“Nothing.” Setting his half of the sweet back in the bowl, he draped his arm over her shoulder, moving his thumb gently against her arm. Remembering the smell of the newlings, he dropped his gaze to her flat belly, not swelling with life for more than a year now. His wish for sterility might have extended her life—but had it also made her last years empty?
Setting her sweetball aside as well, Matalina shifted from him, pulling out of his reach to sit facing him. “Is it the pixy that you and Bis went into Cincinnati to help? I’m proud of you for that. The children enjoy watching the garden when you’re gone. They feel important, and they’ll be all the more prepared when they’ve a garden of their own.”
A garden of their own, he thought. His children were leaving. Vincet’s children were so young. His entire adult life was before him. “Mattie, do you ever wish for newlings?” he asked.
Her eyes fell from his, and her breath seemed to catch as she stared at the piles of clothes.
Fear struck Jenks at her silence, and he sat up to take her hands in his. “Tink’s tears. I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I thought you didn’t want any more. You said… We talked about it…”
Smiling to look even more beautiful, Matalina placed a fingertip to his lips. “Hush,” she breathed, leaning her head forward to touch his as her finger dropped away. “Jenks, love, of course I miss newlings. Every time Jrixibell or any of the last children do something for the first time, I think that I’ll never see the joy of that discovery on another child’s face, but I don’t want any more children who won’t survive a day after me.”
Worried, he shifted closer, his hands tightening on hers. “Mattie, about that,” he started, but she shook her head, and the dust falling from her took on a red tinge.
“No,” she said firmly. “We’ve been over this. I won’t take that curse so I can have another twenty years of life. I’m going to step from the wheel happy when I reach the end, knowing all my children will survive my passing. No other pixy woman can say that. It’s a gift, Jenks, and I thank you for it.”
Beautiful and smiling, she leaned forward to kiss him, but he would have none of it. Anger joining his frustration, he pulled away. Why won’t she even listen? Ever since he’d taken that curse to get lunker-size for a week, his flagging endurance had returned full force. It had fixed his mangled foot and erased the fairy steel scar that had pained him during thunderstorms. It was as if he was brand-new. And Mattie wasn’t.
“Mattie, please,” he began, but as every other time, she smiled and shook her head.
“I love my life. I love you. And if you keep buzzing me about it, I’m going to put fairy scales in your nectar. Now tell me how you’re going to help the Vincet family.”
He took a breath, and she raised her eyebrows, daring him.
Jenks’s shoulders slumped and his wings stilled to lie submissively against his back. Later. He’d convince her later. Pixies died only in the fall or winter. He had all summer.
“I need to destroy a statue,” he said, seeing the clean wood around him and imagining the dirt walls Vincet was living between, then remembering the flower boxes he and Mattie had raised most of their children among. He was lucky, but the harder he worked, the luckier he got.
“Oh, good,” she said distantly. “I know how you like to blow things up.”
His mood eased, and he shifted her closer to feel her warmth. Pixies had known how to make explosives long before anyone else. All it took was a little time in the kitchen. And a hell of a lot of nitrogen, he thought. “By tonight,” he added, bringing himself back to the present, “to help free a dryad.”
“Really?” Eyeing him suspiciously, Matalina popped her half of the sweetball into her mouth. “I ’ought ’ay were cut ’own in the great deforestation of the eighteen hundreds. ’Ave they emigrated in from Europe?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But this one is trapped in a statue, existing on energy right off a ley line instead of sipping it filtered from a tree. He’s been slipping into Vincet’s children’s minds when they sleep, trying to get them to break his statue.” He wasn’t going to tell her the dryad had accidentally killed one. It was too awful to think about.
Matalina stood, rising on a burst of energy to dust the ceiling. “A city-living dryad?” she murmured, cleaning wood that would lay unseen for months if Rachel continued her pattern and avoided her desk even after they vacated it. “Tink loves a duck, what will they think of next?”
Jenks reclined to see if he could see up her dress. “Blowing it up isn’t the problem. See, there’s this nymph,” he said, smiling when he caught a glimpse of a slim thigh.
She looked down at him, her disbelief clear. Seeing where his eyes were, she twitched her skirt and shifted, eyes scrunched in delight even as she huffed in annoyance. “A nymph? I thought they were extinct.”
“Maybe they’re just hiding,” he said. “This one said something about waking up. She was having a hard time breathing through the pollution.” Until she came after us.
Flitting to the opening in the desk, Matalina shook her rag with a crack. “Hmmm.”
“She’s got this goddess … warrior vibe,” he said when Matalina returned to the ceiling. “Mattie, the woman is scary. I think if I get the dryad free, the nymph will follow him and leave Vincet in peace.”
Again Matalina made that same doubt-filled sound, not looking at him as she dusted.
“Freeing the dryad is the only way I can help Vincet,” Jenks said, not knowing if Matalina was unsure about Sylvan or the nymph. “He’s only been on his own for a year, and he has three children and passel of newlings. He’s done so well.”
Matalina turned at the almost jealous tone in his words, the pride and love in her expression obvious. “You were nine, love, when you found me,” she said as she dropped to him, her wings a clear silver as they hummed. “Coming from the country with burrs in your hair and not even a scrap of red to call your own. Don’t compare yourself to Vincet.”
He smiled, but still…“It took me two years to be able to provide enough for Jax and Jih to survive,” he said, reaching up to take her hand and draw her to him.
His wife sat beside him, perched on the very edge of the couch with her hands holding his. “Times were harder. I’m proud of you, Jenks. None has done better. None.”
Jenks scanned the nearly empty desk, the sounds of his children playing filtering in over the radio talking about the freak tornado that had hit the outskirts of Cincinnati last night. Not wanting to accept her words, he pulled her to sit on his lap, tugging her close and resting his chin on her shoulder and breathing in the clean smell of her hair. He could have done better. He could have given up the garden and gone to work for the I.S. years sooner. But he hadn’t known.
“You need to help this family,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “I don’t understand why you do some of the things you do, but this… This I understand.”
“I can’t do it alone,” he said, grimacing as he remembered Daryl controlling the wind, taking the very element he lived in and turning it against him.
“Wasn’t Bis a help?” she asked, sounding bewildered.
Jenks started, not realizing what his words had sounded like. “He was the perfect backup,” he said, his words slow as he remembered almost being squished, and then Bis’s frantic flight in the streets. “He’s no fighter, but he yanked my butt out of the fire twice.” Smiling, Jenks thought he couldn’t count how many times he’d done the same for Rachel. “I’d ask Rachel to help,” he said, “but she won’t be home until tomorrow.”
Still on his lap, Matalina reached for Jenks’s half of sweetball and put it in his mouth. “Then ask Ivy,” she said as he shifted it around. “She’ll help you.”
“Ivy?” he said, his voice muffled. “It’s my job, not hers.”
Collapsing against him in irritation, Matalina huffed. “The vampire is always asking you to help her,” she said severely. “I don’t begrudge it. It’s your job! But don’t
be so slow-winged that you won’t ask for help in return. It would be more stupid than a fairy’s third birthday party for Vincet to lose a newling because you were too proud to ask Ivy to be a distraction.”
Jenks thought about that, lifting Matalina to a more comfortable position on his lap. “You think I should ask her?” he asked.
Matalina shifted to give him a moot look.
“I’ll ask her,” he said, feeling the beginnings of excitement. “And maybe have Jumoke come out with me, too. The boy needs something other than his good looks.”
Matalina made a small sound of agreement, knowing as much as he did that his dark hair and eyes would make finding a wife almost impossible.
Grinning, Jenks pushed them both into the air. She squealed as their wings clattered together, and a real smile, carefree and delighted, was on her as he spun her to him, hanging midair in the closed rolltop desk. “I’ll teach Jumoke a trade so he has something to bring to the marriage pot beside cold pixy steel and a smart mind,” he said, delighting in her smile. “I can teach him everything I know. It won’t be like Jax. I’ll make sure he knows why he’s doing it, not just how. And with Ivy distracting the nymph, I’ll blow up the dryad’s statue. I already know how to make the explosive. I just need a whopping big amount of it.”
Matalina pulled from him, holding his hands for a moment as she looked at him in pride. “Go save them, Jenks. I’ll be in the garden when you get back. Bring me a good story.”
Jenks drew her close, their dust and wings mingling as he kissed her soundly. “Thank you, love,” he said. “You always make things seem so simple. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’ll get along just fine,” she whispered, but he was gone, already having zipped through the crack in the rolltop desk. Smile fading, Matalina looked over the empty desk. Picking up the discarded fabric, she followed him out.
4
The shouts of his kids came loud through the church’s kitchen window, their high-pitched voices clear in the moisture-heavy air as they played hide-and-seek in the early dark. The boys, especially, had been glad to get out of the desk and into their admittedly more-cramped-than-a-troll’s-armpit quarters in the oak stump. More cramped, but vastly more suited to a winged person smaller than a Barbie doll.
A parental smile threatened Jenks’s attempt at a businesslike attitude as he stood on the spigot before the window and cleared his throat. Jumoke’s apprenticeship had begun, and Jenks was trying to impress on him the sensitivity needed in mixing up some pixy pow. It wouldn’t be napalm, which pixies had first used to get rid of weeds—then fairies when it was discovered to their delight that it would go boom under the right conditions. And it wouldn’t be C4, C3, or any other human explosive. It would be something completely different, thanks to the dual properties of stability and ignition that pixy dust contained.
“That’s it, Papa?” Jumoke said doubtfully as he penciled in the last of the ingredients on one of Ivy’s sticky notes. Unlike most of Cincinnati’s pixies, Jenks’s family could read. It was a skill Jenks taught himself shortly after reaching the city, then used it to claim a section of worthless land before the proposed flower boxes existing on a set of blueprints went in.
“That’s it,” he said, gazing at his son’s hair. It looked especially dark in the fluorescent light. For the first time, he saw it as perhaps an asset. It wouldn’t catch the sun as his own hair did, a decided advantage in sneaking around. Perhaps Jumoke was the reigning hide-and-seek champion for a reason.
Bis, newly awake and doing his sullen gargoyle thing atop the fridge, rustled his wings in disbelief. “There is no way that soap, fertilizer, lighter fluid, and pixy dust is going to blow that statue up. It’s solid rock!”
“Wanna bet a week’s worth of sentry duty?” Jenks asked. “I use it all the time. A pixy handful will blow surveillance lines and fry motherboards, QED. We’re just going to need a lot more.” Rising up, he eyed the rack of spelling equipment hanging over the center island counter. “Can you get that pot down for me?”
Jumoke made a small noise, and Bis’s pebbly gray skin went black. “Rachel’s spell pot?” the gargoyle squeaked in apparent fear.
Hands on his hips, Jenks hummed his wings faster. “The little one, yes. Jumoke, go see if you can find Ivy’s lighter fluid out by the grill. We need more propellant than we have dust.”
The young pixy darted out into the hallway, and Jenks frowned at the worried tint to his son’s aura now. Tink’s tit-ties, he could use Rachel’s spelling equipment. The woman wouldn’t mind. Hell, she’d never even know.
Ears pinned to his ugly skull, Bis hopped the short distance from the fridge to the center island counter, jumping up with his wings spread to pluck the small copper pot. It would hold about a cup of liquid and was Rachel’s favoritesize spell pot. She had two of them.
“Can I have the other one, too, please?” Jenks said dryly, and the kid’s tail wrapped around his feet, his ears going flatter. “I can’t touch anything but copper,” he complained. “And if I use the plastic ones, they’ll smell funny. Will you grow a pair and get the bowl?” he said, darting upward and smacking it to make it ping.
“Don’t blame me if Rachel yells at you for using her spell pots,” Bis muttered as he plucked it from the overhead rack and set it rocking next to the first. The draft from his wings blew Jenks back when Bis hopped to Ivy’s chair at the big farmhouse kitchen table, pulling first the phone book, then Vixen’s Guide to Gathering Guys and Gals down and onto the seat. The guide was the larger of the two.
“Don’t blame me if Ivy de-wings you for using her computer,” Jenks shot back as Bis settled onto the stack of books and shook the mouse to wake the computer up. One day he was going to get caught, and then there’d be Tink to pay. Tugging a bowl to the middle of the counter, Jenks felt a moment of guilt. “Rachel will never know. What’s the problem here?”
Bis looked up from the keyboard. His thin fingers were curved so his nails touched the keys, and he snapped off Ivy’s password without looking. “You didn’t ask her.”
“Yeah, like you said pretty-please for Ivy’s password,” he said, and Bis flushed dark black. Smug, Jenks pulled the recipe closer and wondered how he was going to size up the amounts. “I’ll polish the stinkin’ bowls when I’m done,” he muttered, and Bis smirked. “I’m not afraid of Rachel!” he said, hands on his hips.
“And I’m not afraid of Ivy.”
They both jumped at the hum of dragonfly wings, but it was Jumoke. “It’s metal,” he said, his expression going confused when he saw the panicked look on their faces. “What did I do?”
“I thought you were your mother,” Jenks said, and Jumoke’s wings turned a bright red as he drifted backward, giggling. It didn’t seem right to be teaching a six-year-old how to make explosives. The giggling didn’t help. But now was the time to start teaching him, not two weeks before he left the garden like he had Jax. There was a moral philosophy that went along with the power a pixy could wield, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake with Jumoke as he had with Jax.
Bis stood, stretching his wings until the tips touched over his head. “I’ll help,” he said, and the two flew out into the hall and then the back living room. The cat door squeaked, and Jenks sighed, glancing at the clock. He’d already called Ivy, but she wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours. The three of them would have to make a whopping amount of explosive before she got home; he didn’t want Ivy to know he could make this stuff. Word would get out, and then Inderland Security would start drafting them into service. Pixies liked where they were, on the fringes and ignored … mostly.
Jenks drifted down until his feet hit the polished stainless steel, harmless through his boots. The squeak of the cat door brought him back to reality, and he pretended to be estimating the depth of the bowl when Bis and Jumoke flew in with the reek of petroleum.
“Because their horns don’t work,” Bis said. “Get it? Because their horns don’t work?”
> The thunk of the tin can hitting the counter was loud, and Jenks’s hair shifted in the gust from Bis’s wings. “Jumoke, what do you think. A cup?” Jenks asked, measuring the bowl off at his shoulder and pacing around the perimeter.
“I don’t get it,” Jumoke said, and after landing inside one of the bowls, he added, “A cup and a third to the brim?”
“You know, their horns?” The gargoyle reached up and touched the tiny nubs where his would be when he grew up.
“Bis, I don’t get it!” Jumoke said, clearly embarrassed. “Dad, what’s next?”
Jenks smiled, pleased. A cup and a third. Jumoke had it right. Jenks looked up to find Bis and Jumoke watching him eagerly. Teaching an adolescent pixy and teenage gargoyle how to make explosives might not be such a good idea. But hell, he’d learned when he was five.
“Mmmm, Ivory soap,” he said. “Ivy has a stash of it—”
“In Rachel’s bathroom under the sink,” Jumoke finished, already in the air. “Got it.”
Bis was a moment behind, his wind-noisy takeoff making the bowls rock.
“Just one bottle ought to do it!” Jenks shouted after them. “We’re blowing up a statue, not a bridge.” The Turn take it, they were far too eager to learn this.
When the sound of their rummaging became muffled, he braced himself against the copper bowl and pushed it to the can of lighter fluid. Taking to the air, he tapped the can with his sword point, moving down until he heard a sound he liked. Marking the spot with his eyes, he darted back, aimed his sword, and flew at it.
With a stifled yell for strength, he jammed his sword into the canister. The hard pixy steel went right through. His elder children had fairy steel, taken from invaders testing their strength. Jenks’s blade was stronger, and the thin sheet of metal was nothing. Grinning as he imagined it was an invading fairy he had just pierced, Jenks put his foot on can for support and pulled the sword out, darting back to avoid the sudden stream flowing out and arching into the bowl … just as he had planned.
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