Endure (29 page)

As we reach the auditorium, people and pixies are scrambling toward the exit doors. A curtain falls, flaming. Betty’s feline form leaps over the tops of chairs and toward the outside. Then the building starts to crumble down around us. We dodge and duck and scurry, but make it to the street. It looks like it’s been bombed. Buildings smoke. Some blaze. Sirens go off. With a roar, the Grand collapses into rubble.

Issie and Betty hobble from the ruins. Issie’s hand clutches the fur on Betty’s back. More people, survivors, teeter and moan. Some film things on their cells. Some stand and stare, sobbing. Betty sees me and howls. A frazzled-looking FBI agent makes eye contact with me. I hold his gaze for a moment, but look away. There’s dead all around us. So many dead. My insides break with the loss of them, all of them, good and bad.

“Zara!” Astley orders, trying to pull me toward the end of the street, where there seems to be less disaster. “Come.”

My voice is calm, quiet. There is no more fighting, just doing. I let go of my hold on Astley’s arm. “No.”

Head lowered, Astley looks at me. His eyes meet mine and there’s a chill inside his. He understands.

“Zara, no,” he repeats, even as a piece of road topples into the slowly expanding hole. “You can’t. I can’t.”

Orange haze from fires colors the white snowy air.

“I am the one who has to close it up, Astley. Me. That’s what the prophecy said. It’s what I’m meant to do.”

He growls, an inhuman noise, full of fear and pain. “I cannot lose you.”

“You will lose me either way. At least . . .” I stare into the pit that’s growing now, growing even as we speak. It’s engulfed every bit of the rubble from the Grand. It’s like the theater never existed. “At least this way the world will survive.”

“You aren’t even pixie.”

“Isla said I didn’t have to be.”

“You’re going to trust my mother now?”

“Then make me pixie. Make it so it works. So there are no uncertainties. Just turn me, Astley.”

The ground shakes beneath us. I grab him by the front of his shirt. He’s so alive and beautiful. I need him to stay that way.

“I need to do this. It is my destiny to do this.” I am determined even though my stomach is cramping. I can feel my expression grimace.

“Zara.” His eyebrows raise up and he pulls me backward, away from the ever-expanding edge. It tugs at me, just as it did in Hel’s home. Doesn’t he feel it too?

From the top of the Maine Grind, two of our hunters have their rifles loaded and they are calm enough to shoot every blue pixie they see. Most of them have turned blue. Most are running away. They must feel Frank’s death. They must know everything is different now. Humans scream down the street. Sirens blare. Astley and I sink to the ground, clutching each other.

“I have to do this, Astley.”

“But—”

I cut him off. “You know I have to.”

“I love you,” he says. “You have to know I love you.”

He loves me, and that is such a good, lovely thing, and it makes me happy to know, but it can’t change who I am, can’t change my priorities, can’t change what I have to do even if I wish it. Part of me just wants to run away with him and go to that castle place he talked about—the one with the flowers and the seals. But the world will end if I don’t stop it right now. There will be no more warmth, no more flowers.

“What if I survive this?” I ask, even though I know I won’t. I might not be able to even stop it since I have no magic. “What if by some crazy luck I survive it and I’m a pixie? Or I don’t change and I’m a human?”

He holds my shoulders in his hands. His thumbs move slowly back and forth. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters.”

“No. No it doesn’t. Pixie or human, either is just your outer shell, Zara. It does not affect your soul—the essential thing that makes you, you. That is what I love. I love the girl who could not stand to see the enemy suffer, the girl who risked her life to untie me from a tree.”

“That’s not who I am anymore, Astley. I killed. I’ve killed pixies.”

“Evil, murdering pixies who wanted to hasten the end of the world.”

Good point, but still Chogyam Trungpa says an enemy should only be killed “once every thousand years.” I totally didn’t follow that rule. Instead I fought to become a pixie queen, killed to keep my town safe. I wonder if we could have found another way to survive, found a way to deal with my father, and then Frank and Isla, more peacefully. It is too late now to wonder anymore. What is done is done.

“Zara!” Devyn and Issie are approaching from beneath the Maine Grind. He is human again.

Holding up my hand, I try to stop them from coming any closer. I swallow hard. Fear battles against what I know I have to do. “What if I end up in Valhalla?”

“Then I shall come to you. But you won’t. You can’t because you have already been there. You would end up in Hel.”

“What if I just die?”

He groans. “I could not bear it.”

“Yes, yes you could. People you have loved have died before.”

“Not you.” Desperately he looks toward Devyn. “There’s got to be another way.”

Devyn shakes his head. “There isn’t. I wish there was but . . .”

“Zara!” Issie half sobs and half yells my name. “The watch! Look inside the watch.”

What?

“Yes,” Devyn says. “Remember what Isla told you. They hide secrets in timepieces.”

They’re right. I never thought of it. I pull up my sleeve to look at the watch my dad gave me. There must be a way to open it. I try to pry at the face with my fingers but it’s no good. Astley reaches out. His fingernails have turned into pixie claws and he gently uses the tip of one to pry open the watch face, revealing a message scratched underneath:
love is magic.

Holy— That’s it? A cheesy 1960s, hippie sort of message? Love is magic? It makes me groan. I snap the watch shut. Issie’s face is full of worry.

“It will be okay, Issie,” I lie. “It’ll all be okay.”

In her hands, she holds the branches that signify Astley’s and my souls. They glow, still entwined and solid, but shaking in the horrible, hot wind that blasts up out of the hole in the earth. All this time, Issie was the guardian and she never told me. There is so much about my friends, about this world, that I will never know.

“Where did those come from?” I ask Astley.

“In a safe, at the Maine Grind. They’d been in her home, but we moved them there for—” He starts to say more but I realize it doesn’t matter.

I grab Astley.

“Kiss me with intent,” I order him. “Change me.”

“It takes too long,” he says.

Grabbing his head, I force his face to mine and whisper over the screams. “Make me like you again, Astley. Let me feel your love before I die. It is all I want. Please . . .”

And he does. His lips, his soft and amazing lips, touch mine and the world spins with a different kind of magic. This kind isn’t evil or hard, but lovely and wild, and I melt into it. He melts into it too, I can tell. I can feel how much he loves me just by the touch of his lips. And it is a good love, a really good love.

I make myself move away just enough to say, “Change me.”

As soon as the words mingle with the screaming air, I push my lips against his again. The kiss morphs into something different, something filled with a new kind of power. My focus leaves and it’s just spinning, spinning until Issie’s scream and a tiger’s roar slash through the spinning, until Astley breaks away the kiss. I manage to open my eyes and see his beautiful, worried face. Blood is smeared on his forehead just below the hairline. I will miss him so much. I will miss all of them. I want so badly to have some sort of happily ever after where we don’t have to battle evil or save the world, where I get to finish high school and go to college and save the world by writing letters to dictators instead of killing monsters. I want a world where my body doesn’t feel like it’s about to implode, where I get to love Astley and be his queen, where there’s no crazy Hel pit right beside me. I want a world where I don’t kill. I want a world where I can live my life with kindness.

“I love you,” I say, and I’m saying it to all of them, to Astley and Issie and Betty and Devyn, to my mom safely far away, to Nick, to this crazy Maine town, to all of it, but especially to the king in front of me. “I love you and love is magic.”

He reaches out to me. “No. I can’t . . . You can’t do this, Zara. You—”

But I scramble forward out of his reach and fall, tumbling into the flames that are fire and cold, tumbling toward death.

“I love you, Astley.”

In the last second I remember my father, my pixie father, and how he came through for me. So with the last ounce of will that I have left, I whisper it, and hope that he and the higher powers can hear.

“I forgive you,” I whisper. “I forgive you and I thank you, Dad.”

The frosty fires of Hel wait below me. And I fall.

CNNS NEWS

Emergency Management Agencies from throughout the northeastern state of Maine responded to the town of Bedford last night when a mysterious sinkhole appeared beneath a local theater that was hosting a high school fund-raiser. Dozens were injured. At least twelve died and many remain unaccounted for today as authorities mounted cleanup and rescue operations. Bedford has recently been the site of multiple abductions . . .

I wake up. There’s this smell of a man in the room—warm and crisp. The heat of a fire pushes against my skin and I can feel it against my face before I even open my eyes.

I clear my throat and then realize there are fingers touching my fingers, gently holding my hand on top of a soft, furry covering. My lungs haul in air. I manage to push my shoulders up and the fingers on mine squeeze gently, reassuring.

“How long have I been out?”

Opening my eyes takes effort, but it’s worth it to see him, right there in front of me. He’s so beautiful, golden. It’s so cheesy, but it’s how he is. He is warmth to me. And he holds my hand. And he looks at me like he loves me. And he has tears in the corners of his eyes.

“You’re here.” My voice is hoarse and full of tears. “Are you dead too? Did the world survive?”

“It survived. The pit closed after you fell in. There’s a huge hole now. They are calling it a sinkhole.”

“But Issie, Betty . . . everyone else?”

“They survived.”

“Cassidy?”

“She is in a hospital in Boston, but alive.”

Beyond Astley is a window with an ornate gilded frame, beyond it is a world covered in ice and frost. It hangs from the trees, covers the ground. I’m in Hel.

“Am I dead?”

He moves forward, scooching up on the bed, completely obscuring my view of the world. “That’s debatable. You are technically half-dead, but the rules are being broken for you because you risked so much to save us. The moment you want to, Hel is allowing you to go back. She has a soft spot for you.”

That’s nice to know. My lips are dry but they manage to smile. Then I realize all the possibilities.

“Wait. Are you dead?” I ask.

Astley’s eyes flicker and widen and he leans forward, kissing my forehead; soft lips, cool against my skin. Then he settles back in a chair, never letting go of my hand, his gaze fixing me. One tiny tear leaks its way onto his cheek, slowly traveling down toward his lips.

“I am not dead. And this time, Zara White,” he says, “this time it is my turn to rescue you.”

Four Months Later

FROM AGENT WILLIS'S PERSONAL LOG

For about two months now, the town of Bedford, Maine, has been quiet. All winter it was besieged by random kidnappings of teens and eventually adults, scores of missing, and then a sinkhole that destroyed the local theater and coffee house. The snow has stopped. Incident reports are run-of-the-mill. There are no missing youths, no reports of strange whispers in the woods. Still, the place has something off about it, and my case, I fear, will never be officially closed. So many civilians and so many officers lost their lives in the strangeness that went down here. That sticks in my gut.

 

 

 

Spring in Maine comes with a rush of mud. Streams overflow from melting snow, and temperatures plunge back into the land of cold every night, but I do not care. Spring is spring, and my friends and I are alive, even Cassidy, although she was in the hospital for a terribly long time. The show choir is headed for Disney and the national competition. Disney is in Florida, where it's warm, even at night.

We sit on the lawn in front of the school. Seniors shuffle off to get their cars out of the senior lot. The late bus straggles up to the turnaround. Brakes squeal as it comes to a stop, the door opens, red lights flash near its roof.

Nobody is in danger.

Nothing is going to snatch anyone away.

Issie flops onto the grass, then adjusts herself so her head is resting on Devyn's thighs. His hand plays in her hair.

“Do not get me wrong,” she says, crossing her feet at the ankles. “I like that nobody is in mortal danger anymore but it's . . . it's kind of . . . Well . . .”