Endure (9 page)

He ignores that. “Training for what?”

“To fight pixies.”

There is this horrible pulse of anger that seems to fill the air. It’s red and hard and I can almost smell it. His face hardens but he doesn’t yell. Instead he just bangs out the words like bullets. “You cannot do things like this without telling me.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Zara, this has broad implications.” He turns his head away. A muscle in his jaw beats against his skin.

I wait for him to say more. He doesn’t. There’s a fire alarm on the wall. I resist the urge to smash the glass, pull the lever, and have the alarm sound just because I so badly want to rush out of here and away from this horrible tension. Instead I just say, “And . . . ”

He groans, leaves the gym, and enters the corridor. I follow him as he paces away, flashes up the stairs to the second floor, and then jumps down to the ground next to me again in a total display of pixie speed, pixie power despite last night’s near-death experience. “I have no desire to insist that you check with me before you do things, Zara, but this? This is huge. We will be sanctioned by the high council for this. You have revealed us to all these humans. You have no idea of the implications. We have hid our existence for centuries, Zara, centuries! And now you have undone all that hard work in a day.” He pauses, sways a bit. “This is what occurs when I am poisoned.”

“Times have changed,” I say. There’s blood on my lip. I must have been biting it. I wipe it away. It’s the same color as the fire alarm and I breathe in, relieved. Every time I see my blood, I’m so glad it isn’t blue.

He grabs my entire hand in his, swallowing it up.

“Astley, you are not acting like yourself.” I start to pull my hand away but he holds it in his fingers. For a moment we just stand there. For a moment neither of us moves. I try to will him to calm down, to feel kind. Then his eyes soften and his hold on my hand lessens and I know that I could pull away now, but I don’t. I force my anger into myself a little, force my voice into a kinder mode and then explain.

“I didn’t ‘out’ the pixies. They’ve outed themselves with what they did to that bus of Sumner kids. They’ve outed themselves by taking the Beardsley boy and killing him, by kidnapping Jay. I didn’t do that. My father did. Frank did. Your mother did. Not me. I have to keep these people safe. I have to, Astley. It isn’t just about stopping the apocalypse. It’s about empowering people to stand up for themselves, to fight, to know what is killing their friends. How can we not do this? How can you even be angry about this?”

“I cannot.” Astley draws in a breath. His teeth appear at the corner of his mouth for a second and he looks so terribly young all of a sudden, young and vulnerable. His free hand reaches up and rubs behind his ear. That’s when I notice his eyes.

“Your eyes are green.” I’m trying to figure it out. “Your eyes change color. When I first saw you they were like this, but then—”

“They have been blue and silver. Yes.”

“Why?”

“It has to do with you, my reactions to you, my energy.”

I wait for him to explain more. He doesn’t. The shouts of people in the gym echo into the hallway.

“They sound so innocent,” he finally says. “They don’t fully understand how feral we can be, how hungry.”

“I know.”

He lets go of my hand and reaches up to stroke my cheek before I can react. Then he pivots hard, paces away, looks inside the gym. I don’t move, just watch the expressions twist across his face, the feelings flow off of him in colors. Resignation is blue. A deep yellow is the color of his pain. Despair is a dark, dark brown that almost looks black.

“You are just preparing them to be slaughtered.” He turns and strides toward me, suddenly all powerful again. Nick had used the same word—slaughtered. His shoulders seem to have grown six inches wider and his face is rigid. “I apologize for saying that. You would not be my queen if you did not care for your people, and I have to recognize that humans are still your people just as much as pixies are your people.”

I don’t say anything. He lifts his hand up to touch my face again, but I step backward just enough for him to notice.

“You must learn to trust me. Tell me before you act on things with such colossal implications, please.”

He is gone, striding out the glass front doors, leaving a trail of gold glitter behind him. I squat down and touch it with my finger. It sparkles and sticks to my skin. I wipe at the specks as I stand back up, but it clings to my finger. I rush out a text to Becca and Amelie and tell them to find him and protect him. He shouldn’t be out gallivanting when he just almost died. He looks like he could pass out any second.

Issie flings open the door from the gym. Nick and Cassidy are a half step behind her. All their faces are frantic, tense.

“That didn’t look right,” Nick says. “He was bothering you. Wasn’t he?”

Issie hiccups. I look over her head at Nick and Cassidy and right behind them is everyone else. They are staring. Jay Dahlberg is at the front. His mouth is tight but open and he asks, “That was one, wasn’t it?”

I nod. “Yeah, but he’s not bad. Let me explain.”

They wait.

“Not all pixies are bad,” I start. “The ones who can’t control their needs are bad. They start to torture people, feed on their energy. I’m not sure what kind of energy. I think it’s their life force or—”

“Soul,” Nick interrupts. “They feed on people’s souls, torment them, seem to get more energy and pleasure the more frightened and in pain the person is. Usually it is young men. But once things get truly out of hand, it can be anyone. That’s what’s happening now.”

People sort of murmur. Some just look scared. Some look angry.

I take over again. “But not all pixies are like this. A lot of it depends on their king. They are somehow tied to the emotional stability of their king. The kings rely on queens to keep them in balance. They are all linked somehow. It’s not telepathy, but more like they are one multifaceted entity.”

Now people are looking blank. Worried that I lost them, I bluster on. “Anyway, the one you just saw, Astley, is not from here and he is a good king. He and his people are trying to help us get the bad pixies under control.”

“And you know he’s good how?” Jay asks.

“He just is,” I say. “He’s been trying really hard to help.”

“And he’s stable?” Austin asks, stepping closer.

“Super-stable,” Issie answers. She smiles and bobs her head. “Really, really stable.”

“So who is his queen?” I’m not sure who asked this. I didn’t see. I open my mouth to answer.

Nick answers for me. “Zara is. Zara is a pixie now. And she is his queen.”

There are more questions and lots of reassurances as what should have been a good training time becomes Pixie 101 and Zara interrogation. Cassidy and Is back me up and field a lot of the questions. Nick refers people to the handbook, and eventually they all head back inside the gym. I think about what both Nick and Astley have said, how I am just preparing them to be slaughtered, but I have to believe that it’s better to know. Right? It has to be.

Standing at the door, holding it with one arm, Nick turns around and waves for me to come in and join them, to get ready for the war.

I do.

After a long day trying to train our friends and acquaintances, we’ve been trying to figure out why Astley’s mom attempted to poison him, other than the obvious: she wants him dead.

“I want to understand the why,” I keep saying.

Nick, Cassidy, Issie, and I are in the gym cleaning up. Pretty much everyone else has left. There are water bottles rolling around and paper scraps everywhere.

“Sometimes the whys aren’t knowable,” Nick says, tossing a tissue into the garbage. “So you just have to ignore the whys, and just focus on what
is
and move on.”

I wonder if he’s talking about the murder attempt or about us.

WEEKLY REPORT: 12/14 to 12/21

TROOP/UNIT: Troop J

I
tems of interest to local agencies:

12/16: Trooper Barnard responded to multiple reports of a tiger seen roaming in the area adjacent to Leonard Lake. Failed to locate.

After the training, even though I’m still sore from saving Astley and feel like total crud, Issie and I do the task that everyone hates. That’s because the worst part of killing pixies isn’t actually the killing, which is what I used to think. Believe it or not, you get used to the sickening feeling of bones breaking or blood spilling onto the snow or onto your nice flats, your
favorite
flats. You get used to the responsibility of causing death, which seems horrible, and let’s face it: it
is
horrible. Still, that’s not the worst of it. The worst part of killing pixies is getting rid of the bodies.

We head to the river and pull down the back bumper of Grandma Betty’s truck. Issie holds the legs of a now-dead pixie man. He’s heroin-user skinny and wearing dad jeans, which are pulled up way too high. It’s like a casting director got two parts confused and made a mishmash character called Heroin-Using, Minivan-Driving Dad. Although in the credits it would probably be called Dead Evil Pixie #5.

As she stumbles beneath his weight, Issie’s hair curls out from under her rainbow hat and she is shin deep in snow.

I hold the arms and shoulders and say, “On three. One . . . two . . . three!”

We throw him up and into the water. His body splashes into the dark gray river and sinks. Soon he will melt away like a marshmallow that’s been sitting in hot chocolate too long. The water will take him. Astley told us that the bodies will become one with the water and the authorities won’t find them, not ever. I cross my fingers that he’s right about that as we go back to my grandmother’s truck and take another body out from under the tarp, trudging through the snow.

“You know,” Issie says, “I wish they were vampires. In TV shows vampires always explode or disintegrate. It seems so much easier for cleanup.”

“Even the exploding?”

“Yep, just a little vacuuming up the dust, maybe a Clorox bleach wipe, and you’re done.”

“That would be nice,” I admit. “This is a better workout, though. On three. One . . . two . . . three!”

We send a pixie girl splashing into the water. I recognize her from an earlier attack at a school dance. Nick killed her this morning, tearing her throat out as she stalked Paul Rasku leaving his house for the Y. I had let her go from the dance with a warning. I’m still soft even now that I’ve turned into one of them.

Issie’s arms shake from the exertion. It’s too much for her muscles. We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t get stuck doing this duty again, but she’s not the best fighter and it seemed safer somehow.

The feeling comes back—cold, deathly, like someone is watching me. I pivot a full three hundred and sixty degrees, scanning the parking lot, the river, the old Community Health and Counseling building off to one side, the harbormaster’s office off to the other. Nothing. I sniff and get only the faintest smell of death mixed with vanilla bean.

We hike back to the truck, secure the tarp with rocks so it won’t blow away, and climb into the cab. I turn the heat on full blast so Issie doesn’t freeze.

“We just threw bodies into a river,” she says.

“I know.” I put the truck in drive and edge it forward. I’m not too comfortable with driving it, so I take it slowly.

She pulls off her hat, revealing crazy hair frizz. Some of it actually sticks to the roof of the cab because of all the static electricity.

“It’s just I know that this whole keep-people-safe-from-evil-pixies thing is of ‘vital importance.’ ” She actually makes air quotes around the words “vital importance” and then continues, “But I would like to have a conversation without the words ‘death,’ ‘corpses,’ ‘bodies,’ or ‘end of the world’ in it, you know? And I’d like to be able to leave the house without my mom giving me pepper spray and taping knives to my forearm and acting like she’s never going to see me again.”

I pull the truck out onto the main road. “ ‘End of the world’ is a phrase, Is, it’s not just a word.”

We trundle toward Mike’s, this corner store that’s not actually on a corner. I pull into the parking lot of Mike’s Store.

“Thank you, Miss Nitpicky,” she says, and out of nowhere goes, “Just remember at the end of the day it isn’t boys that matter. It’s your friends that matter.”

“And whether or not you stop the apocalypse.”

“Yeah,” she says, leaning her head back into the headrest and closing her eyes for a second. “That too.”

Mike’s Store is small and sort of claustrophobic. It’s known for having a penny candy section where you scoop candy out of glass jars, which is very retro. The other end of the square store has a little deli, which, according to Betty, is Food Poisoning Central. There are about three rows of wooden shelving with canned goods, dog food, and tampons. That sort of thing. A lot of stuff is covered with a thin layer of dust. Someone once said that’s all people are: dust. But I can’t believe that’s true. I think we have souls and energy and that goes on even after our bodies die. Valhalla sort of proved that, actually, right? Still, the dust gives me a creepy feeling.