Pale Demon

he said again, then accidentally rolled off the wall to vanish behind it with a yelp.

“Jenks!” Ivy shouted, lunging forward.

“No, wait!” I shouted, reaching after her and feeling like the earth was going to drop out from under us. A piercing whistle echoed. My adrenaline pulsed.

“Rhombus!” I shouted, cowering as my molecule-thin layer of ever-after rose up around us. The protection circle snapped into place with a mind-jolting echo, and I looked up as tiny arrows plunked into it. The sun seemed darker, scaring me. Have I put that much smut on myself already?

“Stop!” a shrill pixy voice cried out ahead of me. “Or we kill the black-haired woman!”

“Rachel, stop!” Jenks shouted, and I looked up. And blanched. Thirty. No, fifty, maybe more, pixies surrounded Ivy, all with a bow or a sword or both. She wasn’t in my circle. Her vampiric speed had moved her too far.

“Ivy!” I called out, and she slowly licked her lips, fingers spread as she put her arms up in capitulation. Her face was deathly pale, and she barely breathed as the pixies, in shades of brown and violet, hovered over her, their dust coating her in a sheet of red, savage as they hooted and brandished their weapons. I had the ugly realization that this was how they survived out here—bringing down animals to supplement the traditional pixy diet of pollen and nectar. Shit, we were in trouble.

“Ah, sorry about this,” Ivy said, freezing when the pixies above her told her to be still.

“If you hurt her,” I threatened, and my gaze darted to the ridge. Trent was there, tense and looking like he was ready to do something. Damn it, I couldn’t protect both of them. What was he doing? If they saw him, they’d attack, and I tried to tell him with my eyes to get the hell out of here.

The bright flash of yellow drew my attention back, and I frowned at the colorful pixy dressed in a flaming yellow, billowing outfit as he hovered before me. He looked like an ill eighteen-year-old who’d been into the Brimstone too much, his dark skin wrinkled by the sun and too little rest. His grip on his six-inch toad sticker of a spear was firm enough, though, and his green eyes were as sharp as any I’d ever seen.

“Why are you following us, witch?” he demanded, hovering inches from my barrier. His words were so fast, I almost couldn’t understand him. My eyes flicked back to Trent, and I shifted my shoulders as I realized he was gone. Just start the car and wait, I thought, knowing that was too much to ask. He was going to do something, and it probably was going to make things worse. Stupid elf.

From behind the wall, I heard Jenks shout, “What the Turn is wrong with you? They’re my friends!”

The pixy confronting me darted to the wall. “Liar!” he exclaimed, gesturing for two pixies to get him. “They’re lunkers!”

“They’re my friends.” Two pixies dropped down, depositing Jenks back on the wall right where he’d started from. Looking pissed, Jenks stood, wobbling as he tried to find his balance. It looked like they’d weighted the tip of one wing to keep him from flying.

“I’m not making this up,” Jenks said in disgust. “I’m Jenks! Of Cincinnati. I’m traveling to the West Coast on a job, and I can’t stay here. And I’m not going to marry any of your women! I have a wife!”

I exchanged a shocked look with Ivy, and she rocked back, centering herself. They had kidnapped him as stud material?

“Liar!” the head pixy shouted, his wings moving fast in the heat. “You said she died!”

I opened my mouth, but Jenks beat me to it, shouting, “I don’t want a new wife! I love my old one. Do you have troll turds in your ears? Get this thing off me!” Jenks shook his wings, dusting heavily as the clip weighed him down.

Two more pixies, both in matching shades of sage green, had risen to flank the head pixy. “He did complain the entire way,” the one with the length of steel said.

“Lifted his ass 150 miles, him bitching nonstop,” the other with the bow said. This was weird. I’d swear they were the same age, but they didn’t look like they were from the same clan. Pixies didn’t cooperate like this. At least, pixies east of the Mississippi didn’t. Maybe they had to band together in the desert to survive. That might explain why they thought Jenks should take a new wife, too.

“He can’t even fly,” the second one said, pointing at Jenks with his bow. “Even without the shackles. I say let him go. They want him, and for all his finery and height, he can’t fly.”

“He’s from the east,” the pixy in yellow said. “He’ll adapt. He’s not used to the air. Look at how water fat his flesh is. And his sword,” he said, hoisting the one in his hand, and my eyes narrowed. It was Jenks’s. “This is pixy steel. Pixy steel! Fifty-four kids he says he has. All living.”

At that, the surrounding pixies rose up, gossiping in words too fast for me to understand.

“He lies!” a pixy said. “You can’t keep that many children alive.”

“Jenks can,” I said.

“You’re not helping,” Ivy called out, and I winced.

“I bet he can!” The head pixy in yellow waved Jenks’s sword around. “Look at him!”

Jenks stood with his hands tied before him and his gossamer wings dripping a black dust. Even I had to admit he looked good, especially compared to the gaunt, smaller pixies surrounding him. In another world, in another time, in another size…but he was Jenks, my friend, and my anger grew. I daren’t move, though. Not with Ivy having a dozen poisoned arrows pointed at her.

Around us, the pixy women tittered, and I burned when one said loudly, “I don’t care if he can fly or not. I’d just unwrap him and wear him like a fur.”

“We stole you,” the head pixy said to Jenks, gesturing for them to back off. “You belong to us.”

“Jenks doesn’t belong to anyone!” I shouted, but Ivy was silent. She was a vampire, and vampires were born to be treated like objects, given to others as favors for a day or a lifetime.

At my exclamation, the pixy flew to the bubble and poked at it with Jenks’s sword. “You’re not big enough to stop us. Get in your car and leave, or we’ll kill the vampire.”

I swallowed, feeling cold. “Please. I know this is weird, but Jenks has been working with us for over two years. He owns the church we live in. I pay him rent. You can’t keep him. He has responsibilities. A job. A mortgage. He’s got to get back to his kids because I’m not going to watch them!”

“He owns property?”

It had been the one with the bow, and I nodded as the pixies buzzed over that.

“His garden has so many flowers you can’t step without crushing one,” I said. “The grass grows so fast, I have to cut it every week. His children are so clever, they stay awake all winter. They play in snow.”

“It sounds like paradise,” a pixy wearing a flowing brown tunic said with a sigh.

“You aren’t helping…,” Ivy said softly, her voice rising and falling like music.

The pixy with the bow frowned, taking a higher position than the other two. “I told you we should have asked. They do things differently across the Mississippi.”

“We caught him!” the leader insisted, but hope rose in me as I saw a crack in their resolve. “Dragged his sorry ass across six clans, and you want to give him up? His wife is dead, and he’s on a quest to spread his seed to the wind. Why else would he be wearing all that red?”

Excuse me?

Ivy made a small sound of disbelief, and I turned to Jenks. He looked as mystified as me.

“Uh, that’s what we do where I come from to get safe passage through another pixy’s territory,” Jenks said.

“You don’t just let them cross?” a pixy woman asked, her brown silk furling as she darted up. “How do you find enough food to survive?”

A cultural difference? I thought. The entire mess was the result of a misunderstanding over the color red? “I’m sorry for the mistake,” I said, for the first time thinking we might get out of here without a fight. “Can we have him back? He won’t wear red anymore. We didn’t know.”

The pixies were flitting in the sun, the shadows of their wings flashing over Ivy as they argued in small knots. Slowly I began to relax.

“He’s a proven provider!” the head pixy said. “We need new breath in our children!” But the bows had been eased and the sword tips had fallen.

“Look,” I said, taking a half step forward and halting when the pixies bristled anew at me. “He didn’t know wearing red meant that he was trying to spread his, uh, seed.”