Chapter 1

I have just one rule about the use of cell phones on date night – they should remain turned off or at least on silent ring mode. If you call us, make sure that the Three ‘F’s’ Rule damn well applies! The interruption better involve either ‘Flood, Fire or Foes’. No exceptions. If you’ve cut your hand off, go put on a Band-Aid and call 911 – not us!

We try and do date night every Saturday but if it’s just Barry and I out alone together usually we skip the candles, table linen and the obligatory Little Black Dress and we’ll just settle for a brace of good hamburgers or big tray of perfect chicken tenders. But about once a month, like tonight, it’s a gathering of friends and semi-almost family and that means putting on a slinky outfit and the thigh holster only ... and at least reminder from hubby not to pistol-whip either the maître d’ or our waitress ... however much they might deserve it.

The whole experience of ‘eating out’ used to once be defined as an enjoyable evening away from home, having a nice dinner prepared by someone else ... and they get to have to deal with the dirty dishes afterwards. Now it invariably mean 2 hours of frustration dealing with an indifferent waitress that pretends all night that she can’t see us beckon for her, eating sub-standard food served by abused and under-payed employees without the requested extra cheese or insufficient refills of garlic bread, cooked by apathetic illegal aliens each with a hodge-podge of respiratory and skin diseases, and finally being severely overcharged with a sneer for the ‘privilege’ by the manager who always drops our customer comment card straight into the trash without even glancing at it.

Most Hollywood types love this sort of pretension, but it drives me insane ... and hubby says it’s bad form to shove a gun up the nostrils of the menials, even in SoCal.

And so, tonight the cell phones were ringing. All of them. Mine, hubby’s, the famous actor (now semi-retired) Jack and his wife Dorothy (whom we all informally call Dot or Dottie), all started to ringing nearly simultaneous. This was bad. When our oldest friend, Linda Lovegood’s phone also then went off about twenty seconds later we know that the shit had hit the fan hard enough to go airborne! At least once a month Linda joins us for dinner out and at least once a week she’s over at our house, or Jack and Dottie’s for brunch or dinner. She used to be a fairy, the magical sort, years and years ago in the Magic Kingdom, but she gave it all up to be a practicing psychiatrist. She jokes that it’s exactly same sort of work. A few years ago she sent my husband Barry, a struggling former Marine with serious PTSD issues off on a little mission to the Magic Kingdom and we met there. I gave being a Duchess (in a heart-beat) to return awhile later to rejoin Barry here in the mundane realm and never regretted a second of it. It was true, true love ... for both of us. Linda now is just our best-est friend and sometime hints that the Magic Kingdom might not be entirely done with us just yet.

Sometimes, like tonight, our bosses Jack and Dot come to dinner with us too. Jack was currently retired, but he had been a Hollywood A-list actor and producer for nearly three decades and Dottie was his original high school sweetheart. The rare happy Hollywood marriage! We’d lucked out (some of Linda’s magic?) by getting the estate security job for the couple and over the years a genuine friendship had grown between us, far greater than any employee-boss relationship. So, years later my husband and I were still the resident bodyguards and co-chiefs of security for the estate, with a nice salary and an appallingly opulent guest residence all our own. Living it large!

Our adoptive daughter, Amelia, now a very promising young woman of college years, had been left home minding the fort at the Coldwater Canyon estate along with Jack and Dottie’s two high school aged twin daughters (fraternal and quite similar, but not identical twins), Jasmine and Trinity, and the trouble had to come from there ... but this would indeed be a quite singular first! The pair of girls might have been given stripper names at birth, but both tended to be reasonably rational and generally well-behaved. As the informal au-pair for the duo of teenaged girls, Amelia was more than competent enough to handle virtually any problem all on her own, and she quite managed the entire household (us included) very well indeed. Even in her sleep, our girl was more ‘reasonable’ than any of us, especially me. I don’t do ‘reasonable’ – never did ... and especially if it interfered with date night! Part of me was already in shock, right from the start that there existed a problem somewhere in the universe too large or complicated for her to handle entire on her own accord without so much as raising a firm eyebrow!

Amelia had been always been a rather exceptional young lady, even back when she just a filly ... a young centaur lass, back in the Magic Kingdom. No, I did not misspeak, stutter or stammer. As the eldest daughter of the chief centaur of perhaps the largest and most proud centaur clan, she had witnessed first-hand what piss poor rulership and idiotic personnel management (not to mention high treason) could do to her old tribe. Now as a princess in sort-of exile, sent along with me to rejoin my hubby here in the ‘normal’ mundane non-magical world, she had long ago resolved to do much, much better for herself. In high school she had been a student government leader and currently now at UCLA she was battling an inconceivably brutal triple major of business management, pre-law and international affairs. For her, it wasn’t that much of a battle ... she was on the honors list every single semester and was set to even graduate early, at the end of this forthcoming fall semester. Corporations were already salivating at the thought of recruiting her but the money didn’t seem to interest her. We rarely spoke about it, but it was no secret that someday she’d be returning home – undoubted to lead her people, the centaur tribes, in some great future time of need. Their ‘Once and Future Queen’.

She also had a fondness for military-grade firearms that was only barely exceeded by her adoptive parents. If it was trouble that Amelia couldn’t handle ... then it was pretty appallingly serious trouble indeed. The phone call to Jack and Dot confirmed that! There had been a major armed home intrusion back at the estate and armed masked gunmen had assaulted the house and seized Amanda, but not the twin girls!

The dinner check had fortunately already been paid and we had just been sitting around the table at the restaurant sampling deserts with lazy benign indifference when the disaster calls came in and barely thirty seconds later we were all dashing for our very lives out to our cars in the parking lot. Jack had driven the four of us in his hydrogen-converted H3 SUV and Linda had come in her own car and she followed behind us. We weren’t that far from the estate and we got there fast, running every single light in the process. The red light cameras were having a field day going off in sequence as we barreled past, but nobody gave the slightest fuck. “Just go faster!” Dotty hissed as her husband floored the gas (hydrogen) pedal down to the floor and swerved to evade crossing cars that did possess the right-of-way.

Reaching the estate we knew the trouble was serious when we saw the flames and the huge cloud of smoke now hovering over the estate. Not everyone, not even in Hollywood, has a gigantic 24-foot burning pentagram blazing away in the middle of their front lawn! With all of the batshit woo-woo limousine liberals that lived in this area, I was sure that there might be a few to be found locally ... but tastefully hidden somewhere in their back yards so that the usual blood sacrifices wouldn’t disturb the passing ‘Homes of the Stars’ tour busses.

Linda Lovegood, a former senior fairy of the Magic Kingdom, California board licensed psychologist, and our very closest family friend (but alas not quite a lover), just looked at the burning pentagram and uttered a loud ‘oh shit’ that could probably have been easily heard on the other side of Laurel Canyon. That gave me a pretty good notion that this meant trouble from ‘the other side’, aka The Magic Kingdom where my hubby and I spent several wonderful and exciting months a few years ago painstakingly restoring law and order while undoubtedly burning through several cases worth of ammunition and creating a big enough burial mound of corpses to probably fill-in the banks of the Los Angeles River. He grumbles about the experience and gripes that this was a rather complicated way to quit smoking, but you can’t argue with success.

Inside the house we found that both of the teenaged girls were indeed just fine. A bit shaken up, but unharmed. The intruders, there had been six of them, had wanted ... and taken, someone else – Amelia! It had been a military style strike done with extreme clockwork precision; the work of trained mercenary professionals. They had appeared from no-where with a huge flash of light and flame, teleporting right onto the front lawn, blown open the front door of the main house with an explosive, tossed in a series of flash-bangs, and the team of six dressed all in black like ninjas toting assault rifles then burst into the house and seized Amelia. Then they dragged her out of the house biting, kicking and screaming and they all disappeared back into the burning magical summoning circle and were gone in perhaps less than a single minute. They’d never even looked twice at the actor’s daughters or laid a single finger on them.

Here in the so-called ‘normal’ world, the girls could be considered a valuable target for kidnappers. Their dad had made a boatload of money during his ‘A-list’ acting career and then Jack had at least doubled his supply of moola by producing another dozen or so successful movies and mini-series in the last decade. No one in the Magic Kingdom, though, would give a rat’s ass about that. The talent pulling this snatch might be local, recruited here from this Earth ... but their target, and the magical means of arrival and departure, all screamed that there was something very fucked-up happening right now back at the Magic Kingdom! Linda Lovegood was looking deathly pale and her knees were visibly quaking as she examined the used summoning circle. Her fear was palpable to the rest of us.

“They called her ‘Princess’,” Trinity, the younger daughter had remembered, “and it was her that they wanted, not us ... to take her ‘back home’ they said!”

“She was the princess, the one they were hunting for ... they were sure of it. They had something in their hands that glowed bright blue when they used it to touch her, that she was the One,” Jasmine added, “and then they said something about hurrying, that they were going to be late to meet the Queen and that Amelia wouldn’t want to be late to her own sacrifice! I thought they were joking ... but now I don’t think so. Our Amie ... Amelia, was she really a Princess?”

“She was, yes ... a very real princess, from a very important family.” Barry quietly replied. I could see the fury growing in his eyes already; my former USMC lover was mentally packing up his ‘Go Kit’ to go kick some more ass. Fortunately, being sort of prepared for this sort of contingency, we already had a bit more than a few backpacks of hiking stuff pre-prepared. Fire, Flood or Foes ... we were ready!

“A very important family,” Linda confirmed, her inspection of the burning summoning circle now complete. She’d been here at the estate quite a few times before over the years and knew the entire family well. “We all knew that Amelia’s exile here would only be temporary and that someday she’d need to return home for an extremely important and vital duty, but the time wasn’t quite ready yet ... but it was close. Yes ... quite close enough. Someone has decided to jump the gun, so this timing will have to do! Barry and Amanda, I think you know what needs to be done! Go do it! We all need to be inside that pentagram within the next ten minutes if we want to be sure that we arrive there after them as quickly as possible. Remember the time flow differences between here and there! I’ll need to start the ritual to re-trigger the teleportation gate within fifteen minutes. Fortunately, I keep a bag of emergency magical things in the car! We can’t afford another minute’s delay!”

Time did flow unevenly, even erratically between the Magic Kingdom and here, the mundane world. Barry had spent months there during his original visit only find that barely a single day had past here. Then, while Amelia and I waited to rejoin him, time flowed the other way, and we delayed barely a few months there while a full year passed here! Now, here in Mundania, a little more than six years of normal time had past ... what would that mean over there, in my former home?

“So you’re going back... there?” Jack enquired, reaching over the fireplace to grab his WW-II vintage Garand M1 rifle that he had toted as an actor in two separate films (once as an Oscar winning lead actor and the other as an extra, in a hit Emmy winning mini-series he had produced). It was an antique, real vintage WW2 war surplus, but it had been immaculately maintained and he was a crack shot with it. “Then you’re going to need more folks in your fire team and I’m appointing myself 1st Sergeant. Dottie, go get the two big Army duffle bags stashed in the left corner of my office walk-in closet, and girls ... go to the garage and grab your earthquake backpacks and your gun club bags. Barry, go get the Goat and pull it upfront for loading, the camp trailer is already attached, right? Good! Amanda, you’ve got the most shit to shovel, so run and start grabbing it. Everyone then meet in the driveway halfway and we’ll all ferry the loads to the Goat’s trailer. Now ... everyone move it! Be out in the driveway to finish help loading in five, FIVE minutes, or we’re moving out without you! GO!” He slung the vintage but well-loved rifle over his left shoulder in a well-rehearsed casual manner and beckoned at me impatiently to get my ass and elbows moving!

Jack and Dottie knew that we had a ‘bit of a past’ before we were hired to protect them and the girls. We’d told them once or twice that some very strange things had occurred to the both us in a rather far off place and that Amelia, who was then barely a teenager, was a very important person back there that we needed to protect, first and foremost. The fact that Barry often lovingly called me ‘Duchess’ was also something of a serious give-away too. Dottie and I had our own frequent drunken bull sessions of girl talk over bottles of wine or mimosas sitting out by the poolside and over the years she’d undoubtedly clued in on a few more odd bits of our secret past. The word ‘magic’ never really never crossed our lips, overtly in public anyway, but Barry and I would joking use the words ‘The Magic Kingdom’ on occasion, usually in the sense that something currently was moderately fucked up ... just like being ‘back in the Magic Kingdom’, we’d joke. Today it wasn’t funny.

My beloved husband Barry was a veteran of the USMC and while on duty as a marine junior NCO he had spent more time in unfriendly deserts smiting the ungodly than was mentally healthy. When he’d left the Corps he’d brought a handful of physical and emotional problems back to civilian life with him. A little exercise in applied anger management visiting the Magic Kingdom had helped. Afterwards, several years of monthly sessions with our friend Dr. Lovegood had polished off the worst of the remaining sharp edges. As for myself, being a former handmaiden to a very evil and naughty princess for several rather peculiar years, I certainly had my share of issues too, mostly psycho-sexual in nature. Becoming a Duchess of the Magic Kingdom afterwards as a reward for my services was a nice reward, but at heart I’m still an extremely slutty lady-in-waiting, ever eager to do my master or mistress’s bidding ... especially if it’s really, really, nasty.

Married life, I’m delighted to report, had suited us both and except for our mutual gun fetishes, we could now almost proclaim ourselves as being ‘normal’ ... ha! Perhaps on the surface anyway.

Barry ran to go get ‘The Goat’, Jack, Dot and the girls ran off to grab their disaster preparedness packs and gun packs and then met their father outside, to help ferry all of the various cases, crates, packs, packages and parcels I could fling out on the lawn. Virtually everything I wanted to take was pre-stacked at the entrance to our garage, all-ready to load up into the trailer of the Goat, and I spent the next four and half minutes running around our guest house garage like a chicken with my head cut off! Then I checked inside of our guest house and began to despair! We (really meaning me) had left boxes of guns and ammo scattered everywhere! There were guns and piles of ammo here in our guest house (in every room) and yet more guns in various boxes and crates semi-hidden in the back of our smaller storage shed in the back yard. Gotta take them all ... everything must go!