Chicory Up: The Pixie Chronicles (15 page)

The “moth” reared its ugly head and bit Ian’s finger.

Phelma Jo watched him do it. Amazement and bewilderment stupefied her, made time slow down. She saw each movement as a series of images, like a slide show.

For half a moment she found herself back in The Ten Acre Wood on a hot summer’s day stuffing a purple dragonfly into a canning jar with a wolf spider. Dick had come along and rescued her prizes. What had he said about the dragonfly?

Then she reeled back into normal time.

“Ouch!” Ian shook his hand until the “moth” dropped
away. It staggered down, then caught sufficient air under its wings to fly a rapid spiral right back to Phelma Jo’s ear.

“Dusty and Thistle are in the bridal shop. Dick is waiting in his car across the street. Do your job.”

She didn’t know where the high-pitched words came from. Part of her dismissed them as just random buzzes from the bug.

Still, she looked across the street and saw Dick Carrick in his BMW convertible, talking on his cell phone while consulting a tablet computer. And sure enough, Dusty and Thistle had just turned from admiring the shop window display to enter the bridal boutique.

The moth flew a deliberate path across the street—at windshield level forcing three cars to screech to a halt and nearly crash. It circled the BMW and landed on the roof.

Phelma Jo’s jaw dropped. It couldn’t be. That moth had spoken in Haywood Wheatland’s voice. He claimed to be a half-breed Pixie/Faery.

The world spun in a new orbit, robbing Phelma Jo of balance. Her peripheral vision started to close down. Cold sweat broke out on her brow and back. Suddenly, her head was too heavy for her neck to support.

“Phelma Jo!” Ian caught her. “You don’t look so good, little lady.” Deftly, he hoisted her in his arms and strode purposefully into a side door of the courthouse.

Shrill, discordant music clanged in Phelma Jo’s mind.
Ding dang chug shplach.
But she didn’t care. She snuggled into Ian’s chest, blotting out the anger behind the atonal chords.

Thistle hummed lightly as she deadheaded the last of the overgrown rhododendrons in Juliet’s garden. She’d found the perfect gown for her wedding at Bridget’s, a figure-molding sheath of light silk with an overlay of lace that sparkled with hints of lavender glitter and tiny bits of faceted glass that looked like stars spangling a night sky.
Dum dee dee do dum dum.
She hummed her happiness, imagining how the gown would look on her in candlelight during the simple, intimate ceremony.

She looked up from her daydreams to snip off another cluster of spent flower petals.

The quiet chaos of eccentric groupings of flowers and shrubs would make a perfect Pixie haven, she mused, or a location for a wedding in a different season, when the sun shone more reliably. She paused, drinking in the moist air, smelling the clouds thickening above.

With a quirk of a smile, she waited half a heartbeat before dashing for the back porch. She beat the first raindrop by half a wingbeat. In Pixie, she could count that as a prank. Cheating rain out of a drenching was difficult.

“I love my life now,” she whispered. Problems between Pixies and Faeries vanished from her mind. They didn’t involve her anymore.

She gazed at the little circle of gold, amethyst, and diamond on her left ring finger. Dick’s promise of marriage, he’d called it. A genuine antique, Juliet had proclaimed, with a warning to be very careful of the precious gem. It came from Juliet’s mother-in-law’s mother.

Thistle had trouble keeping the generations and tangled relationships straight. Music replaced the puzzle in her mind.

Dum dee dee do dum dum.

She spun in a circle and laughed.

“I’m glad your exile hasn’t been a total misery,” Alder said from somewhere near her right elbow.

“What? How? Who?” As she stammered, her former lover grew from a yellow-tinged green Pixie with mottled gray bark clothing into a graceful young man half a head taller than she was.

Skinny wimp.
That’s what humans would call him. She bit back her smile, wondering how she’d ever thought him a strong and vibrant leader.

Until she knew for sure that he’d closed The Ten Acre Wood last summer to protect the tribe from a Faery invasion, she considered him a teenager prone to temper tantrums.

Thistle turned away from him and replaced her garden tools on the shelf above the old cement sink.

“Please, Thistle, I need to talk to you.” Alder stayed her hand with one of his own.

She stared at the short, slender fingers. “Your touch used to thrill me. Now it doesn’t,” she said flatly.

He jerked his hand away. “Please, I need your help, Thistle. Pixies need your help.”

“Why should I help you? You exiled me, humiliated me. Betrayed me.”

“I know. And I’m sorry for that.”

“Apologies aren’t enough.”

“Thistle, you have to come back to The Ten Acre Wood with me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“For the sake of all Pixies, you have to come. You are the only one among us who can end the war among the tribes.”

“You should have thought about that before you closed off access to the Patriarch Oak. You should have thought about the consequences before you took me on a mating flight, promised we’d be together forever when you knew you’d marry Milkweed within the week.”

“Consequences?”

“Oh, I forgot, you’re just a Pixie. You
won’t
think beyond the next prank. Was your betrayal just another prank?”

“Pixies don’t play tricks on other Pixies. That’s what humans are for. You broke that rule by getting Milkweed lost on her way to our wedding.”

“Go away, Alder. I don’t need or want you anymore.”

“But Pixie needs
you
. You are the only one of us who can think up a treaty we can all agree to. The Faeries are watching humans destroy their hill. Now they want to claim The Ten Acre Wood as their own. They are behind this war, and unless you do something about it, those cowards will win, just by sitting back and watching us destroy ourselves. Do you want to see all of Pixie die? We’ve buried six this last week, all killed by other Pixies.”

“There is nothing I can do.” Grief and regret stabbed her heart. “You should find the Faeries a new hill so they’ll leave Pixie alone.”

“I removed the curse on you, Thistle. I removed it right after I cast it.”

“Then why can’t I get back to Pixie? I have tried.”

“You could have returned anytime. All you had to do
was make being a Pixie more important than your love for humans. But you don’t love humans enough. There’s a lost child wandering around Rosie’s territory. Your territory. And you can’t even see her. Until you complete this mission, Pixie will not respond to you.”

“We are all lost children, Alder, wandering in a wilderness of conflicting emotions.”

“Find and help this lost child. Guide her to her proper home and family. Then you can come back to Pixie. But hurry. We are running out of time.”

With that, Alder shrank back to his tiny green form and flew off, dodging raindrops that fell from the sky like tears.

Only then did she realize he had no music. All Pixies had music. Why didn’t he?

D
UM DEE DEE DO DUM DUM.
THISTLE hummed lightly as she applied a scrub brush and cleanser to Mabel’s kitchen countertops. While the house was generally tidy and clean on the surface, a lot of corners and hard-to-reach surfaces showed signs of neglect. If she’d learned nothing else about being human while living with Juliet for six weeks, she’d learned how to clean.

Cleaning gave her an opportunity to think quietly about troubling matters; like a lost child in need of help. But she couldn’t help until the child acknowledged she needed help. That was one of the rules of Pixie. She had to wait for the child to show herself. But who was she? Where was she hiding? If Thistle could figure that out, she could arrange to stumble across the girl. Alder had said it was a girl child.

She applied some extra pressure and bleach water to a particularly stubborn stain. “Ketchup and mustard.” She frowned at the splotch that had become ingrained in the tile.

The colors reminded her of something. Something she knew was important but flitted about, just beyond the reach of her thoughts like cottonwood fluff. Or thistle down.

She giggled at how her name fitted the idea.

A knock on the back door interrupted her musings linking names to personalities, and how she was the only Pixie capable of long-term thoughts. Why couldn’t she nail down the one that drifted on unseen currents just out of her reach?

“Hi, Dick.” She greeted her fiancé with a kiss to his cheek. Oh, how she liked that word fiancé. It sounded special, just like the relationship it implied.

Before she could think further, Dick grabbed her around the waist and drew her into a longer, more intimate kiss. His mobile mouth played teasing games around her face, lingering on her eyelids and at the corner of her smile. Then he plundered her mouth with his own, his tongue dancing with hers.

“You taste good. Like cinnamon,” he whispered between more light kisses. “Hungry for you.” He held her tighter, his fingers digging into her back with an exciting intensity.

“I thought we were meeting Chase and Dusty at the Old Mill Bar and Grill,” she protested weakly. For the first time since arriving in Skene Falls, Thistle wished she knew how to cook, so she and Dick could stay here in this cozy little house and while away the evening in each other’s arms.

“We should go.” He stepped away from her, settled his shoulders, and drew a long breath that expanded his chest all the way down to his bottom rib.

“Before we do…” Thistle placed her left hand on his chest so that they could both see the wink of the gems in her ring. She also needed to keep touching him, just feel him breathe, let his warmth infuse her hand and her life. “I have something important to tell you.”

“More important than dinner with Chase and Dusty.”

“This will only take a moment once I gather the right words.”

“Start at the beginning. One word at a time.”

Thistle gulped back her excitement. “You won’t like the first part. Alder came to see me today when I was working.”

“You’re right. I don’t like that. Was he human or Pixie? ’Cause if he was human, I’ll smash his nose in.” Dick clenched his fists fiercely.

“He came as a human and left as a Pixie. He left alone, though he asked me to go back to The Ten Acre Wood with him.”

Dead silence.

“He said he’d lifted the curse right after he threw me out of Pixie. He said I could have gone back any time if being a
Pixie was more important to me than my human friends,” she said all in a rush.

“He did?”

“You know what that means?”

“I hope I do.”

“That I love you more than I love being a Pixie. And as long as you love me, I will never, ever leave you!”

“Promise?”

“Promise.” She held out her hand to shake his, as she’d seen people do.

Instead, he threw his arms around her waist and lifted her high, spinning them both until dizziness and laughter collapsed them on the floor in a long, soul-deep kiss.

Chicory crept out of Mabel’s house at first light of dawn. The second dawn. He’d slept for most of two nights and an entire day between. This was autumn after all, the time when Pixies usually slept more and more until they hibernated.