14) Nailed it.

My sister knocked on the door frame of my room where I was on the computer. I had gotten my room back after we set up Mom’s old room for her. Imogene had passed on my offer to paint the walls a new color or put in new carpeting, but we did get a new mattress and bedding.

We also got her some new clothes and stuff, and she messed with me pretending not to understand about bras and making me explain them. Then she thought I was messing with her as payback when I started asking her about her needs for her periods. One of the first spells Mom had taught her dealt with that.

At my door, her staff was humming with an angry tone and spinning in little jerking motions from right to left and back again as it floated next to her.

She grabbed it and gave it a stern look. “I’m going out.”

I started to get up and grabbed a nearly clean set of pants off the ground to change into, but she held up her hand. “Alone.”

He’s father race were a bunch of tiny little people, at five foot two, she was as tall as their men, which meant that up to now going out alone around a bunch of six foot guys had been making her too nervous to go out alone.

Especially when they hit on her, although she seemed pretty smug about it afterwards.

I had to explain what I meant by them having a hobbit fetish. Then she had smacked me.

Then there was the whole being in a new world thing keeping her at home. Luckily once we drove somewhere she could go back there directly by what she called a “Shortcut” that looked like a Starship going into hyperspace.

I didn’t like it the few times she took me with her, it made me dizzy. She said it had done the same thing to Mom too, it must just not be human friendly.

After giving Imogene a long look, which made her look away, I finally asked. “What’s going on?”

She hemmed and she hawed, but I finally got out it of her. “There’s been an incursion.”

Things had started to arrive in our world, and she had been part of a group in hers that she translated as "The Night Guard" as part of the price of her training in dimensional magic.

From the other side of the door to my room, as I got dressed, she explained that there was no one else around here to deal with things other than her, and she had sworn an oath.

And that she didn’t need me to come with her.

Ignoring her complaints, I just finished changing my clothes and got the guns out of the Go bags.

I might need to put some body armor in the big bag too, but at this rate, it was going to end up being the “Oh Shit” bags, plural.

A long dark trench coat concealed the shotgun slung along under my arm. The Thunderer went on my belt in its holster, and the .38 went in one pocket of the coat with the extra ammo in the other one.

I opened the door, and despite her complaints, I think my sister looked relieved to see me ready and determined to go. "Any clue what we're dealing with?"

She winced. “Fairies.”

I stared at her, then dug the iron nail ring out of my pocket and slipped it on my right middle finger.

So from what she began to tell me, Fairy was a place that was not a place, but a place between other places made up out of places that had been lost, or stolen.

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Makes sense? Not to me either, but what I picked up was that everything from Fairy was insane and dangerous.

And they didn’t like iron, the more pure it was the better. There was just something real about it that they hurt them.

I thought about making a quick stop in the kitchen. I had never liked using grandma's cast iron pan, not cleaning it always seemed nasty, but I had to keep it around on a back shelf anyway.

Oh man, did I just Chekov's gun myself? I better move it somewhere more handy

I ended up leaving it at home since I decided that I was already carrying too much already.

She lifted her staff, and circles of light filled with weird looking symbols began to appear around us, and then spin. "I have a visual of the Incursion, we will be coming in fairly close.”

Everything around us squeezed up tight, and I shut my eyes as the dizziness hit, then there were the sounds of screams and gunshots.

Snapping my eyes open, I found myself standing on the edge of the field and looking at a two story white wooden farmhouse covered with creepy thing gray skinned… things. The number of their limbs, and eyes varied, but mouths full of sharp teeth and the eerie wheezing sounds they were making seemed standard for all of them.

An older man and two younger ones stood on the front porch with pistols and rifles and were shooting out at the ones still scurrying around the house while an older woman was standing in the open front doorway with a shotgun. They looked to be holding the things off, but some of them had climbed over the top of the house and were closing in on them from above.

I pointed at the gray things and glanced at Imogene who was twisting her fingers around in the air while her staff circled around her in the air, seeming to be on guard. "Bad guys?"

She nodded sharply without even looking up. “Neatherlings. Very bad guys.”

Shouting, I began walking toward the house, freeing up the shotgun and pointing in the air up above the homeowners, “Up high, five of them.” I held off on shooting since it would be kind of at them, and I didn't want to shoot up their house.

The Neatherling blood was a rather thin blue color that looked like would stain the clothes of the three men shooting up at them. I still held off on shooting since it looked like they had it but instead looked back at Imogene for anything moving up on her.

I’m pretty sure her staff could handle things, but I wasn’t here to play hero, I was here to look out for my sister.

Meanwhile, Imogene finished her spell, and well… Dimensional magic is a bad way to die.

The space the Neatherling were in stretched, and they stretched along with it, in a way that wasn’t healthy.

As she relaxed her hand, the tapered off bits of them fell to the ground.

Imogene looked around, “There’s still something here. Something powerful enough to press down on the fabric of real, a lot more than a Neatherling would.”

She began to walk hesitantly towards the barn, seeing where she was headed, one of the men shouted, “Beth! Beth was in the barn!”

They beat us there, but then we weren't in a hurry, or at least I wasn’t. And little Imo was all tuckered out, and she had short little legs. I had mentioned them to her before, she tried to hit me, but she couldn’t catch me with those little Hobbit legs.

The girl, Beth, had herself a Fairy prince in the barn lying exhausted in the hay behind her. Black velvet looking clothing embroidered with silver stitching covered up his thin body. He had pale skin, but pale in an interesting way rather than looking unhealthy. All that with a set of long sharp tipped ears and deep green eyes shaded by his dark curly hair hanging down loose past his shoulders.

The girl was kind of pudgy in a ready for a growth spurt kind of way, and her freckled nose was sort of sunburned.

She was standing in front of the elf with her arm out to block everyone. "Stop Dad, he needs our help. Those things were after him."

The father, and what I guessed were the Grandparents looked from the girl to the elf boy, while the other guy that had been with them was looking at me and my sister standing over at the door to the barn.

He lifted his hand and then waved it over at the girl and the elf in an “Explain?” gesture.

I nodded at him and shouldered my shotgun by its strap. "Federal Immigration Commission of Investigation. Private contractors. We'll take him from here."

Who knows, maybe that’s what FICA is and what they’re doing with the money that comes out of our paychecks.

Walking past the family, and the girl protesting that she needed to help “Gloren”, I let her father pull her aside and reached out my hand to help Elf boy up. "Come with me if you want to live."

That would be the hand with the nearly pure iron ring on it. I had seen the bite marks on the girl's neck, and the traces of blood on Gloren's lips.

He screamed as I yanked him to his feet. And turned into something else.

I guess it was still kind of frog prince like in a way, but it wasn't a nice combination of frog and prince. It looked like just being alive like that would be a world of pain.

The girl also screamed, I let out what I to this day still maintain was a manly shout, and other people yelled.

And as he opened his mouth to bite me with the two fangs that snapped out with beads of something dark on the tips, Imogene did something that squeezed him into a basketball sized orb with the sound of snapping bones just before he clamped down on my arm.

She began to float the ball out of the barn as the old woman comforted the girl, and the men gave me questioning looks.

I shrugged. “Special training. Firestarter program.”

Then I followed her outside.

Over the next few hours, I helped the old guy and his two sons, along with the "Name I won't mention so no one gets in trouble" Sheriff's department collect and pile up the Neatherling bodies and soak them in kerosene before burning them out by the mulch pile.

The Sheriff was the old guy’s cousin. He wasn’t too worried about writing anything down.

“Gloran” got tossed in on top. He went up with some pretty purple flames and a rather nasty pungent smell.

Then me and my sister went home, and as she washed up I ordered a couple of pizzas, something my deadly little sister had become ridiculously fond of. Even if she does want all veggies on hers.

She is fine with dairy, fish, and birds, but cows and pigs are too cute looking to her to want to eat. I didn't bother to tell her about anchovies since I don't want that evilness in my house.

I can afford two pizzas, and it’s not like we won’t finish off the leftovers.

That was the first time.