Chapter 28
PANDORA’S DIARY
Wild acid trips: Zero
Inadvertent peyote ingestion: None
Psilocybin milkshakes: Nada
Okay, Diary, here we go: I can unleash the echoes of long-forgotten fae magic.
I can’t wield the ancient magic, but memories of those days still linger, and something inside me resonates with them.
I can interact—maybe feebly, maybe ignorantly, definitely clumsily—with the faintest remnants of true fae magic.
I feel traces of the original power of our foremothers.
Though I have yet to figure out what that really means or how I can control my gift.
Now, back to what happened that afternoon in the library. Hold onto your pages, my dear Diary, because this is going to rock your spine.
Joy welled up in my chest. I already had my gift, and now I understood my gift. I was whole in a way I’d never expected—never needed, dammit, but it thrilled me nonetheless. I was whole and the music flowed from me and—
“Yah! Fuck! Look!” Deja stood so quickly her chair slammed to the floor. “Holy Dames!”
That shook me out of my happy little epiphany. I spun toward Deja and found her staring at the bookcase. She pointed with a trembling finger at one of the pixie-shaped bookends.
“The—the little,” Deja stuttered. “I swear on my gift, that l-little—”
The forest pixie bookend took two dancing steps forward on the bookshelf.
Let me repeat: the bookend that had spent thirty years in my parents’ living room took TWO DANCING STEPS FORWARD!
Wings unfurled from her back, translucent like a dragonfly’s wings but as long as my pointer fingers. Her dark skin shimmered while her hair fell in lustrous ringlets. Her green eyes twinkled like emeralds and her red lips parted briefly.
She made a fluttery noise, then leaped from the shelf.
Someone screamed. Maybe we all screamed—and laughed as we jerked away from this flying creature, watching with delight and shock and maybe a little denial.
“No way!” Leo blurted. “No way.”
“It’s a pixie,” Deja bellowed.
“You see it too?” Leo demanded.
“A fucking pixie!” she howled.
Shrig gaped in silent amazement while I gibbered and giggled.
The pixie zoomed around the room in circles, moving so quickly that she almost blurred.
Then she stopped in mid-air. She hovered a foot in front of me and cocked her little head as the sunlight drew prisms through her translucent, fast-beating wings.
She wore a crown of wildflowers over her blonde ringlets.
A dress made of daffodils covered her dark skin and her slippers looked like they were made of gold leaf from the illuminated manuscript.
She gave a tinkling laugh, then the other pixie, the other bookend—with purple hair, light skin, and a violet dress—joined her. They flew in circles together like an elaborate bird-mating dance, then zoomed out the door and into the library.
“That’s not…” Leo murmured. “Nobody’s seen a pixie in two hundred years.”
“Until now!” Deja boomed. “This will go down in faerie-kin lore.”
Shrig murmured his amazement in what I thought was at least three languages: “Truco de la luz, mimpi, apsara…”
And me? I closed the manuscript with a crack that echoed in the room, then raced after the pixies. I caught a glimpse of movement among the stacks and veered toward them. Because pixies! Pixies!
I heard the others behind me as I galloped through the mythology section, then stopped short at the sight of the standing globe. The purple-haired pixie stood on top of the curved surface, stretching her wings wide. She gave me a little finger-wagging wave and I froze, not wanting to scare her off.
“Hi,” I breathed. “Hello. Hi, um. Hi!”
She fluttered a laugh.
“I’m Pandora,” I said.
She made breathy noises, perhaps introducing herself. I wanted to ask Shrig if he could understand her, but he, Deja, and Leo were lurking in the stacks, trying not to frighten this tiny miracle away. Apparently I was the designated speaker.
“I—I’m thrilled to meet you,” I said, though I didn’t know if pixies understood anything of our current world. Could she even speak English?
She must’ve understood my intent, because she gave a curtsey.
But as she dipped, the globe spun beneath her and her graceful, courtly gesture turned into a mad scramble to stay upright, like someone on a too-speedy treadmill.
Bubbles of laughter threatened to overspill from my heart, and I covered my mouth with my palm.
The pixie almost caught her balance, then plummeted off the back of the globe… and reappeared a moment later, flying straight upward, in complete control.
I gave her a curtsey, and she flew toward me, fast as an arrow, then hovered in front of me again. She seemed almost expectant. So I lifted my hand and she gave a fluting laugh and landed on my upraised palm. She weighed nothing, but magic tickled my skin.
“Look at that,” Leo breathed, from behind me.
“I think we unsealed them,” Deja said, uncharacteristically quietly. “Pandora freed them.”
“I—I can touch fae magic,” I explained, raising my hand until the pixie and I were face to face. “The echoes of real fae magic. That’s my gift.”
A blonde-haired pixie came flying in a zig-zagging course through the stacks, zooming past books, causing pages to flutter.
Four others followed, each maybe six inches tall and feminine-looking, wearing gossamer dresses made of flowers and sparkles.
Two were plump while two were skinny: one had long pink hair, one was dark wearing a dress of white roses, one wore black and white stockings and tiny golden combat boots, and another wore mossy-looking mittens, for some reason.
“Uh, what exactly are pixies?” I asked.
“Can you smell them?” Deja said, speaking in a hushed voice for the first time ever. “It’s like they’re made of the flowers they wear.”
I glanced at Leo for an answer, and found him staring at the pixie on my hand, his blue eyes soft with awe.
“Playful air spirits,” he whispered to me. “According to most texts. But this is impossible. Unprecedented. This is—”
“Magic,” I declared.
As one, the pixies took flight. Two of them danced around Shrig and Deja, herding them toward the main floor of the library, while two beckoned to me and Leo—and a third, the one with mittens, clung onto an errant strand of my hair and swung along as I followed, giggling madly in her fluting voice.
“They like you,” Leo said.
“I like them,” I said.
The pixies zoomed to a bank of light switches on the wall.
One of Beane Isle’s elder residents had created a switch plate needlepointed with colorful flowers.
The pixie swinging from my hair took a seat on my shoulder, kicking her slippered feet happily against my collarbone as the other two hovered in front of the switches, miming curiosity and confusion.
Daffodil Dress looked wide-eyed before she approached the light switches—then recoiled and peered back at us without touching anything.
“Is she asking permission to flick the switches?” Leo asked.
“Well, they don’t know what electricity is. Go on,” I told the pixies. “You can play with them.”
Pink-hair darted to the light switches, extended a slim arm, flipped a switch, then zoomed away in the same motion, like she was afraid of the consequences.
I laughed at her. “It’s not a trap, it’s a light switch.”
I flipped a few to show them, and Pink-hair perked up when she noticed a light going off and on.
Mittens flew off my shoulder toward an overhead light and made a sort of “ta-da!” motion.
I flicked switches until that one turned off, and she swooped and dove in glee toward the lights that were still on, like a moth to flames.
So yeah, I spent five minutes switching lights on and off to amuse pixies. I do not regret a single moment.
“Um, Pan?” Leo said.
“Mm?”
“Do you hear that?”
I stopped flicking and listened. A moment later I noticed a faint creaking approaching through the stacks. An ominous metallic scraping.
Yikes.
I peered closer as the sound grew louder. Shadows moved in the narrow aisle… then a book cart squeaked into sight.
The cart seemed to be pushing itself until small figures appeared.
At first I thought they were pixies—sure, that was a normal expectation—but instead they were scrawny, knee-high creatures with bright black eyes and wild hair.
Some wore patchwork dresses and some wore patchwork overalls, though not with any regard for apparent sex.
Good for you, gender-nonconforming gremlins!
Six or seven more of them rode atop the cart. Well, and leaped into the shelves, trying to wrestle books free.
“Brownies,” Leo whispered.
“Brownies!” I repeated.
“It’s not just pixies, Pan. It’s everything in the manuscript.”
I felt my smile widen. “They’re wonderful.”
The brownies stopped short when they heard us talking, and the ones on the floor clambered up to the pile of books atop the cart.
They shoved each other roughly until they formed a line facing me and Leo, then they attempted to bow all at once.
Except half of them had already gotten distracted and forgotten about us.
So the others pushed them and gibbered, until the attempt at “synchronized bowing,” like nineteenth-century servants, devolved into what looked like a playground brawl.
Then a bearded one with pointed, hairy ears emerged from the scrum holding a book overhead. Well, a pamphlet, a glossy four-color guide for birdwatchers. The brownie pointed to a picture of a bird in flight and chirruped.
One of the others leaped off the cart, flapping her arms wildly.
For a moment, I thought she’d take flight.
She did not. She landed on her face, folded in half with her pointy shoes draped around her ears.
Hilarity ensued among the brownies as they pointed at her mockingly. Leo and I stood dumbfounded as we watched a second one try the same thing. And one by one they launched themselves, flapping wildly, each time convinced anew that they would not crash. Or maybe crashing was the best part?
“This is too much,” Leo said.
“I know! How can they keep doing it!”
“Not that, Pan,” he said. “What—what have we done?”
I laughed in sheer pleasure. “Released magical creatures back into the world.”
“Into a world that no long embraces myths and magic. Look at these things. What if—what if they’re the ones who broke the island?”
“These numbskulls?” I scoffed. “They can barely sneeze right!”
On cue, half of the brownies attempted to prove me wrong by fake-sneezing.
“And they just showed up now,” I continued. “They weren’t even here yesterday.”
“How do you know?”
“You think they’re so quiet and subtle that we missed them?”
“Well, maybe they—”
“Pandora!” Deja caterwauled from downstairs. “Leo! You need to see this!”
We exchanged worried looks then trotted downstairs to the lobby, where we found Deja and Shrig watching three brownies trying to check out books. Well, at least they were date-stamping things. Random things. They were extremely officious about it, though utterly inept.
“Look at them!” Deja said. “It’s not just pixies!”
“Brownies,” Leo told them.
“So, uh, what do we do now?” Shrig asked.
“Keep them in the library,” Leo said. “Close the windows and lock the doors before they escape into—”
As he trailed off, I followed his gaze toward a formation of pixies soaring through an open window above the book returns box. Leo looked so forlorn that I didn’t have the heart to show him the side door, through which brownies were chasing an unravelling roll of toilet paper.