Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond(76)
Author: Kim Harrison

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed, seeing a tiny white figure at the center. "Bis, she’s flying! The freaky bitch is flying!"

Bis’s smooth wing beats faltered. Glancing back, he gulped. "She’s riding a ley line. Jenks, I don’t know how she’s doing it or what she is!"

Pointing at them with her sword, the woman clenched her teeth and grinned, clearly eager for battle. Her oiled ringlets lay flat, and her robe plastered to her like a second skin. The chugging of heavy air reverberated off the nearby buildings, but the trees were utterly still.

"Go!" shrilled Jenks, smacking Bis’s shoulder. "Go to ground!"

The heat off the street was a wave as they left the park. Town homes gave way to buildings, flashing past and reduced to blurs. Cars were moments of light and noise, and still she came on, leaving the sound of horns and folding metal in her wake. Glass shattered, and Jenks hunched into Bis’s protection, a new terror filling him as he realized that to take to the air now would be his death. Bis’s flight grew sickeningly erratic among the buildings, and Jenks looked behind him.

They weren’t going to make it.

"Down!" he screamed, voice lost in the shrieking wind. "Go to ground, Bis!"

Twisting wildly, Bis brought his wings in close, diving for a gutter drain.

"Oh-h-h-h-h no-o-o-o!" Jenks exclaimed, ducking his head.

Wings back, winging furiously in the sudden dark, Bis hit the wall with a grunt, sliding down to land in a sludge of water and goo. Putrid muck splashed up, coating Jenks in cold. Shaking his head, he lay on Bis and tried to figure out what happened.

I’m in a hole, he realized, his pulse hammering hard enough to shake him. I’m alive.

Above him, the wind shrieked, sounding like a woman screaming in battle. Bis shifted underneath him, and Jenks put a finger to his own lips when the gargoyle’s eyes opened. Together they listened to the destruction as glass shattered and heavy things hit the earth. Slowly the roaring wind faded to leave the frightened calls of people and the growing sounds of sirens.

Shaking, Bis began to wheeze in laughter. "Pigeon poop. That was close," he said, sitting up slowly until Jenks took to the air.

Jenks’s flash of anger at Bis’s mirth dissolved as he realized they were okay and they would both live to see the sun rise. "Watch this! I’ll get her to follow me, Bis!" he said, shaking his wings until a sludgy dust spilled from him to light the hole.

Bis stood shin-deep in the muck, his skin shifting toward pink as he upped his body temp. Appreciating the warmth, Jenks moved to his shoulder and tried to wipe the muck off his clothes. Matalina wouldn’t be happy, and he enviously watched the mud dry and flake off Bis.

"Think she’s gone?" Bis asked as he gazed up to the rectangle of brighter dark.

Jenks darted to the opening and the fresher air to hover with his head in the opening. Hands on his hips, he whistled long and low. "She tore up the street," he said loudly, looking up at the broken streetlights. "Power’s out. Cops are coming. Let’s get out of here."

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.

THREE

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.