“Good. Listen anyway. Looks to me like you’ve become the leader here. Accept it. Know it comes with a price. People will be doing things for you. Don’t be selfish. Let them.”

“I owe Nick and Jenks my life,” I said, hating it. “What’s so great about that?”

“No, you don’t. Because of you, Nick no longer has to kill rats to stay alive, and Jenks’s life expectancy has nearly doubled.”

I pulled away, and this time he let me go. “How do you figure that?” I said suspiciously.

The resonate tang of the pan hitting the coffee table was sharp as Keasley set it aside. He tucked a pink towel under my wrist, and I forced myself to look at it. The tissue looked more normal. A slow welling of blood rose to hide the damage, spilling over my wet skin to flow messily onto the towel.

“You made Jenks a partner,” he said as he ripped open a gauze pad and dabbed at me. “He has more at risk than a job, he has a garden. Tonight you made it his for as long as he wants. I’ve never heard of leasing property to a pixy, but I would wager it will hold up in a human or Inderland court if another clan challenged it. You guaranteed that all his children have a place to survive until adulthood, not just the few firstborn. I think that’s worth an afternoon of hide-and-seek in a room full of lunkers to him.”

I watched him thread a needle and forced my eyes to the ceiling. The tugs and pinches started up with a slow rhythm. Everyone knew pixies and fairies vied with each other for a good bit of earth, but I had no idea the reasons went so deep. I thought about what Jenks had said about risking death by a bee sting for a pair of measly flower boxes. Now he had a garden. No wonder Matalina had been so matter-of-fact about the fairy attack.

Keasley fell into a pattern of two stitches, one dab. The thing wouldn’t stop bleeding. I refused to watch, my eyes roving over the gray living room until they fell upon the empty end table where Ivy’s magazines had once sat. I swallowed hard, feeling nauseous. “Keasley, you’ve lived here awhile, right?” I questioned. “When did Ivy move in?”

He looked up from his stitching, his dark, wrinkled face blank. “The same day you did. You quit the same day, didn’t you?”

I caught myself before I could nod my agreement. “I can see why Jenks is risking his life to help me, but …” I looked at the hallway. “What is Ivy getting out of this?” I whispered.

Keasley looked at my neck in disgust. “Isn’t it obvious? You let her feed off you, and she won’t let the I.S. kill you.”

My mouth opened in outrage. “I already told you Ivy didn’t do this!” I exclaimed, my heart pounding in the effort to raise my voice. “It was a demon!”