Entice (22 page)

A big sob threatens to swallow me up, but I push it down and back. There are things to do. Mrs. Nix would want me to take care of people. Still, my heart pulses slow with loss, feeble and aching. We have lost so many.

What I’ve learned lately is that people deal with death in all sorts of different ways. Some of us fight against it, doing everything we can to make it not true. Some of us lose ourselves to grief. Some of us lose ourselves to anger.

A roar fills the air, shaking through the snowflakes, splintering away from mere sound and into something solid and fierce. Astley grabs my arm, propels me behind him. I push around to see. Betty has turned. Her tiger self stands near my mother and the others. Devyn has moved slightly in front of everyone else, protecting them, I guess, but why would he have to protect anyone from Betty? Amelie is slowly walking backward, like she’s afraid she’s about to be eaten, but the tiger’s focus isn’t on them. Then I understand. Even from over here, Betty’s anger and desire to kill form one solid, twisted force.

The tiger takes two steps and leaps up, her mouth open and ready. The front half of her torso elongates and her front two paws stretch out, claws unleashed. She swats one across BiForst, knocking him to the ground. The other paw follows, ripping into his flesh. She falls on top of him, snarling. Issie gasps. I can do nothing. It’s too late. My grip on Astley’s arm tightens as BiForst stops moving.

Done with him, the tiger turns and looks at me, blood in her mouth. Her eyes are wild with grief and rage. She takes one step toward us. Astley’s muscles tense, bracing for an attack. Then the tiger wails, turns, and bounds away across the snow, toward the gazebo in the little harbor park, then up to the trees that border between the houses and the park. And she is gone.

“She killed BiForst.” I stagger backward to Betty’s truck. The world reels.

Astley touches my cheek with the heel of his hand, and I let him. I do not jump away. There is sorrow in his eyes too, just like mine, maybe not so much for Mrs. Nix, but for his other losses.

I swallow hard, try to push that sorrow into a small place—maybe behind my appendix or something—put it somewhere contained for a while so that I can function. Then I yell for everyone to come back here, to back away from the carnage and destruction so I can take care of them and we can regroup.

Just as I do, a burned piece of fabric flutters down from the sky. It’s part of Mrs. Nix’s pine green sweatshirt. There’s the eye of a reindeer on it. She was so excited about Christmas. She’d already decorated her office with little reindeer, which may be breaking those rules about separation of church and state, but I don’t think she cared. Trembling, I scoop down, pick it up, and put it in my pocket. Why? I don’t know. Just because. Just because she was a hero and I need something to remember her by, and if that has to be a burned piece of her sweatshirt, so be it. Just so be it …

We walk to our cars, wounded and zombielike. I know we have to get out of here before the police come. Someone must have heard or smelled something. Astley and Amelie, however, put a glamour on the area, trying to make it look like it did before. They stand together and a hum fills the air. I do triage, trying to bandage up everyone’s wounds before we get out of here. I use the med kit Betty keeps in the metal locker in the bed of her truck but that she’d shoved into the car at the last minute. “Just in case,” she had said.

Issie has rips in her puffy pink coat and she’s softly crying. Devyn’s mouth is a grim line. He’s bleeding from the neck and forehead.

“Let me bandage that,” I tell him. We are barely moving. Shock numbs us into half of our selves.

“Issie first,” he insists. They sit on the back of the truck, feet dangling.

“Issie isn’t hurt as badly,” I say.

“Issie first.”

“You okay with that, Is?” I ask.

She nods, but she doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t spoken a word the entire time. It’s like she’s lost her voice. Her eyes are hollow, full of tears. I never even asked her how she got out of her house arrest to come with us. I’m a horrible friend, putting her in danger over and over again, putting all of them in danger. The guilt of it flips my stomach. I take care of Issie quickly and move on to Devyn and then my mother, while Astley cares for Amelie despite his own injuries. Cassidy seems to be healing on her own, thanks to her special blood. She checks on Issie and Devyn, murmuring magic words, hiccupping softly with tears as she works.

“We will be okay,” my mother insists.

I work on her hands, applying burn cream. It globs out of the tube. She cringes.

“We will be okay,” she repeats.

But I don’t know how we will. I look up at Astley. He meets my gaze, and it’s then that I notice. His eyes are full of tears, and they glisten, goldish. I wonder if my eyes look like that too. I wonder if we will ever find Nick. I wonder if we will ever stop losing people we love. I wonder and wonder as I work on my mother’s hands, but I get no answers. I get nothing but the feeling of loss.

My mother uses the burned palms of her hands to grab my own, stopping me as I roll out the gauze. “We are done with this, Zara. You hear me? No more Valhalla. No more fighting. I forbid you. We are done.”

“But Nick—”

“No boy is worth this.”

Everyone stops what they are doing and watches us. My mouth has dropped open. I clamp it shut and then open it again, measuring my words, but no words come.

Her pupils flare. “I forbid you.”

That tone. It used to make me do anything she wanted. It sent me to my room when I was being a brat. It made me do dishes or get to school on time. But not anymore.

“You can’t forbid me anymore, Mom. You can’t stop me,” I say.

Her hands twitch beneath my fingers. “You used to be so human, Zara, but now … but now …”

I pull out of her grasp easily. Then I slowly and methodically continue working on her burns. Nobody else says anything. They look away like nothing has happened, but something
has
happened, something big. I feel it inside of me, and that knowledge aches, bitter and hard like death.

Recent sightings of large cat prints have stumped local officials, but some residents are now wondering if the cause of the missing youths isn’t a human predator at all.

—
NEWS
CHANNEL
8

Astley makes phone calls and some of his pixies come to dispose of BiForst’s body. Betty hasn’t come back. Two days pass and we all mourn. It’s a double mourning, for both Mrs. Nix and Nick, because it seems like we’ve lost all chance of finding him. It’s a triple mourning almost, because it feels like Betty will never return. To make it worse, she isn’t being careful. There are news sightings of big cats, and one television report showed a man pointing at Betty’s massive paw prints in the snow.

The days stretch into grayness, bleak and horrible. Mrs. Nix was one of the kindest people in the universe and now she’s gone. Mrs. Nix’s disappearance does not go unnoticed at school, nor does Betty’s. My mom substitutes for Mrs. Nix, but there’s nobody to fill Betty’s shoes. On Friday an
FBI
agent stops me and Cassidy in the school parking lot and asks us questions. We answer the best we can:
We don’t know about Mrs. Nix. Betty went to visit a sick friend in New Hampshire
. We give him Betty’s cell phone number.

“Aren’t you worried about things?” he asks us. “So many missing. I’d think you kids wouldn’t even be walking in parking lots alone.”

Cassidy pulls her arm through mine. “We aren’t alone.”

“Oh, you have each other, right?” he snarks.

“You’re alone,” I say.

“Yes, but I have this.” He pats the side of his belt where his gun is. That’s not tacky or over-the-top macho or anything.

Later the same day, Astley and I meet at the grocery store since my mother refuses to allow him anywhere near the house. We roam up and down the aisles, carrying little baskets but not really buying anything. Eventually, I grab some mushroom ravioli just as an excuse to actually be here.

He walks me to the car. My hat is lopsided, so I fix it. Astley tucks my scarf more securely around my neck, then asks, “You have given up hope, haven’t you?”

I shrug, even though I know it’s a pathetic body gesture.

His hands go to the side of my face. “It hurts me to see you like this.”

“I am okay,” I say. “I—I’ve dealt with loss before.”

He leans closer. The smell of him overwhelms everything else, makes the snow falling behind him in the white sea of the parking lot vanish. It’s just him and me here, just us with our grief.

“I would take it all away if I could,” he says.

“Why?”

It’s his turn to shrug. “I just would.”

My butt rests against the
MINI
. I reach out and wipe the snow off his shoulders. “I wish you could.”

His fingers curl around my wrists, wrapping the ends of my mittens with warmth.

“Zara?” His voice is hoarse and aching.

I tilt my head and before I know it I’m clinging on to him, like he’s some magic tether that keeps me from sinking under with grief and pain and loss. His head dips down and our lips touch just the faintest of whispers, and then they mold right into each other, aching for life and comfort, longing to know that we aren’t alone. The world shimmers. He clutches me closer, and it’s just the two of us standing in the snowflakes, air swirling around us, the world spinning on its axis, time slowly clicking forward. It’s like the world has wrapped us up in old blankets, warming us with passion and need and …

I break away first. My hand flutters to cover my lips. “Oh … Oh …”

Someone starts a car in the next aisle and pulls out of the space. I try to figure out what to say, what to feel. Astley kissed me. And it was nice. It was more than nice. I can’t—

Astley interrupts my thoughts. His face is suddenly hard, lined. “It was all a trap. My mother set us up. She hoped to kill you at the bar, but she had a backup plan. Vander must have been beholden to her, in league with her. It’s rare, but it can happen, because she was the queen and I am not as strong as I should be.”

Shock ripples through me. “Why? Why would she want to kill me?”

“She is the widow of a king. If I died, she could choose her own king and rule through him, but now that you’re alive, you have that power instead of her.”

I try to process that. If Astley died, I’d have to find another king. And if we both died, she’d get to rule again. “That’s horrible. She meant to kill me? And you?”

“She killed my last queen, I think, through treachery. And Iceland— She— It was her. I am sure of it.”

Concentrating on his face, I try to push the anger out of my gut and focus on him and his hurt, his loss. I don’t know what it could possibly be like to have a mother like that. How alone he must feel. As I watch his lips, my stomach hitches up. I kissed him. We kissed each other. We …

He swallows so hard that I can hear it. “I shall find him.”

“What?” Shaking my head, I try to clear my brain. “What do you mean?”

“I will find your wolf. I want you to want me because you want me, not because of grief, not because he is not here. I want you to love me for me. I want you to kiss me first and not because you need me to help you, but because you need to kiss
me
.” He lifts his eyebrows just a little bit and his lips open. I drop my hand, reach for him, but he steps back and whisks away, dodging behind cars, before I have a chance to say that I don’t want to lose him too.

I see Astley the next day after school. He meets me in the parking lot and we stand by the
MINI
. His eyes are soft but wary—he’s watching the perimeter of the woods while we talk instead of making eye contact, which I understand because I do it too. We can’t let our guard down.

“I need to ask a favor of you, Zara,” he says.

I nod. I’m cool with that.

“I have arranged a meeting of our pixies so that—”

“In the graveyard again?” I interrupt.

“No. I think that was a bit—”

“Emo? Melodramatic?” I suggest.

Tilting his head, he smirks at me and makes eye contact. “As a species we have a weakness for drama. Thank you for reminding me,” he teases. “But no. It is actually in a conference room at a hotel. Many of our pixies are posing as reporters and are at the Holiday Inn. We’ve rented a room and pumped in a feed so that everyone in the kingdom, even those who are not here, can watch.”

That’s smart. But then I think, why?

“I want to tell them all about what happened in Iceland and with Mrs. Nix. I need to reveal my mother’s treachery.” His Adam’s apple moves down in his throat and he rubs a hand through his hair. “It will not be fun.”

It isn’t. We spend an hour in the conference room with its puke pink walls and old coffee smell. The whole time I remember how I ran at the cemetery, and the shame of it burns my cheeks. They’ve made such sacrifices being here, to protect the town, the people, my friends, me. They deserve more. Throughout the meeting, Astley stands at a podium and talks and talks, fielding questions from the two hundred or so pixies sitting at tables. The questions are respectful, and from the way that Amelie glares at anyone who asks anything, I’m sure everyone is afraid she’d rip their head off if they were even the slightest bit rude. Astley explains how his mother is basically trying to assassinate us. He also mentions that we saw Fenrir, the wolf who heralds the Ragnarok, the end of our world.

Finally Becca, a pixie who has chewed gum the entire time, raises her hand and asks, “So, you’ve been trying to find Valhalla to rescue the were who at one point tied you to a tree?”

“Yes,” Astley says.

Amelie paces along the perimeter of the room, feral almost. I try to imagine how hard it must be for her, having killed her sister and now having to see me as Astley’s new queen.

Becca ignores Amelie and continues on. “And he is the boyfriend of the queen?”

Astley nods.

“And the queen has killed others because of this wish? Exploited it?”

“Yes,” Astley says, looking at me. I think we’re both hoping that Becca will get to the point.