Entice (15 page)

“But we have to … Nick …” Issie’s voice is high and she’s speaking in sentence fragments, which is never a good sign. My heart hitches a little bit and I move as quickly as I can toward the stairs.

Issie, Cassidy, Devyn, and Mrs. Nix are all sitting in the living room. Betty is pacing back and forth, and Astley stands outside the door. Pixies aren’t allowed inside. House rule. Also, they can’t actually come inside unless invited in, like that old saying about vampires. And all tied up next to Astley on the porch is BiForst. There are chains around his hands and feet. It’s a safe bet that they are iron.

“What’s going on?” I say from the stairs. They all look up. Issie’s mouth drops into an
O
and she and Cassidy both jump up like they’ve been caught doing something really naughty.

Betty, however, has the opposite reaction. She roars at me like I’m the one screwing up. “What are you doing out of bed?”

I swallow hard. She starts up the stairs and stops halfway. Her nostrils flare.

“I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed out,” I say, trying to solid myself up so I don’t seem frail.

“You just got back from the hospital. Of course you aren’t allowed out.” She scowls at me and then bounds up the rest of the stairs. She puts her arm around my shoulder and starts to pivot me around. “Now let’s get you back to bed.”

My hand grips the banister. “Tell me what you all are talking about.”

She stops tugging on me. Nobody says anything. The air is still and cold and heavy. The furnace kicks on, a big rumbling monster. Issie jumps.

“Sorry.” She blushes. “Jumpy.”

“Well, it’s not easy when there are two pixies on the front porch.” Devyn mollifies her and puts an arm around her shoulder. For a second, jealousy rips through me. Nick would have done that for me, tried to make me feel better. I honestly don’t know if he’ll ever be able to do that again.

Everyone looks at each other. Tension makes the air prickle.

“What? Let me in on the secret,” I persist.

“Okay … the thing is …,” Issie starts. She clears her throat nervously, takes a step toward me, and stops. “You need to be calm about this, honey, okay?”

Not a good sentence. She used the words “calm” and “honey.” The world hazes around me, but I fight the dizziness even as Betty’s hand tightens on my shoulder.

“What is it?” I ask.

Once again they all exchange a look. Cassidy clears her throat. Mrs. Nix stands up out of her chair slowly, but Astley, still outside, is the only one brave enough to just say it.

“There is a time constraint about getting Nick,” he says, nodding toward BiForst. “Our lovely associate here has told us that if the warrior is not retrieved from Valhalla within a month, he may never return at all.”

“What?” I make a quick calculation of how much time has already gone by and start stumbling down the stairs. Betty must not have expected me to move, because she doesn’t stop me as I stagger-walk down the stairs and toward the front door. I step outside, ignoring Issie and Betty and everyone else, focusing only on Astley. “We don’t even know how to get there. We don’t know how long it takes. We don’t—”

I stagger in the thin layer of snow that covers the wood boards of the porch. Astley, who has been crouching by BiForst, reaches up and grabs me by my arms. I can’t read his eyes. The cold soaks into my snowmen socks, sharp and raw.

“Zara,” he says, staring into me, “we can do this. We will do this.”

I cringe. The snow falls around us. BiForst rolls his eyes as if Astley is too smarmy for words. I don’t know what’s going on in the house behind me as I scan the woods for other pixies. It seems clear for now. I swallow hard again. It’s so hard to even swallow, let alone stand.

“We have to get him,” I whisper, and I’m whispering it only to Astley. “We can’t just leave him there. He’ll think we abandoned him. We need him here to fight.”

“It is okay.” A pulse shows on a vein in his neck. His eyes meet mine.

I have thought about Nick’s death for so many hours and days, twisted in my head with moments of every day and night, that the entire memory is solid with echoes. It is like I can touch it, hold it to my chest and squeeze it. The only thing that was letting me continue was the knowledge that I had a chance to save him. Now there’s a time constraint?

“Did he tell you what he told me? In the bar?” I gesture toward BiForst. “He was all cryptic and said the queen I replace is in the apple.”

“That’s why she kept talking about the apple!” Devyn says to everyone in the house.

“We thought you were delirious,” Mrs. Nix clarifies. She breathes deeply and tilts her head just the tiniest of bits. Kindness emanates from her.

“So my mother is back in the city?” Astley asks BiForst, anger rippling out of him. “And you didn’t tell me this because …?”

“You didn’t ask,” BiForst snorts.

I stare at Astley. “New York?”

“The Big Apple,” Astley explains.

I feel suddenly very stupid. How could I not have figured that out? My whole body aches from tiredness and cold. I sway a little bit and a soft voice comes from behind me. “Come inside, Zara.”

I turn around slowly, because it’s all I can manage. Mrs. Nix’s round face looks down on me. Her big brown eyes are kind. She’s wearing her sweatshirt with the Christmas tree embossed on it.

She tucks a piece of my dirty hair behind an ear. “Now come away from these pixies and into the house with us and get warm. We still have to figure out who is setting these traps for you and why. You were almost killed in Iceland. You were shot in the bar. We’ve got a cage almost finished in the basement. We’re going to keep that pixie there until he talks some more.”

I turn my head to check to see if Astley is okay with keeping BiForst trapped, since I know he disapproved when we trapped my father’s people. He nods, but then stops midmotion, listening to something. I hear it too—a motor. No, a car. It’s coming down our driveway.

“Someone’s coming,” I say.

The rest of them come to the door just as a silver sedan rolls into sight. The driver cuts the engine and leaps out of the car, her short legs rushing across the snow, her brown hair flying behind her.

I gasp. “Mom!”

The Bedford teen who was shot at a local bar has been released from the hospital and is said to be recovering at home. Police are still looking for the perpetrators as yet another boy goes missing. Unverified reports say his name is Thomas Steffan, a high school freshman …

—
NEWS
CHANNEL
8

Wow. Okay. My mom is here. It takes me a second to actually accept this as reality, but I do as my mom quickly checks the perimeter of the woods. It’s so obvious she’s dealt with pixies before.

As I watch her half run, half power-walk toward the house, I wish I could make everything in our lives completely different, wish that this crazy epic that we’re living in never started, that my pixie king father never fell for her, that we never had to stare at the woods and wonder if danger was lurking in it, that the responsibility of knowledge was not ours, that we knew nothing, that we could live happy, peaceful normal lives.

That’s selfish, though.

And it’s too late for that to happen.

And if it did, I may have never met Nick.

It’s all pointless thinking.

I start to sway as my mother bounds up the steps. Astley’s arm goes around me, supporting me, keeping me upright a little bit better. Despite the cold, I think I’ve started to sweat from exertion. My mom eyes us and keeps coming. Her skirt flutters in the wind. She’s wearing a big red ski parka that looks like it’s left over from the 1980s. She must have dug it out of the closet. Her dark hair lifts from her face, revealing worried, narrowed eyes.

“Don’t you touch her,” she snaps at Astley. She points a long finger in his face. She has perfect fingernails. Today they are red like blood. She looks like she might scratch him. “I know who you are.”

“Mom, it’s—,” I start, but she yanks me into a huge hug. All I breathe in is parka and her coffee smell. For the tiniest moment I let myself just lean into her, like I used to do when I was little and needed her so much. Sometimes I’d be so tired after a day at kindergarten or nursery school that she’d come into the school and pick me up. I wouldn’t even be able to stand straight anymore because I’d be so worn out from a day full of kissing tag and coloring and those singsong finger games that the teachers always led. On those days, I’d just lean into her and she’d take my pink Hello Kitty backpack, hold it in one hand, and wrap her other arm around me. Sometimes she’d just carry me right out the door and into the car. That’s what this reminds me of right now when I lean into her: being little and not being responsible and just being able to let go, to be tired, to be scared, to just
be
...

“Oh, Zare Bear,” she murmurs into the hair by my ear. “You poor honey. What have these things done to you?”

Things.
I am one of “these things.”

I force myself to move away enough so that I can look at her. She has more white hairs mixed in with all the brown. The skin under her eyes has little lines in it and her chin seems older too somehow, like it’s sagging maybe? I don’t know.

“I’m okay, Mom,” I say as she shakes her head. Tears collect in her eyes. She hasn’t seen me since I’ve changed into a pixie. And now she sees me like this—weak, injured, tired. Her lip curls up a bit and she steps away from me almost like I’m poisonous.

“My feet are kind of cold, though,” I say. I’d really like some shoes, actually.

Her eyes narrow and she whirls on Astley and the fiddler pixie guy, who really looks pretty casual for someone tied up on a porch. For a second she just stares at them. I sway backward once she lets go of me, and faster than humanly possible Astley moves to my side to catch the back of my head with his hand before it hits the cedar shingles of the house. My mother loses it.

“Don’t you touch her!” she says again. Her hands move into fists.

“It’s a little late to play the protective mother now,” he lashes back.

“What?” She spits the word at him.

“From what I have heard, you sent her up here into the heart of danger because you were too frightened to protect her yourself.” Anger boils up in him like I have never seen it before. I don’t know where that anger is coming from, but it rushes through the air, awkward and hard and surprising. I can feel it.

“Astley.” I say his name to try to get him to stop, but my voice comes out so weak that even I am not impressed.

He obviously isn’t either, because he just keeps going. “From what I have heard, you only come when it is convenient for you, too busy with your corporate job and life to take care of your own blood, instead entrusting her safety to elderly weres who—”

“Astley!” I yell his name this time. Why is he doing this? I think that maybe he’s not just mad at my mother but at all mothers. He stops, swallows, but does not apologize.

Crows alight from an oak tree near the corner of the porch. They caw as they flap away.

My mom steps forward. “How dare you!”

He opens his mouth again but is cut off by Betty, who is suddenly on the porch with us. She glares at Astley, probably because she’s not too cool with being called elderly by a pixie king, and roars out, “I think you should go.”

I sway, my body overwhelmed by everything. Astley lifts me into his arms. I’m too tired to protest much, but I manage to say, “I’m fine.”

“Let me bring her inside,” he says.

“You’re not stepping one foot into this house,” Betty says. “This is my house. You are not coming in. Give her to me.”

He hesitates. I nod slightly and he flinches, but leans me into Betty’s arms. I’ve got to say one thing for my grandmother: she is strong. My mother reaches out and moves the hair out of my face.

Astley stands in front of the door for a moment. His voice is soft and calm. “We are all on the same side here.”

“You turned my daughter into a monster,” my mother says. Her glare would kill lesser guys. “We are not on the same side.”

Something inside me breaks open and it hurts way more than my gunshot wound.

“She asked me to,” he replies, not backing down. The wind blows his hair back from his forehead. “We are not monsters.”

My mother doesn’t back down either. “You took advantage of her.”

He inhales deeply and steps away so that Betty can bring me across the threshold of the house.

“Maybe,” he says slowly, as if each word is an effort, “
she
took advantage of
me
.”

State police have confirmed that the latest missing Bedford boy is indeed Thomas Steffan and report the grisly recovery of the body of another missing youngster. The police are not releasing details.

—
NEWS
CHANNEL
8

My mother is the only one in our family who cries when she’s frustrated or mad, and there is something both annoying and endearing about this. Once we’re inside the house, she slams the door, shutting out both BiForst and Astley. Tears well up in her eyes and she pushes her back against the wall. She closes her eyes as she whispers, “I hate pixies. I just
hate
them.”

I don’t say anything, but my wounds suddenly seem a lot deeper as Betty places me on the sofa. Issie and Devyn move so that there’s room for me. My mother crumples in the corner of the room.

“Zara really should be up in her bedroom,” Cassidy says. “All the healing things are there.”

“Cassidy has been working on you,” Issie says, fingering the whistle hanging from her neck. She looks proud of Cassidy and happy that conflict time is over. “That’s why she’s so pale and dead looking and why you’re healing so fast, even for a pixie.”

“Thanks, Is.” Cassidy smiles. Dark circles frame her eyes. She does look dead.

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way!” Issie blusters. “You’re a total hero.”

They are all sitting and standing throughout the living room. Mugs and glasses litter the coffee table and the end table. Issie and Cassidy aren’t wearing any shoes. They have the look of being camped out here for a while, and Cassidy isn’t the only one who looks tired. Both Mrs. Nix and my mom seem to need a good nap. I tell them it’s rude to leave Astley outside, but they all ignore me and chatter on about things. I can’t quite follow it all, because my head is foggy and I’m too busy wondering if they all think I’m a monster, if I’d be better off out on the porch with the others.