At Jenks’s pointed look, Pierce took his coat off and draped it over me. I would have protested, but it was warm and smelled like him and the garden both. A puff of redwood rose as I tugged it close, and Jenks eyed the witch, the first glint of anything other than grief in his eyes.

“You’re smaller than I thought you’d be my size,” he said dryly, attention going to his home as a weird keening rose. The flames had eaten through the ceiling, and the wind was being sucked in through the tunnels, feeding the fire. It sounded like the wood itself was moaning, and it gave me the creeps. “Maybe I should hit you now for when you make Rachel cry.”

“I’m not going to make her cry,” Pierce said indignantly.

Jenks’s wings lifted slightly, turning red from the increased circulation and heat. “Sure you will. All her boyfriends do. Why would you be any different?”

“Because I am,” he offered.

“Pierce is not my boyfriend.” Frowning, I shifted from foot to foot and glanced at Ivy, a good six feet back from the stump as it burned. Her jaw was set and her feet were spread wide, hands on her hips and just about daring the coven to bother us. To anyone else, it’d look like she and Ceri were doing some garden burning, oblivious to the funeral and the fairies scattered in the garden like, well, fairies.

“Maybe you should go, Pierce,” I said to the sky. “It’s almost sundown. You think getting away from Al is hard now, I imagine it’s impossible when you’re only four inches tall.”

Pierce glowered at me. “In all my born days, I’ve not seen a witch as skeerylike as you about being demon snagged. Al won’t bother me. I’m watching you. He can’t touch me, or Newt will have his—uh. Never mind,” he stammered, face reddening.

Grimacing, I turned back to the flames. I thought it odd that fire looked the same no matter what size I was. A hiss of fabric whispered behind me, and I spun to the silken thread coiling on the ground. It was Sidereal, and as he snaked down it, Jenks spit on the ground.

Slightly more subtle, Pierce sidled closer to me. “I don’t like them,” the witch said, eying the much larger fairy. Pierce and I were pixy size, which put the fairies two inches taller than us. Or like two feet, in pixy terms.

“Yeah, me neither,” I said, remembering that poison dart Pierce had burned from me. But when Jenks loosened his sword, I felt a moment of worry. “Easy, Jenks,” I murmured, not wanting a repeat of this morning. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”