Summary: H.P. has a huge crush and Sanderson is not impressed.

Characters: Sanderson, H.P., The Fairy Elder, Adelinda von Strangle

Rating: T

Prerequisites: None

Posted: October 10, 2017

14. Minion (The afternoon before "Pixies Inc.")

Thursday April 25th, 2002

Year of Leaves; Spring of the Last Berry

"How old are you, Sanderson?"

Ow. I adjusted my shades with my thumb, rattling the loose screw on the right side to disguise the clenching of my teeth. "You don't know how old I am, sir?"

H.P. fiddled with the generic Fairy World grocery store wrapping foil that hugged the flowers in the bin. From the clench of his right hand against the rim of the can, and the way he made the gesture again when he moved to another one, his left hand always rifling meticulously among petals and leaves, I could tell it took everything in him to resist the urge to pluck the mixed bouquets apart and sort them all by color.

I felt no such compulsions; as a matter of fact, I liked to see the flowers grouped purposefully, artificially, in multicolored patterns that someone who understood these things better than me found aesthetically appealing. Jardine liked his plants au naturel, arranged in neat and tidy rows when growing outdoors. And that made absent-minded sense too. But privately, I preferred order in the universe. I liked my flowers trimmed at the stems and tied together, set out on display for purchase. No matter the season, they were always there. Even when plants died outside and down on Earth, you could always plan on finding some inside the grocery store, tame instead of wild.

Idly, I plucked up one of the nightsky petunias and brought it to my nose, just to feel the anthers brush my skin. This batch of flowers came from the Starfields on Plane 7. Identifiable by the sugary sweetness they gave off from entire wingspans away. Smaller but brighter than Earthside flowers, and so much stronger-smelling, they never failed to make me melt.

It was a stupid fatal flaw to have. Flirting I detested, checks written from a client directly to me instead of the company I wasn't allowed to accept, and I had no patience for anyone who attempted to criticize the way I lived my life. Yet stride into my office and offer me a single blossom in an outstretched hand, and I'd go from unwaveringly firm to amused and then outright giddy in wingbeats. A flower? For me? A cheap gift I wasn't expected to pay back? One alone was not enough to deliver to H.P. like an affectionate gift, which made it the perfect souvenir to keep for myself without a fleck of guilt.

H.P. considered flowers akin to jewelry: a decorative pin of sorts to tuck behind your ear. At the start of the war (Oh smoof, don't start me on the war) between the Fairies and the Anti-Fairies over the question of whether humans ought to be considered on level with us as equals, or below us as a race to be godparented and monitored, H.P. had insisted we announce our stance of neutrality by way of flowers. Specifically pink ones. The bright orchids were his favorite. He'd sewn a sort of lei of them by hand, and thrown the entire gray color scheme of the company out the window. He'd even requested his Refracted counterpart design him a hat in white and blue for the occasion. No, he'd told us with his typical wagging finger. No gray. While this war wages, we're all going to wear white… Absently, holding the petunia to my nose there in the grocery store, I reached up to stroke my chin. I'd grown a goatee back at that time. In fact, I'd grown the hair on my head out so long, even the cowlicks Kalysta Ivorie had licked into my hair as a nymph had temporarily faded away. Such a shame to have it all buzzed off in the end.

Flowers were pleasant niceties. I think sometimes that the reason H.P. is always so publicly insistent that his favorite color is purple, not gray, is because he couldn't stand to surrender his beloved flowers should someone choose to argue with him that they were unbecoming of a dull and logical pixie. So long as the universe viewed purple as a Pixie color, flowers could thrive in their hallway planters and along the bushes between our buildings. Always purple ones, most of which Jardine had bred artificially for the color. I didn't like them growing wild, but I did accept them as part of our world anyway.

It's super difficult to find error in flowers; to error was Faedivus, not flora. Color, shape, size, scent- flowers have it all, though the scent, of course, has always been the most important aspect of them to me. I'd trade away my sight before my sense of smell. I considered vision less important- my shades tint all colors dark anyway, and I rarely take them off except in the comfort of my dimly-lit apartment at the top of Rapunzel Tower.

But my sense of smell is everything to me. Anti-Fairies have their hearing. The Refracted have their eyes. Smell and taste, interwoven, are the senses used by Seelie Courters to detect the minute shifts in the magical energy field which dictate our waking lives: where to stand to avoid dropping the lines that connected us to patches where we could breathe, how to approach or avoid an oncoming magical presence, when wind or Fairy-clipses stretched the field too thin and left us magicless and gasping.

And with smell and taste, we picked up on the attraction signals of those around us, able to identify even the facial expressions of someone standing some ways behind our backs. Anti-Fairies don't read expressions that way, I'm pretty sure. We are creatures of nostrils and taste buds, but they use their mouths in a different way. And ears. When they scream. But that only works in one direction at a time, and is nothing, certainly, compared to our ability. If I ever lost my vision, my nose would still let me keep my sixth sense, and I'd hardly be the wiser that it was gone.

Filing paperwork was a job for the eyes. And that was important, too, in its way. But I'd been born a drone. H.P.'s cheeks, so freckled with fading gyne spots when mine were bare, were indication enough of that. But I'd come to learn that even drones had abilities which were all their own. Most importantly - such a constant, daily necessity for drones like me - we could scent pheromones.

All Seelie Courters had them, for that went hand in hand with having insect DNA embedded in your blood. "Imprint" was the fashionable term of the modern age. That word, though, was used only by your commonplace kabouters who didn't understand the two concepts of pheromones and imprints were mutually exclusive. Kabouters didn't have the keen drone nose required for sorting through myriad overlapping layers, picking out who had passed this way how long ago and when, down to their genus, down to their subspecies, and down even, sometimes, to which area of the body the traces had originated from. Magic gathered thickly in the hands (the right moreso) and pheromones were thickest there, in the mouth, and on the back of the neck. Any drone could tell you that.

Even gynes, whose pheromones were always the strongest, struggled to identify their own familiar scent among a dozen of samples which were all unique and absolutely different (Too much ketodecenoic and 9-oxo-2-decenoic acid sometimes, or too little gossyplure, maybe not enough 4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenylethanol, et cetera). Drones were natural trackers, bred to wander among huge groups of authority figures, yet without fail pick out their superior and come running to him (or her, should an unfreckled kabouter be all some pathetic drone could catch) from anywhere. That was biology. That was fact. Drones without a dominant figure in their lives went against Reality's intended design.

I valued my ability to smell, and flowers tickled my senses deeper, perhaps, than even H.P.'s. Boiled down, flowers may be an embarrassing Achilles heel to suffer, but my burden in life to bear. Fortunately, most clients didn't think to bring such things when they stopped by the complaints department. I didn't have to make myself a grinning fool in front of many. No, just… just one crazy lady who visited me so often, she'd figured me out and stitched me up again. Tarrow's curses, Mrs. Cosma.

"Please answer the question, Sanderson," H.P. finally said. "Sometimes I ask you things in order to keep you on your toes."

I nodded agreement, unconvincingly. "I'm 253,163 years in two months, sir."

"Oh smoof, is it April again already?" H.P. squinted at a drooping yellow rose in his hand. "I meant to be finished and done speaking with Gary about the preparations for the Learn-A-Torium before now. The incident with Rosencrantz and Betty on Monday has put us unexpectedly behind schedule."

"Yes, sir," I murmured, deciding not to suggest alternative explanations, such as his own procrastination. He'd agree and shrug; no point in interrupting when I could already anticipate the answer.

"I'm certain he'll perform very well to make up for her. He's a good boy. And such a nice grammar fanatic too; remind me to ping him up to the cloudlands one of these days so he can give a press conference to all of Fairy World explaining how to properly abbreviate my title. Well. If he hadn't panicked and so rudely snatched your starpiece when you brought him to your office, I'd consider giving him a promotion. But. Sensitive, emotional humans. What can you do?" H.P. pressed the yellow rose against his nose like I had and drew in a deep whiff. I resisted the urge to smirk. When you're a drone, you quickly learn whiffing is for kabouters and gynes, and not necessarily for you.

Some people liked to be very rude and insist, occasionally to my face, that drones had no strengths of any kind. A heightened sense of smell may not seem the most glamorous of superpowers. And true, like all magic, the ability wanes when I get too anxious. But trust me, when two hundred and fifty thousand years of your life (and counting) are spent bustling around in an ever-growing cluster of buildings, all your coworkers seemingly identical at a glance, then identifying one another in a way more reliable than sight quickly becomes necessity. Even Longwood gets us mixed up and hovers in the halls, flushing beneath his own light freckles. H.P. remembers, because he bore us and he's our company founder and of course he would remember, but often, Longwood forgets. We tease him frequently just to watch him stammer and fight the puffiness in his eyes. He would make a terrible Head Pixie, and as soon as H.P. realizes that, he'll be replaced.

"I ought to have invited Jardine along," H.P. mused, still pawing among the flowers. He'd deliberately replaced the yellow rose in a full bouquet of yellow blossoms, rather than returning it to the mixed cluster he'd plucked it from. "He remembers all the specifics about damsels and their interests better than I do."

Speaking of pheromones.

The smirk slipped completely from my face and memory. All at once, I recalled why we had come to the grocery store in the first place. These were the Indiana skies, and it wasn't like they were on the way between Inkblot City over Kansas and the Fairy capital of Faeheim over California. The detour wasn't small. The transportation costs had been unanticipated and unbudgeted for. Perhaps I could ring up Hawkins, if he hadn't gone hiking out of cell and magic service, and we could reevaluate the situation together. And while flowers were pretty to look at and nice to smell, who said damsels deserved them? Especially this particular damsel, whose magical amulet had…

Ah, never mind.

"You think this is stupid," H.P. realized, glancing up at me. Pink petals crumpled between his fingers. The constant thrum of the shop's heater filled the air between us. Several aisles to my left, a soft noise like thunder rumbled, and the sprinklers flickered on above the fresh vegetables.

"Sir." The whine crept into my voice against my request. I placed two fingers to the base of my throat, hoping to quell it, but it leaked through anyway. "I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to. I can see it in your eyes."

"Why do you enforce the shades in our standard dress code if you're going to denounce their abilities like that?"

"It's in your wings," he smoothly corrected himself. His fingers moved again towards the flowers, this time so he could stroke a bundle made up entirely of orange. "I can tell it by the way you lean."

I shifted the weight between my feet, then spread my wings and lit from the ground with a soft buzz. "I said nothing of the kind, sir. You know I have the utmost trust in you."

"Sanderson?"

I didn't want to, but I lifted my gaze to his level anyway. Now H.P. clutched the orange bouquet against his chest, his lower lip pressed out in the slightest pout.

"Do you think my idea is stupid?"

For a moment, I inner-turmoiled with my desire to please my boss and the Pixie customs I'd been raised with which valued honesty. But, while Da Rules and even yapping coin sith gave them a free pass (sometimes), white lies were not precisely my area of expertise. Not my department. Relaying my actual thoughts always came easier to me than trying to organize the words in my head that went against them. Many of my coworkers would have lied anyway. H.P. was the boss, and yet he always seemed to recognize when we lied, and then it would irritate him. I knew him better than most of the pixies in the company did. I understood his thoughts more intimately. For all his insistence that his word was law as far as we were concerned, he didn't value suck-ups or yes men. He wanted our validation because we trusted him and he had earned it, not because we hoped to wheedle his favor in the workplace. Yes, as was typical for me, honesty won out over glaze-eyed loyalty.

"It's a little stupid," I said, quietly. "But I support your decision anyway, H.P."

He stared at me, still holding the orange bouquet. Then he sucked in his cheeks so his saliva slurped and his teeth clicked. "I know how this looks, Sanderson. With me bringing her all these flowers. But I assure you, I'm only seeking her out to discuss a matter of business."

My nose twitched. I could pick up on the cologne he'd rubbed underneath his ears. Oh, I'd noticed it the instant he summoned me for our journey out beyond the company walls. Instead of asking me to help, he'd deliberately waited until after I'd finished my retinue duties this morning, too, like he thought my sacred sense of smell wasn't good enough to notice if he snuck it on. He had continued grooming himself without me. Behind my back, even. With cologne that smelled of some extravagant Anti-Fairy dish that even I couldn't identify. I fixed my eyes on his ear, hoping he would notice even through my shades, but either he'd been bluffing his ability in the dim light of the store, or he was a smoofing good actor. Both statements were probably true. I unclenched my teeth and managed to say, "You don't need to explain yourself to me, sir. I trust and support you."

He dropped his gaze to the roses. With one hand, he folded back the transparent plastic wrapping. "They're just business flowers. Really. They are."

I nodded.

We paid up front, him refusing to put the flowers down and me skimming my silver credit card through the machine, methodical and bored. At the entrance of the store, H.P. paused. Then he shoved the bouquet into my arms. Thorns pricked my fingers even through the foil. I nearly dropped the bundle, but caught it as it fell. H.P. spun on his heels and marched back to the flowers in their bins.

"Sir-"

"Nope," he said, leaning over the case again. "It's a shame I just had my prescription renewed last week. I couldn't turn a blind eye if I wanted to. We fix this here and now."

With that, he began to tear flowers loose from their careful wrappings. A bead of blood stabbed the air as he pricked his thumb on a thorn, too. My wings twitched forward. My throat sealed shut. But, it was only one drop, and I resisted the urge to swarm to his aid.

Instead, I drifted down one of the neighboring aisles. Since starpiece magic didn't work inside the grocery store, it would take him at least five minutes to get the job done by hand. That's if no employees tried to stop him, which they certainly would, even when today was Thursday and the bare minimum of people were about. But H.P. would keep repeating that word, "Nope," over and over again, louder and louder so no one could get a word in edgewise, and he could pretend old age and failing ears prevented him from realizing what he was doing was wrong… A faint smile tugged in the corner of my mouth. That would be just like him. And then, before I could stop myself, I snorted and shook my head at the ceiling. That would be just like him.

I could leave him alone for five minutes. H.P. had lost the battle against his own patience, and now he had to serve his time. Certainly, he wouldn't slip out of the store behind my back. He and I were a package deal, and if the irritated Fairies threw him out, they'd come straight for me next and remove me too.

There was only one thing I wanted to grab, anyway. A quick thing. Quick enough that even I willingly strayed from my boss's side to fetch it.

"Smoof," I muttered under my lines when I realized I had dropped to my feet and started to sprint. The trim stems of the roses were wet and piercing in my hand. H.P. wouldn't leave me for at least five minutes, and it would take less than five minutes to obtain what I was looking for at a walking pace. These were logical facts, though my mind was still reluctant to accept them. I had dared to step away from H.P., and perhaps my calculations had been off. Five minutes may have been too generous an estimate. Perhaps the employees would call in the Keepers, and the Keepers would call Jorgen himself. He might wrench my boss physically from the premises by the back of his neck and fling him all the way back to Pixie World, not even realizing I would have been left behind in the process.

And okay, so I had a starpiece in the pocket of my suit coat. But-! But what if that starpiece stopped working? What if a fairy stole it from me? What if someone shot me in the wing and I lost my ability to fly? What if I got pinned in jail? What if I were accidentally left abandoned?

I skidded to a halt next to a display of bananas much too green for eating. After a few seconds' hesitation, I changed course and fled back to H.P.'s side. The Dolly Parton CD from the rack I'd been eyeing when we'd passed it earlier wasn't worth risking potentially permanent separation. I probably knew every song on it anyway. I knew all of the songs.

H.P. finished rearranging the bouquets by the time I reached him again. He looked at me with his mouth a few millimeters more crooked than usual in surprise. Great, so he'd finished earlier than anticipated and he hadn't noticed I'd slipped off until I'd returned. What did that mean? Would he have really left me behind?

"My roses," he said unnecessarily, nodding at them in my hands. "Let's go."

We left the grocery store and spent a few minutes lingering in the open air until the effects of anti-theft magic drainage had worn off. Then H.P. flipped out his phone and pinged us both across the cloudlands to Faeheim. I rematerialized next to him on the end of the Pink Castle's rainbow drawbridge. Together, we studied the three pillars out front and the four yellow flags flapping from its turrets. I handed the roses back to H.P. and said, "Hm."

He glanced at me sideways. "Oh?"

I dipped my head. That was the extent of our exchange, and I cautiously followed him over the bridge and up to the door. We passed through security, signed in at the desk, and were instructed to head down the long hallway on our left until it opened into what had once been a ballroom, but now served as a waiting room for the few visitors allowed access into the Castle. Then we were to turn right. H.P. began to hum and skim his fingertips against the purple hallway wall, but as I trailed after him, I did it with my nose pinched shut and mouth clamped. The fact that the walls were bare of portraits, decorated only with identical white doors, did not help me distract myself. I'm sure it was done on purpose. At least the tiles were checkered with violet and white. Not terribly different from Pixie World, then.

Except for that stench.

Before we'd gone very far, I gave in. I grabbed H.P.'s arm and yanked backwards, which almost kept him from moving forward. "Sir, I have to ask you to reconsider."

He peered down at me, a thin smile etching its way across his face. "As usual, I understand, but I reject you and your opinions."

My lips pressed together. Okay, don't get me wrong. I loved H.P. He was organized and efficient, energetic enough for my needs without running us to exhaustion, and he enforced plenty of rules and structure in our lives so we didn't become overwhelmed. That, and he smelled delicious. But he didn't understand drones like he understood other gynes. So when he pried my fingers loose from his arm, I positioned myself directly in his path and allowed my wings to rub together with an uneasy chirp. "Sir, even you can smell her pheromones. It's my duty to warn you that if you continue approaching her, they will overpower yours and you will become a subordinate gyne. And you know what that means for me. Again, as your retinue, I have to ask you to reconsider." I paused, then added softly, "Even though I know you won't."

"I know what I'm doing."

I continued to hover at the entrance of the hall as he continued floating down it. At the fifth door down, he turned back.

"Sanderson? Aren't you coming?"

"I…" I placed my palms against my legs, spreading my fingers. Though not usually the Pixie way, especially for a drone, I forced myself to draw air in through my mouth instead of my nose while I struggled to order my thoughts. "I'd rather not, sir. You know exactly what has to happen."

He placed the fist that gripped the orange bouquet against his waist. "Sanderson, the last time we were here was almost ten thousand years ago. You've licked my neck a million times. You don't think my 253,156 years of pheromones in your brain will survive contact for two minutes against hers?"

I frowned. "Sir, if that wasn't a joke, you will need to clarify your thoughts."

"Never mind," he said with a shake of his head. The metal star dangling from the tip of his hat tinkle tinkled. He gestured vaguely for me to follow him. I hesitated for another several seconds, then did.

We didn't make it far. After passing two more doors, I wrenched the phone from my pocket and pinged myself out of my suit and into an identical copy- but in bright yellow instead of gray. When the Head Pixie looked over his shoulder at me, betrayed hurt glimmering faintly in the backs of his guarded eyes, it almost brought color to my skin. I met his gaze for a beat, then attempted to make a move past him. The Head Pixie caught my wrist. Before I could protest, he dragged me three doors back down the hall we'd come from.

"Excuse me," I said, studying the clench of his pale fingers against my slightly tanner skin. "I'm going to have to ask you to let go."

"I'll let go when you're back to wearing the approved Pixie dress code."

Obediently, I followed his direction. My yellow suit vanished with a ping, replaced with the proper color again. H.P. released my hand. "Try harder to stay gray," was his simple suggestion.

"It's not my fault, sir."

He kept a steady eye on me as we again made our way down the empty hall. And when we reached the end of it and stepped out of the passage, into the main waiting area full of white chairs and walls, I automatically switched the colors I was wearing. At the distinct ping, the Head Pixie promptly turned around, took my shoulders, and pressed my back against the sharp corner of the wall. My wings stopped beating. The Head Pixie's large hands, bonier than I remembered from my younger years, pinched my skin- even around the bouquet he still held. He leaned forward.

"Can I help you?" I droned, watching him. A literal said tag, that.

Instead of responding verbally, the Head Pixie stuck his tongue to my forehead, just beneath my cowlicks. Warm, familiar scents of sharp falak beans mingled with the subtle banana tang that lingered around all gynes I knew. Then the sensation deepened, uncovering the deep waft of fresh black ink, the vibrant sting of orange slices, the tight dustiness of old parchments, and most importantly, the infamous cinnamon taste we pixies seemed to carry naturally as a species- all of the Head's gyne pheromones, custom-made after six hundred thousand years of life and meant specifically to appease picky drones like me. Oh, yes, all sorts of scents, such wonderful scents, leaking into my nose. I cleared my throat and squeezed my eyes shut, just… just smelling them. The Head Pixie got in a few rough and irritated licks across my face, moving from my forehead down the bridge of my nose, before I had the sense to reach for my phone and go gray once more. Ping.

I didn't open my eyes until he withdrew his tongue, still clenching my shoulders. "I did warn you, sir."

H.P. watched me replace my phone inside my coat, hesitate, and channel my magic to switch my suit yellow without removing the starpiece from my pocket again. Then he continued watching as I flicked back to gray. The fourth time I went yellow, I picked out a smirk twitching in the corner of his mouth.

Ping. "This isn't funny, sir."

"I must disagree," he murmured, placing another lick on my face, "because I think it's hilarious."

Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Yellow in dress and red in the face, I finally dropped my attention to my feet and resolved to stabilize my jittering thoughts. "Head Pixie, I understand this is sadistically entertaining for you, but I need you to let me pick a side. Using too much magic too fast is going to make me throw up."

"Oh, all right." He released me and motioned with the roses for me to lead the way through the empty former-ballroom-turned-waiting area, with its scattered soft chairs and star-shaped lamps. "But to be frank, yellow is not your color."

I ignored him and took off my shades. Folding them up, I clipped them to the collar of my shirt. And, as an afterthought, I reached up and pulled the pointed hat, also yellow, from off my crown. It was a broken crown, malformed by genetic mutations and lack of proper nutrition since my birth, but wearing a hat of distinctly Pixie culture was simply out of the question right now. Behind me, the Head Pixie exhaled through his nose in what, I imagined, was the closest an emotionless being such as himself could come to disappointment.

"You don't have to come further than the waiting area, Sanderson. I realize this place distresses you. Honestly, I should have left you home. Wander if you wish. Try to find a wet wall with paint you can watch dry, or something. If you wait up front by the Giant French Doors of Time, I'll pick you up and turn you back on my way out."

"That's not your choice to make." I paused. "Sir."

The Head Pixie considered my words as we crossed the room. "Rude. Sanderson, you're pushing your luck with this power fantasy of yours."

"Yes, sir." An arched doorway had arrived on our left. My hands, I realized belatedly when I gestured to it, had been outfitted in white gloves by instinct. I had the instant urge to rub them across a vase or the frame of a portrait to check for dust, but instead I managed to say, "It's this one. Follow me, Drake Head Pixie."

I'd walked these castle halls long ago, but that wasn't how I identified her location. Even the Head Pixie could smell her now- I recognized it in the perking of his brows, the faint quickening in his movements. His own pheromones spun through the air with every flit of his wings, but they were weaker now than they had been in the hall. Good. At least I could expect him to take the change of rank in stride and not thrust me unceremoniously against any more walls. Even for a drone, that was demeaning. But, not demeaning enough that I could resist the urge to lick my lips, trying to pick up any lingering traces of his smell near my nose.

With each passing wingbeat, H.P.'s familiar pheromones flickered away from my detection threshold. The foreign scents of physical dark and liquid cold replaced the warm ink and orange-cinnamon twist I'd long grown accustomed to. I flinched despite myself. Oh, those were Tuatha Dé Danann pheromones, all right. The sheer reek of the stuff could have blasted the powder off a bank of snow. Already I wanted to take a shower. Actually, yeah. I planned to do exactly that. They literally had showers off the waiting room for exactly this reason.

All of a sudden, the Head Pixie put his hand on my upper arm. "Sanderson?"

I took his hand and moved it to his waist. "Please call me Mr. Sanderson. But yes?"

"How do I look?"

"Um…" I eyeballed the bright roses pinned to his side by his arm and tried to keep my gaze off his face. He'd used a certain soft tone when he asked the question. The way he always used to do back when I worked for him, when it was just the two of us, and we weren't engaged in public meetings with the rest of the management team around the conference table. Like we were in his break room alone. He wanted my actual opinion on the matter. A humble drone's opinion, of all things. While lightly flattering, it, well… wasn't. On the surface, the tall pixie with the signature gray star hat seemed the pleasantly dull and boring figure who rattled off both Earthside and cloudland postal codes or the nutrition labels for a hundred different cereal boxes as easily as some people said their ABCs, and snickered over the lips of soda bottles with his lavender eyes dancing as he watched underage juveniles buzz back and forth on sugar highs.

I knew him. But I didn't. I knew those glasses, but not the wide eyes behind them, or the hopeful peak of his brows combined with the strange shy smile sneaking over his face. I knew the light fluffs of his white hair and the single Whimsifinado family swirl curling low from the back, but I didn't know the purple bow tie resting at the base of his neck. The bow tie that rested on top of his usual black tie, because it wasn't exactly a thing he wore often and I doubt he'd thought twice about how many he was wearing. I certainly hadn't put it there during my morning retinue routine. After 253,156 years, I knew every curve of him, every wrinkle of his skin, every silver hair on his arms, but I didn't know that way he hovered barely two inches above the ground, with his shoulders slightly hunched and his chin tilted down towards his neck. Submissive. Subordinate. Willingly. I worried that if I looked too closely, I would pick up signs of honest pleasure about the situation in his body language. That would be confusing.

The lyrics to Longwood's favorite "Bye Bye Birdie" song popped into my head before I could stop them: It won't last. Not at all. He's too thin. She's too tall.

"You look fine, Head Pixie, sir. But I'll straighten your ties again. They've become unstraightened. You can't meet my boss looking like that."

He narrowed those formerly-wide eyes. The hopeful smile slipped away. "You're fortunate I'm not the jealous type, Sanderson, or I'd have you fired as punishment for quitting without a two weeks' notice."

I shrugged. It had been a long time, I think, since the Head Pixie had actually seen me shrug. We hadn't been big on such body gestures back when I worked at Pixies Inc. Information then had been delivered verbally and crisply. No guesswork. He recoiled, but didn't comment.

"There," I said, turning my attention further down the hall. The unmistakable scent of warm rotting flesh and moldy peaches had grown so immediate, I couldn't have switched my clothes back to gray no matter how many licks the Head Pixie - or anyone, even Mother Nature and Father Time - forced on my face. Around another corner, she appeared. First, a pair of knees, concealed to the ankles in yellow ruffles and ribbons. Her hands, folded, rested in her lap. Then her arms followed with gaping sleeves large enough that I could have crawled inside them easily. Then the rest of her.

The Head Pixie instantly jerked to attention. He swept off his hat and held it to his chest. I plucked my crown from the gravitational field above my head. Behind her came Adelinda von Strangle, with her huge staff raised. Her own hair had long ago turned white to the roots, and she'd cut off her wings before even the Head Pixie had been born, but with her glowing staff, she magically eased the Fairy Elder towards us in a wheeled (yet floating) chair anyway. I dotted a submissive greeting pattern across my neck with two fingers and then bowed. I didn't straighten, but stayed floating there to study the spirals and grooves in the checkered pattern of the tiles. As the last of his pheromones finally crumpled into him, the Head Pixie copied my gesture.

"Isn't she something," he breathed in my ear, like a statement.

I resisted the instinct to plug my nose. I even suppressed the urge to either lift my eyebrows or gag as I peeked past my swooping cowlicks and sized the Elder up. Towering was the first word that came to mind when I looked at her. The Head Pixie had taught me that the Aos Sí had stood at an average of 8'4" when they still wandered the universe. His ancestors even taller than most; with exception of me, who didn't eat much and burned more energy than I took in, pixies were a broad-built stock. And even the Aos Sí had still been a race subject to the Tuatha. I ran quick calculations through my head as I studied the Elder in her chair, and predicted her height loosely around 20'5". It was a really tall castle. While both the two cloudland castles were tall, the Blue was the longer one. The Pink had even more of the height.

The next thing my eyes latched onto was the huge diamond closing the gossamer mourning shawl at her throat. It would have fetched an awfully pretty penny on the human market, and we Fairykind could probably coax some use out of it as a nice bookend or doorstop or something, but its true value ranked far above mere coins and bills. The Fairy Elder ought to have gone the ways of natural things long ago. That enchanted diamond alone kept her soul forcefully grounded to her body, hence the stench of death that had overpowered her "true" pheromones generations back. The longer I stared, the more my skin prickled. I actually threw up a bit in my mouth. Nonetheless, I forced myself to squeeze my eyelids shut and swallow it rather than make a spectacle of myself. Not in front of him. Her.

I switched my attention to something else. Something that didn't suggest I didn't belong here, faux data squirted into some magical matrix and left to sow seed. No. I would not accept the ugly reality that I may be a fused, double-layered, artificial thing pieced together by Mother Nature and Father Time. I was a person of flesh and lines and blood. I was all Sanderson.

Her skin was black. Not brown, but black, black, black, like the whole universe. No Fairy crown floated above her head. Instead, silver antlers branched up from between her sweeping pointed ears, twisting and intertwining. Because of course she wasn't tall enough without them already. There were four antlers, and each one decked out like a tree in the design you'd expect from a temperate season. I couldn't find a single square inch on her face that hadn't been coated beyond all reason with wrinkles. Her eye sockets were hollow, yet they glowed with sheer white as though lit from somewhere within. Her arms and legs were bones. Her skin sagged. It even peeled in a few places to show what lay beneath, like bright stars glowing in the deepest black sky, so "bony arms" was hardly an exaggeration. Well. I might be subservient to her, but my tastes were my own to a certain point, and no amount of pheromones could take that away from me.

"She's something." I chose to leave it at that. The only feature of the Fairy Elder that didn't look or smell or presumably feel or taste mere minutes from death would be her hair. Tall as she was, it lay braided down her back to the floor in brassy waves, distinctly fiery orange in color instead of the pale sunshine yellow of her dress, and Adelinda had to take care not to step on it. Merfolk showed bright tails occasionally, but they weren't technically magic, so they could be excused. Otherwise, orange was not a natural color for Fairies, or genies, or any of the magical creatures in the universe, except the Tuatha themselves. And of course, that's what she was. The last of her race as the Head Pixie had been the first of his.

Adelinda brought the Elder closer with a tilt of her staff, and both he and I stopped bowing and dropped to our knees instead. Our wings stilled. We didn't even rustle them into place against our backs, but allowed them to droop beside us to the tile. I crushed all eight fingers into the hardness of it and curled them until my knuckles flared white.

Nearly two minutes passed in this way. Whether by pheromones or by choice, I found my tongue too heavy to attempt speaking. Even the Head Pixie remained absolutely silent, except for the occasional skitter of his wings. I didn't need to look at him with my eyes to sense his struggle to keep his face straight. Silently, he brushed a line of drool away from the corner of his mouth and replaced his hand to the floor. Gynes. Honestly.

"Fergusius Whimsifinado," the Fairy Elder said at last. Her voice grated and rasped with the squishy scrape of a damsel who had lost her teeth eons ago, and whose mouth stayed dry no matter how much she drank. The Head Pixie had always told me that she remembered the names of every member of the Fairykind in the known universe, and probably every alien too. She was just so perfect that way. Personally, I imagined it took her longer to identify someone than most because it took her nose that much time to penetrate her own stink of undead flesh and pick up on our pheromones at all.

"My goddess." Once he'd greeted her, the Head Pixie grabbed his bouquet and pushed himself back to his feet. He fingered his bow tie, and then his hand moved up to smooth the puffy clumps of hair around his ears. He replaced his hat.

Those empty eye sockets fell on me. "Mister Sanderson."

I stood too, more stiffly than he had. Once I'd returned my broken crown above my head, I crossed the room to take up my expected place at her left arm, beside Adelinda. My gloved hands went behind my back. I bowed again, though with less enthusiasm this time. "My goddess."

Her skeletal hand lifted from her lap. She moved the enormous fingers down to my face - each one taller than I was - and I flinched at once. Instead of touching me, the Elder kept her tent-like hand less than a wingspan from my skin. When I didn't move, she returned it to the arm of her chair. "It is a personal pleasure to see for myself that thou hast recovered completely from the ordeal at our last meeting, Sanderson. The Wise Ancients were correct. Thou hasn't changed a bit. I see thine leg is still limping."

My eyes flashed again to the heavy diamond dangling like a plastic Peppy Meal toy at her neck. I clenched my teeth. No, I hadn't cared for our last meeting. All of a sudden, my body felt three sizes too small. Not even caring that I was breaking Pixie tradition, I made a fast, observable movement and scratched furiously at the crook of my left arm. Oh, it was a snatter of a place to be, trapped between a gyne and a god. On the one hand, the Elder's pheromones gleamed on my tongue like sparkling suns that I could stare at without flinching away, but on the other, even she couldn't overpower two and a half hundred millennia of scent layers quite so easily. Though my body and actions were hers, my brain longed to stand safely beside the Head Pixie again.

But I didn't make a move to do so. As a drone, I had little choice but to passionately serve the most dominant source of pheromones in the area, and for now, that dominant source was a deity, not a dear old friend.

The Elder's glowing eyes, if you wish to call them eyes, wandered from me to the Head Pixie again. Throughout our exchange, he had said nothing, done nothing, but float less than two inches above the ground with an unmistakable expression of pining scrawled over his entire face. He still pressed the orange flowers to his chest. The tip of his tongue poked out from between his lips. His wings chirped every few beats. Even his legs began to tremble at the knees. Poor man, I thought absently as I studied him. He wasn't half as used to switching roles as I was. Apart from the constant twitching in my nose as I tried not to inhale the reek of death, I stood as steadily beside the Elder as I ever stood beside him. But the Head Pixie wasn't like me. He had no concept of altering allegiances on a whiff and a whim. Instead, nature forced his mind to bend, his perception to shift, his puzzled instincts to manifest in the only way a gyne could possibly understand.

Rivalry towards drakes who expressed dominant behaviors. And lust towards dominant damsels.

I knew no other word for it. True romantic affection was out of the question, for love was an abstract emotional concept and nothing I understood. Lust was biological, lust was mechanical, lust made sense in a gruesome, despicable way. In my youth I hadn't been able to recognize the difference between the two, which had caused no end of confusion millennia ago when staring down at his original copy of Origin of the Pixies down in the Labyrinth with a quill gripped in my fist and my eyebrows arched. I did not understand kindness, charity, changing hearts, and knew only that my boss would never succumb to such petty, unfalsifiable beliefs either.

Obsession, now that I could comprehend. By the distinct natures of our biology, my own "infatuation" with the Fairy Elder manifested differently than his. Drones were natural fair-weather friends and sycophant servants. Even I, though minutes ago I'd loved him fiercely, had no power to alter my fate. For kabouters (and, especially, gynes) it was confusing to watch our colors change in a snap. Hurtful, even, that we could so easily abandon someone who fed and cared for us in instant favor of someone we'd never met. Yes, hurtful even for pixies, pallbearers of emotion they may claim to be. Even a pixie gyne must be hurting to see me now. Hurting, and lonely, and confused, and dripping with lust and fearful anxiety. And thus, I looked back at the flushing Head Pixie with pity in my brain, without a thought of blame or hypocrisy.

This was not my fault. This was not his fault. It did not matter whose fault it was. Neither of us mattered to each other right now. One thing alone mattered, and she was the Fairy Elder.

The Head Pixie's wings chirped like an imp's again in the silence. The Elder, with a groan, relaxed her back against her chair. "What a pleasant surprise it is that I mayest visit with thee both. Is it mine birthday? Perhaps Valentine's Day? I confess I had not been informed thou wert coming."

I watched his face without mirth. It had brightened into crimson. The same shade as a piece of fabric that was also bright crimson. I didn't even know pixies could turn that color. He must have forgotten I was looking, or he didn't care, because he shifted the roses in his arms and slipped his thumb inside his mouth. The nail splintered between his teeth. "Good morning, Yvainna. You're as radiant as usual today."

Her chin lifted. "I see thou art as charming as thou hast ever been, Fergus."

He giggled an actual, nervous monotone giggle before he could stop himself, hugging the flowers again to his breast. His fingers popped from his mouth and went to his cheek. The others curled against the stiff cotton of his suit. At some point, when I hadn't been watching, he'd turned the fabric from gray to yellow. "We've got to stop meeting like this. Could I perhaps buy you a coffee sometime, dear Elder?"

"Thy sentimentality is appreciated, Head Pixie, but I must refrain."

He drifted closer, never removing his eyes from her face. He ended up a mere wingspan away from me. Then his wings began to beat more rapidly, fighting the natural pixie curse that always left us hovering near the ground rather than granting us the ability to fly high. It was a struggle that sent beads of sweat marking his brow, but he rose until he ended up level with her lap. Once he could position himself above her knee, remaining airborne was easier. Adelinda and I watched him place the tiny orange roses among the ruffles and folds of her sweeping dress. With considerable physical effort, and possibly some help from his starpiece, the Head Pixie lifted her hand in both of his (it was longer from wrist to pinky than even his pointed forehead) and kissed her middle knuckle. "I understand your careful diplomacy. But my offer is forever available if you should change your mind. I meant it, what I said. About you being radiant."

"What?"

I repeated his comment in half a shout. The Elder, slightly more befuddled, somehow, than she normally was these days, begged he say it again. She touched her tall pointed ear for emphasis, and the Head Pixie obeyed her request, much louder than before. When he had, she tilted her head. "Mine pheromones art clouding thy judgment. I didst not brush mine hair today, nor hast make-up been applied."

"And I'm not the type to mind." After lowering her hand, the Head Pixie's fingers slid behind his back. His eyes dropped. With a gentle kick, he scuffed the folds of her yellow dress with his shoe. "My fair lady, if we can take this conversation elsewhere, there's a private matter of business I wish to discuss with you."

Adelinda and I cleared our throats at the same time. "The Fairy Elder does not entertain visitors in private," she said.

The Head Pixie temporarily disappeared from my line of sight as picked his way across Yvainna's lap like a sailor on a skyship. I tracked his signals. Soon enough, he reappeared from behind her arm with his hands and chin resting on her wrist. He stuck out his tongue. "She does for me. Let's not deny I've always been her favorite."

While I understood lust, in theory, I still twitched my nose at the insinuation. Adelinda and I shared a glance. She tightened her fists around her staff, and the Fairy Elder's chair twitched forward. As one, in silence, we flicked our attention upward to hear her rule on the matter. She'd already slumped to one side, asleep, with sticky drool glazing a path to her shoulder.

"You're a lovely couple," I drawled. "Such a loss for the single elderly everywhere."

"I want a whole litter of white-haired, wrinkle-faced nymphs," he murmured. Even from where I stood, I could hear the words. When I processed the underlying meaning of the statement, I crossed my arms. Longwood's song picked up in my ears again.

Hiya, Hugo! Are ya stupid? Whatcha wanna go get pinned for?

"Would you kindly?" Adelinda asked, offering me her staff. Her thick brows had scrunched her eyes to slits.

"Would I? Dame, it would excite my neurotransmitters." She placed it in my arms. I staggered beneath the weight, but managed to keep upright. Of course I wouldn't dare use the thing, but I couldn't just let it touch the floor either. Adelinda grabbed a horizontal bar on the back of the Fairy Elder's massive chair. Then another bar, and another, heaving herself up as the Head Pixie watched curiously from the Elder's wrist. By this point, he'd settled himself completely on top of it, and he made no attempt to move as Adelinda slid down the Elder's shoulder and trotted along her forearm towards him.

It took both her arms to push him off, and when she had, she perched on one of the Elder's knuckles. Her legs, not nearly as muscled anymore as her son Jorgen's but still vaguely reminiscent of her prime nonetheless, dangled like slabs of cold meat from the ceiling of a walk-in freezer. "Excuse me," she said, staring the pixie down as he slunk a step back. "I stand as the primary caretaker and confidant of the Fairy Elder. She does not entertain visitors in private."

I shifted my position so I could observe the scene with my eyes as well as my magical senses, taking care not to scrape Adelinda's staff along the wall (How the Elder and her floating chair even fit in the hallway was a mystery my simple drone mind could not comprehend, arched ceiling or not). The Head Pixie smiled, hands clasped at his waist. "Fair enough, Dame von Strangle. While that's a shame, it doesn't change the fact that I need to talk to her. It's about the Fairies who have been encroaching on Pixie World property. They're being mean."

Adelinda frowned. "I have no trust in you. I do not like you. This coming summer marks the thirty-seventh anniversary since Cupid and the Tooth Fairy chased you and your assistant out of Las Vegas for sneaking those Amity licenses off your sister and attempting to impersonate the godparents of no less than eleven children. All at the same time. I believe you yourself did remind us all at the Council meeting - a month ago, yes? - that you and your pixies have been plotting to seek revenge on Fairy World this year as is your ridiculous tradition."

I watched with passable amusement as the thin smirk dropped from the Head Pixie's face. "Oh. Yes. That does sounds like something I would let slip in public." Then his face straightened. His hands moved to his waist. "And immediately after that, you dropped that lava lamp with the genie straight into Flappy Bob's lap. Thankfully I had confederates who were able to intervene (even if the results were distasteful), but I don't think you realize what you almost did. That alone wouldn't have been so bad, but Anti-Cosmo had a fit when he heard and rang me up at three in the morning. Something about the bottle not passing regulation, something about saltwater… Honestly his accent thickens when he's upset and I stopped trying to decipher it millennia ago."

"Ha!" Adelinda slid down from the Elder's hand and jabbed a finger at his chest. "I knew it. I knew your human clown would play a role in your big, dumb takeover plan."

"Yes, you're very smart. He's useful and I like him. Under, ahem, Anti-Cosma v. Adelinda von Strangle, I believe you aren't allowed to interfere in my transactions with humans unless I either reveal the existence of the cloudlands or directly cause a human physical injury. I have not. I have gone out of my way, in fact, to ensure that human in particular has not been harmed. Despite his best efforts to throw himself into danger, apparently." He lifted his eyebrows. "Does that bother you, dame? It's fine if it does. It would bother me. But the fact remains, dumb Fairy laws prevent you from getting in my way. Even if I've confirmed I will be launching one of my revenge schemes this year, and even if you know where I will likely act and who I may be utilizing as a pawn, you can't stop me." Each of those last few words, he spit like their own sentence, wings beating rapidly until their noses were nearly bumping.

"My son and I will not be taking our eyes off Dimmsdale for a second."

"Do it," he said, softly. "Send in your patrol of godkids to stop me. March them straight through the Learn-A-Torium doors and onto Pixies Inc. property. Maybe you'll find a find a weak point in our plan that Sanderson and I didn't catch and correct."

That was my name. And… that was my old job. Adelinda realized it at the same time I did. As I inhaled sickly pheromones through my nose, she turned and stared down at me. Her fingers snapped once. "Spill your guts, pixie."

I stayed quiet, glaring up at her as the Head Pixie widened his eyes behind her shoulder. When she made as though she might leap down and approach, it was a steady process- not the quick, unexpected lunges forward that the Head Pixie (more than Anti-Sanderson, or even the Dame Head) were well known for. Apart from shifting her staff in my arms, I didn't move. The wingless Adelinda positioned herself, fuming, at the tip of the Elder's knee.

"Pixie, you wear the colors of our goddess. For the good of the Fairy nation, reveal to us what you know."

"Adelinda, I'm gone, but I'm not that far gone. I'm a drone. Not a computer program. While my present loyalties lie with the Fairy Elder over the Head Pixie, I'm able to perceive that if he should accept me back upon her leaving, I will again belong to him. In this likely scenario, it would no longer benefit me to share that information with you. I don't discuss my ex with current employers."

She leaned backwards, grasping white curls in her fists. The Head Pixie chuckled, dryly. "Catch me if you can, Adelinda. You can't. I think I've planted enough red herrings to occupy your forces until it's too late." Keeping his hands where they were on his waist, he squinted up at the Elder. "Should we wake her up? Seriously, those delinquent Fairy punks have been slicing off chunks of my Pixie World cloud for weeks now. We should talk about that. If this keeps up, they could unbalance the whole structure of the vapor and cause a collapse. My city plummets straight to Kansas. They're annoying and I'm losing my patience." Then he went stiff. "Oh- hello, my goddess. You're awake."

"Mmm…" She lifted her drooping sleeve to her eye sockets as though yawning had resulted in tears. When she shifted, her knees rocked slightly. Adelinda stumbled, grabbing the Head Pixie's elbow to avoid tipping over. He studied her in amusement until she realized what she'd done and shoved him away. The Elder tilted her head down. "I didst doze off?"

The Head Pixie drifted along her arm up to her shoulder. "There are no hard feelings. I'm devoid of all but one feeling, of course. You work hard and you deserve a rest now and again, Yvainna."

I mouthed "Work hard?" in Adelinda's direction. She was too busy glancing between my ex-boss and our current one to notice. It was my understanding that these days, our Fairy Elder was little but a public figurehead. She'd delegated her political and magical powers to the seven Council Robes not long after the Sacred Revolution. The great sword Claímh Solais was her one claim to magic now, and even that was purely ceremonial.

The Fairy Elder watched him skim along her arm. She lifted her hand towards her shoulder, slowly, grimacing, and the Head Pixie lighted on her fingertips. When she brought him to her torn and sunken cheek, he kissed it politely and questioned, "And you will help me with my little problem, won't you, sweet goddess?"

"We can discuss such a thing."

Adelinda folded her arms. "Do not rashly succumb to any urge to meet with him in private, my lady."

The Fairy Elder chuckled, and I watched warm color rise in Adelinda's cheeks. Still cradling the Head Pixie near her cheek, the Elder patted one fingertip against her confidant's head. "Faithful child, thou art insulting me. I count Fergusius Whimsifinado among mine dearest friends, and I hath bestowed the utmost confidence in him and in his gentlemanly respect."

Every muscle in Adelinda's face tightened. Her throat constricted. I again shifted her staff, adjusting my weight between my feet too, and fought not to copy her posture. In the Elder's hand, the Head Pixie leaned a smug shoulder against her thumb.

"You can run along and play with Sanderson, Adelinda. You know I'll take good care of our dear Elder while we engage in our…" His eyes wandered up to her face, and his smile became another smirk. "… discussion."

Lost your marbles! Are you nutty?

The Elder turned her blank eyes on him, the chuckle still dancing on her wrinkled lips. "And thou remaineth a charmer. But, Adelinda shall remaineth in mine presence for now. Thou canst close thy mouth and not waste thy strength. I assure you, we shalt discuss matters of business today."

A flash of undisguised irritation zipped across his face. Adelinda perked up. But, the Head Pixie shrugged his annoyance away. He removed his hat again. "And, you'll have to give me a dominance lick or two to suppress my lingering pheromones, my goddess." So saying, he angled a finger down at me. "After all, Sanderson is here. Even when I wear your yellow, he does a good job of keeping me turned on."

I resisted the urge to shoot him a miffed glance that said, Explain in a pamphlet how this is my fault. Instead, I shut my eyes and clenched Adelinda's staff. But even with my eyes tightened, irises softly glowing against my lids, I could pick up their respective movements in the energy field. The Fairy Elder could have swallowed him. Easily, her mouth was large enough. She wouldn't have even had to chew, but only flick her tongue and he'd disappear into her gullet. Quick as a snapping snake. The thought ought to have concerned me, I suppose, but the Head Pixie was not my gyne now and I observed with only absent interest.

The Elder put out her tongue, but instead of swallowing him, she touched the tip tenderly to the wrinkles on his forehead. His wings chirped again, and the whine that left his mouth wasn't quite Fairykind, so much as it was something deep and primal. Against Pixie teachings, but evidently not against base pixie instincts, I cringed with each of her gentle movements. Though her forked tongue brushed over his face and not mine, every lick she made buried his comforting, familiar Head Pixie scent deeper and deeper beneath her own rotting corpse one.

I drummed my fingers against the staff. Did they really get pinned? Did she kiss him and cry? Did he put the pin on? Or was he too shy?

… In fact, I actually made it through the entire "Telephone Hour" song twice over (with the appropriate mental voice shifts!) before the Elder had finished. When she finally withdrew her tongue, the Head Pixie stepped back with a ditzy, dopey grin. He sat down on the pad of her hand with a flop to fan his face with his collar. His reaction made the Fairy Elder smile once again and shake her head. Her antlers threw out sparks when they scraped against the ceiling.

"My goddess," I interrupted, raising my voice. "With your kindly consent, my primary gyne is officially yours for the afternoon, and that's my cue to step out."

"Hmm?" The Head Pixie still had one hand pressed to his cheek. When he opened his eyes, he blinked down twice at me before he registered my words. "Oh. Oh, good dust, yes. Give us some privacy, Sanderson. It's just common decency."

Without my shades on, perhaps he could see it from up there in her hand, and perhaps he couldn't. I figured that even if he looked, his mind had to be a thousand cloudlengths away. So, I rolled my eyes. "Yes, sir. My goddess?"

Is it true about Kim? I just knew it somehow…

The Fairy Elder studied me with her unseeing, blistering gaze. "Adelinda, if thou wouldst release Mister Sanderson from the duty of bearing thine staff?"

I must call her right up…

Brimming over with reluctance, Adelinda slid down the Elder's lap, hopped from her foot, and landed lightly on the floor beside me. She reclaimed her staff and made a flickering shoo, shoo motion with her hand.

I can't talk to you now!

"I'm going, sir," I cut in as the Head Pixie had begun to speak. His wings went rigid at this breach of protocol. He twisted to gape at me, perhaps to scold me for my mid-sentence interruption, but I met his gaze. "I will await you patiently in the waiting room down the hall, under the impression that you will finish here and then shower before you make the attempt to turn me. An act that I endorse only because it's my understanding that the Elder is willingly to release me from her service should you indeed wish to reclaim me as your own." And then, somehow restraining every ounce of sarcasm that begged to leap from my voice, I added, "Beloved goddess, may I have your consent to be excused?"

She granted my request as though it made up for everything. She and the Head Pixie, pushed magically by Adelinda, moved off into one of the great neighboring rooms and shut the door. It was a big door, painted yellow (of course), with a smaller door in its base at von Strangle height, and an even smaller one for Fairykind closer to my own size. That door had a little window. I lingered outside it, leaning my back to the wood.

From there I could stretch out my legs and cross my arms. Glancing in occasionally from that position, I could just watch them go through the motions. Adelinda stood on the other side of the door, out of sight but not out of range of my magical detection abilities, which meant she could pick up on my attraction signals too. The Head Pixie had been relegated to the floor. He paced in front of the Fairy Elder, gesturing with one of his arms as he presumably explained the situation about the delinquent Fairies robbing us of physical chunks of our vapor. New land, he pleaded. We needed power to expand our cloud, or at the very least we needed someone with heavy authority to crack down on this inappropriate behavior. If she would just let us have new land. He'd pay for everything if she simply authorized the expanding permit and magic usage. The Elder reclined in her chair, softly sucking on huge balls of chocolate with slurping gums as she listened.

I unclipped my shades from my collar and tapped one lens against my teeth. This was a swell predicament. Surely the Fairy Elder wouldn't finish up in there and then leave down the hall without me. We were a package deal, a goddess and her drone. My eyes wandered up the purple walls. I might be working here instead of Pixies Inc. now, but at least the color scheme was the same. Did the Fairy Elder reside permanently in this building, or was she relocated to a safe, secret location every night? Even we Pixies didn't remember filing away the answer to that. It sounded like something I should know before I should chance to get lost in the Castle tonight without her.

Hmm… I considered the existence of the Elder's pheromones. They were layered down so heavily in these halls, a constantly overwhelming presence, that even my separation anxiety might not kick in if I didn't let it. Probably, I could make it to the showers before the lonely panic could seep into my brain and trigger my instinct to hunt down the nearest figure of dominance. Then again, were her rotting scents so thick that showering would prove to be pointless? Might I rid myself of the Elder's influence briefly, only to end up snatched in it again the moment I stepped out with a yellow towel around my waist?

But hadn't I also made a promise to the Head Pixie that I would shower and meet him in the waiting area? And wasn't the Elder my boss? I wrestled with these two conflicting scraps of information, chewing on the arm of my shades. Head Pixie. Fairy Elder. Which one did I hold more loyalty to? The gyne who'd nursed me from nymphhood, or the drooling god prone to random acts of napping? Conundrum.

I discarded the question after only a few seconds of toying with it. Maybe it didn't matter where my puzzled loyalties lay. After all, the Elder had dismissed me, and she hadn't told me not to use this time to take a shower. Obviously, those two geriatric giants would be occupied "discussing" things for a while. Could I finish with my shower before she crumpled his tender, er… "feelings" with her gentle but constant rejection for probably the dozenth time? If I knew the Head Pixie, he would almost certainly-

"Head Pixie," Adelinda snapped. My dangling wings flew forward towards my knees with a flutter. Whipping around, I checked through the window just in time to watch the Head Pixie jerk back from the Elder's elbow. His palms shot to his cheeks. I narrowed my eyes and tossed my vision into field-sight. That didn't work because I couldn't see through the window that way to confirm traces of his magic along her skin, but even a drone like me realized he'd been occasionally planting kisses up her forearm between his words. I flipped my vision to normal colors again and drearily wondered what else he might have done to her in the process. Keeping up with what the current penalty was for biting the Fairy Elder hadn't been my job, and frankly, I didn't want to know.

The Elder shifted her empty gaze. "Beloved Adelinda. Allow Fergus to act upon his instincts as feeleth natural. I am Tuatha, and my presence doth overwhelm his better judgement. I know he be a decent man beyond these walls, and I mindeth not if even he cannot resist mine influence when confined in the same chamber."

"As feels natural?" the Head Pixie echoed, scooping the discarded roses from her lap. I turned away with a groan. But not before I caught the glitter in his eyes. This was going to be a long afternoon. He's in love with Kim; Kim's in love with him.

I itched my skin, nails slicing even through my new gloves. Dead cells and and purple dust drifted to the tiles. These Tuathan pheromones were unfamiliar to me, and sooner or later I really did want to check out the showers. When I next peeked through the window several minutes later, the Head Pixie lay back across the Elder's ocean-wide lap with one leg folded over the other, his arms behind his head, and the second dopiest grin of his life plastered across his face. Yeah, I was done here. As far as I was concerned, I wasn't.

He just wasn't… the Head Pixie anymore, subordinate like that. The man whose hair I carefully combed, whose face I gently washed, and whose wings I so tenderly scrubbed with my fat black brush every night during my retinue duties was intimately familiar to me. While I didn't understand how his brain worked half the time (That's why he was the boss, after all), I'd grown accustomed to picking up on his little fidgets and inner cogs. My H.P. had never let his stiff demeanor slip that way when tingle-fritzy before. Not even for me. He'd never slipped and let on that he enjoyed any sort of physical contact even back when our dominance licking rituals were regular events between a drone and his gyne. Way back before modern technology had come along with all its sickeningly artificial ways to spread pheromones through the company halls. The Pixies Inc. ventilation system had shafts so wide, Gary and Betty used to crawl through them with hardly a squeeze in their younger years, I swear…

Ha ha. Right then, the man in her lap seemed as foreign to me as one of the pixies from the Beanstalk Tower who worked down in the warehouse by the cloudship dock, and whom I never saw except during rare instances when sometimes I saw them. All right, I thought. The king is dead. Long live the queen.

I flared my collar and floated off down the hall. "Now, Sanderson," I scolded myself as I went. "I'm going to go subordinate on purpose, disregarding all risks of losing you forever." Not bothering to switch the way I did the voices for obvious reasons, but throwing in the slightest whine anyway, I cried back, "But sir, what if you can't go dominant again? Your pheromones are already weaker now than they used to be a hundred thousand years ago. They fade too fast from my head. What if you lose me and then you're too weak to turn me back? Sanderson! Don't question my authority. Just get up and walk out of the Castle when I do. Just try harder to stay gray. You won't miss me once the loyalty pendulum swings towards her anyhow."

Ending the reverie with a shake of my head, I snorted to the ceiling again, as I had back in the grocery store. "I haven't been forced from a gyne since the incident with Aspen. First the Fairy Elder. Who's next to snatch me up? Anti-Cosmo? Ha ha, ha ha. Anti-Cosmo staying dominant for longer than five minutes at a time. What an idea. Huh. In theory, it could totally happen if I end up in Anti-Fairy World and he rinses me down." I winced. "No. Smash the thought, Sanderson. Anti-Cosmo wouldn't place a finger on the Head Pixie's alpha retinue. Yes he would. He respects the Head now, but those pheromones are certainly on their way out. Can't pinpoint the exact time frame, but they're fading, and there's no question about it. The Pixies will need a new gyne, and if I have to spend the rest of my life fawning over Longwood, I'll hurl paper mâché."

I stopped floating forward and frowned at the sign on the wall that proclaimed there were showers near. Well, I supposed the fate of Pixie World wasn't important. Or rather, the importance of it was to be determined. The Fairy Elder wasn't actually a gyne, and since her pheromones could easily sway all of Fairy World, she had a policy of not keeping us when we automatically turned. She let everyone go freely. Even drones. Logically, I knew that. But in the same way I pined after the Head Pixie when I strayed too far from his circle of influence and lost his taste in my nose, as a drone, by rule, I physically had to function right now totally believing she'd never give me back at all. Every time the Head Pixie left my side, he left me with no promise that he'd ever come back, regardless of what words he spoke or how many times he'd returned in the past.

I tugged my tie with my thumb and forefinger, twice. In a fight between my logic and my biology, the latter was rapidly winning out. The Head Pixie had entered his senescent stage of life. These wings were his last, his familiar freckles had faded pale white against his skin with age as Longwood's had reddened, and I'd watched from the sidelines as it took longer and longer for him to satisfy the needs of each and every drone. The Head Pixie's influence over me was dying, and that was more terrifying than him actually dying, which he was, but not nearly as fast. At this rate, I would outlive his pheromones before he outlived his body. That was basic fact. Some random gyne would walk past me someday soon, and I would make a choice that wasn't a choice. Biology over logic. Pulled from from the Head Pixie long before he ever died.

No. Not pulled. Leaving him willingly with my own four wings. Not even caring. Not even missing him. Not sparing him a second glance or thought for the rest of my happy life. Not bothering to say good-bye. And that, I think… was my greatest fear in the universe. The Head Pixie tossed away and left to die alone. And Sanderson abandoned to lick the oils off the freckled neck of someone who, in a matter of wingbeats, he would instantly come to love more.

"Disgusting," I muttered, clenching the front of my suit in my fist. My wings spun and whirred with a buzz. They clipped a bust of Prince Eastkal situated on a podium. He tipped, but didn't fall. I took the next left randomly. "But true. He's getting weaker and you're a turncoat. You can't go as long or as far as you once could without racing back to him. Face it, Mister. The Head Pixie is dying."

I hovered for a few seconds, shuffling through my muddled thoughts and trying to take a survey on whether or not I cared. It didn't seem like it was my business. My place was with the Fairy Elder. Right now, the fate of the Head Pixie was none of my concern.

I could leave him, murmured a soft voice inside my head. It was a soft voice, you see, because that was the part of my brain that gave me innovative ideas, and obviously it didn't get a lot of use.

"Leave him?" I studied a new sign directing me to the showers again and buzzed down the proper hallway. Not quickly enough to shake away my own stabbing doubts.

"Why not? He suspects I will. He's always known my loyalty is frugal."

"It is not," I mumbled, but the sweat had begun to bead on my brow. I mean, it was difficult to argue when here I was decked out in yellow. With fumbling fingers, I shoved my shades back on my nose and felt my pockets for my hat. "Sanderson, her scent is weaker now that you've come this far. We can fight it. I can wear these things again, see?"

"It's not like I'm the company vice president, or the Pixie ambassador to the Council. It's not like I'm legally tied to stay."

"But I like Pixies Inc." I placed the pointy hat on my crown again. "I like my office, and my apartment, and the benefits I get from working there."

"Maybe I shouldn't procrastinate this decision. Then again, I've got time. As long as I'm not vice president or Pixie ambassador, I'm sort of free to leave whenever I choose."

"I'm a drone. I can't just walk away from his pheromones."

"I can if they're not there."

"Legally, I am over age of majority. Whimsifinado v. Caudwell does not apply to me. Still, leaving the Head Pixie and the company would be wrong."

"I gave myself to Anti-Cosmo once."

"That was an accident."

"Not the second time."

"Stop it. Stop it." I halted my skim and flattened my back to the nearest purple wall. Throat silently aflame, I dug my fists against my eye sockets. If I were in Pixie World, I wouldn't have leaned over. But my practiced mannerisms had been slipping ever since I'd floated in here. Back home, the Head Pixie's pheromones were overpowering because he had certain ways he wanted things done. He had rules. Dress code rules, body language rules- rules that evaporated the instant his aura collided with the Fairy Elder's. She believed in free expression. Thus, we drones were encouraged to unconsciously express ourselves freely, within reason. And what had I done? Gotten one whiff of her in my nostrils and ripped away the color, the shades, the stiff posture, and even the hat that marked me as a Pixie. Right in front of him.

"He's fading. I'm his favored retinue drone. I get to look at his face during scripture reading every night. I've watched those freckles fade."

I leaned even further forward, my wings still pressed to the wall. Pixies didn't think in pictures, or vague thoughts, or at least I didn't think we thought that way. We thought in words. Each word printed across our brains with a heavy thump one at a time like a big rubber stamp, half unable to predict the ends of our own sentences, or at least half not wanting to, and either way always struggling to let a sentence drop early- easier to carry it out.

"If I left the Head Pixie while he was weak, Longwood couldn't take me for his own."

"That's unimportant. I belong to the Fairy Elder."

"See how easy it was? To trade a lifetime of loyalty for momentary pleasure?"

"Pleasure?"

"Anti-Cosmo still smells like chocolate."

"He always smelled like chocolate since Sugarslew," I agreed with myself. "Beautiful, thick white chocolate. Salt and seaweed too once the modern Water Temple went up."

"If not him, there are a thousand other gynes. Two thousand other gynes."

I hesitated as I completed my own thought. "Two thousand… other… gynes. Every one of them deliciously different compared to the last." For a moment, I dared to let the fantasy play out in my head, me pleasuring myself with upwards of a million pheromones washing over my tongue, but in a sequence rather than a clashing mess. So many gynes, so many smells. Gynes who would pay more attention to me than the Head Pixie ever did.

Then I squeezed my shoulders. Just once. Unfolding my arms again, I placed both hands to the wall and pushed myself upright again. "I serve the Fairy Elder. Get a hold of yourself, Sanderson."

With that gentle scolding, I buzzed my wings and flew down the hall again. Oh. With my nerves distracted and on end, I'd gone around the building's lower level in a huge circle. No wonder I'd thought at one point that the Elder's pheromones seemed so far away.

I'd made it back to the Castle's waiting area, with its generally open walls, sizzling fireplace, plump couches, smudgy glass coffee tables, crumpled newspapers, dog-eared books, rolled-up magazines, and even a few simple board games. Everything was white. Just plain white. Except the fire. That would be weird.

I found the place still deserted. Understandably. Today was Thursday, after all. Only the highest-ranking persons (and retinue drones like me) even had the authority to wander around in here, let alone seemingly unsupervised. On top of that, Faeheim always quieted down when Thursday came around. The Big Wand needed to turn off come midnight and recharge through Friday morning. Fairies were down to the last dregs of their week's supply of magic. With the exception of a few grocery stores, sugar bars, and Keepers departments (and obviously political establishments such as the Pink Castle), everyone closed their shops. Everyone had the day off. Thursday was a time to put thoughts of entertaining guests out of one's head, and simply relax at home. We were magical beings capable of surviving for hundreds of thousands of years, easy. We could afford a day. Once a week, efficient as the clock in Comet Falls that rang out the seasons each year, our entire world slowed down. And it worked for us. Even we pixies got restless and were released from our duties early on Thursday, and the stars help anyone who tried to drag us back to our offices before noon on Friday if we didn't want to go.

So the waiting room was empty. I passed through it and approached the restrooms on the opposite side. They branched off to either side of a decorated alcove. I didn't even have to check the signs to know which one I wanted. My nose did that for me. Though, it was the scent of soap, water, and perfume that rose above any other stink that might normally have filled the area. Just as in the waiting room, I was the restrooms' solitary occupant.

"Logically, the Fairy Elder will give me back to him when time is up."

I frowned, shoving the first of the four shower curtains aside with my hand. "Then I'll serve the Head Pixie."

"For how much longer? He's fading. Why not give myself to Anti-Cosmo?"

"He wouldn't take me," I said as I peeled off my first glove.

"Oh, so you've asked lately."

"Shut up, Sanderson. You're talking to yourself again." The entire conversation was verbal- I always argued both sides verbally when faced with strong conflicting decisions, at least when I was alone, because silence was the worst, and because being without strong pheromones was the worst, and because silence and lack of pheromones was the worst. "That's stupid," I continued aloud, hanging up my tie, then unbuttoning the coat of my yellow suit. "Anti-Cosmo is an Anti-Fairy. Okay, yes. Sometimes he plays a particularly dominant role when he stops by, and I will admit that chocolate and sea salt caramel scent of his is very attractive in the proper breeze. I won't deny I've snuck a sniff a time or two when he's come around. However, he's still a kabouter, and it would be so easy for a gyne to steal me away from him. Our arrangement would only be temporary."

"But then again, so is my arrangement with the Head Pixie."

As I stripped away my shirt, I tried to remember who had planted such treacherous thoughts in my head. Were they all mine, or were they what was left of Aspen's influence, acting up now that I was here in the Pink Castle again, the very place where I had come to know him so well? It seemed like Aspen would have been in understandable favor of Longwood over any other figure, which meant…

My teeth tightened. "Sanderson. Shut. Up. You're driving yourself batty."

"Batty, am I? Oh, now you're thinking of him. Maybe you do want him. Aren't you curious? Don't pretend you haven't wondered how the other half lives. Give him a chance. Try him out. How can you know you want to be with the Head Pixie if you haven't explored your other options?"

"I did try. It ended badly. There were regrets."

"That was a long time ago. Try again."

"Focus. Water." I fumbled for the knobs with both hands, ignoring the fact that my pants were still on, and yellow too. "You need water. And you need focus. Sunnie almighty, give me this strength."

"Anti-Cosmo serves the Water spirit. You were born in a Water Year yourself. A perfect match- almost as perfect as a Water and a Soil."

"I… serve…" I wrenched both knobs all the way up to full blast, and shrieked at the burst of hot and cold that nearly buckled my spine. "The Head Pixie!"

"But which one? The old or the up and coming?"

"I don't know! Both?" Pushing my fist across my face, I clung to the other knob and tried to keep my knees from giving out beneath the torrent streaming down my skin. As I watched, the yellow of my pants began to fade, rivets and waves of pure white washing the color away and replacing it not with gray, but with nothingness. "My relationship with the Fairy Elder is only a temporary position. The Head Pixie has my loyalty. He cares about me, my physical needs, and my mental health."

"Then why did he bring me back here?"

"I don't know!"

"To shake me off. To replace me. To abandon me."

"Stop it. These thoughts are artificial. They'll go away when my head isn't full of conflicting pheromones. They always do." I punched the soap dispenser with my knuckles, squirting a stream of suds and liquid across my other palm all the way up to my wrist. Then I switched hands. With both of them soapy now, I rubbed up and down my skin until it turned red and raw, and my clothes continued the gradual shift into uninfluenced white.

My wings began to flutter less frantically. I groped with my soapy hand for the pocket of my coat hanging from its hook on the wall, trying to ignore the fact that I left spots of white all over it when I did. Quite a bit of spray had sloshed down it. I dug blindly and finally closed my hand around my phone. It sparked, warm and familiar, in my hand. I placed it on the highest corner shelf of the shower, out of the way of the spray, and requested it play back the summary report the Head Pixie had given at last Friday's meeting with the management team in the conference room. I'd recorded it. I always recorded them. I learned best with verbal instructions. While his old voice was no substitute for the real and present thing, and it didn't keep me from squirming and shifting my weight between my feet, it did help.

But not enough. With my palms flattened to the shower wall (I say flattened, though my fingers were curled), hands planted on either side of the knobs with their temperatures blasting, I found my entire body trembling. Both palms squeaked across tiny rows of tiles. My nails scratched along lines of pale grout. I bowed my head, blinking occasionally as shampoo and soap ran down my drooping curls and threatened to blind my eyes. My foot, still in its scuffed black shoe, covered the drain. An entire inch of water had pooled around my ankles. Traces of gray and yellow, of pheromones, one after the other, layer after layer, swirled there in the sparkling puddle.

"No. No, I don't serve him. I don't serve the Head Pixie. He's not the dominant one. But I don't serve the Fairy Elder either. Against all odds, I can't smell her noxious odor on me anymore." I shifted my foot aside and watched the shower empty. At least, I consoled myself, I was doing a good job of maintaining my cool. I hadn't made any attempt today to snatch up handfuls of the dirty water, guzzling pheromones and choking at the vile taste.

I studied my pants. Ribs of yellow still gleamed around the pockets, and probably most of the back, but the majority of the color had washed out. "I serve myself. I can get by without. Everything will be fine. It's fine. I'll just stay in here and gather my thoughts and whoa uncool is that a spider on the wall?" Instantly I slapped at it, then recoiled to stare at the hairy lump squished in the wrinkles of my hand. Smeared spider guts oozed along the creases. When I shook my hand, it didn't fly off.

"Um." I wiggled my sticky fingers as my vision started to turn black around the edges. "Hmm. Okay, let's analyze this situation. I squished a spider. It's on my hand. It's not coming off. If it doesn't come off, I'm going to be stuck with a spider on my hand for the rest of my life. I won't be able to hold a coffee cup with a spider on my hand. Can you use an iPod with a spider on your hand? I need my jams." My eyelid twitched upward. One of the lines between me and the energy field fritzed with an audible snap. "Yvainna! I have a problem!"

Clinging to my wrist, leaving the water running, abandoning my phone and the other pieces of my suit, I jumped from the shower and took off for the door. My feet instantly skidded out from under me. I hit with a slam. Why? A) Soapy feet? B) Tile floors? C) Natural clumsiness? D) All of the above? What kind of pixie can't even walk right? Oh geez, I was a failure. No wonder H.P. had abandoned me. And now Yvainna had abandoned me too? Why wasn't she here? Didn't she care about me? How could not even the Fairy Elder care about me?

My vision clouded over. I couldn't breathe. Had all my lines fritzed? They must have all fritzed. I couldn't breathe and I was going to die.

"Keep it together," I gasped into my clean hand, still twitching on the floor. My elbow fizzled where it had been bumped. "Don't go into capture myopathy. You can do this, Sanderson. You can do this. Just get up. Get up. Pretend this is a supervised in situ assessment. Everything is okay."

"Find the Head Pixie. Explain the situation in the calm and rational manner that's becoming of you. That will work. It always works."

"No. Find the Fairy Elder. The Elder is the boss."

"But the Head Pixie's always helped me before."

"I can't go crawling back to my ex!"

"The Elder will know what to do. I have to find the Elder. Yvainna, help!"

"Whoa, slow down." The instant I came barreling out of the restroom, Adelinda grabbed my elbow. My legs swung up in front of me as my wings whirred. "Pixie. Pixie, I am here. What is it that you need?"

"The Fairy Elder! The Head Pixie! The- the- I need- I-" I clapped both hands over my ears, then snapped the one with the spider away from my head. Adelinda followed my gaze. Then she used her fingers to brush the spider's limp body onto the floor. When it was no longer on my hand, and with her steady, authoritative grip on my arm, I settled down and blinked up at her. She offered me one of several fluffy towels hanging from her arm. It was white. The ones provided in the bathroom had been yellow.

"I have seen many drones," she said when I made no move to take it. "Come. We will get you dried off. You will feel much better when your pores have closed up."

So saying, she stamped her staff against the ground. Three of the towels she carried instantly flew into the air and wrapped around me, rubbing back and forth as they scrubbed off every trace of water. One even wriggled a tip into my ear. I tilted my head towards it, raising the opposite arm in response to another towel weaseling underneath. "What about the Fairy Elder and the Head Pixie?" I asked, surprising myself when my voice slipped into my natural steadiness without even a tremor. Not quite a monotone. The monotone was due to the Head Pixie's influence. But it was steady, and somewhat familiar. I clung to it since I had nothing else.

"I have given them a strict five-staff personal space rule." Adelinda shrugged. "They are only talking about how he wants her to authorize more land for Pixie World. I am confident I can leave them alone for five minutes. The worst that can come out of it is…?"

I stared at her, allowing the third towel to scruff my hair in the back, even though that was Longwood's signature style. At the moment, I couldn't be bothered to care; my two cowlicks had been licked into existence by a will o' the wisp when I was a baby, so they'd spring up again within the hour anyway. "Did the Elder kick you out because she always wants to do the opposite of what you tell her, and you told her not to meet with the Head Pixie alone?"

"No. Shut up." Adelinda held out the one towel that hadn't leapt from her arms. "I am going into the bathroom. I will gather your things, turn off the shower, soak this in fresh water, then wrap it around your neck."

"Like a noose?"

"Like a scarf. That will keep you damp enough to avoid picking up indirect pheromones until the Head Pixie has come back for you. Take a seat on the couch over there."

I did as she asked, bracing my hands to either side and watching her until she slipped out of sight. Once she'd gone, I crumpled back into the white cushions. The fabric covers smelled of laundry detergent and dryer sheets. Probably, they were washed on a daily basis in a practically never-ending cycle to keep them smelling clean. I picked up one of the pillows by the couch's arm and held it in my lap. Adelinda returned to find me running my fingers through my hair, trying to coax my cowlicks back up. She placed the towel around my neck as promised. Then she sat right beside me, holding her staff horizontal across both of our laps. Did she do that to keep me pinned down, like a child in a seat belt? I didn't miss the fact that she hadn't handed me back my starpiece.

"They have been in there for a long time," she said after we'd sat in silence for a few minutes.

"Adelinda, he's a drake. Of course he's still in there." I clenched the pillow with my knees and fingers. "I hope it's important. And I hope I don't get all gross and hormonal like him when I grow up. To think that he likes her even when we're beyond these walls. Ridiculous."

She looked at me curiously. "How old are you, puny pixie?"

"253,156 the last week of spring. Adelinda, can't you wedge your staff between them?" I paused. "Or does she count as a nature spirit, so Nattin v. Skyburst would prevent you from interfering with her, er… personal choices like this?"

"That's disgusting, pixie," was her matter-of-fact response. "My position does not authorize me to bother with matters of the Fairy Elder's business. Nor does yours."

I held her gaze for several beats, then dropped it to the pillow in my lap again. The tension in my legs and hands eased. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be saying these things. Back in Pixie World, the heaters and air conditioning units push the Head Pixie's smell everywhere at all times of the day. Even after we shower, we just fall into them again. I'm not used to this. Being without." My eyes latched onto a glass bowl on the coffee table. I clicked my teeth. "Smoof. Is this who I really am when all the pheromones come off? Bitter and sassy and critical of everyone and everything? It doesn't happen often, but it's unprofessional and demeaning when it does. Do I not really like him? The Head Pixie is my boss. He's the founder of our company. I have to like him. So where did all of these flaws I see in him suddenly come from? I shouldn't say that. Don't tell him I said that." I clenched my fists to my ears, this time without the spider. "Sanderson is not a fan-derson when the Head goes subordinate. All of a sudden he's not… He doesn't seem… I don't view him as… I start spreading negative gossip about him. Like this. I ought to be ashamed, but I'm just not in the state of mind to be ashamed. Do you regular kabouters ever get like this, Adelinda, or is this the curse of drones?"

"I can relate. It is called being annoyed, pixie. It's an emotion."

I fumed for a few seconds, unable to think up a clever response for her rebuttal. My hands slid down my face and then dropped into my lap. "Well, I don't like it. I hate the 'freedom' of being a drone without a gyne. I'm nothing without one." My voice splintered. Reaching for my knee, I finished, "And I wish I'd remember that. But without pheromones, my brain doesn't want to. Thank you for the towel. My thoughts are clearer without conflicting scents raging in my head. However, there's still an empty deadness inside me. Blankness. Lostness. It's not natural, Adelinda, to look upon the world and hate your own workplace. To criticize your employer. How can kabouters ever get by holding positions and doing part-time work like it's some passing fling, not devoting every ounce of their passion to what they do? How can they serve someone and contentedly work side by side in a company doing a job they don't like with people they don't like either? I could never live that way."

No, I couldn't. I just couldn't. I ran my hands up and down my pant leg. "If this is what it's like to be a kabouter, to live life hating the daily grind, never pleased with what you have, spotting flaws everywhere and griping about them after-hours, then I'd take being a drone in a wingbeat. But it's just not natural, to be an independent drone. No one should have to be frustrated with someone they admire."

After another minute of silence, Adelinda suggested I dress myself and we make our way back to the big yellow door. It was her job to keep tabs on the Fairy Elder, after all. I let her take the lead, pressing a fold of the white towel over my mouth and nose to filter out some of the stronger smells. I could sense the Elder's stray pheromones making their moves on me anyway, but I kept my focus locked on Adelinda's smooth, wingless back. That helped.

Adelinda rapped her staff against the von Strangle-sized door that led into the Elder's meeting hall, then let herself in. It was only several seconds before the Head Pixie stepped calmly through the same door (still dressed in yellow), and allowed it to fall shut behind him. He held a two-inch high stack of papers in one hand. I pricked up, but stayed standing against the wall, holding the towel around my shoulders. The Head Pixie took his tie in his fist and adjusted it with a single jerk. Then he pushed his fingers through the left side of his hair. Still combing it with absent flicks, he floated in my direction, whistling a chord from Willa Ford's "I Wanna Be Bad".

"How did it go?" I asked when he neared. After another second, I decided to unwrap the towel and let it drop to the floor. I reached instead for the Head Pixie's hand. He didn't seem to notice. I drew back.

"Heh." Without making eye contact, the Head Pixie flapped the papers at his face. "They must crank the heater in that room above Tuathan body temperature. I need to get out of this sweaty suit. Pixies were never meant to be this warm or damp, and you know how I get when I overheat."

"You do smell more like wet pine needles than like cinnamon." I watched his other hand, waiting for a familiar double finger snap command followed by an unmistakable gesture towards his neck. It didn't come. Instead, he turned his face in the other direction, tapped my shoulder with the papers, and then passed them over.

"Take a gander at what I got off her."

He leaned back and slid one hand in his pants pocket. I looked down. And almost dropped every sheet. Oh, I took extreme care not to change my facial expression. I didn't even lift my eyebrows or twitch my nose. But my mouth did dry, and there was no helping that. The words were printed before my very eyes. That was, undeniably, the Fairy Elder's signature across the bottom of the first page, seared magically into the page since her fingers would struggle to hold any pen. The sight of her name alone nearly knocked me off my feet and swept my clothes yellow again. "Sir?" I asked, very calmly.

"Shh. Adelinda doesn't know, and she has eyes everywhere. We will talk about this later. Shall we go?"

"What?" I looked up. "Oh. Head Pixie, you're still subordinate. I hate to say this, but you're completely unattractive to me until you shower her pheromones off. I can't stray or ping away from this general area of my own will until a more dominant force decides to turn me."

"Don't use the 'u' word when we're talking biology. It makes it weird." Nonetheless, his comment was absent-minded, his thoughts clearly wandering back to what had gone on in the Fairy Elder's meeting room. I didn't dare ask. Still tugging at his collar, he slipped the pocketed hand from his pants and into his coat, and patted around for his phone. "I'll just ping you to Pixie World myself and correct this issue once we're home. I think I'm allowed to do that. I'll be much happier washing off in my private bath than in some filthy public shower stall. Besides, I want to talk to you about what the Fairy Elder gave me. And I'd rather be out of here immediately than wait for Adelinda to realize what happened."

On cue, an enormous shriek rocketed along the entire hall: "You gave him what?"

The Head Pixie pinged us out of there just as the smaller door banged open.

"The Fairy Elder handed over a quitclaim deed for all of Fairy World?" I asked the instant my mouth had reformed. We hovered in the rear of his C-level office, between his high-backed wheeled chair and the curtained windows that overlooked the Inkblot City square, with its simple fountains and cloudstone benches (Wooden benches, once, and a mistake that had never been repeated). I hadn't set foot in the overwhelmingly-purple and white room for months, but I found every shelf and drawer organized as immaculately as I remembered. The Head Pixie's laptop perched on his desk, happily plugged into the wall with its power light glowing white, next to his printer and a vase of fresh, square-petaled daisies that Jardine must have brought in from the greenhouse. An L-shaped couch with perfectly symmetrical pillows had been tucked into the far corner near the door, apparently never removed after the last incident with Jorgen and too-small chairs. Stylized shelves stood everywhere, most of them full to bulging. Somehow, I preferred the Head Pixie's decorating style more than even my own, with my floating desk, scant personal items, and the dartboard on the wall I liked to throw highlighters at from across the room when the long minutes passed without any clients in my office. It smelled of home. It smelled of him.

"How shalt I refuse my goddess?" Modestly, the Head Pixie rubbed his knuckles up and down his chest. "I'm a charmer. I did hook Flappy Bob up with Beatrice Gale last year even after he slapped her in the face with that pie, didn't I? Color-coordinated flowers always work, Sanderson. Once I had Adelinda out of the way, seducing Yvainna was easy. As the Dagda wooed battle plans out of the Morrígan during the Sealing War, so I wooed the deed to Fairy World out of the Elder."

"Ha ha. I have utmost confidence that you had an all-powerful immortal goddess eating out of your hand, sir. Spare me the details. Neither the fact that her awareness of the world's been basically gone for the last billion years nor the fact that the parasitic wasp venom in our saliva lends itself to subtle amounts of mind control could have had anything to do with it."

"Mm… Nope. Pretty sure I'm actually this suave."

I rifled through the papers again as the Head Pixie unbuttoned his yellow suit coat and eased it from his wings. He flapped it in the air three times. It sent up distinct waves of Tuathan corpses, rotten peaches, sticky sweat… and the slightest whiff of cinnamon. He tossed it over his printer, looked at it, then picked it up and folded it properly. It went down on his desk. Sliding my shades from my collar, I knocked one lens against my right canine tooth. "I'm impressed, sir. This looks like the real deal."

"And you said flirting was a stupid negotiation tactic."

"Don't pretend you thought in advance this offer might be on the metaphorical table, Head Pixie. I know you well. You're just as surprised as I am." With a single twitch of my wrist, I flipped the stack back to the front page and held it out to him. Then I replaced my shades on my collar. "Once you've reinstated yourself, I will be proud to assist you in this project. And do hurry, sir. While it's easier to maintain my composure when we're back in Pixie World, I still feel naked without your pheromones in my pores. The sooner they're blowing through the air conditioners again, the more content in life I will be."

"Air conditioners?" He turned back to me, chuckling the typical dry chuckle that always made the hairs prickle on my scalp and behind my neck. I drew a flap back. "That's the problem with you, Sanderson. You always think small. You are so…" He held his thumb and forefinger in front of my eyes. "Simple."

"Sir?"

"Fairy World, my dull, dumb friend." He grabbed my shoulders, instantly sending half a dozen little pings of his imprint and effervescence shooting down my arms, and spun me in a circle. "We did it! Forget Flappy Bob. Forget Beatrice Gale. Forget Gary and Betty."

"Forget Gary and Betty? But-"

"Forget them. Forget Kenny and Remy and Hadley and every human in Dimmsdale or beyond we've ever looked at twice. The Fairies will have to notice us now. We've got them dangling on our strings."

Ping! The coat on his desk turned from yellow to gray again, as did his pants and his hat. He grinned. My thumb twitched towards my cell phone. "For how long?"

"Oh, until Adelinda physically beats us into submission when we don't hand them back nicely, I presume. We'll just have to make the most of what little time we have. Stay strong." He stopped spinning me and slammed me against the bookshelf instead. A fat purple binder and an abridged copy of Da Rules toppled to the floor. My wings crumpled, but I didn't protest. The Head Pixie leaned forward until the rims of his glasses dug into my skin. I squinted. He laughed, again, and his fingernails pinched my arms through my sleeves. "Finally, my crazy desire to take over Fairy World and control all magic is effectively being realized. Sooner than this time tomorrow, the entire universe pays attention to me."

I raised my eyebrows as he dropped his hands from my shoulders. I think he bruised them. "I offer my congratulations, sir, but to be frank, your pheromones are my first priority. If you don't mind, I'm going to find a nice air conditioner to sit in front of until you've finished washing off the Elder's scent."

"And again you bring up the dull air conditioners. Oh, Sanderson. You poor, poor thing, you."

The hands flew up again. He shook me so my head bashed the shelves just a bit. To my befuddlement, he couldn't seem to stop chortling. As a rule, pixie pupils were not large in nature. Anti-Cosmo insisted it was because our blood ran thick with inborn narcotics that dulled our sensitivity to pain and emotions, though I didn't know what sources he'd cited on this, and Jorgen said he thought it was Mother Nature's way of reducing our ability to see color. In my experience, we were simply a race more sensitive than most to the Sun's rays, and thus it benefited us to keep our eyes concealed in the dark and stay inside, safe in the warm glow of artificial lighting. But then, I was a drone. What did I know?

Musings aside, when I looked at the Head Pixie, his pupils were distinctly visible, and quite wide too. His wings skipped every few beats. His fingers began to drum against my elbows. "Sanderson, think beyond air conditioners! I believe I may be experiencing the beginnings of a mood, and it's called unbridled celebratory enthusiasm."

"I see. Shall I break out the sodas and the gray and white Skittles?"

"That won't be necessary yet," he decided, yanking me away from the wall. "There just so happens to be something else that I want to do with you first. And in private too, if you catch my meaning."

I tilted my head. "I don't follow, sir."

"No? Fine. I'll give you another hint. Mister Sanderson, I've been neglecting you since we had the ventilation system installed. Awfully. I think it might be in the best interest of both of us if I were to be more, well, direct when it comes to reinstating my superiority over you this time around." On that note, the Head Pixie ran his index finger up my throat and balanced it beneath my chin. I stared back at him as my lines constricted against the energy field's flow. He arched the usual eyebrow even higher. Hm? What was he getting at?

He tipped his head to mimic mine. When I still didn't understand, he darted his tongue around his lips like a lizard.

Or like a gyne.

I shoved my shades on my nose again, fighting to keep my wings beating steadily, but they picked up speed anyway. When the Head Pixie pulled me forward, it was with a smirk and dancing eyes. His chipped fingernail jabbed the soft skin beneath my jaw a little deeper and forced my head up. "I've run all the calculations. Results suggest it's highly probable that someone here will be getting special dominance licks tonight."

"Mmm…" I was floating nearly horizontal before I could stop myself, lured by the faint scent of bananas clinging beneath his skin, lured by the pale freckles along his neck, lured by choice. "That does sound positively reinforcing for my workplace productivity, Head Pixie. I will get my good suit."

"See me in my break room for retinue duties at 9:00 as usual, and you can have as many licks as you ask for. Mostly. Within reason. Don't push it. Perhaps we'll enjoy our session over lukewarm chocolate. Coffee would just keep us awake for hours. Obviously, neither of us want that."

I smirked. "Obviously, sir."

He scratched beneath my chin with two quick twitches of his finger, then swept his hand away and spun around in the same movement. My feet dropped back to the floor with a whoosh. "But first," he said crisply, never once having altered from his usual monotone, "to business." He snapped his fingers twice at me over his shoulder as he started for his office door. Then he began searching his pockets. "I want Longwood informed of this development immediately. Hawkins is to whip us up a budget. Cowan and Bayard are expected to brainstorm all aspects of marketing for this project by midnight. Keefe may have gone home for the evening, but I want his wings down in the Labyrinth immediately. He's going to be running research overtime tonight. He'll need help, so get Wolfram, Springs, and Commelina on that. No, not Wolfram; that's a bad idea. Get Palomar instead. Palomar's my favorite child. And of course, I have a press conference to attend in Faeheim tomorrow. I'll want you there. And bodyguards. Yes. Inform Newman, Hamilton, and Faust that I have a job for them. In fact, I want them on shifts outside my penthouse all night. They can team up with whoever else likes to work at that hour. I'm always asleep, so I don't keep on top of who is up then. Not my job. And once I'm in the bath, you can take my suit down to Rosencrantz. Fully turned or not, can you manage all that?"

I was already on that last one. The moment the Head Pixie turned his back, I'd unfolded his abandoned suit coat with a flap and held it to my nostrils. The scent of his sweat and magic had worn through it over the years, and even the caress of the Fairy Elder's pheromones hadn't wiped the spread of his magic aura out completely. Bananas. Bananas, sweat, orange juice, printer ink, paper, coffee beans, cinnamon- I outright whiffed it in, all of it, even though I was a drone, even though he hadn't licked my forehead, even though I was still technically free.

If you gotta go, that's the way to go!

It was my choice to give myself to him, all mine, mine, mine, and I embraced it fully. When they've got you hooked, then you're really cooked… With a whistle, I stumbled backwards and collapsed in his chair, and spun a full circle with that coat still pressed over my nose. That's the way it should be.

"Sanderson?" he called, holding the door open with the heel of his hand, fingers curled.

They'll be happy, I know.

With a ping, I returned my suit to its proper gray, straightened my tie, and threw the coat over my arm. "Coming, H.P."