Unbound

“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.