Into the Woods (39 page)

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.

Wiping his sword on the rag over the sink, Jenks listened to the changing sound to estimate how full the bowl was getting. Little splashes spotted the counter, and he dropped to the floor, slipping into the cupboards by way of the open space at the footboard.

It was a weird world of wooden supports and domesticity behind the cupboards, and using his arms as much as his wings, he maneuvered himself to the kitchen’s catch-all drawer. Vaulting into the shallow space, Jenks hunched over, vibrating his wings to create some light as he moved to the front, dodging dead batteries and mangled twist ties until he found the spool of plumber’s putty. The trip out was faster, and eyeing Bis and Jumoke standing on the counter and panicking about the rising level of lighter fluid, he expertly plugged the hole.

“More than one way to empty a can,” he said, vertigo taking him when the flow stopped and the fumes hit him hard. “Don’t get too close, Jumoke. I swear, this is the worst part.”

“It stinks like a fairy’s funeral pyre,” the boy said, plugging his nose and backing up.

Standing on the counter beside his son, Bis looked huge. There was a bottle of soap in his grip, and the gargoyle easily wedged the top open. Jenks could have done it, but it would have been a lot harder. “How much?” Bis asked, poised to squirt it out.

Still reeling, Jenks covered his eyes, now streaming a silver dust as his tears hit the air and tuned dry. “Put it in the empty bowl. I’ll say when.”

“Rachel’s spell bowl?” Bis said, hesitating.

“It’s soap!” Jenks barked, rubbing his eyes and staggering until Jumoke grabbed his shoulder. Holy crap, it was nasty stuff until it all got mixed together.

The squirt bottle made a rude sound as it emptied, and feeling better, Jenks peeked over the edge to see how much they had. “That’s good,” he said, and Bis capped the bottle by smacking the tip on the counter. “Jumoke, see the proportion to the lighter fluid? Now all we need is the nitrogen and the pixy dust. Lots of nitrogen to make the boom intense.”

“Fertilizer,” Jumoke said. “In the shed?” he asked, and when Jenks nodded, Jumoke rose up. “I’ll check.”

In an instant, he was gone. Glancing out the night-darkened window, Jenks watched Jumoke’s arrow-straight path, the sifting dust falling to make a gold shadow of where he’d been. His siblings called out for him to join them, but Jumoke never even looked.

Pleased, Jenks turned to find Bis trying to get the fridge open by wedging a long claw between the seals. It felt good to be teaching someone his skills. Tink knew that Jax had been a disappointment, but Jumoke was genuinely interested. He already knew how to read.

Leaning against the bowl of soap, Jenks scratched the base of his wings, watching Bis hang from a fridge shelf with one hand and pull out a tinfoil-covered leftover with the other. His claws scrabbled on the linoleum when he dropped, and Jenks wasn’t surprised when Bis shook the leftover lasagna into the trash under the sink and ate the tinfoil instead.

The rasping sound of teeth on metal made him shudder. Black dust sifted from him, and seeing it, Bis shrugged, crawling back up onto his elevated seat before Ivy’s computer. “A gargoyle doesn’t live on pigeon alone,” he said, and Jenks winced.

Pushing off into the air, Jenks rose into the hanging utensils for his own snack. There was a pouch of sweets for the kids in the smallest ladle. Rachel never used it. Opening it, he popped one of the nectar and pollen balls into his mouth, then grabbed another for Jumoke. The kid had a lot to learn about maintaining his sugar level. Unless he was snacking in the garden. How long did it take to look through the shed, anyway?

Angling his wings, Jenks dropped to the dark windowsill and pocketed the second sweet. Hands on his hips, he stared out into the dark garden and watched the bands of colored light sift from the oak tree. Jumoke wasn’t among them. The individual trails of dust slipping down were as pixy-specific as voices, and he knew them all. There’d been no new patterns to learn in years.

No more newlings
, he thought, more melancholy than he thought he’d be. He’d done it to save Mattie’s life, and it had seemed to have worked. A healthy pixy woman gave birth to more sons than daughters by almost two to one. The size of the brood, too, was telling, which was why only two children were born that first season, none the next, then eight, eleven, ten, twelve . . . then seven—four of them girls. That was the year he panicked, going to work for Inderland Security. Matalina had borne only three children the year he’d met Rachel, two of them girls. None had survived to naming. His wish for sterility had saved her life. Another birth of newlings might have killed her.

What he hadn’t anticipated was with the absence of newlings, both he and Matalina had time to spare on other things. He’d gone from side jobs to a full-time career outside the garden, gaining enough money to buy the church and the security that went with it. Matalina had been able to help their eldest daughter take land before taking a spouse, something that only pixy bucks traditionally managed. Not to mention Matalina pursuing her desire to learn how to read, and then teaching the rest of the children—all impossible if caring for a set of newlings. Children were precious, each one a hope for the future. How could they be detrimental?

Frowning, Jenks tried to figure it out, failing. Perhaps he wasn’t old enough yet, because it didn’t make sense to him. Maybe Mattie could help him. She was the smart one. As soon he got her to take the Tink-damned curse, he’d rest easier. They’d live in the garden for another twenty years, then, watching their children grow, take their places . . .

The sharp taps of Bis on the keyboard stopped, and the gargoyle ruffled his wings. “Listen to this,” he said, his high, gravelly voice pulling Jenks’s attention from the window. “ ‘Dryads declined with the deforestation, and many ghosts have been blamed on them as they learned to live in statues placed on ley lines.’ ”

Jenks flitted close, thinking he looked nothing like Ivy. “Kind of like pixies adapting to city gardens. Humans. Learn to live with them, or die trying.”

Bis blinked his red eyes at him. “We’ve always lived with humans. I can’t imagine living in the woods. What would I eat? Iron ore and sparrows?”

Ignoring his sarcasm, Jenks moved closer to the screen. Now that he thought about it, gargoyles were dependent on people. The picture of the dryad on the monitor was his size, and he tapped it. “Look at that. It looks like the statues in the park, doesn’t it?” He turned, starting when he found Bis unexpectedly inches from him.
Holy crap, didn’t the kid breathe?

“Yeah . . .” Bis said softly, not noticing he had jumped.

Trying to cover his surprise, Jenks walked across the keyboard to the “down” arrow, scrolling for the rest of the article. “ ‘Because they declined before the Turn,’ ” he read aloud, proud that he could, “ ‘little is written about them without the trappings of fairy tale, but it’s commonly accepted that they live as long as the tree they frequent does, perhaps even hundreds of years. Though generally thought of as meek and gentle, Grimm has placed them several times in the position of wildly savage.’ ”

Chuckling, Jenks put his hands on his hips. “Yeah,” he said as Jumoke flew in trailing a disappointed green dust. “And the freak had kids shoving witches into ovens, too.” Scraping his wings for his son’s attention, he tossed Jumoke the pollen ball.

Catching it, his son tucked it away, saying, “It’s not there. I think Rachel used it.”

“Crap on toast,” Jenks swore, using one of Rachel’s favorites, but pleased that Jumoke had indeed been tapping off his sugar level. The kid had a head on his shoulders. “She did. I remember now. She put it around the azaleas this spring.” Frustrated, he rose up as his wing speed increased. “I hate it when people use stuff and don’t replace it. How am I supposed to make a bomb without nitrogen?”

Bis brought up a serious-looking black screen and started deleting evidence of Web sites and searches. “How about mothballs?” he asked, and Jenks laughed.

“You’ve been watching TV again. No, mothballs and pixy dust don’t mix. Besides, that would make something more like napalm, and we want inward destruction, not outward devastation. Vincet wouldn’t thank me for destroying his garden.” Jenks frowned. Ammonia, maybe, but Ivy didn’t keep that on hand like she did the soap and lighter fluid. “We want a nice simple pop, and for that, we want fertilizer.”

“How much?”

Jenks looked at Bis as he pushed back from the table, wondering what Ivy would say if she knew the gargoyle had been using her computer. Silent, Jenks pointed to a bowl hanging from the overhead rack.

Bis’s pushed-in face smiled as he flew to the rack, his wings sending the loose papers on the table flying. Jumoke took flight, yelling that Bis was as dumb as a downdraft, but Jenks squinted through it, not moving as the gargoyle dropped to the counter with the larger bowl.

“We’ve got lots of nitrogen at the basilica,” Bis said, grinning at him through the settling papers. “I’ll ask my dad about nymphs and dryads, too.”

Alarmed, Jenks clattered his wings. “Hey, this is a run, not a job,” he called, and Bis hesitated, flipping in midair to cling to the archway to the hall with the bowl dangling from a hind foot. “You can’t steal it from the gardener shed.”

Bis made his wheezing laugh, looking evil as he hung upside down with the white tuft of his tail twitching. “No problem. They can’t give this stuff away. Thirty minutes.” Instead of dropping to fly out, he slithered up to the hall ceiling, going nearly invisible as he shifted his skin tone to match the shadows. Only the glint of the copper bowl gave him away. That, and the faint scrabbling of claws. Jenks would be really worried about the scratches on the ceiling if he didn’t know where they came from. The ceiling, the walls, the window ledges . . . He had to get Bis to start wearing some clothes. A bandanna or something.

Stifling a shudder, Jenks turned back to Jumoke, seeing him pale and wide-eyed. “It gives me the creeps when he does that skin thing,” the small pixy said, and Jenks nodded.

“Me too. But we need to figure out how to mix this stuff up in one batch before he comes back or we’ll be here all night. I know Vincet’s going to keep his kids up, and Sylvan might burn another one of his new-lings. And carefully!” he added when Jumoke tipped the bowl with the lighter fluid to look in it. “The last thing I need is Ivy coming home and finding fire trucks at the curb. She’d have hairy canaries coming out her, ah, ear.”

At his shoulder, peering in at the lighter fluid, Jumoke shook his head. “Women.”

That one word jerked Jenks’s attention up, and his own smile grew to match Jumoke’s. Pride filled him. Jax hadn’t been like this. He wasn’t making a mistake teaching Jumoke his skills. This was going to work, and his son would have a unique talent, one that would help him find a wife, and then all his children could have their happy-ever-after.

Jenks clapped him across the shoulders. “Can’t live with them, can’t die without them,” he said, beaming with pride. This was not a mistake. Not a mistake at all.

FIVE

P
igeon poop?” Vincet exclaimed, aghast as he hovered with his three children clustered behind him, clearly frightened of the sight of Ivy reclining on the nearby bench. “You’re going to save my family with pigeon poop!”

“Pigeon poop,” Jenks affirmed, concentrating on the silvery goop in the bowl Bis was holding steady. The moon was up, making it easy to see Vincet’s horror as he dug his hand into the softly glowing mess. Taking another oozing wad back to the statue, he slapped it onto the smooth stone with the rest. “That and pixy dust!” he said cheerfully, trying not to think about it as he wiped his hands off on a fold of stone. He’d never be able to handle a mixture of lighter fluid, soap, and nitrogen like this without the pixy dust to act as a stabilizer. It was the dust that made it go boom so spectacularly, too.

“That’s disgusting!” Vincet said softly, and Bis, holding the bowl, rolled his eyes.

“Tell me about it,” the gargoyle said. His voice was stoic, but Jenks could tell he was almost laughing. The white tufts of fur in his ears were trembling.

Ivy, too, smirked. The living vampire had driven them out here on her cycle—Bis on the gas tank and grinning into the air like a dog—but now she looked bored, lying back on the bench with her knees bent to gaze up into the branches of the tree. It was obvious that she’d been at someone earlier tonight; her color was high, her motions edging into a vampire-quick speed, and her obvious languorous sultriness, which she tried to hide from Rachel, poured from the slightly Asian-looking woman in a flood of release. Even Vincet had noticed, wisely not saying anything when the leather-clad woman had strode up to Daryl’s statue, hip cocked as she pronounced she could take the nymph—if she had the brass to show up.

Right now, though, Ivy looked more inclined to seduce the next being on two legs she encountered, not fight them, her long straight hair falling almost to the cement as she lay on the bench, and a sated smile on her placid face. No wonder Ivy satisfied her blood urges during Rachel’s weekly absences. Seeing Ivy like this might blow everything to hell. An emotionally constipated Ivy was a safe Ivy.

“This would go faster if someone would help me,” Jenks said, eyeing the goop remaining when he flew down for another handful.

In a smooth motion, Ivy sat up and swung her boots to the cement to stand. “I’m going to do a perimeter,” she said, heels silent on the sidewalk as she headed out. “And don’t put that bowl in my cycle bag. Got it?” she shouted over her shoulder.

Jumoke landed atop Bis’s head and fell into wide-footed stance that would allow him the best balance if the wind should gust. “Mom made me promise not to touch it,” the kid said, clearly proud of his new red belt.