Need (21 page)

It’s someone else. Or something else, something that has been in the house but not in the room. It’s something that sounds just like my dad.

“Just come to me, Zara. I need you to come to me.”

“What?”

“My need… I can’t hold it back any longer… it’s huge.”

“What arc you?” I ask, staggering backward, still staring at the doorknob. “What the hell are you?”

Whatever he is roars with rage. He storms up and down the stairs and it sounds as if he has summoned a tornado to trash Grammy Betty’s house. Books crash. Glass breaks. I close my eyes and cover my ears. Nick growls.

I crumple on my bed. For a second, I believed that what I wanted more than anything in the world had come true. For a second, I believed that my dad was back. But he isn’t. He’s gone again. He’s really, truly gone and I know it. I know I’ll never see him again no matter how much I want to.

The candle in me has blown out and I’m afraid, really, really afraid, because my biggest fear is true. I have to live my life without my dad, my running partner, the guy who taught me about Amnesty and sang John Lennon songs really off-key.

I sob and clutch my stuffed bunny. Nick leaps up on my bed and squashes his body against mine, nuzzling my face with his muzzle until I lift it enough for him to lick away my tears.

While the pixie rages downstairs, I wrap my arms around Nick’s furry body and cry into him. My shoulders quake from the effort of it. He whimpers once or twice and tries to lick my face some more, but mostly he watches the door, and eventually I stop with the pathetic sobbing stuff and just keep crying. And eventually the crying stops too because I am hugging myself against Nick, hoping that everything isn’t real, that it is somehow a dream, but if that were true, it means that I would lose Nick, too. It would mean he isn’t real, and I really, really want him to be real. I want that even though I know that I’ll probably lose him, like I lost my dad and my mom, like I lost myself.

He’s human again when he wakes me up with just a small kiss on my forehead.

I open my eyes to see him smiling above me.

Groaning, I put my hands over my face. He’s pulled the shades and bright light streams into the room. I moan.

“Did I fall asleep? Really? How could I fall asleep?”

“Stress and crying knocks people out. You conked out once the pixie stopped destroying everything downstairs.”

“Oh.” I touch my cheeks. “You licked me.”

He laughs and leans over, giving a tiny tongue swipe to my hand. “You’re very lickable.”

I try to hit him. He laughs harder and grabs my hands.

“No fair! Mere mortal against werewolf,” I complain.

“Fine.”

He lets go, but first he kisses my fingers, each of them. I sigh happily.

Then I come to my senses and sit up.

“The pixies?”

“Gone,” he says, standing up and stretching. He’s put on clothes again. His entire body makes cracking sounds, one vertebrae at a time. “I can’t smell them.”

I nod like that makes perfect sense, which it doesn’t, but it isn’t like I’m some expert in magical creatures. My stomach sinks.

“He pretended to be my dad,” I say.

Nick’s eyes soften. “That must have been hard.”

I swallow. My mouth tastes terrible, like old, burned wood.

“You outsmarted him, though,” he says. “I’m proud of you.”

I try to smile but I can’t quite do it.

He grabs my hand. “Let’s go see if the phones are working, okay? Maybe find something to eat?”

“Is Betty here?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you think she’s okay?”

“The roads are bad, Zara. Unless she changed it would be hard for her to get here quickly.”

“Unless she changed,” I repeat. My fingers wrap around his. They like the feeling, safe, nestled in his crevices. “Is it safe?”

“I’m with you, Zara. I promise you, you’ll be safe.”

I want to believe him, but I’m not sure I can. Is there really anything that’s safe?

We brave ourselves up enough to go downstairs and it’s awful, so awful. Maybe only one pixie made his way in, but he’s done so much damage, it’s hard to believe he couldn’t have been a hundred or more.

“it looks like I had a party. A really big, really good party,” I say, stopping on the middle of the stairs to survey the damage. “Oh God, Betty is going to kill me.”

The couch is all Hipped over. The white leather chair has soot smeared into it. Papers and books are scattered about the floor. Pixie dust coats the cushions of the couch.

Nick grabs my hand and pulls me down the stairs. “It’s okay. We’ll deal with it. It won’t be bad.”

He lets go of my hand and takes an end of the couch. “Let’s flip this first.”

Together, we turn the couch right side up and push it back up against the wall. Nick blows the dust off his hands. “Disgusting.”

“It could have been worse. He didn’t slash the pillows or anything,” I say, but my voice sounds fake.

It fools Mick, though. “Right.”

We start picking things up. I check my cell phone and the regular phone to see if they work yet. They don’t. We open up the door and snow tumbles into the house. Any pixie prints are long buried.

My breath catches.

The world has a fairy-tale, Nutcracker, Christmas look. The snow covers the trees, turning them white and magical. Nick’s
MINI
is completely blanketed. It seems beautiful and orderly, and natural and safe, the opposite of Betty’s house.

“We’re snowed in,” I announce.

He sniffs the air. “It’s a big storm. It’ll probably last all afternoon, and not end until tomorrow morning.”

I tromp across the living room and try to radio Betty. I get Josie, the dispatcher, who says, “She set out for home two hours ago.”

“Oh, God.”

“No. Don’t you go worrying. I’ll try to call her up on the other channel. There’s been no word on the Dahlberg boy. The storm’s supposed to last through tonight, and the roads are bad, so it might just be taking her a little bit of time. And the satellite’s down, too, so some of the other channels aren’t working.”

I press the button on the radio. “Okay. Don’t tire yourself out, Josie.”

She laughs and it comes through the static loud and clear. “I’m not dead yet, Zara. I still got some life in me.”

We all do, I think, and I go back to trying to clean up the living room.

We clean forever it seems and finally both our stomachs growl louder than the wind.

“I’m starving. You hungry?” he asks.

I pat my belly. “Yep. You think Betty’s okay?”

He hugs me. “I think she’s okay.”

He strides into the kitchen and grabs some eggs out of the refrigerator, while I move the rest of the contents outside into the snow so they won’t go bad.

He has two frying pans set up on top of the woodstove and is opening up a can of corned beef hash when I come back inside.

“Corned beef hash?” I say. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s good, puts hair on your chest.”

“Fur, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

He pops off the metal lid and puts it on a paper towel. He slops the hash into the pan and stirs it around.

“This might take a while.” He grabs another spoon to stir the eggs. “I was thinking we might need to get some help for this pixie situation.”

“Okay, I thought wolves had packs. Do you have a pack?”

“Not in the traditional sense.”

“Sorry, Nick, but when it comes to werewolves, I don’t know what the traditional sense is.”

“I don’t run with other wolves.”

I nod. I wait. I finally give up and say, “So you run with…”

He winces. “Coyotes. But they have some wolf DNA”

It’s hard not to smile. “You are alpha at least, right?”

“Of course I’m alpha.” He almost growls at me.

“Sorry. Sorry. So, are we going to ask your pack for help?” I ask. “If you’re alpha, you can tell them what to do, right?”

“We’ll ask them. They can do little stuff, try to divert the pixies, keep them busy. But they’re just regular coyotes, Zara, and they get scared of magic.” He breaks up the hash a bit. “No, I was thinking about asking somebody else.”

“Who?”

He points the spoon at me. “You have to be calm about this, okay? When I tell you, you can’t get hysterical or anything.”

“Just tell me.”

“Issie and Devyn.”

I whirl around at him. “We can’t do that. First, they could get hurt. Second, what? You’re going to tell them you’re a werewolf? Oh, yeah. That’s going to go over well.”

“They already know, because…”

The fire crackles again. The wind shakes the house. He stands alert and ready, but nothing happens, including him finishing his sentence.

“They already know because…,” I prompt, completely impatient.

He pulls in a big breath.

“Oh my God! lssie’s a bunny, isn’t she? Do they have those? Do they have werebunnies?”

“Big leap there, Zare.” Nick cracks up. He shakes with laughter.

I pout. “She’d be a good bunny.”

“True. But it’s not her. It’s Devyn.”

“Devyn? Devyn is cute and normal.”

He scrapes at the bottom of the hash pan. His voice comes out dead calm. “He’s an eagle.”

“Oh. Okay. I am not going to freak out about this, but let me say that I am surprised.”

“Because he’s in a wheelchair?”

“No! Because he’s a bird.”

The wind rallies the house, makes the flames dance in the woodstove. I’m eating a bizarre combination of meat and diced potato with a guy who is actually hotter than the fire and what do I say?

I say, “We need to figure out how to keep the pixie from kissing me, from making me his queen.”

“I know,” Nick says.

“I don’t suppose just saying no would work.” I give a nervous laugh.

Nick starts scraping at the brown, crunchy hash that clings to the bottom of the pan. He mixes it into the softer hash parts, clumping it into a big brown, red, and white mess.

Still, it smells good, almost good enough to make me not think about pixies. Almost. Or that the only cool people in school are weres.

“Seriously, Zara,” he says, moving on to his egg scrambling.

“First off, I can’t believe pixies have kings and queens. That’s so old school. I don’t care if they are Shining Ones. It’s just lame. Are they some sort of totalitarian dictatorship based on a monarchial ideal of superiority, because those are some of the worst governments possible. I mean, the human rights violations in governments like that-”

He puts his free hand over my mouth just like Devyn did to Issie once. But I don’t do an Issie and giggle or lick his fingers. I just glare. Nick keeps scrambling the eggs with his free hand as if nothing is going on, nothing at all, as if this is a normal conversation for people to be having.

“Zara, these are [_pixies _]and when it comes to human rights violations, pixies don’t really care,” he explains. “One, they aren’t human. Two, torture is part of their M.O.”

I try to stomp on his foot, but he just pivots it away in some super quick werewolf maneuver and never stops scrambling the eggs, which are holding together now, almost finished. He doesn’t move his hand off my mouth and his eyes twinkle like he thinks I am so amusing.

l am not amusing.

“I’m going to move my hand now. Okay?”

“I am not queen material,” I sputter.

He wipes his hand on his shirt.

“What? Did I drool on you?”

“A little,”

“You’re a wolf. You should be used to drool.”

“That’s low.”

He takes the egg pan off the top of the woodstove and places it on the brick hearth that surrounds it.

I cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t care.”

We stay silent for a minute while he scrapes at the hash in the pan again. The windows seem like empty white blanks because of all the snow that keeps tumbling down. Some of the flakes splatter against the house like they are trying to escape the wintry reality.

“This isn’t their normal behavior, obviously. I mean, the pixies haven’t been killing everyone all this time. There’s a gap,” I say. Nick starts to interrupt but I hold up my hand to stop him. “I know we know that. I’m just thinking out loud, trying to process it. It’s got to all be connected to my dad’s letter.”

“And they’ve been without a queen for a quarter of a century. There’s got to be a rule about that.” He points the scraping spoon at me. “Zara, I know you’re a little freaked out by all this and that’s normal, but I think that-”

“Normal? What’s normal about any of this? You, possibly the best-looking guy in the universe, actually like me, but you’re a werewolf.” I can hear the hysteria in my voice but can’t stop it. “Two of my favorite people at this crazy school are a werewolf and a were-eagle. Did I get that right? Werewolf and were-eagle? And of course, my grandmother is a weretiger.”

He nods and lets me spew. I pace back and forth in the living room.

“And don’t let me forget, pixie man has trashed my living room, and pixies want me to be their queen.

And to accomplish this, instead of being nice and asking or bringing me flowers or something, some guy whispers my name when I’m in the woods trying to make me lost and then barges into my house the moment my gram isn’t here.” I stop for a second. “Wait. Why did they wait until Betty wasn’t here?”

Nick spoons some hash onto a plate, then starts on the eggs. “I have no idea. They’re probably afraid of her. Weretigers are tough.”

He shrugs and starts scooping food onto his plate.

“Maybe they got tired of waiting,” he offers, sitting down on the floor in front of the fire. I sit with him. The heat laps against us and it feels so good.

“Maybe they realized that I wouldn’t let you get taken by them in the woods, so they decided a direct attack was best,” he says. “Wolves fight better outside. We aren’t house pets. Do you like your hash?”

I stir my eggs around my plate a little bit and then fork up some hash. It warms my mouth. “This is good.”

He smiles. “Thanks.”

“So you can cook, too?” I ask. “You’re perfect, aren’t you?”