Entice (2 page)

My stomach clenches up. “Yeah.”

“We’ll find him,” she insists. “We’ll bring him back.”

I give her a half smile and nod, because the truth is I have to believe what she says. I have to believe that Nick is alive in Valhalla and that somehow we can bring him back here, where he belongs.

“We’ll get him,” I yell back, trying to sound as determined and positive as I can. My lips hit her dangling pink flamingo earrings. She smells like coconuts.

She does one of her super-vigorous nods. “That’s right. We will!”

Devyn looks back and forth between us. His mouth presses into a line and I know—I
know
—that he has doubts.

Just then the music changes from loud and awesome and frenetic to slow-dance time. I groan. Devyn pulls Issie into his arms. He looks tired from all the exercise. I can see it in the crinkles around his eyes, the tightness of his lips, like he’s holding the pain in so Issie can have fun and not worry. He’s only just started walking again. He’d been injured and was stuck in a wheelchair, paralyzed in a pixie attack, actually.

Cassidy and I stand together while Issie and Devyn sort of sway side to side and press into each other. They both look fragile and bird boned, easily broken.

“They are so sweet,” Cassidy says into my ear.

I nod. She smells like lavender and herbs.

“You doing okay?” she asks again. Her voice flits down to me.

I nod again.

This time she doesn’t let me get away with it. She bumps me with her hip. “Liar.”

I kneel down and fidget with the anklet Nick gave me. It’s thin and silver, a reminder of him flush against my skin. I check the clasp, make sure it won’t break, and say, “To say this sucks is an understatement.”

She pets my head like I’m a puppy. “I know, honey. I know. Your misery is pretty obvious.”

Callie and Paul, who have matching Mohawks and have been going out forever, tango past us even though this song is totally not a tango. They both smile and Callie waves, just lifts her hand up a tiny bit.

Jay Dahlberg scoots closer to us and fake bows. When he stands up straight again, his thick blond hair ruffles into his eyes. He reaches out his hand like some sort of eighteenth-century duke. “Miss Cassidy, may I please have this dance?”

She scratches at her neck while simultaneously saying in this super-fake pretentious voice, “I would be honored, Mr. Dahlberg.”

He pulls her into his arms and she looks at me over her shoulder as if to ask if it’s okay. I give her the thumbs-up sign and start toward the wall.

Nick and I slow-danced once, late at night after we’d gone to a really awful movie about a girl ghost kid who didn’t actually say anything, just looked pale and walked around while people screamed when they saw her. After that had happened for the twenty-seventh time in the movie, Nick remarked, “No wonder she wants to kill people. They’re giving that girl a complex.”

After the movie Nick pulled me out of his red
MINI
Cooper and stood me under the stars. Our feet crunched on the snow.

“What are you doing?” I laughed as he put his arms around me.

“Salvaging our date.” He cuddled me close to him so that I could breathe his pine scent and the leather of his jacket. He was warm. He was always so warm.

The music on his iPod in the
MINI
changed to a slow U2 song. He was not into U2. I am, but only old U2 from the eighties and nineties. This was one of those—a haunting heartbeat of a song all about love and war.

“You hate this song,” I murmured into his sweater. He is so much taller than I am. I went up on tiptoes to get closer.

He bent his head toward me and smiled. “But you love it.”

He must have downloaded it for me, which was so sweet. I snuggled in closer, as close as I could. “You know it’s about the Polish Solidarity movement?”

“Really?” He acted mock surprised. And then we kissed. His lips fit perfectly.

“Zara,” a male voice by my ear makes me jump. The clean smell of Dove soap mixed with mushrooms seems to overwhelm my nose. It is how I smell now too. It is the specific smell of pixie kings and queens.

Astley stands in front of me, dark blond and tall and much more rugged looking than when he was half dead and bound to a tree just a few weeks ago. My skin bristles. So much has happened so quickly. I lost Nick. I lost my humanity. And what did I gain? I became a pixie.

I grab Astley by the impeccably dressed elbow and fast-walk him to the side of the room by the vending machines, scanning the crowd. People have noticed he’s here. Devyn makes to come over, as does Cassidy, but I shoo them away with my hand and loud-whisper to Astley, “What are you doing here? I already had to deal with enough pixies tonight, thank you. No offense.”

He doesn’t answer my question. Instead he appraises my outfit. “You look lovely. I am used to you in those jeans with the holes and peace signs inked onto them. They have that homeless look, but—”

He pauses for a second, awkwardly, and I can tell that he’s remembering me when I turned pixie, after he’d kissed me when I was a bloody, awful mess, feral and barely conscious. I can feel my face flush with heat that comes from embarrassment. I don’t know how I know he’s thinking about this, but I do.

“Yeah … well … Issie and Cassidy dressed me, so no homeless look tonight,” I explain, feeling pretty self-conscious. Letting go of his elbow, I yank on the bodice of my dress so I don’t show too much skin; then I realize how silly this is since he pretty much saw me naked when he turned me. I lean my shoulders against the wall.
Do not think about it. Do
NOT
think about it …

He shifts closer to me, puts an arm up on the wall, hand next to my head, and asks, “How did they take the news that you had changed?”

“They were suspicious at first,” I say, putting it pretty mildly. I don’t explain how they didn’t want to let me in Issie’s house at all or how Devyn basically threatened me. “But they’ve accepted it—I think.”

For a second I contemplate telling him that they only trusted me because Cassidy checked me out for evil intentions, which she could do because, unlike me, she has an elf ancestor a long way back. But I don’t quite trust him a hundred percent yet even though I trusted him enough to dehumanize me and turn me into a pixie. Strange but true, like pretty much everything in my life.

“Did you hear what I said before about pixies? Devyn and I had to bounce two pixie girls who were munching on a drunk guy,” I tell him.

“Bounce?” He lifts an eyebrow. His voice gets lower when he’s confused. I never noticed that before.

I tell him the story. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and then he touches my arm lightly, just brushing it with his fingers almost like he’s afraid to startle me. It’s the quickest of movements, and then he uses that same hand to gesture toward the dancers. “They are all so innocent, are they not?”

“Innocent?” It’s hard to think of Cierra and her current boy toy, Jake, as all that innocent since they are basically dry-humping in the corner. One of the teachers, Mr. Burns, heads straight over there. He’s power-walking like a pro.

“They are so unaware of all the magic in their midst. Here we are, pixies. Your friend Devyn is a were. Outside, in the woods, scores of pixies lurk, regrouping, hungry, filled with needs.”

I whirl on him. “We have to protect them.”

He cocks his head just the tiniest of bits. His hair shakes out over his eyes and then falls back into place. He is standing so close to me. I step backward as he says, in his super-calm voice, “Of course. And you have to meet our people, Zara. They need to meet their queen. They will fight beside you.”

“And we have to find Nick,” I insist. “We have to get started.”

He doesn’t answer, just puts out his hands. The music switches to another ballad about love and loss. “Dance with me, Zara?”

“Oh …” I stumble for words. “I don’t—ah Nick—”

He swoops me into his arms before I finish my sentence. He dances formally, gracefully, not like a high school guy at all, but I guess that’s the pixie king in him. He’s more like a professional dancer on one of those dance competition reality shows. His posture is straight and his movements are fluid. He is nothing like Nick, who dances like a big goofy dog, really. Dancing with Astley is easy. It feels like I’ve been doing it forever.

“It’s not so bad, is it?” Astley whispers near my ear.

I pull away, a little jarred. “Yes. Yes. No— I mean—”

He smiles at my confusion but doesn’t let go. His hand moves slightly against my back. It’s like I’m hyperattuned to every move he makes. I don’t know if it’s just normal pixie senses or because he’s my king.

Their clothes are different too. Nick dresses like a guy from Maine, massive boots or running shoes, jeans, clothes from one of the nicer stores at the mall, while Astley’s clothes are textured and expensive, richly made. The fabrics are deeper and more rugged somehow. They make me think of Scotland.

I decide to use the moment to ask him some of the questions that circle round and round inside my mind. “Did you find out anything? Did you talk to your mother?”

His mother is supposed to know how to get to Valhalla, this ungettable place of myth that supposedly has Nick. Astley frowns and then pulls me all the way into his chest. It moves with each of his breaths. “She is missing at the moment.”

“Missing!” This time I pull all the way away. “How convenient.”

His hand reaches out and grabs mine before I can react. “I am not lying to you, Zara. She does this a lot.”

“Right,” I say as he tries to draw me closer. That’s not going to happen. I pull against him. Frustration rattles my teeth. “I refuse to dance with you.”

“I could force you.”

“But you won’t.” I say this like I’m certain of it, like I’m certain of who he is, but really I’m not certain of anything.

We stand there for a moment, staring down each other as the rest of the people in the cafeteria swirl and swoon and fall in love. We are at a stalemate. His eyes soften. He lets me go, dropping his arms away, and I feel suddenly, terribly alone. I almost kind of want to dance with him again, which is so wrong, I know.

For a moment his face is sad, but he covers it quickly with a smile. “I apologize. I have confused you somehow. I am going to patrol outside, make sure it is safe for the students as they leave.”

He bows and backs away, leaving me in the middle of the dance floor. He cuts through the throngs of people easily, bumping and jostling no one, as if he could do it blindfolded.

I reach down and check the clasp of my anklet. It’s still tight, still secure. I am not alone, not while there is still hope of finding Nick, not while I still have my friends. My will seems to solid up. There is so much to do and so little time to waste.

Despite my total dread over the big Grandma Betty confrontation that’s waiting for me, after forty-five minutes of dance hell I go outside and patrol around for pixies, just to make sure all the happy-dancing humans are safe when they leave to go home.

This is the world of a pixie—my world now, I guess—pacing and hunting, sniffing the air and looking for threats. I look for threats because I need to keep people safe. I look for threats because I do not want to
be
the threat. It’s a fine line, I guess—a fine line between good and bad, between savior and predator, between hero and villain. I do not want to be the villain and I do not want people dead, not on my watch, not ever. I have to believe that every step I take is a step toward good, because if I don’t—if I don’t believe that—then everything, absolutely everything, is lost.

Something thuds onto the snow. I dart toward it even as my fists start shaking again, imagining Frank.

“It’s just sludge,” I tell myself, and I’m right. It is only snow and ice packed behind the tire of a truck. It’s come loose and fallen to the ground.

Every noise I hear is a potential problem. Every smell I take inside me is a potential warning. Every squirrel leaping from one tree branch to another could be not a squirrel but a pixie. Now that I am pixie I hear so much better and I smell so much better—not me personally smelling good, but my sense of smell has improved—and so I sniff in. It’s not a sniff. A sniff is an involuntary action; this is an actual intentional sniffing in.

The whole time I’m thinking: How will we get to Valhalla? How will we find Nick?

I pace back and forth in the parking lot, listening for pixies, and then—the smell wafts through my nostrils. My muscles tense and I’m pacing right by Issie’s car when Astley jumps off a big streetlamp right in front of me. He stands beneath the light, which makes his hair seem more gold than ever. A fine coating of pixie dust mingles with the snow.

“I thought you left,” I said.

“Why?” he asks roughly. “I said I would be patrolling. You didn’t believe it?” He squares his shoulders and looks away from me.

“I thought maybe you’d given up. Too many evil pixies. Too many humans to keep safe.”

“I am not the sort who gives up.” He gives a half shrug. His shoulders seem to stretch out the hard fabric of his jacket. With all that blond hair and golden-tinted skin, he looks almost like he could glow, but he doesn’t quite. Instead he leaves tiny traces of glitter wherever he goes. It’s the sign of a pixie king. He squints his eyes, looking in the distance, and adds, “I decided I should stay and be assured that you’d manage to make it safely home. Are you leaving now without your friends?”

I squat down, drag my finger through the thin layer of snow. “No. I’m just patrolling too. I don’t want anyone to get hurt by—” I break off and don’t know how to say it without being rude.

“Pixies like us?” He half asks, half finishes after a slight pause.

I don’t answer and instead look down. I’ve been writing the letter
N
in the snow,
N
for Nick, tracing and retracing the three solid lines of it, and I hadn’t even noticed what I was doing. Standing up, I ask, “Have you seen any?”

“Quite a few. Amelie is out there patrolling about a half mile away. Between the two of us, we have pushed off a good number.” He rubs at the side of his face like he’s checking for stubble or something. “She loves a decent fight. It frightens me sometimes how much she loves it.”