Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond(81)
Author: Kim Harrison

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."