Unbound

Unbound by Kim Harrison, Jeaniene Frost, Vicki Pettersson, Jocelynn Drake and Melissa Marr

Ley Line Drifter Kim Harrison

1

The dim gloom was heavy in the lower level of Jenks’s stump, only the high ceiling of the cavernous great room still holding the fading haze of the setting sun. Working by the glow of his dragonflylike wings, Jenks hovered in the wide archway leading to the storerooms, feet dangling and shoulders aching as he smoothed a nick from the lintel. The smell of last year’s garden drifted up past him: musty dandelion fluff, dried jasmine blossoms, and the last of the sweet clover used for their beds. Matalina was a traditionalist and didn’t like the foam he’d cut from a sofa he’d found at the curb last fall.

The rasping of his lathe against the living oak only accentuated the absence of his kids; the quiet was both odd and comforting after a winter spent in his human-size partner’s church. Shifting his lower wings to push the glowing, silver pixy dust upward to light his work, Jenks ran a hand across the wood to gauge the new, decorative curve. A slow smile spread across his face.

“Tink’s panties, she’ll never know,” he whispered, pleased. The gouge his daughter had made while chasing her brother was now rubbed out. All that was needed was to smooth it, and his beautiful and oh-so-clever wife would never know. Or at least she’d never say anything.

Satisfied, Jenks tilted his wings and darted to his tools. He would’ve asked his daughter to fix the archway, but it took cold metal, and at five Jolivia didn’t yet have the finesse to handle toxic metal. Spilling more dust to light his well-used tools, he chose an emery board, swiped from Rachel’s bathroom.

Late March, he thought as he returned to his work, the sparse sawdust mixing with his own pixy dust as he worked in the silence and chill. Late March, and they still hadn’t moved back into the garden from Rachel’s desk, on loan for the winter. The days were warm enough, and the nights would be fine with the main hearth lit. Cincinnati’s pixies were long out of hibernation, and if they didn’t move into the garden soon, someone might try to claim it. Just yesterday his kids had chased off three fairy scouts lurking about the far graveyard wall.

Breath held against the oak dust, Jenks wondered how many children he would lose this fall to romance and how it would affect the garden’s security. Not much now, with only eight children nearing the age of leaving. Next year, though, eleven more would join them, with no newlings to replace them.

A burst of anxious motion from his wings lit a larger circle to show the winter-abandoned cushions about the main central hearth, but it wasn’t until a sudden commotion at the ground-floor tunnel entrance that he spilled enough dust to light the edges to show the shelves, cupboards, and hooks built right into the living walls of the stump. “If there’s no snapped wings or bones sticking out, I don’t want to hear about it!” he shouted, his mood brightening as he recognized his children’s voices.

“Papa. Papa!” Jerrimatt, one of his youngest sons, shouted in excitement as he darted in, trailing silver dust. “We caught an intruder at the street wall! He wouldn’t leave, even when we scared him! He said he wanted to talk to you. He’s a poacher, I bet, and I saw him first!”

Jenks rose, alarmed. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“Naww,” the suddenly dejected boy said as he tossed his blond hair in a credible mimicry of his dad. “I know the rules. He had red on.”

Exhaling, Jenks let his feet touch the ground as, in a noisy mob, Jack, Jhem, Jumoke, and Jixy pushed a fifth pixy wing-stumbling into the room.

“He was on the fence,” Jixy said, roughly shoving the stranger again to make his wings hum, and she touched her wooden sword, ready to smack him if he made to fly. She was the eldest in the group, and she took her seniority seriously.

“He was looking at our flower beds,” Jumoke added. The dark-haired pixy’s scowl made him look fiercer than usual, adding to his unusual dark coloring.

“And he was lurking!” Jack exclaimed. If there was trouble, Jack would be in it.

The five were on sentry detail this evening, and Jenks set the emery board aside, eyeing his own sword of pixy steel nearby. He would rather have it on his hip, but this was his home, damn it. He shouldn’t need to wear it inside. Yet here he was with a strange pixy in his main room.

Jerrimatt, all of three years old, was flitting like a firefly on Brimstone. Reaching up, Jenks caught his foot and dragged him down. “He is wearing red,” Jenks reminded him, glad they hadn’t drawn blood from the hapless pixy, wide-eyed and scared. “He gets passage.”

“He doesn’t want passage,” Jerrimatt protested, and Jixy nodded. “He was just sitting there! He says he wants to talk to you.”

“Plotting,” Jixy added suspiciously. “Hiding behind a color of truce. He’s pixy trash.” She threatened to smack him, stopping only when Jenks sent his wings clattering in disapproval.

The intruder stood with his feet meekly on the floor, his wings closed against his back, and glancing uneasily at Jumoke. His red hat of truce was in his hands, fingers going around and around the brim. “I wasn’t plotting,” he said indignantly. “I have my own garden.” Again, his gaze landed on Jumoke in question, and Jenks felt a prick of anger.

“Then why are you looking at ours?” Jhem demanded, oblivious to the intruder’s prejudice against Jumoke’s dark hair and eyes. But when Jhem went to push him, Jenks buzzed a warning again. Eyes down, Jhem dropped back. His children were wonderful, but it was hard to teach restraint when quick sword-point justice was the only reason they survived.

At a loss, Jenks extended a hand to the ruffled pixy as his children watched sullenly. The pixy buck before him looked about twelve or thirteen, old enough to be on his own and trying to start a family, married by the clean and repaired state of his clothes. He was healthy and well-winged, though they were now blue with the lack of circulation and pressed against his back in submission. The unfamiliar sword in Jumoke’s grip led Jenks to believe the intruder’s claim to having a garden was likely not an exaggeration, even if it was fairy steel, not pixy. The young buck wasn’t poaching. So what did he want?

Jenks’s own suspicions rose. “Why are you here?” he asked, his focus sliding again to his own sword, set carelessly next to his tools. “And what’s your name?”

“Vincet,” the pixy said immediately, his eyes roving over the sunset gray ceiling. “You live in a castle!” he breathed as his wings rose slightly. “Where is everyone?”

Vincet, Jenks thought, wary even as he straightened with pride at Vincet’s words concerning his home. A six-letter name, and out on his own with cold steel. Pixies born early into a family had short names, those born later, the longest. Vincet was the fifth brood of newlings in his family to survive to naming. That he had a blade and a long name to his credit meant that his birth clan was strong. It was the children born late in a pixy’s life that suffered the most when their parents died and the clan fell apart. Most children with names longer than eight letters never made it. Jerrimatt, though…Jenks’s smile grew fond as he looked at the blond youngster scowling fiercely at Vincet. Jerrimatt, his birth brother, and both his birth sisters would survive. Matalina was stronger now that she wasn’t having children anymore. One or two more seasons, and all her children would survive her. It was what she prayed for.

Not knowing why he trusted Vincet, Jenks gestured for his children to relax, and they began shoving one another. The earth’s chill soaked into Jenks now that he wasn’t moving, and he wished he’d started a fire.