Authors: Carrie Jones
Endure
To the fans of Zara who stuck with her for so long
despite her flaws. You are all made of awesome sauce.
And to my daughter, Emily, because every book
I write, I write for her.
“Remember upon the conduct
of each depends the fate of all.” —
Alexander the Great
Contents
INTERVIEW WITH HOLIDAY INN ROOM #321 OCCUPANT
Safety Announcement on Flight 132
Landing Announcement on Flight 132 to Iceland
Bedford County Sheriff’s Department Release
OFFICER SAFETY BOLO (BE ON THE LOOKOUT)
FROM AGENT WILLIS’S PERSONAL LOG
Scanner Traffic, Bedford Police Department
FROM AGENT WILLIS’S PERSONAL LOG
A conversation with Carrie Jones
TROOP/UNIT: Troop J
I
tems of interest to local agencies:
12/14: Trooper David Seacreast responded to a theft complaint in Brooklin regarding metal stolen from a rental property. Investigation continues.
Trooper Jennifer Roberts responded to a missing-persons complaint in Bedford concerning a fifteen-year-old male last seen at the YMCA. FBI took over investigation, which continues.
“Do you want some more spaghetti?”
Nick’s voice is so abrupt and unexpected that it actually makes me jump in the dining room chair. As he pulls a hand through his snow-wet dark hair, I try to pretend like I wasn’t startled and everything is all fine and normal. This is a big lie. Even the weather isn’t normal. December in Downeast Maine isn’t usually this overwhelmingly snowy, but we’re battling a potential apocalypse and one of the signs is a “lovely” non-stop snow. That’s why there’s a plow attached to the front of my grandmother’s truck, and that’s why I have blisters on my hands from shoveling, and that’s why Nick’s hair is wet from snow that’s melted in the warmth of the house.
“I’m good for now, thanks,” I say to him, and for a second I feel like we’re an old married couple that’s had some fight over shopping money or something, but it isn’t that easy. We aren’t old or married. He is my ex-boyfriend, I think. We never officially broke up and now the air between us is awkward with this crazy undercurrent of tension.
He twists some more spaghetti around his fork and sort of grunts to acknowledge that I spoke.
One of the conditions of my mom leaving me in Maine and finishing up her work contract in South Carolina was that Nick had to stay here in my missing grandmother’s house with me. Under normal circumstances a mother (especially a Southern mother—especially
my
mother) wouldn’t leave a teenage male and a teenage female in the same house together at night unsupervised, but these aren’t normal circumstances. Let me detail why:
1. Evil human-sized pixies led by a pixie king named Frank/Belial are attacking us. They have additional help from Isla, Astley’s freaky mom. Astley is a good pixie king. Yes, there is such a thing.
2. Frank and his evil pixies are kidnapping young guys and killing them, draining them of their souls and torturing them in the process.
3. They have also just started kidnapping girls.
4. This same evil pixie killed Nick, sending him to a mythical place called Valhalla where only fae can go.
5. I had to turn pixie to go there.
6. Nick hates pixies.
7. Therefore Nick now hates me, even though I rescued him.
Nick doesn’t actually
say
that he hates me, but he doesn’t really say anything to me. Even right now, he looks away while I push spaghetti around my plate. He stares down so intently at his food that it’s like he’s memorizing every single strand of pasta. The silence is a painful, solid thing that crackles the air between us.
I push my bright yellow plate away, force myself to look at his rugged boy face: the stubble on his cheeks, the dark smudges beneath his eyes, the tight line of his mouth that makes his lips disappear.
Flipping my fork over, I put it on the side of my plate and steel myself for whatever comes next, but seriously, anything has to be better than this silence.
“You know,” I say. “You can hate me
and
still talk to me.”
His eyes flick up and meet mine for a second, just a second.
“I mean, you hated Ian and you talked to him. I hated Megan and I talked to her,” I say, referencing two evil pixies who posed as high school humans before they were killed in this escalating war. “Hate and rudeness don’t have to go hand in hand.”
Ugh. I can’t believe I said “hand in hand.” I sound like my mother.
My bamboo fork falls off the plate with a clacking noise. I didn’t balance it well, I guess. I pick it up again. I could kill Nick with this fork. That’s how strong I am now. Well, maybe not kill him, because he is one tough shape-shifting wolf, but I could hurt him. Not that I’d ever want to.
“I don’t hate you, Zara. I hate this situation. I hate that when you first got here you were this normal, depressed, pacifist girl who cared about human rights and peace and now you’re this . . . Now you spend your nights hunting down evil. Now you kill without blinking an eye and it’s just part of your routine. I hate what you’ve become.” His voice cracks the tension between us, evaporates my random thoughts, and before I can even answer him, he stands up and heads to the sink, taking his plate with him.
My adrenaline pulses and I will myself to be calm, to not cry or fill up too much with the anger that comes from being offended.
His metal fork rubs across the ceramic surface as he scrapes off the remnants of the meal. “I’ll clean up. You go get ready. It’s our night to patrol.”
I know that. I know that it’s our team’s turn to look for pixies, but it doesn’t make me happy. I never imagined that I would dread spending time with Nick, yet I do. I wish Astley were here. He wouldn’t say he hated what I’ve become if I magically turned back to human, I don’t think. And what have I become that’s so hate worthy? A pixie. A killing machine who wears jeans with peace signs on them. A protector of my friends and this crazy town. Someone who eats spaghetti way too often. But that’s my life now and I’m totally okay with it. I just wish Nick was too. He’s the real killing machine around here, the big were warrior, and now that I can protect people too he gets all uptight about it. I think it’s because I lack testosterone. Just thinking about the whole double standard of it makes me cranky.
“We need more people to help us patrol,” I say. I’ve said it about a dozen times in the last two days.
“It would just put them at risk. Humans can’t fight pixies.”
“We could make an army, train them. Devyn and I have been talking about it a lot.”
“You’d be sending them to slaughter.”
The argument is pointless. We’ve had it before. Standing up, I stare at Nick’s broad back as he faces the sink. The muscles of his shoulders work as he moves his arms to turn on the faucet. The water runs down the drain, swirling the spaghetti bits into the trash compactor, where they’ll be ground into nothing. Everything leaves so easily. It is there and seems so real and then it can just get washed away. I miss my grandmother, Betty. She’s run off, turned into a tiger and left. Every patrol I look for her. She’s never there. And I miss Nick. He’s here but he’s always angry, nothing like the old Nick.
I put my plate on the counter next to him and say, “It feels like you hate me.”
“Well,” he says as he grabs the plate, runs it beneath the hot water. “I don’t.”
Three words. He gave me three sort of positive words.
That has to be enough for now, I guess, so I say, “Let’s go patrol.”
He nods.
Well, I don’t
.
That’s what he said. Usually when people hang on to three little words, those words are “I love you,” but for me it’s “Well, I don’t.” That’s pretty sad, even I know it, but as I get dressed to go outside, I still hold on to those words like they are some magic lifeline to happiness.
We have to replow the driveway first because of the snow that keeps trucking down, but once that is done we drive out toward the high school and the YMCA to hunt. Neither of us talks as we pass the First Baptist Church, which is currently a trailer because the real church burned down in the summer and they still have to rebuild. It’s hard to rebuild a church when people keep vanishing. We sludge past the self-storage place that has a big barbed-wire fence around it, past the Bedford Falls Minimart where they make the super-good butter rolls, the gas pumps where a state trooper is filling up his cruiser, all the little houses sided with aluminum and clapboard. Windows squared with light brighten up the night and the snowy scene. The world is quiet. Most people are too afraid to leave their homes after dark now. There used to be a curfew for everyone under eighteen, but things have gotten so bad that hardly anybody is around to break it.
Nick doesn’t say anything as I park my grandmother’s truck in the school lot. We’ll head down the railroad tracks and into the forest, which is where we’ve found the biggest clusters. Frank’s pixies must be living back there or something. Tonight, Astley and Becca, and another all-pixie team of Amelie and Garret, will be hunting in town. They are stealthier, less likely to be seen than me and a giant wolf, which is why I’ve assigned us the woods. It made sense before, but right now it just makes me feel lonelier to face all these trees and the snow-closed sky.