Vincet licked his lips. “I don’t know. I’ve not heard anyone say the name of the place yet. I’ll take you there. It’s by a long set of steps in the middle of a grassy place. It was perfect. We took the flower beds, dug out a small room under the roots of a dogwood. Noel brought to life seven newlings. We were even thinking of naming them. Then Vi, my daughter, began sleepflying.”

Frowning, Jenks shivered his wings for some light as he sat across the fire from him. “Sleepflying? She’ll outgrow it. One of my sons spent a summer waking up in the garden more than his bed.” Jenks smiled. There was always some question if Jumoke had been sleepflying, or simply looking for solitude. His middle-brood son endured a lot of good-natured ribbing from his elder siblings due to his brown hair and hazel eyes, rare to the point of shame among pixies.

Vincet made a rude huff, the dust from his wings turning black. “Did your son scream in pain as his wings smoldered while he beat at a statue? Did his aura become sickly, and pale? My daughter isn’t sleepflying, she’s being attacked. I can’t wake her up until the moon passes its zenith. Even if I bend her wing backward. It’s been happening every night now that the moon is nearly full.”

Vincet’s face went riven with grief, and his head dropped. “Last night I kept her awake, and the statue attacked a newling. Noel held him as he died, unable to breathe, he was screaming so. It was…” The young pixy’s wings drooped, and he wiped his eyes, black dust slipping from his fingers when the tear dried. “I couldn’t wake him. We tried and tried, but he just kept screaming as his wings turned to powder and his dust burned inside him.”

Horrified, Jenks shifted on his cushion, not knowing what to say. Vincet’s child had burned alive?

Vincet met his eyes, begging without saying a word. “Noel is afraid to let the newlings sleep,” he whispered, his hands wringing and his wings still as he sat on Jenks’s winter-musty cushion. “My children are terrified of the dark. A pixy shouldn’t be afraid of the dark. It’s where we belong, under the sun and moon.”