The scrabbling of claws made him shiver, and he made the quick flight to the sidewalk when Bis slid out like an octopus. Bis shook his wings and sniffed at his armpits, then turned black to remain unnoticed. The sirens were coming closer, seeming to pull the distraught people together.
Frowning, Bis somberly clicked his nails in a rhythm that Jenks recognized as Mozart as he took in the tossed cars and broken windows. Fingers shaking, Jenks wedged a sweetball out of his belt pack and sucked on it, replenishing his sugar level before he started to burn muscle.
“Do you think all nymphs were like that?” Jenks asked, glad the muck hadn’t gotten to his snack.
“Beats me.”
With a push of his wings, Bis was airborne. Jenks joined him, shifting to fly above him where they could still talk. The night air felt heavy and warm, unusually muggy as they flew straight down the street and to the park. Only a small section of the city was without power, and it looked like the park was untouched.
“Maybe we should check on Vincet,” Jenks said, and the gargoyle sighed, turning back to the cooler grass to check, but Jenks was already thinking about tomorrow. He had promised to help Vincet, and he would—even if it was a dryad trapped in a statue by a warrior nymph.
He had to help these people, and he had to do so before midnight tomorrow.
3
Even from inside the desk, Jenks could hear Cincinnati waking up across the river. Under the faint radio playing three houses down, the deep thumps of distant industry were like a heartbeat only pixies and fairies could hear. The hum of a thousand cars reminded him of the beehive he’d tormented when he was a child and living in the wild stretches between the surviving cities. It wasn’t a bad life, living in the city—if you could find food.
Worried, he sat in his favorite chair, thinking as his family lived life around him. The doll furniture he reclined in had been purchased last year at a yard sale for a nickel, but after stripping it down, reupholstering it with spider silk, and stuffing it with down from the cottonwood at the corner, he thought it was nicer than anything he’d seen in any store Rachel had taken him in. Nicer than Trent Kalamack’s furniture, even. Distant, he rubbed his thumb over the ivy pattern that Matalina had woven into the fabric. She was a master at her craft, especially now.
A faint sifting of dust slipped from him to puddle under the chair, but his glow was almost lost in the shaft of light slipping in through the crack of the rolltop desk. The massive oak desk with its nooks and crannies had been their home for the winter, but after Matalina had perched herself on the steeple last night to wait for his return, she’d breathed in the season and decided it was time to move. So move they did.
The voices of his daughters raised in chatter were hardly noticed, as was the bawdy poem four of his elder sons were shouting as they cheerfully grabbed the corners of the long table made of Popsicle sticks and headed for the too-narrow crack.
Matalina’s voice rose in direction, and the rolltop rose just enough. It wasn’t until Matalina sent the rest of them out to scout for a nest of wasps to steal sentries from that it grew quiet. All his children had lived through the winter. It was a day of celebration, but the weight of responsibility was on him.
Responsibility wasn’t new to him, but he was surprised to feel it—seeing as it was coming from an unexpected source. He’d always felt bad for pixies not as well off as he, but that was as far as it had ever gone. A part of him wanted to tell Vincet that he chose badly and he’d have to move, newlings or not. But Vi clinging helplessly to him had gone through Jenks like fire, and the smell of the newlings on Vincet kept him sitting where he was, thinking.
Jax had been his first newling he’d managed to keep alive through the winter. Jih, his eldest daughter, had survived in Matalina’s arms that same season. Scarcely nine years old, Jih had moved across the street alone to start a garden, and Jax left to follow in his father’s footsteps by partnering with a thief instead of devoting himself to a family and the earth.
Jenks had never wanted more than to tend a spot of ground, but four years ago, forced by a late spring and suffering newlings, he’d shamefully taken a part-time job as backup for Inderland Security, finding that he not only enjoyed it, but was good at it. Working for the man had eventually evolved into a partnership with Rachel and Ivy, and now he was on the streets more than in the garden. Turning his back on his first independent job wasn’t going to happen. Blowing up the statue wouldn’t be the hard part—it would be getting around Daryl to do it.
A nymph and a dryad, he thought sourly as he sucked on a sweetball in the quiet. Why couldn’t it be something he knew something about? Nymphs had vanished during the Industrial Revolution, and the dryads had been decimated by deforestation shortly after that. There was even a conspiracy theory that the dryads had been responsible for the plague that had wiped out a big chunk of humanity forty years ago. If so, it had sort of worked. The forests were returning, and eighty-year-old trees were again becoming common. Nymphs, though, were still missing. Sleeping, maybe?
And what about Daryl, anyway? A deluded nymph, Sylvan had said. A goddess, Daryl claimed. There were no gods or goddesses. Never had been, but there were documented histories of Inderlanders taking advantage of humans, posing as deities. He frowned. Her eyes were downright creepy, and he hadn’t liked demons being mentioned, either.
Jenks started, jerking when his chair moved. The breeze of four pairs of dragonfly wings blew the red dust of surprise from him, and he looked up to find four of his boys trying to move his chair with him in it. They were all grinning at him, looking alike despite Jumoke’s dark hair and eyes, in matching pants and tunics that Matalina had stitched.
“Enough!” Matalina called out in a mock anger, her feet in a shaft of light, a dusting rag in her hands, and a flush to her cheeks. “Leave your papa alone. There’s the girls’ things to be moved if you need something to do.”
“Sorry, Papa!” Jack said cheerfully, dropping his corner to make the chair thump. Jenks’s feet flew up, and his wing bent back under him. “Didn’t see you there.”
“Dust a little,” Jaul said, tangling his wings with Jack’s, and Jack dusted heavily, shifting as he pushed him away. “The fairies will think you’re dead,” he finished, sneezing.
“Come and carry you away,” Jumoke added, his wings lower in pitch than everyone else’s. It made him different, along with his dusky coloring, and Jenks worried, not liking how Vincet had looked at him as if he were ill or deformed.
Jake just grinned, his wings glittering as he hovered in the background. Apart from Jumoke, they were the eldest in the garden now, as fresh-faced and innocent as they should be, strong and able to use a sword to kill an intruder twice their size. He loved them, but it was likely this would be the last spring they’d help the family move. Jack, especially, would probably find wanderlust on him this fall and leave.
“Go do what your mother said,” he grumped, grabbing four sweetballs from the bowl beside him and throwing them to each boy in turn. “And keep your sugar level up! You’re no good to me laid flat out in a field.”
“Thanks, Papa!” they chorused, cheeks bulging. It kept them quiet, too.
Matalina came closer, smiling fondly as she shooed them out. “Go on. After the girls’ room, find the big pots and fill them. Check for cracks. I’m soaking spider sacks tomorrow for the silk. They’ve been in the cool room all winter. If we’re not careful, we’re going to have a hatching. I’m not going to make your clothes out of moonbeams, you know.”