“He can’t even fly,” the second one said, pointing at Jenks with his bow. “Even without the shackles. I say let him go. They want him, and for all his finery and height, he can’t fly.”

“He’s from the east,” the pixy in yellow said. “He’ll adapt. He’s not used to the air. Look at how water fat his flesh is. And his sword,” he said, hoisting the one in his hand, and my eyes narrowed. It was Jenks’s. “This is pixy steel. Pixy steel! Fifty-four kids he says he has. All living.”

At that, the surrounding pixies rose up, gossiping in words too fast for me to understand.

“He lies!” a pixy said. “You can’t keep that many children alive.”

“Jenks can,” I said.

“You’re not helping,” Ivy called out, and I winced.

“I bet he can!” The head pixy in yellow waved Jenks’s sword around. “Look at him!”

Jenks stood with his hands tied before him and his gossamer wings dripping a black dust. Even I had to admit he looked good, especially compared to the gaunt, smaller pixies surrounding him. In another world, in another time, in another size…but he was Jenks, my friend, and my anger grew. I daren’t move, though. Not with Ivy having a dozen poisoned arrows pointed at her.

Around us, the pixy women tittered, and I burned when one said loudly, “I don’t care if he can fly or not. I’d just unwrap him and wear him like a fur.”

“We stole you,” the head pixy said to Jenks, gesturing for them to back off. “You belong to us.”

“Jenks doesn’t belong to anyone!” I shouted, but Ivy was silent. She was a vampire, and vampires were born to be treated like objects, given to others as favors for a day or a lifetime.

At my exclamation, the pixy flew to the bubble and poked at it with Jenks’s sword. “You’re not big enough to stop us. Get in your car and leave, or we’ll kill the vampire.”

I swallowed, feeling cold. “Please. I know this is weird, but Jenks has been working with us for over two years. He owns the church we live in. I pay him rent. You can’t keep him. He has responsibilities. A job. A mortgage. He’s got to get back to his kids because I’m not going to watch them!”

“He owns property?”

It had been the one with the bow, and I nodded as the pixies buzzed over that.

“His garden has so many flowers you can’t step without crushing one,” I said. “The grass grows so fast, I have to cut it every week. His children are so clever, they stay awake all winter. They play in snow.”

“It sounds like paradise,” a pixy wearing a flowing brown tunic said with a sigh.

“You aren’t helping…,” Ivy said softly, her voice rising and falling like music.

The pixy with the bow frowned, taking a higher position than the other two. “I told you we should have asked. They do things differently across the Mississippi.”