Whimsifinado v. Eros Nest: Concerning the arrest of Fergus Whimsifinado for allegedly reproducing without copulation, the Fairy Council ruled that the Eros bloodline are permitted under Aphrodite Protocol to retain in their facility he and whomever else they deem necessary for the sake of fulfilling their holy duties as outlined by the Tuatha Dé Danann in the times of the Great Dawn, may the Lost Ancients return from their underground prison. Fergus Whimsifinado, Anti-Fergus Anti-Whimsifinado, Sanderson Chipixie, Anti-Sanderson Anti-Whimsifinado, Madigan Chipixie, and the soon-to-be Anti-Madigan will remain under Eros watch as they are. The use of a yoo-doo doll to restrain them does not qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. All offspring of Fergus Whimsifinado who are not summoned by the Eroses are to be compensated for the doll's influence over them on a day-to-day basis. Ambrosine Whimsifinado shall act as legal guardian over them in his son's stead until they attain age of majority, and he will be reinstated as owner and curator of Wish Fixers.

So, um… I'm not allowed to sing in the car anymore. After too many instances where I became so engrossed in singing along that I drifted off the dusty road into the fields or nearly plowed into some fence that shielded us from the cows, H.P. got frustrated with wrenching the wheel straight again. He licked his palm, wrestled my cowlick into submission, and then killed the radio with his shoe right in the middle of The Turtles' "It Ain't Me, Babe". We drove in silence after that, and I kept the beaten brown pick-up on a straight course.

It was perhaps an hour and a half before we passed into Jetmore. "Filling station," H.P. said, nodding to it with his head since his thumb was in Flappy Bob's mouth. "We're bound to be running low on gas by now." After setting the little human on the seat beside me, he ducked down to remove the brick from the gas pedal again. I eased into the station and turned off the truck.

"Thirty cents a gallon. It's going up."

"It's the war," was his reply. He tossed me Flappy's red and yellow blanket, and I lay it across my lap as he squirmed into hiding and the attendant came scampering up. "Two dollar's worth," I said, passing the bills through the window, and he fortunately went away without taking too close of a look at me. I did my utmost to appear large and keep my wings hidden as a second attendant rinsed off the front windshield; at least there was enough magic dust lingering on my skin to keep me from appearing terribly out of place to the average human eye.

When we were good to go, then at H.P.'s urging I turned the car to a deserted path marred with ATV treads through mud, and we drove on. It was still a two-hour drive to Mushroom Rock, at bare minimum, and Flappy especially was getting fussy again. But we couldn't stop. We had no way to disguise ourselves from more attentive human eyes, so stacking H.P. on my head to appear taller beneath a trench coat was out of the question. We'd just go without. It was only two more hours.

We passed a farmhouse on our right side, and H.P. and I saw it sitting on a post of the wooden fence at the same time. Both of us flicked up our wings, and I dove for the brick on the gas pedal and slammed it on the brake as H.P. kept the wheel steady. We screeched to a halt just before it was too late. I returned to my seat. There we were, staring it down.

It didn't leave.

A horse in the neighboring corral crunched on a piece of apple a young human drake and damsel near the fence had given it. A rabbit crossed the road with the same steady hop Wilcox always did. We entertained Flappy by dangling the keys in front of his face, and finally he wrenched them from my fingers and began to scrape the metal against his one big tooth. After perhaps five minutes of waiting, H.P. rubbed the light indents on the sides of his nose where his glasses rested.

"As long as we're stuck here, I'm going to take the chance to talk to nature. Keep an eye on Flappy."

"I need to go too, sir." I crawled across the seat to the passenger side and jumped out after him. The horse whinnied, and one of the humans began speaking to soothe it. H.P. gave me a reluctant hand wave to signal that I was allowed to come, and we studied the terror on its fence post from this new angle.

"Turn your back to it, Sanderson. It can't hurt us if we're facing the opposite direction. Just float away."

Pixies are planners by nature, but we hadn't planned for our tormentor to shift from the fence post to the hood of the car by the time we came back. We paced through ATV scours for a good ten minutes, listening to the cows and such on the farm (along with Flappy, who had begun to cry and shake the keys), only glancing towards the pick-up when we dared and mostly keeping our eyes on our feet and our backs to the horse's corral. "How are we going to get in now, sir?" I asked.

"We'll wait. We don't have much choice- we can't fly high enough to keep above the cloudlevel, even if your wing wasn't injured, and flying too low means the humans could catch sight of us and potentially shoot at us again. But we shouldn't be here much longer. It can't stay on there forever."

"Sir-"

"I suppose I could fly if we stuck to covered and deserted areas, but with your wing, the trip will be long and painful-"

"Sir-"

"What?"

"Sir, it stopped grooming and it's- it's coming this way."

He risked a glance back that he probably shouldn't have, and grabbed the arm of his glasses. "Oh, smoof! Split!"

H.P. took to his wings and perched on the mailbox. I ducked beneath the fence and into the horse corral, but our pursuer simply redirected its course to follow me. Keeping my back to it and my head low to watch for any horse leavings, I stumbled along the fenceline until I was approaching the barn. H.P. was forced to stay along the fence with me, occasionally mutter-calling down that it was still interested in tailing us. Herding us.

Too soon, I found myself forced to stop. If I went much further, I was in danger of being stomped by the hooves of the great brown horse. Disgraced descendants of unicorns or not, there wasn't magic in their life force and a single solid blow to the brain could potentially do me in.

"Up, Sanderson," H.P. said. I placed my foot on the first rung of the fence and grabbed his offered hand. What H.P. had not counted on was my weight and angle being enough to pull him down on top of me. I pressed myself into his shoulder, shielding the rest of my face with my arms and injured wing.

Here it came. All twenty-five bristling, boiling black ounces of it.

"Mew?" The kitten bounced off my knee and crawled across H.P.'s shoulder before butting its head against his throat. I could taste the magical energy field chill around us as it officially crossed our path. We looked up together as a thin spiral of blue-black fooped into existence over our heads. Even the horse knew enough to shift away.

"Please be Anti-Robin, please be Anti-Robin, please be Anti-Robin," H.P. muttered half under his breath, as he always did, but his wings drooped when he saw who it was. My mouth ran dry. Taking the kitten by the scruff of its neck, I climbed back to my feet.

"Erm… Anti-Naelita. What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be on Anti-Pixie Isle? Which is supposed to be sealed up? Behind a giant pink gate? Rather magically? In Anti-Fairy World? Locking it was expensive."

"Anti-Schnozmo lets me in and out when I ask him nicely," she said, shrugging her wings. "Technically, the seal doesn't work on us normal Anti-Fairies any more than on you all."

H.P. sat back on his heels, shaking his head. "As long as you're not the Anti-Kalysta, I don't care. Let's get this bad luck business over and done with. We're very busy."

"I'm an artist," she insisted. She tossed her shiny black wand in the air, snapped her fingers, and then swiped it across her body with a flick as it came down again. One foop later, a second, yellower horse materialized in the air above H.P.'s head. He had time to lift a wing and an arm before its rear slammed him into the ground. I held my tongue and prevented myself from twitching more than one finger. The confused horse had been formed of magic; he'd be all right, once he clawed his way out from under it.

"Let's see… And what can I do for you, stranger?" Anti-Naelita leaned one hand against the horse's metatarsal, tapping her starpiece against her cheek. Her eyes wandered from my face to my shoes and then up again. "What about some heebie-jeebies? They say Anti-Fairy kisses really make Seelie Court skin crawl. Sparkling acid adds an extra zip."

I could have nudged her away, but that would have implied I cared. Instead, I neither moved nor blinked as she walked her fingers up my arm. "I don't smooch anti-selkies. We can't reproduce. There's no point. I have better ways to spend my time."

She flipped her braid behind her leathery wings with a snort. "Anti-Sanderson lets me entertain him when my man sugars himself out cold, and I don't even care if he's awkward and sloppy, because he's the Head Anti-Pixie and not just anybody gets to wear a polygraph and boast they got their neck nibbled on by a vampire king last Friday (Most of 'em think I mean Anti-Cosmo and I don't correct them if I don't have to). That all-sugar diet may go straight to his chubby stomach, but have you seen that rippling way he slides and twirls across the dance floor? He's no novice in swaying those gentle hips- I'll tell you that much. No, sir." She snapped her fingers. "Right. You're mirror counterparts. With him being everything you aren't, I bet you can guess how it all goes down, mostly. Do I even want to know how you treat your damsels if he kisses the backs of our wrists and calls us his 'treasured Opalfruits' and his 'favorite lollipops'?"

The dancing was an old sore spot I'd thought I'd grown out of, and evidently hadn't. I could hit notes up and down my end of the chromatic scale and hadn't forgotten a lyric in my life, and he never once missed a step in the foxtrot or the cha-cha or the tango, even tingle-fritzy and sugar-drunk. My lip twitched, but I kept silent and focused on the spider-crawling fingers that had wriggled out from beneath the stunned horse. Anti-Naelita made an attempt to tug my tie from beneath my buttoned suit coat. She underestimated its ability to stay where I wanted it. A crease edged across her forehead, then smoothed out.

"Sometimes things even get a little more interesting- he might let me lock lips with him twice in the same week. Why do you pixie-types always have to take off your sunglasses and kiss with your eyes open? It's freakin' creepy, dude."

"Well, Sanderson Prime has only kissed one damsel in his life, it wasn't worth it, and he's not interested in any other takers." I handed her the squirming black kitten. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have business to do and you're keeping me from it."

I kicked myself once I said it. Why didn't I distract her with a kiss to steal her wand, duh? Anti-Fairy magic was powered by disbelief in magical beings and was arguably more powerful than ours anyway.

Too late, even as I took her elbow and attempted to backpedal. She caught on, stuffed her hand behind her back, raised the other finger to my lips to hush my babble, and drew away. Still pouting, she flapped off over the fence. "You pixies are always so anti-fun."

I watched her disappear beyond a haystack, spinning her starpiece and cuddling the little cat against her neck. Then I walked over to the still-sitting yellow horse, lay my hands against its haunches, and shoved with all I had. "She forgot to hex me, sir. She just completely forgot."

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the sack came down over my head. All the world plunged into burlap darkness. I didn't yelp, though I will admit to my slight flinch. I pressed my fingertips to the crosshatch of squares along the rough fabric. It smelled of smoof, though I wasn't sure if that was the material itself or something it had been lying beside.

"H.P.?"

"Got one," chortled the voice, sounding like a young drake, perhaps around Quincy's age but tilted vaguely younger, like he hadn't quite grown into his adult wings. "Is the big one still here, Tam? Where'd he go? Over there, above the barn? Maybe that's a crow. He's- You think they're Ronald's fairies?"

The damsel - Tam, I suppose - pinched her voice into a falsetto. "They're stuffed animals, Thomas! They're my action figures! My grandma made them for me before she died! I don't know what that star-wand thing you're holding is. Never seen it before in my life. I don't have fairies- you're crazy!"

I curled my hands to fists the way Anti-Sanderson had shown me and beat them against the sack one after the other. "Sir? Advice?"

"They talk," Tam remarked, all cheerful and surprised. I withdrew my hands for a moment to rub the goosebumps along my shoulders, then tried again on the opposite side of the bag.

"H.P.? H.P.?"

Wasn't working- he couldn't hear me- wasn't loud enough-

I slid backwards as Thomas flipped the sack sideways, but before I could right myself and dive out, his hands grasped the edges and drew it shut. I went up into the air as he lifted it, my limbs tumbling together.

"Why can't you do it here?" Tam asked as Thomas began to walk away from the farmhouse and back the way we'd come, gently swinging the bag - and me - against his wingless shoulder.

"I have to be there to make sure it works. And I haven't decided what the third one's going to be. I might need time to think. I'll come back and help you look for the other one when I'm sure he's not going to get away. You're still coming over after dinner, right?"

Taking the scratchy fabric between my fingers, I sunk my teeth into it and tore. This produced a small hole, but just as I was reaching my hand through it (Not smoof), I realized that despite my small size, Thomas would almost certainly notice when my weight disappeared. He'd turn around and simply pick me up, or Tam would see. With my injured wing, it wasn't as though I could fly away before he got his hands around my middle. H.P. couldn't carry both me and Flappy. Human legs were longer than mine, and I still wasn't used to my grounded state- he'd catch me on foot with ease if I attempted to run. Supposing that there were tractors I could hide under or animals to duck behind, he wouldn't give up his search and it wasn't dark enough yet to remain concealed for long. No, I'd be better off making an escape attempt while he was asleep, or if I heard H.P. out there distracting him.

New plan. New… plan…

I bit into the soft flesh of my left arm, near the shoulder. Pixie teeth were the sharpest of all the Seelie Court, and after a few agonizing seconds of nipping, I broke skin and began to leak pink. This, I held against the hole in the bag. At least H.P. could follow the scent of my pheromones for a while should he end up losing the visual trail. Which, if he were still caught beneath that horse, was probable.

We walked in bumpy silence for eight minutes, past a mailbox that read 'Bacon', until Thomas stepped upwards twice and paused. I heard a jingle of a key slipping into a lock, and a pierce-pointed wave jolted through me again. I'd been half-expecting to be thrown in the river or used as an archery target. Both were outdoor activities. H.P. wasn't likely to get me out of a house- not without straining himself. I clawed and bit at the bag again, but by the time the hole was large enough to stick two hands through together, it was too late. The door fell shut behind us.

"Where's your mother?" came an instant, drakian voice. Thomas froze.

"She's not here?"

"She went out looking for you about an hour ago. What's in the sack- Manure?"

"Just some of Tammy's old clothes. I brought them for Janice, if they fit. I'm gonna go see if she's in the backyard." He slammed the door without waiting for an answer and hopped back down the stairs. The sidewalk blurred to yellowing grass beyond my hole. I managed to stick my arm through up to the shoulder, but nothing else would fit. I ripped at the bag again. By then, Thomas had passed through the gate and into the backyard, bounced down another set of steps, and squeezed through the basement door. Sunlight faded into concrete and stud beams. After the quicks of my fingernails bumped against one more folding chair, I surrendered myself to lying in the burlap sack in quiet.

In a chilly, wall-less room that was almost certainly his, Thomas dumped me in a glass tank on his desk that had possibly held fish once, or perhaps a lizard. Before I could stand up, he slotted the lid into place and then put a green Spanish textbook on top of it. After that, he leaned back against an airplane-and-tractor-sheeted bed, and I could see his haystack hair for the first time since he and Tam had fed apples to the horse. "Okay, fairy. I caught you, so I want three wishes in return for letting you go."

Did I look like a genie to him? I chewed over my possible responses as I studied the skeletal framework of the 'walls', then settled on, "That's right. But I have to be in direct sunlight or moonlight in order to do it. In a fairy circle, mushrooms and stuff."

"Nuh-uh. Ronald makes wishes inside. I've heard him in the bathroom at school."

I pursed my lips. There wasn't enough room to stand up in the tank, so I sat cross-legged with my hands rubbing one of my shoes. "Then I'm afraid I can't help you. You see, I can't do magic without a wand, and the Tooth Fairy stole mine yesterday."

Frowning, Thomas ducked beneath his bed and rustled papers and things around. After a moment (which I spent trying and failing to lift the textbook from the lid of the tank), he pulled out a shoebox and took out a black stick topped with a yellow star. "Will this one work?"

"It looks like the real deal, yes."

He pried open the lid of the tank without really removing the textbook and slid in the wand. When I took it, he stood back. "All right. So I just say, 'I wish', then you wave the wand and grant it?"

"That's how it's usually done."

"Okay. First, I wish my real dad would come back from Italy, kick my step-dad out of the house, and we could be a happy family again."

I waved the wand, but it wilted with an unflattering sound, as did my hopes. The power light didn't come on when I ran my thumb up and down the handle. I unscrewed the star capsule at the top. It was empty of rosewater. I took off my shades to rub the place between my eyes. So close. Yet, much too far. Should've kissed the anti-selkie.

"Did it work?" Thomas asked, tilting his head. "I was expecting more pizazz. Sparkles or something. At least a flash of light."

For a second, I debated. I could tell him yes, but if he wished for something more obvious, like a puppy to be in his arms right now, he'd know I lied. I could get punished for that. He might twist my wings. Perhaps he'd take a gun and shoot at me like that brat back in Flappy's cornfield. He'd already told Tam he wanted to wait and assure himself that his early wishes had been granted before he made the third.

My shades went back on my nose. "The star canister here isn't broken, but its insides are drained dry. You need a special kind of water to be able to tune in to the proper frequency of the magical energy field that surrounds the world- a different frequency than the one our physical bodies are connected to so we don't all asphyxiate ten minutes after birth. You can only get purified rosewater from the great fountain Kiiloëi, and that's literally on the opposite edge of the universe as far away from here as possible. It was almost certainly done on purpose; whoever gave you this was throwing you a decoy. I can't do any magic with it."

"Oh… So, if I got you a wand that worked, then you could grant wishes?"

Seeing even fewer reasons to lie now, I shook my head and gave him back the wand when he reached in his hand. "The first problem with your view of reality is, I'm not actually a fairy. I'm a pixie. We're not permitted to grant wishes anyway, for the purposes of this discussion. The Fairy Council likes to keep tabs on whose souls are being drained, and they know that's impossible when they don't have jurisdiction over us anymore. And if you want to get really technical, I'm only half-fairy, and a late bloomer at that, and not terribly good at channeling magic to begin with. You would have been better off capturing the Head Pixie."

His blue eyes narrowed to slits. "So what you're saying is, you weren't even trying to grant my dad wish, you were just trying to escape or attack me or something."

"Duh. Catching me doesn't mean I'm bound to you. I'm not a genie."

Thomas flopped backwards on his bed and huffed at the air. I put my palms and nose to the glass until he sat up again and pointed his finger at me. "Stay."

"I can't go anywhere anyway."

He added a second textbook on top of the tank lid before he left. I hadn't been expecting that. Regardless, I did my best to stand and shove, wings beating, until I heard his shoes clopping back over the thin cement of the basement floor. Then I sat down. Thomas returned with Tam in tow, passing between rows of studs rather than the door since his skeletal room had no walls anyway. There was no sign of H.P.

"Do you eat human food?" he asked, crouching closer to my eye level. When I nodded after a short pause, he handed the textbooks to Tam and cracked the lid wide enough to slip in an orange juice box, a metal spoon, a cup of strawberry yogurt, and a bag of Fritos, already popped open. I watched as he put the books back on. Then I lay down and curled up in the far corner of the tank. How was it that only yesterday, I'd been slinging two wands full of magic the way Anti-Fergus had taught me back at the Eros Nest as I guarded H.P.'s back from Cupid's arrows?

To go from that to the following day, being stuffed in a clear box like a mime, within a human dwelling, with H.P. trapped outside simply because without a starpiece he couldn't ping past the locks, let alone sneak past the drake in the kitchen- it sent a shudder between my wings. He'd need to get back to Pixie World. Retrieve another pen. Then have to register it as his main one so that the other pixies could track it and him as he headed back. He might have forgotten which house belonged to Thomas, and so…

… What if he… didn't…?

E-even if he'd tracked my pheromones, or studied the house, he might choose not to… to…

The Pixie race must survive before any individual.

I smooshed my cheek to the floor of the glass tank and drew my wings up to shield my face from the two humans. I didn't want them to see my uncovered eyes when I could feel them burning against the grooves of my palms. H.P. would come back, I reminded myself, giving my brain a mental slap. He'd come back for me at the cornfield. He'd come back for me at Eunice's fence. He would come back. He always came back. Always, always, always. No matter what he said, he wasn't just my boss, but he was my father, and he cared about me. He had to care about me.

My mind trailed back to that first day as prisoner of the cherubs, when after three thousand years of dwelling on it, I'd all of a sudden looked down and found myself spilling to him exactly how I felt about our relationship, how I would trade every fiber of myself to save his soul, how I appreciated the way he always had the answers, how all the right songs swirled in my ears whenever I saw his face in the mornings, how I could taste the music in his breath against my ear when he leaned down to examine whatever I was working on, how I idolized the way he moved his hands back and forth over breakfast because he was always still filling papers or writing letters or proofreading contracts while he ate, how he felt to me what the fagigglyne addiction must feel like to Wilcox, how he never let anyone crush him beneath their heel like a doormat- how I just wanted to be him so badly, more than anybody else in the entire universe must have wanted anything since the imprisonment of the Tuatha Dé Danann, may the Lost Ancients return from their underground prison, because he always had the answers and was kind and fair to all five hundred and five - three - of us, and he was just my absolute unflinching and unflawed hero and I just envisioned him to one day need me like I needed him, to look at me and want me, want every part of me- to appreciate the tireless way I worked- to just tell me I was his son, and that he'd chosen freely to give me his love even though I didn't nearly deserve it, and I daydreamed that someday his hands might drive me quietly wild with the slow way he'd slide them behind my back to touch me beneath my wings, and his fingers would trace along the back of my neck and press me against his stomach and I'd melt into the warmth of his shirt and he'd whisper my name and just… keep me there, restrained prisoner, with his genuine, fatherly hug…

The crushing dull violet stare. Squeezing my bones to powder. The way he'd turned his back and sentenced me to my bed when my confession had stumbled to an end. Like my deepest needs meant no more than my clumsy poetry. Th-the moment he'd left me for dead in the snow the day I broke out of pooferty had ever been seared into my mind, my single memory from my first century of life, just him walking and walking until he allowed himself to be swallowed up and didn't even look back to check if I was still there- The day I'd humiliated myself only hours before he named Longwood as company vice president instead of me- That time during the War of the Angels when he'd shot me in the leg, not because anyone was forcing him to, but to p-protect himself, and in the box I wrapped my arms around my head and I shivered and choked in silence, because pixies never cried, of course, so that was all I could do, you know? That's what it was, when I wouldn't sob - couldn't sob - We don't do that, you know- pixies. It's unbecoming- just not what we do in this business, you have to realize, it's just not, so I wasn't really crying, see, because pixies don't. Pixies can do a lot of things if they put their mind to it, but there are two actions that they are incapable of expressing at all. We do not cry. And we do not love. That's what H.P. says and the way the universe goes.

"Are those okay?" Thomas asked, still hovering near. He meant the yogurt and chips and juice.

"Not… not hungry."

"What happened to your wing? With the hole?"

"A young human shot me and I can't fly anymore."

Brief hesitation. Tam tapped her nails up and down the glass. "If we find you a wand that works, can you take us to the fairy land?"

At first, I chose not to respond. Then I removed my hands from my face and said, "I don't live in Fairy World anymore. These days I live in Pixie World. I only go to Fairy World when my boss assigns me to. Or I did, anyway."

"Who's your boss? Oh- that'd be the Head Pixie, right?"

I nodded without uncurling. My own reflection appeared as a faint image in the glass. As I shuffled my wings back into place, I said, "I'd… I'd worry more about yourselves than me, in your place. He's going to come back for me soon, you know, and if he finds you standing here like this, he'll- he'll bite out your eyeballs, stick them under your tongues, and then kill you both by slicing you from your belly buttons up to your chins in a single swipe like he were severing one of his magic lines for a nymph."

I felt rather than saw or heard their alarmed glances. Evidently, this was not a thought that had crossed their minds. One of them gulped audibly. Then, Tam's voice: "Er… What's your name, pixie?"

"I'm Mister Sanderson," I said, at last rolling back to my other side. What was the point in pretending they weren't there? They were, and as long as they were, H.P. wasn't going to come for me.

"What's your first name?"

"I don't have one. Just… just Mister."

Thomas snorted. "Your mom and dad didn't even give you a real name?"

"The Head Pixie named me, actually." Pressing my fingertips to the glass again, I knelt up. "I'm Sanderson. His eldest son and the prince of my kind. A-and let me tell you, you totally messed with the wrong. Smoofing. Pixie today, because he's going to come back furious."

They both backed away against Thomas's bed. Swallowing again, Tam said, "You don't look much like royalty, Mister Sanderson. You don't even have a scepter, or a cape, or a sword, or a-"

I yanked off my gray cap with the largest flourish I could muster to display my floating little fairy crown with its three broken points, and the other two clinging on by half-shattered threads. Each of them said a different human word that I didn't recognize, but with context that I could guess. "Thomas," Tam continued in the same breath, "you've just killed us both."

"Hey, you're the one who made me dive for him first!"

"You're a very lucky fellow, Thomas," I said, sliding my shades another inch down my nose. They shook in my hand, for some reason- must have been an earthquake. "If that wand had worked, I'd… I'd have torn you off the face of the planet. I could do it. I would have. And no one ever would have known why."

One of his hands went on his waist. The fingers curled into the folds of his red and white shirt. "You're the prince. Your dad is king. If I set you free, can you send me a real fairy who'll grant my wishes?"

"Yes! Anything you want! Just take me back to H.P.!"

"So that's an official deal?"

It couldn't be. Business instinct prevented me from stating it was. I hesitated for too long with my lips parted. Thomas picked up a third textbook, with an orange spine. "You're no Pixie prince," he said, and put it on top of my tank with the first two. "Don't jump to conclusions, Thomas Bacon," I shouted back, splaying my fingers, "I can help you!" But it was for naught. Though there was an instant of uncertainty hovering in his blue eyes as I named him in full, he brushed it off as he and Tam each took a corner of green and black moose-and-cabin quilt and lay it over my tank too.

"Isn't your step-dad going to find him?" Tam asked. "He'll cut off his wings and slice him up in his own blood for soup, and then kill him."

"Jake never comes down here," was Thomas's reply, and they left again through the doorless doorway.