Chapter 33
LEO’S NOTES
Place: The Wild Wicked Web
Found: Zach’s List, the world’s most comprehensive list of lore, myths, legends, facts, and figures
Favorite quote: Though the ancient fae are gone, ripples of magic remain, perhaps embedded in ancient relics.
Misc: Consulted about illuminated manuscript. Who is Zach? Could he be Zachariah Tenebri?
Leo hadn’t slept well in days. He’d been too busy indexing ancient bestiaries, collecting myths and rumors—mostly rumors—about fae magic, and forging a friendship with Zach of Zach’s List. Well, and answering the questions from demanding, inquisitive faerie-kin historians.
Sadly, the only solid conclusion they’d come to about the creatures and the manuscript was that they needed more data.
At least he’d established that yes, the manuscript did act like a magnet.
It collected motes of the surrounding faerie-kin magic, which was why his book-oriented gift had reacted so strongly.
And why the day Leo, Deja, and Shrig had all interacted with the manuscript, it had absorbed enough magic for Pan to release the creatures.
Yet there were no real precedents to this situation.
Which meant even more speculation and even less sleep.
Well, and the ever-increasing need to convince Pan to help him inspect the manuscript again, with an eye toward reversing whatever she’d done.
Except he’d rather accidentally set the world on fire than watch the joy dim in Pan’s stupidly beautiful eyes. So he didn’t text her again, he just downed another coffee and took a long-overdue break.
Even his break turned into a task. He found himself rooting around in the back of his closet, then lying on his stomach on the floor like he was ten years old.
“Now the other two wheels.” Leo held out his hand, and two quarters were placed in his palm. “No, the wheels! The wheels, we just went over this.”
Bob made a chirpy sound, then Lego wheels dropped into Leo’s hand.
“Thank you.” He attached them to the axle. “There! Finished!”
“What’s finished?” Pandora asked from the doorway.
Leo jerked upward, embarrassed that he’d been discovered playing with toys.
Then his breath caught. Pan looked stunning in a purple cotton dress that floated elegantly over her curves.
Her hair was in tight ringlets that made her look deceptively cherubic but mostly made him want to run his hand through them until every curl was loosened.
Dames, he’d missed her.
Sadly, she didn’t seem entirely approachable at the moment. A pixie sat on each of her shoulders like living epaulettes, which gave her the appearance of a whimsical military general. Mostly because her expression read: “Likely to declare war.”
“Whoa,” he said, because his brain turned off. “You look… good.”
“What’s finished, Leo? Us?”
“No! What? No.” He took a breath. “Uh, Bob wanted to play with Legos.”
“Who’s Bob?”
“You remember…”
Bob darted into view from behind the medieval castle they’d built, carrying the cart they’d just finished with the addition of the final wheels.
“You’re supposed to roll that,” Leo told him. “That’s what the wheels are for.”
“That’s Bob?” Pan said. “We’ve been calling the pixies by their flowers.”
Leo peered up at her. “Who made that rule?”
She put her hands on her hips and her pixie epaulettes followed suit. “I did.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“It makes perfect sense, since we can’t actually converse with them.”
“Not even you?” he asked.
“No, not even me.”
“I thought you were Queen of the Pixies.”
“At least I’m not King of the Legos!” she snapped.
Leo knew he shouldn’t have let Bob talk him into playing. “His name is Bob because he looks like a bobolink. His little tuxedo and blond hair, can’t you see it?”
Pan gave a snort-laugh of the kind that he knew embarrassed her, and he felt it in his gut. As he stood from the Lego-strewn floor and crossed toward Pan, Daffodil and Violet flew off her shoulders to play in the castle with Bob.
“I’ve missed you the past few days,” he said.
“Because you’re so busy playing with toys.”
“I just—Bob got so excited when he found my Legos. I kept all my old sets, even the spaceship someone threw out the window to see if it could fly.”
“You never let me play with them after that.”
“Well, when this is over I’ll let you play with whatever you want.”
She shot him a half-coy, half-mocking look. “How generous. Except Leo, this is never going to be over. The pixies and brownies and gnomes are here to stay. If you’d done anything but play with toys for the past few days, you’d see they’re already settling in.”
“I’ve been researching!”
“Researching what? How to build a tiny plastic catapult?”
He rubbed his face. “I’ve been talking with faerie-kin scholars. I need to inspect the manuscript again.”
“That’s why you’ve been asking me to the library?”
“Yeah, I can’t even touch the thing without you. There’s a chance it’ll eat my gift to get stronger.”
“It’s not going to eat your gift! It’s a vacuum cleaner, not a garbage disposal.”
“Oh. Yeah, good point. I guess I’d have to actively feed it my gift. But it’s still dangerous. This is amazing, Pan—but it’s not safe. No one knows what’s going on or how to stop it.”
“Why would anyone want to stop something so beautiful and untamed?”
“You’re describing a wildfire,” Leo said.
She frowned. “Even if I knew how to send them back, which I don’t, I still wouldn’t.”
“There’s a reason they were locked up in that manuscript in the first place, Pan.”
“They weren’t locked! They were forgotten.”
“Either way, I’m not sure anyone was meant to let them out.”
“That’s like saying that my gift was never meant to happen.”
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
Pan crossed her arms, and her two pixies landed on her shoulders and did the same. “Everyone else is thrilled. Maybe this isn’t about the creatures at all. Maybe you’re just having second thoughts about me.”
“How could you say that? I’m not the one who—”
“You’re the one who didn’t want me!” she said, so loudly that Bob zipped into the Lego castle to hide. “Because I was destined to turn normal. But maybe you don’t want me at all. Even now that I’m fully faerie-kin.”
“That’s such bullshit. You’ve been impossible since you got your gift! You’re the one who released monsters onto the island, Pan.”
“Monsters! If that’s how you feel, why don’t you just go back to Boston?”
“Because I don’t know what the hell is going on!” And there was no way he was going to abandon Pan. Not to mention his mother, and everyone else on Beane Isle.
“Well, I’m not going to help you find out. Just go home already.”
Leo clenched his jaw. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes!” Her voice cracked. “No.”
He knew what he wanted: he wanted to see her smile, he wanted to make her happy.
But you didn’t always get what you wanted, and he also knew they needed to send the creatures back.
Dames, they still didn’t even know what had caused the initial damage in town.
“A magical shockwave,” people were saying, but nobody really knew what that meant.
He softened his voice. “What do you want, Pan?”
“I want—” She looked like she was about to cry. “I want you to want all this.”
“What I want is you, Pan.”
“This is me.”
Leo gazed at her and felt a smile tug at his mouth.
She looked so right with flowers and twigs in her hair, with Violet and Daffodil fluttering around her, as though it were her natural state of being.
Queen of the Pixies. It suited her. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that unleashing the creatures would backfire, but—
“Oh, good!” a voice said from the doorway behind Pan. “You’re both here.”
Pan spun around. “Mom? What’re you doing here?”
“Hi, Grace,” Leo said.
“We want to discuss the folk.”
“The folk?” Leo asked, as his father stepped into sight beside Grace.
“Yes, the ‘folk,’” Leonard said. “It seems rude to call them ‘creatures.’”
“Oh, I love that!” Pan said, the brightness returning to her voice. She turned to one of her pixie handmaidens. “What do you think?”
Daffodil and Violet flew in a happy spiral around each other, then Grace plucked a flower stem from Pan’s hair and said, “Come to the living room for a meeting of the elders.”
“What elders?” Pan asked.
“The faerie-kin elders! We want to share our thoughts.”
“What are you talking about?” Leo asked. “Who are the elders?”
“Me, Grace, and Frank,” his father said. “Well, plus a few other faerie-kin who’ve been around for a while, but they’re not here.”
Leo snorted. “You’re not ‘elders,’ you’re just ‘old.’”
His father suppressed a smile but Grace said, “Well, this elder will swat your ass if you don’t get into the living room right now.”
Leo hoped that the “elders” would understand that the “folk” needed to be sent back, though he wasn’t sure how far he trusted the wisdom of anyone who threatened people with ass swatting.
Plus, the only voice of reason among their parents was his mom.
He never missed her more than during times of faerie-kin trouble.
And as he followed Pan into the living room, he lamented once more how much his mother missed.