“I will never turn!” I shout.
“—she would be powerful, a powerful queen.”
I sort of stare at this pixie man who is my biological father. He’s all hunkered down on the gray carpeting in the back of my car. He looks almost human and almost innocent. He’s not.
An old McDonald’s quarter-pounder-with-cheese wrapper whips into my ankle and sticks there. I reach down and grab it, even though it’s vile and gross. I can’t just let it blow around forever, littering the world.
“Can I sit up?” my father asks.
“No,” Issie says at the same time as I say, “Yes.”
She stares at me. The wind twists her hair around her face. She doesn’t even notice.
I try to explain. “Issie . . . he asked. He could have sat up a million years ago. Think of how he grabbed your wrist.”
“That is what I’m thinking about.” Her mouth becomes a tight line and then she loosens it to add, “I think it’s a ploy.”
“It is not a ploy,” he says. His voice is infinitely weary. “My ploys are much more interesting.”
“You can sit up,” I say. He scoots backward and slowly brings his body up. His breath comes out in a cold puff, mingling with the air and then dissipating. I reach in and wrap the blanket around his legs. “Just in case.”
He half smiles. A dimple appears at the left side of his mouth. “For a moment I thought you were being maternal.”
“Daughterly would be more appropriate,” I say.
We stare each other down. His eyes are mesmerizing, really. They pull at you. It is creepy.
“You survived before because I let you,” he says.
My head snaps up so hard something cracks in my neck. “What?”
He is calm, propped up against the seat. “I let you survive. I let your boyfriend survive. I was out of my mind with need, out of my mind wanting your mother, and still I let you, my daughter, survive. I saw that you were trapping us there and I let her escape through the wires while I pretended to be distracted by you. That has to give you some assurance that I am not against you.”
“Then how come you’re not out of your mind now?” Issie asks, hands on her hips. “Huh? How come you aren’t lunging at me, trying to pixie kiss me or something?”
“You are not meant to be my queen,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Geesh. Nice.” Issie blows air out of her mouth.
“Don’t be insulted,” I say. “It’s a good thing.”
My father stares into her eyes. “And you are not a young man. You are not someone I can bleed.”
Creepy tension charges the air. I shudder. Something in my coat starts vibrating and then I hear it: Nick and my song.
“Crap.”
Issie gives me big eyes. “Is that him?”
I pull the phone out of my pocket. “Just a text.”
My father ignores us and continues. “I know you think that I am a monster, Zara. And maybe I am. However, I know that if my needs are not taken care of, then the others, my people, they are worse, much worse.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” I ask.
“Set me free.”
“I can’t do that.” My eyes meet his eyes.
His eyes are fierce and sad and tired. “I have to feed. That is the only way I can be strong enough to battle. I shall feed and then I shall protect you and your wolf and my right to rule.”
“I can’t let you just go torture some poor boy, even if it is to protect us.”
“Then I need a queen.” His body stiffens almost as if he is going to strike.
My hands become fists. “Nope. No. I mean if you could find some weird woman who actually wants to be a pixie queen, fine. But you are so not taking Mom. She’s not even here, you know.”
“Zara . . . there aren’t many possibilities.” The skin by his eye twitches.
“Those are not options. Torturing boys and turning my mom are not options.”
“I’m the only one powerful enough to stop another king. I’m the—”
Issie slams the trunk shut, cutting off his words. “We need to take him back, don’t you think? We need to just let this settle and think it over.”
I make myself nod and just stare at the back of the car and my father’s face. He slowly closes his eyes, giving up maybe.
Is studies me. “You’re shaking.”
“It’s cold out,” I say.
“That’s not why you’re shaking.” Issie wraps her arm around my shoulders, hugs me to her. “I can’t believe I get to be the tough one.”
The wind bumps us against the car. Dirt gets on our jeans, our jackets.
“Eww . . . ,” Issie says. “Dirt.”
“Very tough, Issie.”
She laughs and pulls open the passenger door. “Thanks.”
But I am not done with him yet. Once I’ve started the car I yell back, “What do you know about Valhalla?”
“It is the mythological hall of Odin,” he answers.
“Odin?” Issie asks, turning up the heat.
“Norse god.” I pull the car out of the parking lot. “So it isn’t real?”
“Of course not,” he scoffs. “I wish you would rethink your assumptions about me, Zara and release me. I assure—”
“What about Valkyries?” I interrupt, stopping at one of our town’s two stoplights. Mr. Burns, one of my teachers, pulls up next to me and waves. Issie and I plaster grins on our faces and wave back.
“Valkyries?” This time my father laughs. “Myths.”
Issie starts to speak, but I put a finger over my lips to keep her from saying anything. The light turns green.
“I don’t know why we bothered with him,” I tell Issie.
She turns up the radio. “Me either.”
When we drop him off, he tries to run. I’m forced to tackle him and drag him back within the steel perimeter of the house. This earns massive respect from Issie, who said I was Super Bowl–worthy. After tromping back to the car we drive away fast. We’re both shaking but neither of us talks. Back at Issie’s house I shift Yoko into reverse but keep my foot on the brake, ready to leave. Waiting for direction, I guess.
“It’s not like I totally believe him, but I am super worried about Nick,” I say. “I’m worried that I won’t be able to keep him safe.”
Is cocks her head. “Zara, honey, it isn’t all up to you. We’re all part of it, okay? You’re not alone.”
“Right.” I grab the steering wheel a little tighter. The roads are getting slippery. “I know that, but even though I know I can count on you guys, I still feel like it’s up to me somehow, like everything is my fault or my credit.”
“You are just as bad as Nick.” She smiles to take the edge off her words. “The fate of the world does not depend on you, Zara White.”
“Promise?” I ask as cold air rushes in through the passenger door.
Issie gets out and grabs the top of the door so she can slam it shut. “Promise.”
I back out of there and wonder if promises ever mean anything at all.
Once I leave Is, I check for reception and call my mom while I drive. She’s still in Charleston but she’s moving up here. She’s already quit her job and everything, but when you are a CEO-type person you have it in your contract that you have to give a certain amount of notice between the day you resign and the day you actually get to leave. If you mess with that, the company you work for can impose “financial penalties” or sue you. Right now, thinking about what my father just said, I’m glad that she’s still down there. But I miss her hugs and her power suits and her mom smell.
The phone rings and goes to voice mail. She’s probably at a meeting about physician recruitment or something heinously boring like that. I babble out a message and click the phone off. I tell myself it’s okay. Driving isn’t easy, so I shouldn’t be messing with the phone. Poor Yoko; her tires try to grip the icy road. I try to steer and not vault into one of the towering snowbanks that hunker at the side of the road, wait
ing. It’s all about trying, right? That’s all we can do in life: try to do the right thing, try to survive high school, try to navigate treacherous icy roads, just try.
Devyn’s always quoting Yoda from one of the original Star Wars movies. Yoda talks in a total stoner voice and is supposed to be all philosophically centered with the good force stuff. I think of him as a kind of Tibetan monk crossed with the dude who hangs out at 7-Eleven even though he’s thirty. To finish the picture add in a green cat. So anyway, Yoda says, “Do or do not. There is no try.” I hate that. Sometimes you can’t just do. Sometimes all you can handle is trying.
I crank up the radio. Listen to Bono sing about loss and need and hope. It’s vintage U2, not their newer stuff.
On the side of the road shadows form in the woods. They look like people. But I’m imagining things, right?
Right.
The winter fog creeps around the tree trunks, shrouding them and whatever else might be hiding at the side of the road. It’s gray. It’s dangerous.
“I’m not looking at you, fog,” I announce, and I turn up the radio volume to twenty-two, which basically ensures that my eardrums will stop working by the time I’m twenty-three.
My skin starts to feel like thousands of spiders are crawling on it, doing an Irish step dance. Maybe it’s residual from being with my father for so long, or maybe we didn’t secure him well enough in the house. Maybe he got out.
“Crap.”
I flip open my phone. Press the speed-dial number two. It rings and rings.
“Issie?”
“Zara?” Her voice is muffled and I’m not sure why. It almost sounds like she’s been crying. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“Yep. Okey-dokie-Pinocchi . . .”
I smush the phone between my shoulder and my head and put both hands on the wheel. “I have the feeling.”
“The pixie feeling?”
“Yeah.”
Keep driving. Going forward. Moving.
“The ‘pixie king is near you so your skin feels like spiders are crawling on it’ feeling?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh-oh.” She mumbles something away from the phone and adds, “She’s got the wiggly feeling.”
“Would you hate me if I asked you to come over?”
“We’ll be right there. Devyn’s here. Call Nick right now!”
I click off the phone again and think for a second. I don’t want Nick in danger. Putting the phone away, I turn up the radio again and then round a curve. I’m barely through it when I slam on the brakes.
There’s a blond man standing in the middle of the road, waiting. Oh please, do not let him be waiting for me.
Definition
Pixie-led: to be lost, to be confused, to be led astray
Yoko skids out of control. She slides left, then skitters right, rushing toward a tree. The tree trunk is massive and thicker than my car. If I hit it? It won’t be good. It’ll be broken-bone bad. I’m going to hit it.
“No!” My voice is screaming the word but I don’t really hear it. I’m pressing harder on the brakes. The brakes are screaming too.
“Nick!” I yell his name without thinking about it. The car smashes into something huge and hard. The tree? My head whips back and forward or forward and back. I don’t know. The airbag smashes into my face and chest. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. The world is plastic and pain. Wires burn. The smell of acid hits my nose. I push at the airbag. My entire chest aches.
“Get out! Get out!” A guy’s voice yells at me.
The door wrenches free. Cold air rushes in. It smells worse now. More burning. Hands are reaching for me as I scream and flail, stuck. “Nick?”
“I am attempting to help you,” the man says. He is not Nick. Of course. Of course he’s not Nick. Focus, I need to focus.
I try to pull in a big breath. “I can’t move.”
“Your seat belt.”
Seat belt? What’s a seat belt? My brain can’t quite compute.
“Unclick it.”
Click? Seat belt? Right. Hands reach across my waist. Fingers push at my seat belt. His fingers. The guy in the road. Not Nick. The pixie. The young one, who was injured.
“I am unable to get it,” he says. “Damn, I despise iron. I should have taken my pills.”
I try to reach around too and free myself, but my arm’s not quite working. It’s the same arm this pixie Ian broke when he kidnapped me and tried to turn me. It feels broken or sprained again, judging by the pain spiraling up into my shoulder.
The pixie’s voice gets urgent and higher pitched. “Fire!”
“Yoko? Yoko’s on fire?”
“The car is on fire. Please, just stay still so I can help you.”
I don’t move even though everything inside of me is shrieking, Get out, get out, run! Something is ripping. The seat belt? How can he rip the seat belt? Hands are yanking me out of the car, into the cold. But there’s heat pressing at my back. Pain shifts from my arm to my chest. My nose burns from the smell of hot metal and rubber and chemicals burning.
He groans and falls backward into the snow. I tumble on top of him. There are all these pinging noises coming from the direction of the car. I manage to turn my head enough to look but my neck is all stiff and crazy slow. Yoko is a jumbled mass of steel. Her door is wide open. Flames shoot out of the hood. The smoke is heavy and dark, toxic and unworldly looking. Glass breaks and falls onto the road.
“It might explode,” I say, sounding like I’m asleep or I’ve lost forty IQ points or something. “Cars can explode.”
He nods and stands up. “Are you capable of walking?”
“I—I don’t know. I—That’s a good question.”
He bends and pulls me up into his arms. He drapes me over his shoulder and starts walking fast down the snowbank. His feet are barely touching the ground.
“You’re hurt,” I gasp. “Your stomach. You’ll hurt yourself more.”
More glass shatters.
“You are suddenly caring about a pixie?” He laughs. It’s a harsh, awful sound full of pain. I don’t know if the pain is mental or physical, I just wish I could fix it somehow, make it better. He smirks. “What is your boyfriend going to say about that?”
He falls to the ground in a sitting position. I slide off his shoulder, coughing. My hip hits the hard, packed-down snow. We’re a football field away from Yoko. She’s smashed into a huge tree. Her hood is crunched in and wrapped around the trunk. I struggle into a sitting position. My neck doesn’t feel like it wants to support my head. “We have to get the fire out. My car—”
She explodes. The sound blasts my ears. Before I know what he’s doing, the pixie guy grabs me and pulls me to him. His hands wrap around my head and he twists so his back is facing the car, like he’s protecting us from the impact, which is really nice of him, but I don’t know why he’s taking care of me, why—
“Oh man. Oh . . .” I can’t even begin to breathe. His jacket is in my mouth. It tastes like wool, bitter and nasty. I struggle to get enough room to look. Orange and black flames leap out of Yoko’s body. The first things I think of? My cell phone. My cell phone is in there. And my iPod. And my homework. And my laptop. My head throbs. Is this normal? Is it normal to think?
“This is why I hate technology!” he half mutters, half shouts. “It is ridiculously dangerous.”
Suddenly my head clears and I am furious-angry. “What? This is not technology’s fault. This is your fault,” I yell at him. “You were in the road. That’s why I swerved in the first place. You made me crash.”
He scoffs. His nose actually twitches.
“Why were you in the road?” I demand, trying to keep my arm stable. “Were you trying to kill me?”
He doesn’t answer. A little blood is seeping through the gray T-shirt that’s under his open jacket.
I scuttle backward and cringe from the pain. I stop moving and try to control my anger. “You knocked me out before—in my c
ar—you escaped . . .”
He plucks a piece of ripped-up seat belt off his leg. I don’t know how it got there.
“You lost consciousness. I availed myself of the opportunity to leave.” He smiles. It’s a wicked smile. Kind but not kind. Handsome but dangerous. Feral almost. I can see why Nick nearly killed him. Nick . . . My father’s warning echoes in my ear. Still, I need to call someone—the fire department at least.
“Do you have a cell phone?” I ask.
He gently touches my cheek. Gently? “I do, but I cannot let you use it. Then they will have my number.”
I try not to shrink away. “Please. I’m hurt . . .”
He seems to think about it and then nods. He does something. “I am blocking the number. I have called 9-1-1.” He then speaks into the phone. “There has been a one-car accident on Route 3 about a mile past the Bedford Convenience Store. The car is on fire. One person injured. It’s not life threatening.
“There. Done.” He clicks the phone off and stares at me. “You still look faint. Can you manage sitting up?”
“Thank you.” I fall back into the snow as he starts to put his arm around to support me. It gets stuck under my body, really awkwardly. “Sorry.”
“I apologize,” he says at the same time. I didn’t know pixies could actually say they were sorry. He pulls his arm out slowly so it doesn’t hurt me too much.
He seems to listen to the woods. “I am going to have to go in a second, little one. Are you going to be all right by yourself?”
“Little one?” Anger wells up in me again.
“I do not know your name.” He squints down at me. His eyes are a beautiful deep green like the tops of pine trees, but it’s a glamour. It’s not what he really looks like. His eyes are silver like all pixie eyes. The glamour makes him look human. It’s part of the magic. “I should know your name now that we have both rescued each other.”