“Naked in the garden is okay with me,” Jumoke mumbled, and Matalina swatted him.

“Out!”

“Remember what happened the last year?” Jaul said, his words muffled from the sweetball as they headed for opening.

“Webs everywhere!” Jack said, laughing.

“Yeah, well you’re the one that moved the sacks into the sun,” Jumoke said, and they were gone, the dust from them settling in a glowing puddle to slowly fade.

“How else was I going to win the bet as to when they were going to hatch?” came faintly from outside the desk, and Jenks chuckled. It had been an unholy mess.

Slowly their voices vanished, and Jenks watched Matalina’s expression, gauging her mood as she smiled. Wings stilling, she walked across the varnished oak wood to settle next to him, their wings tangling as she snuggled in against him. Slowly their mingling dust shifted to the same contented gold.

“I can’t wait to get back into the garden,” she said, gazing at the pile of laundry across the room. “I’ll admit I don’t like moving day, but I’ll not set myself to sleep like that again with the fear of guessing who might not wake up with me in the spring.” Reaching to the bowl, she deftly twisted a sweetball into two parts and handed him half. “You’re quiet. What’s got your updraft cold this morning?”

“Nothing.” Setting his half of the sweet back in the bowl, he draped his arm over her shoulder, moving his thumb gently against her arm. Remembering the smell of the newlings, he dropped his gaze to her flat belly, not swelling with life for more than a year now. His wish for sterility might have extended her life—but had it also made her last years empty?

Setting her sweetball aside as well, Matalina shifted from him, pulling out of his reach to sit facing him. “Is it the pixy that you and Bis went into Cincinnati to help? I’m proud of you for that. The children enjoy watching the garden when you’re gone. They feel important, and they’ll be all the more prepared when they’ve a garden of their own.”

A garden of their own, he thought. His children were leaving. Vincet’s children were so young. His entire adult life was before him. “Mattie, do you ever wish for newlings?” he asked.

Her eyes fell from his, and her breath seemed to catch as she stared at the piles of clothes.

Fear struck Jenks at her silence, and he sat up to take her hands in his. “Tink’s tears. I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I thought you didn’t want any more. You said…We talked about it…”

Smiling to look even more beautiful, Matalina placed a fingertip to his lips. “Hush,” she breathed, leaning her head forward to touch his as her finger dropped away. “Jenks, love, of course I miss newlings. Every time Jrixibell or any of the last children do something for the first time, I think that I’ll never see the joy of that discovery on another child’s face, but I don’t want any more children who won’t survive a day after me.”

Worried, he shifted closer, his hands tightening on hers. “Mattie, about that,” he started, but she shook her head, and the dust falling from her took on a red tinge.

“No,” she said firmly. “We’ve been over this. I won’t take that curse so I can have another twenty years of life. I’m going to step from the wheel happy when I reach the end, knowing all my children will survive my passing. No other pixy woman can say that. It’s a gift, Jenks, and I thank you for it.”

Beautiful and smiling, she leaned forward to kiss him, but he would have none of it. Anger joining his frustration, he pulled away. Why won’t she even listen? Ever since he’d taken that curse to get lunker-size for a week, his flagging endurance had returned full force. It had fixed his mangled foot and erased the fairy steel scar that had pained him during thunderstorms. It was as if he was brand-new. And Mattie wasn’t.

“Mattie, please,” he began, but as every other time, she smiled and shook her head.

“I love my life. I love you. And if you keep buzzing me about it, I’m going to put fairy scales in your nectar. Now tell me how you’re going to help the Vincet family.”

He took a breath, and she raised her eyebrows, daring him.

Jenks’s shoulders slumped and his wings stilled to lie submissively against his back. Later. He’d convince her later. Pixies died only in the fall or winter. He had all summer.

“I need to destroy a statue,” he said, seeing the clean wood around him and imagining the dirt walls Vincet was living between, then remembering the flower boxes he and Mattie had raised most of their children among. He was lucky, but the harder he worked, the luckier he got.

“Oh, good,” she said distantly. “I know how you like to blow things up.”

His mood eased, and he shifted her closer to feel her warmth. Pixies had known how to make explosives long before anyone else. All it took was a little time in the kitchen. And a hell of a lot of nitrogen, he thought. “By tonight,” he added, bringing himself back to the present, “to help free a dryad.”

“Really?” Eyeing him suspiciously, Matalina popped her half of the sweetball into her mouth. “I ’ought ’ay were cut ’own in the great deforestation of the eighteen hundreds. ’Ave they emigrated in from Europe?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But this one is trapped in a statue, existing on energy right off a ley line instead of sipping it filtered from a tree. He’s been slipping into Vincet’s children’s minds when they sleep, trying to get them to break his statue.” He wasn’t going to tell her the dryad had accidentally killed one. It was too awful to think about.

Matalina stood, rising on a burst of energy to dust the ceiling. “A city-living dryad?” she murmured, cleaning wood that would lay unseen for months if Rachel continued her pattern and avoided her desk even after they vacated it. “Tink loves a duck, what will they think of next?”

Jenks reclined to see if he could see up her dress. “Blowing it up isn’t the problem. See, there’s this nymph,” he said, smiling when he caught a glimpse of a slim thigh.

She looked down at him, her disbelief clear. Seeing where his eyes were, she twitched her skirt and shifted, eyes scrunched in delight even as she huffed in annoyance. “A nymph? I thought they were extinct.”

“Maybe they’re just hiding,” he said. “This one said something about waking up. She was having a hard time breathing through the pollution.” Until she came after us.

Flitting to the opening in the desk, Matalina shook her rag with a crack. “Hmmm.”

“She’s got this goddess…warrior vibe,” he said when Matalina returned to the ceiling. “Mattie, the woman is scary. I think if I get the dryad free, the nymph will follow him and leave Vincet in peace.”

Again Matalina made that same doubt-filled sound, not looking at him as she dusted.

“Freeing the dryad is the only way I can help Vincet,” Jenks said, not knowing if Matalina was unsure about Sylvan or the nymph. “He’s only been on his own for a year, and he has three children and passel of newlings. He’s done so well.”

Matalina turned at the almost jealous tone in his words, the pride and love in her expression obvious. “You were nine, love, when you found me,” she said as she dropped to him, her wings a clear silver as they hummed. “Coming from the country with burrs in your hair and not even a scrap of red to call your own. Don’t compare yourself to Vincet.”

He smiled, but still…“It took me two years to be able to provide enough for Jax and Jih to survive,” he said, reaching up to take her hand and draw her to him.

His wife sat beside him, perched on the very edge of the couch with her hands holding his. “Times were harder. I’m proud of you, Jenks. None has done better. None.”

Jenks scanned the nearly empty desk, the sounds of his children playing filtering in over the radio talking about the freak tornado that had hit the outskirts of Cincinnati last night. Not wanting to accept her words, he pulled her to sit on his lap, tugging her close and resting his chin on her shoulder and breathing in the clean smell of her hair. He could have done better. He could have given up the garden and gone to work for the I.S. years sooner. But he hadn’t known.