by R. E. Vance
“Indeed. Although being cooped up with the right kind of company can be socialization in its own right,” Penemue said with a secretive grin.
Ms. Reynolds gave Penemue a playful slap on the hand as she turned bright red. “You’re so bad!”
Penemue held up two fingers. “Twice fallen, ma’am. Twice.”
“Anyway,” I jumped in before Ms. Reynolds jumped Penemue. “Where is Mable now?”
“Mable …” Ms. Reynolds said, not taking her eyes off Penemue. Then she seemed to remember where she was and who she was talking to, because she shook her head and said in a hurried tone, “Oh, yes, Mable … she lives out by the Briar Hill Barn. In a birdhouse behind the gazebo.”
She started to write down the address when my phone rang. I looked at the screen. Astarte. “Sorry,” I said, answering it.
“Take your time.” Penemue shot Ms. Reynolds a sly look. “You were saying?”
“Behave,” I muttered to Penemue, and stepped out of the office to answer the phone. “Astarte, what’s up?”
“News, Jean-Luc. Lots of it.” The way the words came out of her, you’d think she was planning a carnal evening of sin and not reporting information about a kidnapping.
“Astarte,” I admonished. “Just get to it.”
“Oh, Jean-Luc—you are such a bore.” Without further sexiness, she told me all that her informant had uncovered, ending with, “Has my informant done well?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, smiling.
“Very well. I shall reward it appropriately.”
“ ‘It’?” I asked, knowing full well what an appropriate reward was in Astarte’s world.
“Yes—my informant is a naiad. Few know this, but naiads are neither female nor male—they are both. But what it lacks in gender conformity, it makes up with—”
“Thank you, Astarte,” I cut her off. “Do give it my regards.” I hung up the phone.
Whatever it was, it deserved all the rewards in the world.
“Good call?” Penemue asked when I stepped back inside.
“Very good call,” I said, still smiling. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Reynolds. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact us.” I handed the caretaker a piece of paper with my number on it. “And as for Mable—do you have a number for her, as well?”
Ms. Reynolds folded the paper and put it in her lapel pocket. Then, shaking her head, she said, “No … it’s not as if they make pixie-size telephones. But I’m quite confident she’ll be home.”
“Oh? And why’s that?”
“When they arrested Mable, the police were quite rough with her. She’s pretty banged up. I can’t imagine she will be doing anything but resting.”
“Oh …” I sighed. “GoneGodDammit.”
Chapter 3
Ever Been Punched By a Pixie?
As we left Ms. Reynolds’ office, parents were showing up to pick up their little ones. I looked at my Mickey Mouse watch: three o’clock. I guessed that was what constituted a “full day” when you were still potty training.
Chaos ensued as little boys and girls fumbled to put on their jackets and mulled about in search for matching shoes. There was some pushing and shoving, some misplaced bags and lunch pails, but all in all the chaos cleared up pretty quickly. The world was made right again as soon as each kid was holding onto their mom or dad’s hand.
I heard giggling or complaining or the telling of some nonsensical story about their day as the children were escorted home. In that one moment, all the kids of the Next Bees Nursery shared the common experience of being happy. They were happy to be with their parents. Happy to be going home where their toys and bed and the comfort of being somewhere familiar waited for them. What a thought …
I never knew my dad. As far I knew, he was some wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am who left and didn’t even know that he’d knocked up my mom. And as for my mom? She died giving me life. Bled out because of some undiagnosed, severe form of pre-eclampsia called HELLP syndrome. I got to spend exactly two days with her before she left this world.
PopPop—my grandfather, and the man who raised me—told me that her last words as the endless night took her from me were: “My life for his … fair deal. More than fair.” He told me she smiled as she exhaled one last time, rigor mortis pausing her look of contentment for all time. After all, she got to hold her child … if only for a little while.
That was the last time she saw me. I, on the other hand, was a little kid, inchoate and barely conscious. In a very real way I never got to meet my mom at all.
As I saw those kids walk away, hand-in-hand with their moms and dads, three things ran through my mind that made my soul burn with rage. The first was what I would give to be with my mom, if only for a minute. The second was that there were children out there who were crying for their moms right now—and I would do whatever it took to get them home.
As for the last thought, my mind went back to what Conner said to me in the desert: “Sometimes bad men do good things, and good men do bad things. Which one will you be?”
Which one was I? I honestly wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. Whether I was good or bad, one thing was for damn sure: everyone who played a role in those kids’ disappearance was going to die. I’d make sure of it.
“Daddy,” Sinbad said, running over to Penemue and wrapping her arms around the angel’s legs. She looked up at the massive creature and tried winking, but it just looked like exaggerated blinking.
Many of the parents were staring at him. They were already uneasy to have an angel walking amongst them, but an angel with a kid? One mom tilted her head to another and said softly, “Daddy?”
“I think you mean him, don’t you?” Penemue said, pushing her over to me. He glanced around apologetically. “The kid is playing around. She does so because Uncle Penemue here spoils her, while this fellow,” he cocked a thumb my direction, “gets to do all the responsible parenting.”
“I see,” Ms. Reynolds said with a knowing smile. “Police partners can get pretty close. And with Mom out of the picture …” She gave us a big approving smile, like she wanted us to know that she accepted our “alternative lifestyle.”
“Sadly, no,” Penemue said. “We are but friends. He is in a relationship with his past. But I, on the other hand, am free as the proverbial bird. Perhaps I could come back some time and we could—”
“Inappropriate conduct,” I said.
“Nonsense,” Penemue said. “Inappropriate conduct comes after dinner.”
↔
As soon as we were outside, I pointed toward the address Ms. Reynolds gave us.
“You’re in a hurry,” Penemue said.
“I am,” I said. “Seems a certain little pixie has been a bad, bad girl.”
“Will she get time-out?” Sinbad asked.
Hellelujah!
↔
We arrived at the pixie-nanny’s address just as the sun was setting. Except that it wasn’t an address at all, but a series of complicated instructions that started with Go to the park and ended with Find the giant oak tree near the gazebo.
After walking around the park—a park that was bigger than Paradise Lot’s entire downtown—we eventually found the spot Ms. Reynolds had been referring to. And there, hanging off one of the giant oak’s lower branches, swayed one of the most elaborate doll houses I’d ever seen. It looked like an old Victorian mansion, complete with a thatched roof, two sets of balconies that wrapped around its two storeys and an attic big enough for a couple tomcats to take a nap.
Little lights shined through one of the house’s windows. I noticed that an electric cable came out of the chimney, interlaced through the chain and crawled up the tree all the way to the top, where several solar panels rested. Talk about “off the grid.”
I peered through the lit window and saw what looked like Barbie laying on an appropriately sized leather couch. She was reading on a Kindle that lay on its side.
Pulling back, I knocked on the front
door, which constituted flicking the wooden panel with my pinkie finger. I heard a groan and a few moments of rustling from inside, and then the door opened.
“Yes?” said a clearly exhausted pixie.
Standing, she was barely five inches high, with very pretty eyes, high cheekbones and pointy ears. She looked like a female Vulcan doll. Her hair was short, styled in that chic, spikey look that oozed confidence and somehow conveyed the message of “I’m beautiful, serious and fun—if, that is, you can handle me.” She wore jeans and a T-shirt, which I recognized as Barbie accessories because I’m a—ahem—serious toy collector. All in all, she looked like a woman ready to take this world by storm. A woman smaller than a rolling pin, granted, but hey—so many amazing things come in small, pixie-size packages. Don’t judge a book by its cover and all that.
Everything about her would have told me she was one very capable pixie, except for one thing: she was badly beat up. Her arm was in a sling, and I could see large horizontal bruises up and down her exposed skin. I was fairly certain I knew what could make bruises like that: rubber bands. Hold a pixie’s arm down and stretch a rubber band over her arm, pinning it at both ends so that the band was taut, pull it up and let it go. Snap, it slashes across her arm, creating welts that, if done to a human, you’d need a crow bar to replicate.
Ms. Reynolds said that the cops didn’t exercise restraint when interviewing the pixie. But this kind of technique goes beyond getting carried away during interrogation. It was torture—plain and simple.
“Mable?” I asked.
She nodded, scanning with wide eyes from my face to Penemue’s to Sinbad’s. She was clearly terrified that we were here to administer round two.
“Would you mind joining us at the gazebo? We have some questions about Michael and Susie.” I showed her my badge.
Mable gulped. “Let me turn off my Kindle,” she said, and closed the door.
↔
Mable jumped down from her bird house and made her way to the gazebo faster than the rest of us could. Putting things into scale, that little feat was the equivalent of me jumping off a five-storey building and running a 5K … uphill. She did it with one hand in a sling and without losing breath.
These creatures are amazing, and should be respected and held in awe, not tortured, I thought with a heavy sigh. But then I remembered why we were here and the little piece of information that Astarte’s informant had told her, and my skin went cold.
A park bench sat in the middle of the gazebo. Sinbad and I sat, but Penemue, his frame far too large to fit comfortably on it, opted to stand. Mable, on the other hand, crawled up the table’s leg and sat cross-legged at the center of the table.
“So,” I started. “Let me start off by saying that what those policemen did to you … I do not approve and I will never resort to such tactics. I just want to be clear about that from the outset.”
Mable looked at her bruises and breathed a sigh of relief.
“But I won’t tolerate lies, either.” I pointed to Penemue. “Do you know who he is?”
The pixie looked up at the twice-fallen angel and shook her head.
“His name is Penemue, and he is the angel responsible for giving humanity the written word, among other things.”
“Oh …” she said, clarity filling her eyes. “Just like Prometheus, Mātariśvan … Grandmother Spider.”
I gave Mable a blank look.
“He is the angel who gave humans the forbidden knowledge of the written word. He is a traitor to his God and a Champion for humans … But he’s not the only one who defied the gods to help humans. Every pantheon has at least one.” Mable nodded at Penemue with respect.
“I started it,” said Penemue. “The rest are cheap copycats.”
“OK, fine. Traitor, Champion,” I echoed. “Do you know what his thing is?”
Mable shook her head.
“He always knows when you’re lying.” I threw as much gravitas into the statement as I could, trying to let the full weight of the implication hang over her.
It would have worked, too, had it not been for Sinbad, whose eyes widened as she stared at Penemue with new-found respect. “Like Santa Claus,” she murmured.
Mable burst out laughing. “Or a lie detector,” she said, and pretty soon both of them were giggling away.
I slammed my hand on the table, causing Mable to fly up two inches in the air. Not my intention at all—thankfully Mable wasn’t hurt. Sinbad gave me a shocked look, but at least they had both stopped laughing. “This is serious,” I said. “Very serious.” I gave Sinbad my best Stop-talking look, to which the little pirate put her head down on the table and pouted.
“OK,” I said. “Michael and Susie. What happened?”
“I already told the police. I took them home from the nursery and put them to bed. Then I went about making their lunch. When I went to wake them up, they were gone.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Mable confirmed.
“And you didn’t hear or see anything?”
“No, nothing.”
I looked at Penemue, who nodded.
“So they just disappeared?”
“Yes.”
I fixed Mable with a no-nonsense stare and said, “They weren’t taken to … oh, I don’t know … produce more tears to sell on the black market?”
↔
When Astarte called, she said one thing to me: a pixie from the mainland was selling tears on the black market. Tears, especially children’s, were once-upon-a-time a powerful ingredient in many spells, incantations and wards. With the gods gone, such things were less and less common, since many Others were unwilling to burn time to actually make the magic work.
But there were enough Others who held onto the tradition of those enchantments, finding comfort not in the effects of the magic, but simply by having them there. Think of it like hanging a mezuzah on the doorpost or putting cookies out for Santa. Traditions. Comfort. Most Others created tears by mixing the right amount of salt and minerals into distilled water. But many Others were purists, willing to pay a premium for the real thing.
St. John’s wort for health, acacia for protection, sarsaparilla root for sexual vitality … these were just a few of the things you could get in Paradise Lot’s apothecaries. But on the black market, you got the harder-to-come-by ingredients: Dracaena draco for psychic protection, Kotochul eggs for empathy spells and—the rarest item—children’s tears, used for a number of potions both good and bad.
And Mable was one of the leading suppliers.
But when I confronted Mable about the tears, she didn’t give me a look of guilt, but one of confusion. “Tears? Yes, I collect their tears when they cry … but I don’t make them cry. I would never do that. Never!”
“Maybe,” I said. “But then again, maybe you saw how lucrative tears were and you decided to up production. Michael, Susie … a few others, too. A lot of money to be made.”
“You think I would hurt children for money?” She looked at me like I’d just killed her puppy and was laughing. “What kind of monster are you?” She wiped away tears as they formed in her eyes.
“Oooh, poor pixie,” Sinbad said. The little pirate gently stroked Mable’s back and gave me an admonishing look. “Leave her alone.”
“First of all—I can’t. And secondly,” I looked back at Mabel, “why do you do it?”
Mabel looked up at me with tear-filled eyes. “Do you know what it is like to live here? I wake up at five to get everything ready: lunch, diaper station, coloring table, paints, everything. Then I take the children to daycare or the park or the zoo or wherever they’re scheduled to go. We play, I feed them, change them, we play some more, I put them down for naps, I feed them some more and we play. Then the parents come home just in time to tuck them in. That’s when I go about cleaning the house and preparing dinner for the adults. I feed them … but they don’t play.” Mable grimaced at that. “When I was working for them, I was at their home until t
en every night. Seven days a week. I don’t get any time to go outside and gambol.”
“Gamble?”
“Gam-bol,” Penemue corrected me. “Pixie thing, lots of frolicking in nature …” He nodded at Mabel. “Go on.”
“I don’t even get paid minimum wage. They always pay me under the table. Except it’s never actually under the table. They leave an envelope of money on the side table by the front door.”
“So you sell tears?”
“It’s good money,” she said, nervously sniffing the flower on the table. “Besides, half of what I make from their tears is put in a fund for their college education. An ISA account.”
“An ISA?”
“Yeah,” the pixie said. “A non-taxable account. Each kid is allowed four thousand a year. So far, their accounts are full. Then I put twenty-five percent into my own ISA account, and twenty-five percent supplements my own income.”
“Wait, you have a tax-free account?” I didn’t even have a tax-free account. I was jealous.
The pixie nodded.
“So if life is so terrible here, why not move to Paradise Lot?”
“I started in Paradise Lot, but there’s not a lot of work there. The best I could get was washing dishes. At least here I get to play with children. I like children. They don’t care what kind of species you are. All they care about is here and now. I can do here and now. Besides, I love to gambol—and there aren’t many parks in Paradise Lot. At least here I get a couple hours of gamboling each night.” Suddenly she put her hands up to her chest, spinning around three times on the picnic table. “It’s not so bad here.”
“OK,” I said to the nanny-slash-financial-planner. “But the tears. It’s gotta stop.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s illegal.”
The pixie looked at me gravely. “No, it’s not. I checked. There is no law against selling tears.”
“But you’re selling them on the black market.”
“Only because supermarkets won’t stock them. If they would, I’d distribute there!”