Authors: Carrie Jones
“Something is going on over there,” I whisper to Issie.
Nick looks up. His gaze meets Jay’s and Jay stands.
Jay’s blond hair flops over his eyes, shading them a little bit. He grew his hair out after he was kidnapped by evil pixies. It’s hide-me hair, not teen-idol, pop-star hair, although it’s the same kind of trendy cut. He walks over and leans on the coffee table, making direct eye contact with me now instead of Nick. “I remember things.”
The air goes still. The only noise is some background hum of coffee and espresso machines, the mechanical droning of refrigerated display cases and the music. It feels like my entire body is shaking, but it isn’t. My stomach lurches and I get this image of Astley grimacing. He’s so late. I hope he’s okay. It doesn’t feel like he’s okay, and I start thinking about Loki and frosty giants, Cassidy’s prediction. That kidney-crushing feeling inside me gets worse.
Jay’s voice snaps me out of my worries. It is low and urgent as he says it again. “I remember that you were there, Zara. You saved me from those—those things. You got me out of the house.”
Issie’s hand goes to my arm, and I think she’s trying to be reassuring because we both know that now I
am
one of those things.
Earlier this year, Jay was kidnapped by my biological father. He was tortured and bound to a bed where pixies fed on his energy—his soul, basically. We rescued him from this hellish pixie house in the woods, Devyn and Issie, Betty, Nick, and me. He didn’t remember any of it.
“It’s not just that Jay is remembering what’s happened to him.” Callie clears her throat. She meets my gaze. I resist the urge to look away. “We saw you take that guy out the other night after the dance. That wasn’t playacting and it wasn’t because he hit on you. Those were mad fighting skills, Zara. Mad. Fighting. Skills.”
Austin does this weird male-posturing thing where he lifts up one leg and puts it on the coffee table and then he goes, “And that’s just weird, Zara. You’re all Miss Pacifism, Amnesty International, write letters for political prisoners, end all war, and there you are just beating on somebody?”
None of us say anything. Cierra and Danielle hang back watching. Winking, Paul reaches over and takes a sip of Cassidy’s drink. “You mind?”
She shakes her head.
“Thanks.” Paul puts it back. He’s like that—always in everybody else’s stuff. Nobody thinks anything of it anymore. He crosses his arms over his chest. “If we’re in danger, we should know. If you know something, you should tell us. It’s your responsibility to tell us.”
And it is. It is our responsibility. Would I want to be in the dark while pixies were running around? Is it fair to not tell them? Honestly, though, I’m not sure of the implications of telling. I’m not sure if it will make them safer or make them panic, and we don’t even know for sure everything that’s going on.
I look up at Dahlberg. He’s so sweet looking still, but his eyes are wounded and half dead. When he couldn’t remember what had happened to him I thought that was good, keeping him safe and sane, but maybe the not knowing is haunting him anyway, killing him slowly with partial images and questions. I touch the tip of my juice bottle with my finger for reassurance and then lock eyes with him. “Are you really starting to remember?”
He closes his eyes after a second and swallows so hard that his Adam’s apple visibly moves up and down his throat. “I remember teeth, being trapped on a bed. I remember you taking me down these ornate marble stairs through all these monsters. There was a wolf and a tiger out in the cold. I know it sounds crazy but I also know that you saved me from something, Zara. I am positive you did.”
Devyn leans forward on the couch. I nod at him. Nick clears his throat and I can tell just by looking at him that he’s okay with this. The decision is made. I wish Astley wasn’t late so he could know too.
“Maybe they can help,” I say to Nick, even as a knife seems to stab into my stomach. What is that? It’s all I can do not to crumple over. I soldier through it and say, “We can’t do it all by ourselves. Not even with Astley’s people. It’s just too big.”
“I know.” He motions for Paul and Cierra, Callie and Danielle, Dahlberg and Austin to pull up some chairs.
My stomach sort of flops around inside me. If we tell them, then their innocence is gone—just gone. Their entire perception of the world will be shattered. If we tell them, they could potentially tell other people, who could tell other people, and more and more regular human beings will know that the world isn’t anything like they thought—that there are secrets lurking right next to them, predators that look human but have needs, horrible needs.
“Oh my gosh . . .” Issie looks at me. “Is this kosher?”
I nod. Cassie swallows hard. She grabs Issie’s hand. “It’s the right thing to do. It’s better for them to know what they face.”
“But it could go viral.” Issie makes big eyes. “The whole world could know.”
“That’s the risk,” I say. “It’s a big risk.”
They quickly pull the chairs up to the table and once they are settled it is Devyn’s turn to clear his throat.
“Okay,” he begins, “we don’t know everything and it’s going to sound unbelievable but this is what’s happening. There are these things called pixies . . .”
They listen. They gasp. But I know as I watch them that they believe.
There’s a time when you’re super-little when you don’t really know yet that bad things exist. It’s before that first bully pushes you down on the nursery-school floor and says something like “I’m a lion and I’m going to eat you up.” It’s before that first-grade teacher puts you in timeout for talking, even though you weren’t talking and it was actually Stephen Sills. It’s before you see your best friend’s dad punch her mom. That’s when you realize people aren’t always good.
It is not a good realization. It is gaunt and tangled, a sucker punch to the stomach, the last breaths on Heartbreak Hill while running the Boston Marathon kind of realization, and it hurts and resonates all of your life and here we are—Nick, Devyn, Cassidy, Issie, and me—giving Jay and Paul and Austin, Cierra, Danielle, and Callie that same horrible sucker punch, watching them realize that the entire world is not what it seems, that there are secrets, dangerous secrets, out there lurking.
Sweat beads on Paul’s forehead, Austin’s face turns beet red, and poor Cierra is slowly rocking back and forth in her chair while Danielle pats her back. Callie looks like she wants to kill people. And Jay? His entire face is closed and hard.
Finally Devyn finishes our story, and we wait for their verbal reactions. Across the shop, some lawyer-type person orders a triple-shot espresso to go over at the counter.
“Well,” Callie says as she leans back in her chair and fiddles with an earring but keeps her gaze strong and steady on us. “Wow.”
Is blurts, “You’re going to accept it, just like that?”
I open my eyes again. Paul lifts up his hands and sort of shrugs like he’s already getting used to the idea. I wonder for a second what he’d think if Cassidy just told him he would die soon. Would he shrug then too?
Danielle speaks first. “All my life I’ve felt like there was something else going on. Something lurking. Something—oh, I don’t know—something that was here that I just didn’t know about. Now, I know.”
“That’s how I used to feel,” Cassidy agrees. “I even told you that one time at the bowling alley. Remember, Zare?”
I nod and give her a smile. It seems like forever ago, and it was probably less than a month.
“It makes sense,” Callie adds. “Seriously, this town is a freak zone of weird.”
“Jay?” I ask him.
He’s paler than normal. He looks up and meets my eyes. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me before.”
Jay repeats what he said while his feet twitch on the floor. The left foot. The right. It’s like they want to run away from the truths of his kidnapping, our deception.
“We thought you’d been through enough,” Issie starts, trying to explain as another pain stabs into my stomach. Where is Astley?
Jay’s hands are shaking he’s so upset, and I would be upset too. I rub my hand across my eyes. Every cell inside of me is tired and sad. And that’s when I realize that this is really it. We are making an army. I have to be willing to lead them, willing to let them risk their lives fighting this. If we ever want life to return back to normal we have to fight for it, all of us.
“I deserve to know what happened to me.” He shakes his head hard, brushing the hair out of his eyes.
“You do,” I agree. “I’m sorry.”
He nods sharply. “I want to know everything. All of it. We have to make plans. We can’t let what happened to me happen to other people.”
“No, we can’t,” I say, determination hitting me full scale. There is no turning back now. “Let me tell you about this thing Devyn and I have been writing. We call it the
How to Survive a Pixie Attack
manual. It’s everything we know so far about fighting pixies. We’ll make you all copies and then we’ll start training—”
“Training?” Issie’s eyebrow lifts up.
Callie says it for me. “There’s no option, is there? You’ll have to train us to fight.”
“Not just us. Giselle too,” Paul says. “She’d want in on this, and Andrew and Brad and Tyler and Blake . . .”
His list goes on for a while and Devyn starts typing the names into a file. I lean back and close my eyes. Fate feels like it comes spiraling in on me. I want to know where Astley is.
“Do we start today?” Callie interrupts Paul’s never-ending list of names.
“Tomorrow,” Nick says. “We’ll start tomorrow afternoon, meet at the Y. They have free gym time at one. Nobody’s ever in there.”
And so our army begins.
We’re gathering our things together when Becca explodes into the Grind and runs to me, looking like a frightened cheerleader, not the killing machine she is.
She grabs me by the arms. “It’s Astley.”
“What’s happened?” I knew it. I knew something was wrong.
“They’ve poisoned him.” Her face breaks into tears. “He’s bad, really bad.”
Running toward the doors, I yank her along with me, demanding, “Where? Where is he?”
“At the birds’.”
TROOP/UNIT: Troop J
I
tems of interest to local agencies:
12/16: The Holiday Inn staff reported suspicious activity outside one of their guests’ ground-floor bedrooms. A woman was reportedly standing in the snow, laughing for twenty minutes. Failed to locate upon arrival.
Becca gives me the lowdown as we rush to the car. She and Amelie had gone to meet Astley in his hotel room. He didn’t answer when they knocked, but they could smell him inside, so they busted down the door and found him, unglamoured and unconscious on the floor.
“How did you know he was poisoned?” I ask, turning on the truck and yanking my seat belt into position.
“There was a note.”
“A note?” I pull out of the parking space way too quickly and swerve on the slushy road. I just want to get to Devyn’s house, get to Astley, find out what happened. Devyn is flying there. I wish I could turn bird and do that. It would be so much faster.
“Taped to the outside window. It said,
Poison is a fitting way for a weak-hearted king to die.
”
“Weak-hearted?”
She rubs at her eyes and says in a voice choked with venom, “Isla, his mother, always thought he was weak. Too willing to see the good in people, too hesitant to use his power, his authority on his subjects.”
“So basically, he’s not an evil tyrant.” My foot pushes harder on the gas pedal and part of me wishes it was Isla’s face.
“Exactly.” Her tone is heavy and she presses her palm against the glass pane of the window like she is trying really hard not to break it.
The truck skids over the snow-slick road as I turn onto a side street. I ask, “And she’s the one who poisoned him?”
“The note wasn’t signed but the word choice makes it look that way.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Million-dollar question,” Becca says. “Can’t you drive faster?”
I do, zooming dangerously over the freezing roads, passing a city plow truck. I think my questions are frustrating her, or maybe it’s my ignorance plus the situation. I don’t know. All I know is that Astley is hurt, really hurt. Maybe Astley is the key to everything somehow.
“If he dies—” Becca starts.
“He can’t die,” I blurt.
“If he dies, you will be our queen.”
The thought of it makes me cringe. “A queen doesn’t usually rule alone.”
“Some do. You would.”
There’s a pause in her voice. “But?”
“But,” she says, “I think this is part of the plan. Other than a few weres, we are the only ones protecting this town from Frank. If Astley is gone we weaken, especially if you are not strong enough to rule alone. If you are gone, then Astley weakens. It works either way. So, then there is an opening—”
“For an evil pixie king named Belial, also known as Frank.” I pull into Devyn’s driveway. “Not going to happen.”