men with scraggly beards, wielding little more than wooden staffs. I’d been thunked hard more times than I cared to admit. Zev had been right. They were fucking everywhere.
“I think these guys are multiplying!” I shouted as one of Zev’s fireballs exploded near me, sending two leprechauns flying. Every time we took out one guy, five more took his place. The pixie males were aiding in the fight, while the females who had taken part in the mating ritual already had been barricaded inside Keir’s house.
Konig flew over to me and pointed at Keir’s tiny home. “They’re going for the women!” A dozen leprechauns had managed to get past our perimeter and were rocking the container home back and forth.
I was exhausted and in a lot of pain. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping me going at this point. Still, I ran—well, jogged—to the house to defend the soon-to-be pixie moms. I choked up on the bat and smacked the first leprechaun in the head. He careened backward and then fell to the ground. I hit him in the face a couple more times to make sure he wasn’t getting back up. After, I made my way around the outside of the structure, swinging the slugger into every leprechaun I could find. They were so focused on getting inside the container house that they weren’t even trying to defend against my blows. One by one, they went down like dominoes.
However, by the time I made it around the front, several more leprechauns had taken their places. “How many of these assholes are there?” My voice was high-pitched and strangled as I took in the scene.
Keir ripped the arms off one of the scrawny fuckers, then used his diamond-hardened nails to cut the head off another. Then twenty of them jumped on him at once. Fair Konig and Linda were dueting their fight. She would knock them down, and he would stab them in the eyes. Even so, more came. Lu was ducking, dodging, kicking, and cutting, but she wasn’t gaining much ground either. Zev couldn’t make fireballs fast enough to keep a small horde of them from taking him down. He kept poofing out then re-poofing in outside the leprechaun piles before turning the thin, old men into barbeque pyres. The smell of roasting leprechauns was sickly sweet, like burnt sugar, as if their flesh had been made of cotton candy.
I let out an angry cry of frustration as the tiny home began to teeter. For every inch of ground we gained from the wily, multiplying leprechauns, we lost a foot.
Thomas had warned me not to use any magic until I could come to terms with aero-craft, but we were going to lose the house if I didn’t act. I fell to my hands and knees, gripping the soil between my fingers. It felt weird on the hand that was made of magic, but I couldn’t let that stop me.
“Mother Earth and Goddess bound, move and shape this bounty of ground. Mineral, rock, and stone below. Shape, expand, stretch and grow.” I felt the magic gather and disperse beneath me. “Come to me and build a gate. Protect the pixies….” I searched for a good word to rhyme with gate and landed on, “…who are here to mate.” I added my intention to keep the pixies safe and the house standing. As a final, I used Thomas’s ending, “Bend to my will.”
Rapidly, tall spires of rock shot up from out of the ground all at once in a rectangle around the tiny house. The structures were close together, forming a sort of privacy fence that prevented the leprechauns from touching the house, let alone trying to tip it over.
It didn’t stop them from climbing, though. “Sons of bitches.” They were using their wooden staffs like ice picks on the roof, trying to break in through the top.
I called to the earth once more. “Up, up, up,” I told it. “Bend to my will.”
A platform of rock formed under my feet, lifting me as it rose from the ground. When I was high enough, I vaulted to the roof. Unfortunately, my bat was still on the ground.
Once again, I reached for my magic. Ignis this time. I called to the fire from one of Zev’s stack of bodies because I needed the flame for the incantation. “Blood and fire, ignite and fight. Bend to my will.”
I yipped as fire burst from my body like a nuclear explosion. The powerful wave of flames and heat blasted the leprechauns from the roof. When the debris and the smoke cleared, I was the only one up there left standing. “Yes.” I fist-bumped the sky.
From this vantage, I could see the whole battlefield. It was a much different picture than I’d seen on the ground. The yard should have been littered with hundreds of leprechaun bodies, but there weren’t more than a dozen on the ground. Even Zev’s fire piles were gone, with the exception of the one he was currently roasting.
Where were they going? I looked for the one that I’d smashed in the head. He was gone as well. Something wasn’t right. Keir tore limbs off a half dozen more leprechauns, and I knew even more would replace them, so I scanned the area to see where the creatures were coming from. To my surprise, they appeared out of thin air behind Keir, already at a run.
Had that been happening the whole time? How had we not noticed? The same thing was happening to my friends. That’s why we couldn’t get rid of them. Like Zev, the leprechauns could poof. Only, where were the dead bodies going?
Three of them ran at Luanne from a blind spot. “Lu! Behind you!” I shouted. She spun around with the grace of a ballerina, and she avoided their staffs as she dispatched them with quick stabs of her knife.
“Yes!” Then four more popped up behind her. My friends might be better fighters, but the leprechauns were constantly replacing their fallen comrades. A few more hours, and we would be completely overwhelmed.
A red glint from the trees drew my attention. It came from a large oak above the waterfall. Then I saw the beard. It was a leprechaun wearing a red coat and a red beanie. Was the color and indication of status? Was he their commander, orchestrating the fight from a safe perch?
“Oh, hell no,” I muttered. “Not on my watch.” The grimoire had listed the oak as a tree of power, but all I really needed was the poison ivy and creeper vines growing up the sides and hanging from the branches. “Bind and twine, tether and knot. Cinch and clench, for what he’s wrought.”
I smiled when the watcher began to shout obscenities as the vines trussed him up like a giant butt roast ready for the oven.
The sudden quiet on the battlefield startled me from the celebration as the leprechauns that had been fighting vanished. All of them.
“What the hell is going on?” Luanne shouted up to me.
Keir peered up at me with a hand over his eyes as the sun shined in his face. “Did you do this?”
I grimaced. “Maybe. I don’t know.” I pointed at the leprechaun on the hill. “There,” I said. “I think that’s their leader.”
“Hoe-lee shit,” Luanne cheered. “Damn, Iris. You can come with me on my next mission.”
Zev, whose perfect hair was a mess, and his leather jacket torn at the shoulder, blew out a ring of smoke. “I’ll get him,” he said.
In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Zev was gone and back, returned with the red-coated Leprechaun. The vines still held the dude, and his arms were strapped down to his sides, and his legs were bound all the way to his feet.
I climbed down the rock fence as our prisoner tried to hop away, then fell onto his backside. “You’ll pay for this,” he screeched. “All of you! I will shred your flesh and grind your bones. I will turn your bowels into sausage casings. Give me the pixie dust, or you will rue the day you crossed pikes with Blue Haggins.”
I reached down and took his beanie off and stuffed it into his mouth. “There,” I said. “Much better.” I snapped my fingers. “Hey,” I said. “Since I caught him, does that mean I get his pot of gold?”
“You might,” Keir answered. “If he was a leprechaun.”
Lu leaned over our captive. “He’s not?”
Zev nodded. “He is not. Though he made good imitations of the freaks.”
Up close, the asshole didn’t look much like the guys we’d been fighting. He had huge red eyes, a hook nose and thin lips beneath his grizzled beard. His gnarled hands were bent like talons, and he had thin, emaciated arms and legs but a broad bird chest. “Then what is he?” I asked.
“He’s a redcap. A type of goblin,” the fire djinn explained. “Distantly related to the leprechauns but much more malevolent. They conjure physical illusions–usually for nefarious purposes.”
“Legend has it that they soak their hats in their victims’ blood in order to increase their power,” Keir said. “I’ve never actually seen one before in person, though. I’ve only studied them.”
“What do we do with him?” I asked.
“Find out if he knows who else is coming, then dispose of him,” Luanne said. The “of course” was implied. She looked at me and said, “Hey, are you okay?”
I was light-headed, but I’d been too hopped on adrenaline and magic spells to realize how bad I’d begun to feel. I started swaying as my head spun and spun…and then I fell into darkness.