The Nixie’s Song (3 page)

“What are you doing?”

With that weird book tucked under one arm, Laurie walked around the hot, fresh-poured asphalt streets like she was on some kind of exciting safari.
She tried to peer into the partially finished houses.
She looked behind buildings as Nick grudgingly trailed along.
Laurie stopped at the newly made lake, with grates under each of the bridges to keep alligators out and a fountain in the middle that kept it from going stagnant, and then kicked off her flip-flops.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked her.
He wondered how long he had to follow her around.
He wondered if you could die from boredom.

She tied her long skirt up high on her legs.
“Wading.”

“I thought we were looking for faeries,” he said, glancing back at his house.
The kitchen window had a pretty good view of the lake, so pushing her in was out of the question.

“I am,” she said.
“I’m checking for hoofprints on the bank.
That would be evidence that a kelpie lives here.
Or maybe I’ll find reed pipes made by nixies.”

“What’s a kelpie?”

“A water horse.” She dragged one bare foot through the silt and made her voice ominous.
“It tricks people into getting onto its back and then drowns them.
Spooky, right?”

“Whatever.
Why would you want to find that?”

“I know better than to ride it,” she said.
“I’m not stupid.
The Guide tells you how to handle faeries.”

Nick sighed and scrunched his toes against the fronts of his sneakers.
He wouldn’t have minded going in the brackish water, but his dad would freak.
He didn’t want Nick swimming in anything that wasn’t full of chlorine and was always giving dire warnings about jellyfish and riptides to Jules.
“You’re not going to find anything, you know.
Nothing lives here, except maybe turtles.
They just dredged this lake.
They’re going to dump in some fish eventually, but no one’s got around to it yet.”

Laurie kicked over an empty turtle shell.
“I guess a turtle
used
to live here.
Looks like something got it.” She padded over to where the tangles of fresh-planted sea grapes met the old
woods.
There, pinwheel-like palms grew beside the puffy tufts of pine trees.
“You must come out here all the time with Jules.
You’re so lucky to have a brother to do stuff with.”

“Yeah,” Nick said.
He didn’t feel like explaining that Jules was busy a lot with his friends and his girlfriend.
It was none of her business.

“I always wished I had a brother.”

The air was hot and thick and sticky.
Nick thought longingly of the air-conditioning and the games in his bedroom.
Then he remembered his bedroom wasn’t his bedroom anymore.
No longer his territory.
“We’re not allowed to walk in the woods.”

“We won’t go far,” she said, opening the book and holding it out as she picked her way through the scrub, leaving the water and Nick behind.
“Be on the lookout for strange footprints or boulders that look like they have eyes.
Or trees
with eyes.
Or anything with eyes.
And especially look to see if you find a four-leaf clover or a stone that has a hole worn through it.”

“Don’t be so dumb,” said Nick, looking at the empty turtle shell.
“I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Laurie didn’t answer.
She just kept going.
As he followed, he caught glimpses of her between palm trees and scrub.
The distant sounds of construction served only to remind him of
how far they were from anyone.
A storm was coming.
In the dim light, the leaves had turned silvery and strange.

“This is boring,” Nick said halfheartedly.

Laurie shrugged, her flip-flop straps threaded through her fingers, her bare feet crushing reindeer moss as she got deeper into the woods.
He didn’t want to continue following her, but he didn’t want to be standing all by himself like an idiot, either.

“Have you ever found one?” Nick called, walking through shrubs that caught on the fabric of his shorts.
He pulled himself free.

“One what?” She was only a few feet away, looking closely at the side of a palm tree.
It was grooved with shallow woodpecker holes.

Nick jogged over and then wheezed, already out of breath.
“Something out of the book.”

Laurie frowned.
“I don’t know,” she said finally.
Sandspurs had scratched thin lines on
her calves, but she didn’t even seem to notice.
“I guess I’ve seen some weird stuff—like, look at the way the hill slopes over there.”

Nick squinted.
He’d never been even this far in the woods, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be noticing about the hill that was even farther on, but it was true that on the hill, long banyan-tree roots grew like a beard beside a strange-shaped boulder that resembled a sleeping eye.
He shuddered.
Either Laurie’s crazy was contagious or he was getting heatstroke.

Looking down at his feet, Nick realized he was standing in a patch of clover.
He glanced over at his stepsister, but she hadn’t noticed, so he squatted down and ran his fingers through the green plants.

Just as Nick was going to straighten up, he saw a single four-leaf clover.
He reached out and carefully pinched it off at the stem.
If he
gave it to Laurie, he bet that she’d agree to go back to the house, but he’d never found one before and he wasn’t sure he wanted to give it up.
He twirled it once in his fingers.
Somehow it suddenly seemed greener, more vivid, as though his vision had sharpened.
Maybe the clover would make him lucky, and some other kid would move in to one of the houses and save him from a summer with Laurie.

Searching through his pockets, he came up with a receipt that looked like it had been through the laundry once.
He folded the clover inside it and tucked it back in his shorts.

Laurie squeaked, and he looked over at her guiltily.
She was looking up.
Rain splashed on Nick in fat, warm drops.

“Summer storm,” he said.
“Let’s go back!”

But Laurie, freak that she was, just lifted her hands and spun around as her hair plastered her neck and her skirt got soaked.
“Come on, Nick,” she said.
“Let’s pretend that we’re tree spirits!”

That was the final straw for Nicholas.
He didn’t care if his dad yelled at him for leaving Laurie by herself.
He didn’t care if she couldn’t find her way back and got lost in the woods and an alligator ate her.
He was going home and playing
his video games, and that was that.
Turning his back to her, he started walking.

He followed the lake around, listening to the raindrops hiss as they hit asphalt.
The rain stopped as Nick stepped onto his own scraggly, brown lawn.
He sighed.
It hadn’t rained long enough to really make a difference, just enough to annoy him.
He walked in the door and went up to his room, where there were games he knew how to win.

Lightning cracked, shooting horizontally throughz the sky, and thunder boomed.
The rain hadn’t started up again, but it sounded like it was going to come down hard when the storm blew all the way in.
Nick concentrated.
If he just collected a couple more mushrooms, he could
give them to the old wise woman and collect the Blade of Ultimates.

Suddenly, the room went black and his screen powered off before he could save or do anything but stare dumbly.
He scrambled up off the beanbag in his new, shared bedroom.
Downstairs, he heard his father’s voice but not what his father said.
The lightning flashed again and, through the bedroom window, Nicholas saw a pale body out on the wide stretch of grass between the lake and the remaining wetlands.

He squinted.
Laurie.
He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he came inside, and he wasn’t sure if the sky had gotten dark because it was late or because of the storm.
But if that was Laurie on the grass, why was she just lying there?
What could have—?