Into the Woods (34 page)

Frowning, Jenks shivered his wings for some light as he sat across the fire from him. “Sleepflying? She’ll outgrow it. One of my sons spent a summer waking up in the garden more than his bed.” Jenks smiled. There was always some question if Jumoke had been sleepflying, or simply looking for solitude. His middle-brood son endured a lot of good-natured ribbing from his elder siblings due to his brown hair and hazel eyes, rare to the point of shame among pixies.

Vincet made a rude huff, the dust from his wings turning black. “Did your son scream in pain as his wings smoldered while he beat at a statue? Did his aura become sickly, and pale? My daughter isn’t sleepflying, she’s being attacked. I can’t wake her up until the moon passes its zenith. Even if I bend her wing backward. It’s been happening every night now that the moon is nearly full.”

Vincet’s face went riven with grief, and his head dropped. “Last night I kept her awake, and the statue attacked a newling. Noel held him as he died, unable to breathe, he was screaming so. It was . . .” The young pixy’s wings drooped, and he wiped his eyes, black dust slipping from his fingers when the tear dried. “I couldn’t wake him. We tried and tried, but he just kept screaming as his wings turned to powder and his dust burned inside him.”

Horrified, Jenks shifted on his cushion, not knowing what to say. Vincet’s child had burned alive?

Vincet met his eyes, begging without saying a word. “Noel is afraid to let the newlings sleep,” he whispered, his hands wringing and his wings still as he sat on Jenks’s winter-musty cushion. “My children are terrified of the dark. A pixy shouldn’t be afraid of the dark. It’s where we belong, under the sun and moon.”

Jenks’s paternal instincts tugged on him. Vincet wasn’t much older than Jax—his eldest now on his own. If he hadn’t seen Vincet’s fear, he would have said the pixy buck was dust-struck. Taking a stick as thick as his arm, Jenks knelt to put it on the fire, dusting it heavily to help it catch. “I don’t see how a statue can cause children to go wandering,” he said hesitantly, “much less set their dust on fire. Are you sure that’s the cause? Maybe it’s a mold or a fungus.”

Vincet’s dust turned a muddy shade of red as it pooled about his boots. “It’s not a mold or fungus!” he exclaimed, and Jenks eyed his sword. “It’s the statue! Nothing grows on it. It’s cursed! And why would her aura shift like that? Something is in her!”

Jenks’s wings hummed as he drew back from the hearth. Making a statue come to life to torment pixies didn’t sound like witch magic, but there were other things that hadn’t come out of the closet when the pixies, vampires, and witches had—things that would cause humans to raze the forests and plow the abandoned smaller towns into dust if they knew. But a statue? And why would a statue want to destroy itself? Unless . . . something
was
trapped in it?

“Have you felt anything?” he asked, and Vincet glanced at the dark tunnel behind him.

“No.” He shifted uncomfortably, looking at his sword. “Neither has Noel. I’ve nothing to give you but my sword, but I’d gladly hand it over to you if you’ll help us. I’m lost. I can defend my land from fairies, hummers, crows, and rats, but I can’t see what is killing my children. Please, Jenks. I’ve come such a long way. Will you help me?”

Embarrassed, Jenks looked at the young man’s sword as Vincet held it out to him, his face riven with helplessness. “I won’t take another man’s steel,” Jenks said gruffly, and the young pixy went terrified.

“I have nothing else . . .” he said, the tip of the sword falling to rest on his knees.

“Now, I wouldn’t say that,” Jenks said, and Vincet’s wings filled the room with the sound of a thousand bees and the glow of the sun. “You have two hands. Can you make a dragonfly hut out of a flowerpot?”

Vincet’s hope turned to disgust. “I’ll not take charity,” he said, standing up with his sword in a tight grip. “And I’m not stupid. You have a castle and a large family. You can make a dragonfly hut yourself.”

“No!” Jenks said, standing up after him. “I want an office on the edge of the property, on the street side of the wall that divides the garden from the road. Can you build me that? Under the lilac? And paint me a sign if I give you the letters for it? It’s not garden work, and I can’t ask my children to make me an office. My wife would pluck my wings!”

Vincet hesitated. His eyes shut in a slow blink, and when they opened, hope shone again. “I can do that.”

Smiling, Jenks wondered if Jax had made half as honorable a man. The dust-caked idiot had run off, poorly trained, with a thief. Jenks’s last words to him had been harsh, and it bothered him, for once a child left the garden, he was gone forever. Usually. But Jenks’s kids were changing that tradition, too. “I’ll take a look,” Jenks said. “Me and my partner, Bis,” he added in a sudden thought. Rachel never went on a run without backup. He should take someone, too. “If I can help you, then you’ll build me an office out of a flowerpot.”

Looking up at him, Vincet nodded, relief a golden dust slipping from him. “Thank you,” he said, sliding his sword away with a firm intent. “Can you come now?”

Jenks looked askance at the ceiling to estimate the light. The sun was down by the looks of it, and Bis would be awake. “Absolutely. But, ah, I have to let my wife know where I’m going.”

Vincet sighed knowingly, and together they flew up the short passage to the sun, leaving the fire to go out by itself.

PIXY SITUATIONS, INQUIRE HERE
, Jenks thought as he guided Vincet to the garden wall to sit with Jumoke while he talked with Matalina. What harm could ever come of that?

TWO

H
ands on his hips to maintain his balance, Jenks shifted his wing angle to keep his position as the night wind gusted against him. Before him, the distant evening traffic was a background hum to the loud TVs, radios, and phone conversations beating on his ears in the dark, coming from the brightly lit townhouses across the street. Behind him were the soft sounds of a wooded park. The noise from the nearby city was almost intolerable, but the small garden space with its two statues and profusion of flowers in the middle of the city was worth the noise pollution. The barrage was likely reduced to low thumps and rumbles underground where Vincet had begun to make a home for his young family.

His middle was empty, and as he waited for Vincet to return from telling Noel they were back, Jenks fumbled in a waist pack for a sticky wad of nectar, honey, and peanut butter. His human partners were clueless, but if he didn’t eat every few hours, he’d suffer. What Rachel and Ivy didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

“That’s the statue, eh?” he said when Vincet rejoined him and they both came to rest on the back of a nearby bench. It was across the sidewalk from Vincet’s flower beds, and staying off the greenery made both of them happier—even if he had been invited and was wearing his red bandanna like a belt. He hesitated, and then thinking it might be required as part of his new “helping” role, he offered Vincet a sweetball. He’d never given food to anyone outside his family before. It felt odd, and Vincet blinked at him, clearly shocked at the offer.

“No, thank you,” he said, looking confused. “Um. Yes, that’s the statue.” Vincet pointed at the closest statue, and Jenks slipped the second sweetball away. “It won’t attack until the moon is higher,” Vincet added, more at ease now that the food was put away. Wings shivering, he glanced up at the moon, a day shy of full. “It attacks at midnight, not the lunkers’ clocked midnight, but the real midmoon when it’s at its zenith.”

Jenks’s attention dropped to the twin statues spaced about ten feet apart, surrounded by new annuals and low shrubs. Both had a Greek look about them, with a classic beauty of smooth lines and draping robes. The older statue was black in places from pollution, making it almost more beautiful. Carved ringlets of hair pulled back and braided framed a young-looking face, almost innocent in her expression. Her stone robes did little to hide her admittedly shapely legs from her thighs down. There was a flaccid water sack on her belt, and her fingers were wrapped about the butt of a sword, pushing into the pedestal at her toe.

The second statue was of a young man with smooth, almost feminine features. An empty ankle sheath was on one bare leg not covered by his stone robe. He was lithe, thin, with a hint of wild threat in his chiseled expression. The sign between them, framed by newly planted, honey-smelling alyssum, said that both statues had been donated by the Kalamack Foundation to commemorate Cincinnati gaining city status in 1819, but only the statue of the woman looked old. The other was a pearly white as if brand-new. Or freshly scrubbed, maybe.

A distant argument over burned rice became audible from over the grass between the garden and the nearby townhouses. Tink’s tampons, humans were noisy. It was as if they didn’t have a place in the natural order anymore, so they made as much noise as they could to prove they were alive. His garden and graveyard stretching an entire block within the suburbs, now made his by human law and a deed, was a blessing he’d come to take for granted. Rachel and Ivy never seemed to make much noise. ’Course, they slept a lot, and Ivy was a vampire, if living. She never made much noise to begin with.

“Did you clean it?” he asked Vincet, and the young pixy shook his head, looking scared.

“No. It was like that when we got here. Vi wakes as if in a trance, mindless as she hits the base of the statue until the burning brings her down. Then she screams until the moon shifts from the top of the sky and the statue lets her go.”

Jenks scratched the base of his wings, puzzled. Though he didn’t move from the back of the bench, his wings sent a glitter of dust over them. Holy crap, he had to pee again.

Vincet pulled his frightened gaze from the white stone glinting in the light of a nearby streetlamp. “I’d fight if I could. I’d die defending my children if I could see it. Is it a ghost?”

“Maybe.” Pulling his hands from his hips, Jenks crossed his arms. It was a bad habit he’d gotten from Rachel, and he immediately put his fists back on his hips where they belonged.

A sudden noise in the trees above them caught them unawares, and while Jenks remained standing on the back of the bench, Vincet darted away, clearly surprised. It was Bis, returning from his circuit of the park under Jenks’s direction. Jenks was used to giving orders, but not while on a run, and he nervously hoped he was doing this right.

With a soft hush of sliding leather and the scent of iron, the cat-size gargoyle landed on the back of the bench, his long claws scrabbling for purchase. Bis could cling to a vertical slab of stone with no problem, slip through a crack a bat would balk at, but trying to balance on the thin back of the slatted bench was more than he could manage. With an ungraceful hop, he landed on the concrete sidewalk between the bench and the statues.

“Nothing larger than an opossum near here,” the gray, smooth-skinned kid said, his ears pricked to make the white fur lining them stick out. He had another tuft on the tip of his lionlike tail, but apart from that, his pebbly patterned skin was smooth, able to change color to match what was around him and creep Jenks out. He had a serious face that looked something like a pug’s, shoved in and ugly, but Jenks’s kids loved him. And his cat, Rex, was enamored of the church’s newest renter. Jenks sighed. Once the feline found out Bis could kick out the BTUs when he wanted to, adoration was a foregone conclusion.

Bis was too young to be on his own, and after having been kicked off the basilica for spitting on people, he’d found his way to the church, slipping Jenks’s sentry lines like a ghost. Bis slept all day like a proverbial stone, and he paid his rent by watching the grounds during the four hours around midnight when Jenks preferred to sleep. He ate pigeons. Feathers and all. Jenks was working on changing that. At least the feathers part. He was working on getting Bis to wear some clothes, too. Not that anything showed, but if Bis was wearing something, Jenks might catch him sneaking around on the ceiling. As it was, all he ever saw was claw marks.

“Thanks, Bis,” Jenks said, standing straighter and trying to look like he was in charge. “You grew up around stone. What’s your take on the statue? Is it haunted?”

It might have been a jest if anyone else had said it, but both of them knew there were such things as ghosts. Rachel’s latest catastrophe, Pierce, was proof of that, but he had been completely unnoticed when bound to his tombstone. Only when it had cracked had Pierce escaped to harass them. Get a body. Become demon-snagged. Confuse Rachel into a love/hate relationship. Something was wrong with the girl. But now that he thought about it, maybe that’s why Vincet’s daughter was trying to break the statue.
Tink’s a Disney whore,
not
another ghost.

The gargoyle flicked his whiplike tail in a shrug. His powerful haunches bunched, and Vincet darted back with a flash of pixy dust when Bis landed atop the statue in question, his skin lightening to match the marble perfectly. Looking like part of the statue itself, he scraped a claw down a fold of chiseled hair. Bis brought it to his nose, sniffing, then tasting. “High-quality granite,” he said, his voice both high and rumbling. “From Argentina. It was first worked hundreds of years ago, but it’s only been here for a hundred and twenty.”

Impressed, Jenks raised his eyebrows. “You got all that from tasting it?”

Smirking to show his black teeth, the kid pointed a claw to a second sign. “Just the high-quality part. There’s a plaque.”

Vincet sighed, and Jenks’s wings went red.

Wheezing his version of laugher, the gargoyle hopped to the spot of light on the sidewalk. “Seriously, something is wrong. Both statues are on the ley line running through the park. No one puts two statues on a ley lines. It pins it down and weird stuff happens.”

“There’s a line?” Jenks asked, seeing Vincet looking understandably lost. “Where?”

Bis pointed at nothing Jenks could see, cocking his ugly, bald head first one way, then the other as he focused on the flower beds. “Lines don’t move, but they shift like the tide under the moon—unless they’re pinned down. Something is absorbing energy from the line—right between the statues where it’s not moving.”