Macreedy and Ellean kept the dwarfs moving while Sandra walked beside Glen when she could. She pushed the stroller most of the way and carried it when she needed to, but Glen never offered to help or even spoke, so Sandra kept quiet as well. Ignatius came right behind them and the ogre brought up the rear. With the silence, Sandra heard the hobgoblin mumble more than once about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

A good hour later, Sandra had too many questions to contain herself. “What is a djin?” She asked, only to see both Glen and the hobgoblin shake their heads.

“A djin is a powerful and wicked creature, and not one of our Lord’s. Our Lord cares for us sprites of the earth, and the fire, the air and the water sprites, too, but these djin are of a different order.” Macreedy spoke over his shoulder.

“All the sprites?” Sandra wondered. “That sounds like an awful lot. How can you keep track of them all?” She asked Glen, but he did not answer.

“Plenty, to be sure.” Ignatius spoke up. “But there are far more that are not his than his, and these djin range from little spirits, like us, to lesser spirits and all the way up to greater spirits, and if this one is one of the big, bad greater spirits, you will see some sparks fly, let me tell you.

“But what is a djin?” Sandra asked again, and this time Glen said a word.

“Genie.” But removing his concentration from what he thought about caused him to stumble and it took both Macreedy and the hobgoblin to catch him, to keep him from falling altogether.

“There is the opening.” Breggus came back and spoke, though Glen hardly heard him. “I said Gumblittle could find the place, but it looks kind of fuzzy.” Glen squinted, expecting fuzzy, but it looked clear as day out there, as far as he was concerned, and indeed it looked like late in the day, and the outside scene appeared to be a simple forest scene.

“Glen?” Sandra gently touched him, and seemed a little worried, judging the appearance on Glen’s face.

“I’m just remembering too much, too fast,” he explained, and tried hard to pull himself together as he spoke. “Dwarfs, I thank you. Macreedy and Ellean, you need to come to protect Sandra. Prickles, stay here! Ignatius Patterwig, you need to stick with me.”

“Me?” The hobgoblin looked reluctant to move into the light, but as Glen stumbled forward, Ignatius followed along. “What do you want from me?” he whined.

“You need to keep me safe while I go unconscious,” Glen responded, and he fell face down in the leaves and pine needles.

“Me?” Ignatius said again, but he went invisible and hovered over Glen, like a mother bird might hover over her nest.

“And here she is.” A woman’s voice rang out—a chilling voice that Sandra heard before she saw. “I am a bit surprised she made it, but I see she brought a couple of friends with her.” The woman appeared to be an old woman that might best be described as a hag, if that hag was struck in the face with an extra bucket of ugly. She waved her hand and Macreedy and Ellean lost their glamour of invisibility, but they did not lose the arrows that were strung in their bows and ready. The man beside the djin took a step back on seeing real, live elves in his face.

“Wait a minute.” Sandra looked around. “This is the university woods, not very far from where Mother and Mellissa disappeared.”

“Very good.” The hag said. “And it is only a couple of hours since you left.”

“But we were gone for two days.” Sandra protested.

“And a whole night.” The djin nodded and cackled which solidified Sandra’s impression of the djinn’s hag-like appearance. “Sadly, the tree people came out in force so nothing untoward could happen in the night.” She looked disappointed that nothing came out of the dark to tear Sandra to shreds.

“Old woman. You swore you would gather the whole family. How dare you try and send this one to Hell before I had the opportunity to do it myself.” The man beside the djin, an Asian, Chinese looking man with perhaps a taint of European blood raised his hand as if to slap the hag.

“But I did exactly as you asked.” The hag stayed his hand with the words. “They are all here as promised. All of the living in the family line are here. The fee was the first, and this is the last of them all but for her baby; but if she died on the way.” The hag shrugged. “I did not promise she might not die on the way.” She cackled again. She enjoyed the idea of Sandra’s death too much. Sandra would have stepped back in horror at that attitude, but in truth, she hardly heard the exchange as she spied her mother holding the baby, and she ran to them.

“Melissa, Mother! You’re all right, O thank God.” She caught Melissa up in her arms, squeezed, hugged, kissed the two-year-old with her lips and her tears, while Sandra’s mother hugged her daughter, and cried on her daughter’s shoulder. Macreedy stayed where he was. He kept his arrow aimed at the djin and the man, and never wavered, but Ellean ran with Sandra, and she was the one who found one more person.

“Miss Fairy, are you well?” Ellean asked, and Sandra stopped crying and hugging long enough to gasp. A real live fairy, not much more than seven inches tall, stood captive in a small cage that hung on a tree branch. The fairy shook her head, sadly, and then reached out for Sandra, of all things.

“Pumpkin.” Melissa said, pointed to the fairy, and the two-year-old smiled. She was too young to realize the danger she was in or the danger she had just gone through.

“Sandra.” Sandra’s mother made her daughter pause so the older woman could tell her daughter something first. “Sandra.” She repeated. “This is your great-great grandmother, Mrs. Pumpkin.”

Sandra went up to the cage with the wonder written clearly on her face while Ellean apologized for some mistake. “Pardon, Missus fairy,” the elf maid said. “You look very young and I am not very old.”

Pumpkin merely glanced at the elf as if to say no offense taken, but then Sandra put her finger up to the cage as she might have held her finger out for a parakeet. Pumpkin reached out between the bars, touched that finger and attempted to smile. It looked difficult. It looked like the poor fairy had been tortured, and all at once, Sandra got terribly angry.

Sandra spun around, handed Mellissa back to her mother and tromped to within a yard of the man and the old woman.

“How dare you!” She yelled. “Who do you think you are? You have no right holding us. Kidnapping is a crime. You let my family go, and I mean it. Let us go, now!”

The man laughed and the djin grinned and with a wave of her hand, the bows and arrows that Macreedy and Ellean held were ripped from their hands and came to the old woman’s feet. “You have no power here.” The hag said through her cackle.

Sandra took a step back and her expression turned from one of anger to one of incomprehension. “But why?’ she asked.

“Family honor.” The man stepped up. “To finally cleanse the stain between your family and mine.” Sandra looked at the man with questions dancing in her head, but she kept quiet as the man spoke.

“One hundred and thirty years ago, my poor family came to California in search of prosperity. As a young girl, my many-times mother married a man of European decent over the objections of the family. But this was a new world, full of hope, and they had great hopes, and had a son, my sire. Then men found gold along the rivers and the madness began. One man, a man named Marshal Casidy tried to maintain order in the chaos, but he brought with him the creatures of whispers and legend. One of these was the winged goblin now held prisoner to account for her crimes. She stole the heart of that European man and together, they ran off and had a daughter. The stain of that betrayal has never left my family name.

“Our gold was stolen, and our hope was gone. My great father brought his family back across the sea to the place of his birth in disgrace, and the strange looking son who had no father could find comfort only in the arms of prostitutes. My great-grandfather should have been a rich man, living in a California mansion, but he was born in a brothel. My grandfather was born in a ditch and died of alcohol poisoning before he was fifty. My father learned to steal and I was nourished on stolen bread.

“When the Japanese invaded my country, I became a traitor to my own people, and I became rich betraying my neighbors for a price. I made peace with the invaders, and with the money I obtained, I began to deal in drugs and built my own little army of thieves and murderers; but I always knew the shame of what I had done. The soul of my family has never known peace since that first betrayal that destroyed our hope, and I vowed revenge.” The man was angry, spitting. He could not finish his speech, so another had to prompt him.

“And what did you promise to this hag for capturing the fairy and gathering the survivors of her family?” Glen stepped into the light, and Ignatius, the hobgoblin came with him.

The man gasped on seeing the goblin and took a step back as he had when he first saw the elves, but he managed an answer.

“I promised that I would be hers for as long as we both shall live,” he said.

“And you figure after you avenge your betrayal, she will not live long.” Glen understood. “But you do not know what you have promised, for this is no ordinary old woman.”

“Ah,” the djin interrupted. Her voice carried a curious note. “I see how the mother made it through the maze of traps. She brought a warrior with her.” The hag took a half step forward, which prompted Glen to pull the long knife from behind his back. He did not dare pull the sword again. “But it is strange. I do not understand.” The hag looked as confused as she sounded curious, and it clearly seemed something of an unusual experience for her. “I cannot read this one’s mind. It is like he is invisible to me, and that must be how I did not notice him before. Still, no matter.” The hag snatched her hand and Glen’s knife vacated his hand as the bow and arrows had vacated the hands of Macreedy and Ellean, only this time, Glen smiled and stretched out his hand toward the knife. The knife did an about face in mid-air and sprang back into Glen’s grasp as if it never left.