Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond(67)
Author: Kim Harrison

"I never thought I’d be happy to see the I.S.," I said as I dug my soggy ID out of a back pocket and flashed it at them. Satisfied, they moved off to give me space to collect myself before I made a statement. "Thanks for getting that last one."

Kisten put an arm around me, soggy clothes and all. "I told you, Rachel," he said in my ear to start a warm spot in me. "I’ve got your back. Nothing alive will ever hurt you if I have breath in me. And nothing dead will hurt you if I don’t."

He leaned in to give me a kiss, and this time, I let him, my lips moving against his to turn it into a spine-tingling, stomach quivering kiss that delved deep and set my pulse racing.

The old couple on the bench gave a cheer, and I broke from him, embarrassed. One of them had a camera phone, and I looked away when it flashed.

"Crap," I muttered, then thought, the hell with it. I could feel Kisten press against me through my wet clothes. Eyes closing, I wrapped my arms about his neck and kissed him again, deeper.

"Apple dumplings?" he murmured when the kiss broke, buzzing my ear with his lips to make the tingles his kiss started flash anew, and I smiled.

"They’re really good for breakfast," I said, and with his arm over my shoulder, we hobbled back to my car.

Ley Line Drifter

Ley Line Drifter was first published in the anthology Unbound. I had been playing with the idea of dryads for years and thought that it was time to see how the Hollows could shape the concept of tree spirits. Though trees abound in Cincinnati, the idea of using a statue as a prison caught my interest, and from there the usually passive, feminine image of a tree spirit evolved into more of a savage, innocent Amazon.

This was also a chance to see the world from Jenks’s eye, something I’d wanted to do for a long time. Throwing Bis into the mix was the icing on the cake. Rachel still doesn’t know how her smallest spell pot got dented, and she probably never will.

ONE

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.