Chapter 29
LEO’S NOTES
Place: Estate sale, Marblehead, MA
Favorite poem: For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping, than he can understand.
Misc: Felt guilty for paying only $1. Sold for $1,750. A faerie-kin’s gotta eat
Leo watched Pan twirl around the library, laughing at the antics of the brownies, and chatting with the pixies who plucked flowers from the vase on the lobby desk to weave into her curly hair.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He felt her excitement echo in his own heart. She’d released pixies and brownies into the world. It was a gift as unique and special as she was herself.
Yet what if these newly hatched creatures reached the mainland?
What sort of havoc would they wreak? They were considered mythical for a reason, they’d left no mortal imprint on the world.
But this was the twenty-first century, where everyone carried a camera in their pocket—and where unusual things were often unwelcome.
Leo didn’t know if he should be worried about protecting the normals from the pixies and brownies or the other way around.
The only thing he did know was that he needed to protect his mother. He had to keep these roaming pixies and brownies away from her. He’d invent an excuse to get her off the island if he needed to; anything so that this newly released magic didn’t create new blank spaces in her mind.
And in the long term, he was worried about Pan, considering the ambivalence she already felt about her gift.
Unleashing ancient creatures into the modern world was amazing, but also a huge risk.
While Leo mourned the disappearance of the fae hundreds of years earlier, he knew that they weren’t sweet, cheery little spirits. They were malicious and capricious.
So yeah, he didn’t exactly welcome the return of the true Old Folk.
Not when it came to Pandora’s well-being.
“Magical” didn’t mean “wondrous.” Magic wasn’t safe.
Sure, magic could explode into breathtaking, beautiful fireworks, but it could also explode into shockwaves.
If he’d learned anything from his personal collection of mythology and faerie-kin literature, it was that magic and creatures were wild and uncontrollable.
He’d felt power shedding from the manuscript after what Pan had done.
The book had already knocked him on his ass when it was basically asleep.
What would happen now that she’d woken it?
Leo didn’t want to find out the hard way, through chaos and tragedy. He wanted to lock the creatures up tight in the library, the way he secured his office in Boston. And a moment after he said that aloud, he spotted a pack of brownies hurling rolls of toilet paper out the side door.
Well, fuck.
A flying pixie paused in front of him, flapping his wings as fast as a hummingbird.
Oh! His wings. This one presented as male, the first non-female-looking pixie Leo had seen.
His hair was white-blond and he wore a vest of black calla lilies, with a white petal cravat.
He reminded Leo of the bobolinks at the farmhouse; even his golden sandals looked a bit like bird feet.
“Where the hell did they find toilet paper?” he demanded.
The bobolink-pixie mimed diving and splashing.
“They went swimming?”
The pixie swirled wildly in front of him.
“In the toilet? Okay, I don’t even want to know.”
The pixie made a chuffing laugh, then alighted on Leo’s shoulder.
Rude. Leo opened his mouth to tell the pixie to get lost, but was interrupted by Deja’s blaring voice accusing brownies of trying to steal her jewelry.
He looked up and spotted Pan, now adorned with daisies and bracelets made of baby’s-breath, like Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Aw, look at that.” Pan smiled at the pixie perching on his shoulder. “You two are perfect for each other!”
For some reason, those words pushed him over the line. It was too much for Leo: too much impossibility and instability, magic and madness. He couldn’t protect his mom from this—or Pandora, if everything went to hell.
So he brushed the bobolink-pixie off his shoulder and said, “Pan, this is crazy. We need to get them back into the manuscript. This wasn’t meant to happen.”
As Pan opened her mouth to respond, a clomping, marching sound interrupted her. Boots hit the library floor in perfect rhythm as gnomes marched into sight from the library’s kitchen.
“Gnomes!” Deja blared.
Leo blinked at this new horror. Half of the gnomes were carrying can openers, staplers, dustpans, and other household supplies.
They resembled humanoid cats with feline golden eyes and fluffy beards.
They were dressed like they belonged in a Pinocchio movie with suspenders and red shorts and shirts with round collars.
The leader, the one with the longest whiskers and wearing a pointed hat, let out a loud whistle and the gnomes dispersed, cleaning up scraps of torn toilet paper and replacing books on shelves.
“Look at their kitty eyes,” Pan said.
“Oh, Dames help me,” Leo moaned.
“And their fluffy whiskers!”
Even though the gnomes seemed to be tidying up after the brownies, Leo felt himself begin to panic.