Captivate (12 page)

“Absolutely. I need more coffee anyway.” Mike stands up and stretches. He is pretty tall like Nick, only super skinny, all scare-crow limbs. Mike points a finger at me in a pretend gun sort of shape and leaves. The door swings behind him.

The moment he is gone, Betty leaps into action.

“Devyn, get me the kit by the coats,” she orders.

Dev grabs the alarm red box that looks like something you lug fishing lures in, only it has medical symbols on it. It’s kind of cool how he can do this with his braces.

“Take your coat off, Zara.” Betty unlocks the kit and slams it open.

Nick helps me shrug off my coat.

“Roll up your sleeves,” Betty insists.

I pull them up. “You’re blue,” she says. She stops for a second. Her eyes meet my eyes.

“I know.”

“It was worse before,” Nick says.

Betty pulls out a needle and a vial that you store blood in. Her voice is stunned. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Issie grabs my hand. “Do you want to squeeze?”

“Sure,” I say, grabbing her tiny hand back. “Why are you taking my blood?”

Betty plunges the needle into the underside of my elbow. “To see if you’ve turned.”

I shudder.

“Stay still,” she says as the vial fills up. “You can tell by my blood?” I ask, watching. “Wouldn’t I feel different? Evil or something?”

“Tell me when it’s over,” Issie says. She’s the one changing colors now. She’s all pale and looking like she’s going to faint. “I can’t stand it. I hate blood and needles. Even the word ‗need-le.’ Urch.”

I let go of her hand. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt. Much.”

“You’re always trying to be so brave, Zara. You don’t have to be.” Betty eases out the needle. “Nick, put some gauze on that. Light pressure.”

She caps the vial and turns back to us. “I’m going to send this out for some tests.”

“Send it where?” I ask.

“My parents,” Dev answers. “They’re kind of experts.”

I don’t get it. “I thought your parents were psychiatrists.”

“They are. But, um, they have some side fields that they work on.”

“Like what?”

“Cryptozoology. Medical research on blood differences in weres, pixies, others.”

I swallow. “Others.”

He nods. “Since I was attacked, my parents have become a little….um….zealous.”

“They’re brilliant people,” Issie interrupts.

“Yeah, but they’ve gone a little crazy about this. They’ve converted the entire basement into a lab. They’re online 24-7 researching and they didn’t even know pixies existed until this fall.”

I pull my sleeves down. “And why has
nobody
told me this before?”

Everyone looks at Devyn, who is sitting in a metal folding chair with this amazingly introspective look on his face. “Because they’re protecting me.”

I resist the urge to ask why and wait for him to tell me instead. He sits up taller and says,

“My parents aren’t exactly the most normal people and my home is a sty.”

“Beyond a sty, really,” Issie says. “You know the opposite of anal retentive? That’s them. No offense, Dev.”

He slowly stretches his legs out in front of them. “I don’t bring anyone back to the house except Is and Nick. I never have.”

“And it took him years to let me come over,” Nick says.

“He beat me up first.” Devyn smiles. “It was seventh grade. We’d been friends since kindergarten.”

I swallow hard. I understand but I still feel left out of the loop. It makes me feel all new kid and not trusted, like I’m not one of the pack. Part of me wants to pout about it but I buck up and say, “How’s my skin, Gram?”

She leans over and peers into my eyes. Her strong hands rest on my shoulders. “Nobody is going to panic about this. You will get some good cover-up. You said it’s already fading?”

“It’s faded a lot,” Nick answers.

“When did it start?” she asks, letting go of my shoulders. I settle back against Nick’s chest. It is solid good.

“Can
you
tell her?” I ask.

He wraps an arm around me and tells her about the weird feeling I had. He tells her how Issie and I broke my dad out of the house (and put him back) and what he said about the other pixie. She listens to it all before she says anything and when she does, she shakes her head.

“This is bad.” She whirls on me and Issie. “I can’t believe you two did that. You cannot trust pixies.”

“So you can’t trust me?” I ask.

“You’re not a pixie. You’re human.” She snaps her medical kit shut.

“Right. So that’s why my skin is blue.” My stomach threatens to knock a hole through my skin and leave my body in protest.

“Zara…” Nick’s voice is a warning.

“She’s just sad,” Is says. “That’s why she’s being all snippy. Or else it’s the pain meds.”

“They are mood altering,” Dev agrees.

“I am not snippy. I’m mad because nobody is listening to me.” My hands ball into fists.

“What? Just because you don’t want to believe it, Nick, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. I remember how you acted when you found out who my father is. I remember you running away, okay? I know how you totally hate pixies and if I’m a pixie that obviously means that you—”

His arms reach out to me, but his hands are fists. “Zara—”

“Just. Don’t. Say. Anything.” I stare at all of them, take a step back. “Nobody say anything. This is not your problem. This is my problem. Mine. I’m the freak here.

Me.”

Betty starts laughing. “Zara, think about who you’re saying this to.”

“You’re weres. Except Is. Weres are not pixies. They aren’t all evil, okay?” I yell. I grab the doorknob on the emergency exit door and turn it. It’s locked. I turn the little lock mechanism in the middle of the knob. My fingers fumble and shake, but I finally manage it.

“Where are you going, honey?” Issie asks. She moves a step closer to me.

“Don’t.” I yank open the door. Cold rushes in. “I’m just going, okay? I’m just going.”

I rush out the door, slam it shut behind me, and race across the parking lot into the muddy edge where it meets the woods. Before the door closes I hear my grandmother say, “Just let her go. She needs to be alone. She’s always been that way ever since she—”

I run away, stumble through the mud, slosh it up into the cuffs of my jeans, and head out to the woods. I run away, but the truth is, I don’t have anywhere to go.

Pixies will whisper your name and try to get you lost—usually in the woods. Do not listen. You will
not come back. In general, it’s always best to avoid contact with disembodied voices.

I have the emotional maturity of a two-year-old. I know this! I know, but it doesn’t make me stop trying to escape my grandmother and friends and the pity in their eyes and in Nick’s eyes….the eyes I suddenly can’t read.

So I run as best I can through the sloshy snow and mud. My feet take me far enough into the woods that I don’t hear cars anymore. I don’t hear anything. No wind blows through the high branches of the spruce and pine trees. Their thin, pale brown trunks don’t creak with the weight of snow and ice. No birds sing. No squirrels chitter and squeak and make all those noises that squirrels make.

Nothing.

No noise.

Nothing.

That is not normal. I sniff in and smell. It’s just wet wood and old pine needles.

Olfactophobia is the fear of odors. Odor fears get more specific, though.

Bromidrosiphobia is the fear of personal odor. You know, body odor. Luckily, I don’t have that. There is no name that I know of for the fear of a lack of odor. There is no name that I know of for the fear of lack of sound. The fear of sound itself is acousticophobia.

Why are the no names for the fear of the absence of things? Why is there no name for the absence of humanity? Because that is my fear, right here, right now. I am worried that I am losing my humanity.

I’ve seen what happens then. Jay Dahlberg was tortured and bled and bitten when I found him in an upstairs bedroom at my father’s pixie mansion home. Jay doesn’t remember any of it. I do. I remember his body shaking as I tried to help him down the long flight of marble stairs. I remember the smell of his fear permeating everything.

Pixies did that.

I can’t be one of them.

I can’t.

I force the images out of my head and stand here, leaning against a tree for about a half an hour, just trying to understand why I ran away, but the truth is there’s not much to understand: I don’t want to face that I’m turning blue.

My footprints show the way back to the parking lot, to the ambulance, to reality. I walk, staring at those dark footprints indented in the snow. Then it happens: spiders creeping on my skin where no spiders are. And something else: an ache. I fold over in half. My hand presses into my stomach.

“Even your moans are lovely,” Says a voice. It is male, deep, husky but with melody, like a country singer. I recognize it. “I should not be surprised.”

The feelings intensify. The snow impressions blur. I use a tree trunk to help me stand up straight. My throat closes, almost trapping my words. “Oh wow, not you again.”

“You sound panicked.”

Trees surround me. Half-gone snow. Everything dull and white and gray brown, gray green. No place for a voice. I say a toughly as I can, “I wouldn’t be panicked if you weren’t hiding.”

“What form would you prefer?”

What form
? It takes me a second. Pixie or human? That’s what he means. I sway toward the tree. My hand slips down the rough edges of the trunk. “Human”

“Human it is.” Hands grab me, steady me. I jerk back, but they are surprisingly gentle.

He doesn’t smile as I turn to see his face. He just stands there, letting me inspect him.

He’s tall with a wide forehead and dark blond hair that’s cut short. His green eyes are deeply set beneath that forehead. His lips are wide and rugged like the rest of him. His hands have huge knuckles like he’s a boxer or arthritic or hits walls. He looks like he did when he pulled me out of the car, but stronger, taller somehow. He must be completely healed. He looks my age and he looks good, like a guy in high school that everyone, even the teachers, fall in love with.

I shake him off, step back, press into the tree. “You’re the other king, aren’t you?”

“The king, really, since your father is not doing so well currently.”

“You figured that out?” I manage to say. I look for weapons. A tree branch? Could I break off a tree branch? But do I need a weapon? He saved my before. I stall for time, try to think. “You figured out who I am?”

He sighs, rubs his hands over his hair, and changes the topic.

“It is cold here in Maine. Your poor father is stuck with this territory. He must have annoyed someone.”

He makes a face like the entire state is distasteful.

“You could always leave,” I suggest.

I look both ways. It would take me about three minutes to run back to the parking lot, but what then? He’d catch me.

“I would catch you,” he says.

“Reading thoughts?”

“Guessing.”

My teeth chatter.

“See?” he says. “You despise it here as well. I have done my research. You are a southern girl, correct? Charleston. Mint juleps. Lazy, hot days on the veranda. Now you are stuck here eating bagels with all those people.”

“I choose to be here.”

He lifts an eyebrow. It’s a slow, calculated lift. His voice matches it. “I do not believe that. You are here because you have to be. Just as I am.”

I meet his eyes. They are deep and almost mesmerizing. Did I say deep before? Yeah, right. That’s not it. They have a pull to them, like currents, like Velcro or something, totally captivating like when you see a convertible flipped over on the highway and there are body bags and you don’t want to look but you look because you can’t
not
look, because you are just riveted and….

Stop. Just stop. “Are you going to let me go back?” I ask and not my head toward the ambulances and the station.

“Of course. I am not the kind of pixie who makes people lose their way or traps them.”

“Mm-hmm. Right. No calling people’s names out in the woods?”

“That is archaic. Did they really do that?” His voice loses its mesmerizing quality and creeps into curiosity. He seems so young compared to my dad, too young to be a king.

I start walking. The snow invades my sneakers. My feet are already soaked, frozen, cold. He walks just behind me. His breath hits my hair because he is so close. If I stopped fast he’s slam into me.

“No kidnapping either, right?” I say. “Because I am not into being kidnapped.”

“No kidnapping.” He lifts his hand. He still looks amused. “Pixie honor.”

I snort. “Pixie honor. Right. I’ve been kidnapped before, you know. I know all about pixie honor.”

He grabs me by the shoulder and whirls me around, suddenly, alarmingly fierce. I flinch.

His mouth moves hard and fast with his words. “I know you have not had good experiences with us, princess, but your father was weak. His people were barely controlled. That is not how we are meant to rule.”

“Really?” I yank myself away. “Sorry. I’ve found you all aren’t the most trustworthy.”

He eyes me. His voice deepens and almost sounds concerned. “You are turning blue. It was faint when I first saw you and I was not sure, but it is much deeper now.”

The wind suddenly blows. I sway again, almost crumple. I’m so dizzy.”

His arms are around me. “I shall carry you back.”

“No,” I protest, but he doesn’t listen. He lifts me up into his arms. “I said no.”

“You are not going to make it.” He pulls me against him as if I weigh nothing.

The world rocks back and forth, uncontrolled, unplanned.

“What’s—”

“Happening to you?” he finishes. “I am not positive. But I think you’re reacting to me.

My presence sets off your pixie blood, calls it up. There are not that many halves like you, Zara. It is just not allowed, and there are none who are descended from a king.

There is not a lot of precedence for what is occurring.”

“I didn’t turn blue when I was near my father.” I flinch.