Slightly Miffed Bees

Claude

The box on the reception desk hummed. Like, vibrated. Like the U-rail tracks seconds before a train pulled up. Simultaneously, both high- and low-pitched frequencies. The address label read: Mr J Dupont. Care of The Night Cap Bed and Breakfast.

It was really none of my business what the box contained.

Willow and Oggy had told me to wait in the reception area, and after they’d finished serving breakfast they would accompany me to the ley lines. Then, hopefully, whatever the heck I was meant to be doing twice a year to save the house and its occupants would simply click into place. I wasn’t optimistic.

Though, when had I ever been optimistic?

I’d had eggs royale for breakfast—and holy hollandaise! They were some grade A eggs royale. I’d had to go back for seconds.

If staying in this awful house, with these unnerving people, and the expectation of this rhizome ritual was disconcerting, it was somewhat cushioned by the exceptional morning menu. Really nice chai tea too. Couldn’t fault it.

But they’d promised me as soon as they’d served the other guests and cleared up, the sentry fae would lead me to this sacred spot. That was half an hour ago, and all I had to keep me company was John the memoir writer, a bunch of outdated travel brochures, and this buzzing box.

Yup, it really was none of my business.

John had said a grand total of five words to me before I figured out he was what one would label an enabler . “Why don’t you open it?”

“I’m not going to open it,” I’d replied. “It’s for Mr Dupont.”

I knew nothing about Mr Dupont, except that when I said his name, John’s eyes went wide and the smile dropped from his face.

John was human. The humanest man I’d ever seen. White skin, bald head, rounded belly, approximately five foot six. He had a big brown moustache and wore cargo shorts, a wingball jersey, and ancient-looking suede sandals with socks. Based on the evidence of my own eyes, I’d estimated his age at about seventy-five. He’d told me he’d been here at The Night Cap for sixteen years, which coincided with what Willow and Oggy said, but he’d also told me he was in his forties when he first came. Something was off here.

But humans could lie. In fact, any non-fae species could. And as a fae, I was also stereotypically useless at knowing when I was being lied to.

When I’d asked John his age, he’d said to stop being such a nosy twit, and then attempted to convince me to open Mr Dupont’s mail again.

It was none of my business, but . . .

Why would a box be humming?

An alarm clock? A bomb? A battery-operated vibrator? If it was the latter, or indeed the second thing on that list, I dare say Mr Dupont wouldn’t be too happy if I opened it.

The box was around fifty centimetres tall, wide, and deep, with ordinary-looking brown wrap and tape, and an inky black stamp on the side which read: Storm in a B Cup Farm . A bra-size reference? I had no idea.

I poked it with the end of my pen, lifting it up by an inch, and dropped it back onto the counter. It wasn’t heavy, but it also wasn’t not heavy. The humming grew louder.

“What the fuck?” John said, leaving his perch behind the desk, abandoning his notepad and pen. “Pick it up!”

I hesitated, but eventually I placed a hand on either side. It was normal temperature, not hot nor cool, and the vibrations travelled through my palms and up my arms. I tilted it to one side, and the contents... sort of slid around. Hard to tell. I gave it a tiny shake. Something rattled. Sort of. There were definitely loose parts inside the box. The humming grew louder.

I gave it another shake. It grew louder still. What the hell did it contain? I shook it again, hard. This time the noise reached cacophonous levels, and I felt the resonance in my jaw, my spine, and even my toes.

“Ah, superb. It came,” said a deep male voice, hardly more than a growl. The voice’s owner spoke with elegance and expensive education. He took the box out of my hands and cracked the biggest grin, which he pointed directly at me. “The name’s Dupont. Call me Jasper. You must be His Lordship.”

I pushed the hair off my forehead, gulped, and looked up, up, up, until I met the newcomer’s eyes. Mr Dupont—Jasper—stood at, I would guess, a few inches shorter than nine-feet. He had crimson skin, muscles on muscles on muscles, horns that curved backwards from his temples, huge leathery bat-like wings, and grey, dirty-looking smoke tendrils easing out of his joints and nostrils. He was shirtless, and pants-less, and indecently close to being underpants-less, wearing what seemed to be a jock strap fashioned from a pair of jean shorts. He had a faint eggy aroma.

Mr Dupont was a surtr. An enormous, mutinously happy-looking fire daemon. I couldn’t seem to tear my gaze away from his thigh muscles. Each one alone seemed bigger than my torso, and I was not a small man.

Next to me, John scooted back over to his chair and poised his pen above his notepad. He scribbled something down and bounced his wide eyes between Mr Dupont and me.

“Okay, ready when you are, Claude,” said Oggy, as she and Willow also walked into the bed and breakfast’s entrance foyer. They both stopped short when they caught sight of the grinning surtr.

“Mr Dupont, what an occasion to happen upon you here,” said Willow, but they looked at Oggy, WTF etched in every line of their features.

“Just came for my box of bees.” Mr Dupont gave the box another sharp shake, and barked out a laugh, which resonated through the floorboards. Or maybe it was the buzzing of the box reaching its crescendo.

“Your bees?” I said.

“Six thousand angry bees!” He rattled it again and pressed his ear against the cardboard. “Ooh, they do seem especially angry, these ones. Good, because the last angry bees I ordered were nothing more than slightly miffed. I want them furious.” He shook it again. “Come on, you little buggers, get more furious.”

“You’ll want them furious, not dead,” Oggy said, placing a hand on Mr Dupont’s naked thigh. It was the highest point she could reach. He stopped shaking the box.

“Why do you need furious bee—” I started to ask. Willow made a neck-sawing gesture, which I caught too late.

John gave a contented, “Ooh-ho-ho,” and wiggled his butt on his chair.

“Helena reckons she can shred all my clothes without consequence. Look at these blasted shorts. They’re not even shorts, they barely contain my junk. Good thing I’m not aroused right now, or I’d take your eyes out. These bees are going straight to her bedroom.”

I looked at Willow, who mouthed, “Mrs Ziegler,” to my unspoken question of, “Who’s Helena?”

“So, I’m gonna chuck these in her room and we can all go to the ley lines together.” Mr Dupont whistled as he left the reception area, box of furious—and probably half-dead from being shaken—bees held proudly in front of him.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” I asked Willow and Oggy. “He’s going to put bees in a woman’s bedroom. In a bedroom you rent out as part of your bed and breakfast.”

“Correction. It is your bed and breakfast,” Willow said, as Oggy said, “We do not get involved in the affairs of Mr Dupont and Mrs Ziegler.”

John looked at me, puffed out a lungful of air, and shook his head. “Amateur hour.”

“Besides,” said Oggy, ignoring John scribbling eagerly on his notepad. “Now we can sneak out to the ley lines.”

Above us, we heard a door slam shut, a scream like the gates of hell opening, and heavy footsteps running away.

“Quick! Go, go, go! Now, now, now!”

Willow and Oggy ran at full pelt from the building, John trailing them, his sandals slapping against the soles of his socked feet. He laughed—giggled actually—and I had no choice but to follow them. I didn’t want to be the only one in the foyer when Mr Dupont returned. Or worse, if Mrs Ziegler showed up.

As I left the reception area, the three of them disappeared into a gap in the hedge. I followed them through, jogging to keep up, somewhat lamenting my second portion of eggs royale, and absolutely rueing my third.

When I finally caught up with them, they were standing in the middle of an empty field, evidently waiting for me.

“The ley lines!” Oggy declared, holding her arms wide in a tah-dah fashion.

The field was unremarkable in every way possible. It was just that—a field. The uneven, tufty green grass beneath my feet stretched out for at least an acre before hedgerows and trees broke the expanse. In the dead centre between Oggy, Willow, John, and me, lay a lichen-crusted stone no bigger than a fold-down tray table on a U-Rail train.

“Getting any magical vibes?” Oggy asked me, her huge eyes brimming with hope.

I paused, waited to feel... anything. Something heavy dropped in my stomach. “No, I’m not.”

John scribbled on his notepad, slapped a bug on his calf.

“So, what am I meant to do, then?” I asked, dread and panic now rising up my gullet like vomit.

“I was really hoping that bringing you here would ignite some long-dormant mushroom-magic knowledge.” Oggy flopped down onto the grass and immediately lay in a snow-angel position.

“Did my father never tell you what he did here?”

My mind reeled with the possibilities. A spell, an incantation, lighting a special candle, an offering to a god—doughnuts?—a blood sacrifice, a human sacrifice. It could be anything.

“Every time we asked him, he’d say, “Secrets must be kept,” and then giggle like a schoolboy.” Willow sat cross-legged next to Oggy and took her hand in theirs.

John also sat down.

Again, I didn’t want to be the only one not doing something, so I inspected the patch of grass at my feet for deer faeces, and once I’d satisfied myself I wouldn’t be facing a larger than usual dry-cleaning bill, I sat. “So, nobody ever watched him do this ritual?”

“We weren’t allowed,” Oggy said to the cloudless blue sky.

“Sometimes he took women with him when he performed the ritual,” John offered, not looking up from his notepad.

“Women?” I asked. So was it a sexy thing? Did he have to have sex with a fertile woman under the full moon? Would explain the privacy he needed.

But if that was the ritual, the house was as good as dead, and Oggy and Willow and John and Mr Dupont and Mrs Ziegler were as good as homeless. I was gay, and even if I wasn’t, I hadn’t had sex in roughly a decade. I’d practically forgotten how.

“Yes, but not always. Sometimes he came alone,” Willow said, and a nugget of pressure eased from my chest. “Though, he brought your mother with him a few times. About five, six centuries ago, maybe.”

Thank gods I was already seated. “My mother? My mother was here? At Stinkhorn Manor?”

Willow nodded, and Oggy sat up. Five, six centuries ago would have put them here around the time of my conception or birth. And more than once? I hadn’t realised they’d been in a courtship. Mum had always explained their history in a way that painted my father as a one-and-done kind of guy.

“You could call her?” Oggy said, peering up at me with those enormous glassy eyes. “You’re still in contact with her, no?”

I blew out my breath. The answer was yes, I spoke to Mum once a month, like clockwork. I was a good son like that. But in the past, whenever I’d dared to mention Angus Stinkhorn, I’d been met with a receiver slamming onto the holder. Or if we were face to face, the silent treatment.

“Call who?! Not the kid’s mother?! The clue is in the name. She’s a Button, not a Stinkhorn!” A shadow loomed over us.

Willow, Oggy, and John collectively gasped. John pulled his knees up to his chest and Oggy began sucking her thumb.

“Mrs Ziegler,” Willow said, with a pointed look at me. “Such a surprise to see you here, outside the cell boundary.”

The cell boundary?

“I’m looking for that bastard smoke cretin. Anybody seen him? Thinks he can release six thousand slightly miffed bees into my bedroom. Fucker forgot I love bees. Ate them all. Washed down the measly portion of melon I had for breakfast.”

Mrs Ziegler was not what I’d expected. Perhaps because I hadn’t let myself imagine what a person who inspired fear in both Oggy and Willow, and was unafraid to ribbonise the clothes of a nine-foot fire daemon, might look like. I definitely did not expect a short, squashy, human woman with frizzy salt-and-pepper hair and spectacles. She was in that nameless age, somewhere between middle-aged and ancient. Sixty? Sixty-five? She looked as though she could be someone’s cool grandma, the one who swore and smoked weed and let you climb the trees in her garden.

But I knew she wasn’t human. She was fooling no one. Because underneath all the dowdiness, there was a faintly glowing aura to her. It resembled a blue flame licking over her skin. Like a pilot light from a boiler.

I had a sudden urge to wrap myself in a silver anti-hypothermia blanket and find a shaded, desolate roadside to shiver beside whilst replaying every mistake I’d ever made over my five hundred and ten years.

In that moment, I decided, I too would be very afraid of Mrs Ziegler.

“No? Nobody’s seen that useless waste of oxygen?”

“The last time we saw him,” I said. “Was in the foyer. He took the bees up to your room and then we ran away to the field before he came down.” The words did not leave my throat through my own free will. They felt as though they’d been dragged out, like a magician producing a string of colourful kerchiefs all tied together.

“Did you now?” Mrs Ziegler’s face cracked into a maniacal grin. Blue flames danced inside her mouth.

“M-Mrs Ziegler,” Oggy stuttered. “You shouldn’t be out past the cell boundary for too long.”

Mrs Ziegler looked at the back of her hands and swore under her breath. “Fucking joke, this.” She turned to leave but paused, turned back, and indicated towards the general direction of the house. “You need a mushroom-magic... expert to explain the ritual, not a mushroom fae, and certainly not that cock-sleeve Button twirp.”

And then she left, leaving the rest of us bouncing frowns between each other.

Two thoughts flitted through my head. One, did she really refer to my mother as a cock-sleeve? And two, maybe she was right about needing a mushroom-magic expert.

“Cock . . . sleeve . . . But . . . ton . . . twirp,” John repeated slowly as he wrote it on his notepad.

I turned to Willow and Oggy. “Where do we find a mushroom-magic expert?” I asked.

Both sentry fae shrugged.