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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.