“There is no way I will let her know this. You know what she’ll do.” It’s Betty’s voice, and it drops off into the nothingness.
“But we have to… Nick…” Issie’s voice is high and she’s speaking in sentence fragments, which is never a good sign. My heart hitches a little bit and I move as quickly as I can toward the stairs.
Issie, Cassidy, Devyn, and Mrs. Nix are all sitting in the living room. Betty is pacing back and forth, and Astley stands outside the door. Pixies aren’t allowed inside. House rule. Also, they can’t actually come inside unless invited in, like that old saying about vampires. And all tied up next to Astley on the porch is BiForst. There are chains around his hands and feet. It’s a safe bet that they are iron.
“What’s going on?” I say from the stairs. They all look up. Issie’s mouth drops into an O and she and Cassidy both jump up like they’ve been caught doing something really naughty.
Betty, however, has the opposite reaction. She roars at me like I’m the one screwing up. “What are you doing out of bed?”
I swallow hard. She starts up the stairs and stops halfway. Her nostrils flare.
“I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed out,” I say, trying to solid myself up so I don’t seem frail.
“You just got back from the hospital. Of course you aren’t allowed out.” She scowls at me and then bounds up the rest of the stairs. She puts her arm around my shoulder and starts to pivot me around. “Now let’s get you back to bed.”
My hand grips the banister. “Tell me what you all are talking about.”
She stops tugging on me. Nobody says anything. The air is still and cold and heavy. The furnace kicks on, a big rumbling monster. Issie jumps.
“Sorry.” She blushes. “Jumpy.”
“Well, it’s not easy when there are two pixies on the front porch.” Devyn mollifies her and puts an arm around her shoulder. For a second, jealousy rips through me. Nick would have done that for me, tried to make me feel better. I honestly don’t know if he’ll ever be able to do that again.
Everyone looks at each other. Tension makes the air prickle.
“What? Let me in on the secret,” I persist.
“Okay… the thing is…,” Issie starts. She clears her throat nervously, takes a step toward me, and stops. “You need to be calm about this, honey, okay?”
Not a good sentence. She used the words “calm” and “honey.” The world hazes around me, but I fight the dizziness even as Betty’s hand tightens on my shoulder.
“What is it?” I ask.
Once again they all exchange a look. Cassidy clears her throat. Mrs. Nix stands up out of her chair slowly, but Astley, still outside, is the only one brave enough to just say it.
“There is a time constraint about getting Nick,” he says, nodding toward BiForst. “Our lovely associate here has told us that if the warrior is not retrieved from Valhalla within a month, he may never return at all.”
“What?” I make a quick calculation of how much time has already gone by and start stumbling down the stairs. Betty must not have expected me to move, because she doesn’t stop me as I stagger-walk down the stairs and toward the front door. I step outside, ignoring Issie and Betty and everyone else, focusing only on Astley. “We don’t even know how to get there. We don’t know how long it takes. We don’t-”
I stagger in the thin layer of snow that covers the wood boards of the porch. Astley, who has been crouching by BiForst, reaches up and grabs me by my arms. I can’t read his eyes. The cold soaks into my snowmen socks, sharp and raw.
“Zara,” he says, staring into me, “we can do this. We will do this.”
I cringe. The snow falls around us. BiForst rolls his eyes as if Astley is too smarmy for words. I don’t know what’s going on in the house behind me as I scan the woods for other pixies. It seems clear for now. I swallow hard again. It’s so hard to even swallow, let alone stand.
“We have to get him,” I whisper, and I’m whispering it only to Astley. “We can’t just leave him there. He’ll think we abandoned him. We need him here to fight.”
“It is okay.” A pulse shows on a vein in his neck. His eyes meet mine.
I have thought about Nick’s death for so many hours and days, twisted in my head with moments of every day and night, that the entire memory is solid with echoes. It is like I can touch it, hold it to my chest and squeeze it. The only thing that was letting me continue was the knowledge that I had a chance to save him. Now there’s a time constraint?
“Did he tell you what he told me? In the bar?” I gesture toward BiForst. “He was all cryptic and said the queen I replace is in the apple.”
“That’s why she kept talking about the apple!” Devyn says to everyone in the house.
“We thought you were delirious,” Mrs. Nix clarifies. She breathes deeply and tilts her head just the tiniest of bits. Kindness emanates from her.
“So my mother is back in the city?” Astley asks BiForst, anger rippling out of him. “And you didn’t tell me this because…?”
“You didn’t ask,” BiForst snorts.
I stare at Astley. “New York?”
“The Big Apple,” Astley explains.
I feel suddenly very stupid. How could I not have figured that out? My whole body aches from tiredness and cold. I sway a little bit and a soft voice comes from behind me. “Come inside, Zara.”
I turn around slowly, because it’s all I can manage. Mrs. Nix’s round face looks down on me. Her big brown eyes are kind. She’s wearing her sweatshirt with the Christmas tree embossed on it.
She tucks a piece of my dirty hair behind an ear. “Now come away from these pixies and into the house with us and get warm. We still have to figure out who is setting these traps for you and why. You were almost killed in Iceland. You were shot in the bar. We’ve got a cage almost finished in the basement. We’re going to keep that pixie there until he talks some more.”
I turn my head to check to see if Astley is okay with keeping BiForst trapped, since I know he disapproved when we trapped my father’s people. He nods, but then stops midmotion, listening to something. I hear it too-a motor. No, a car. It’s coming down our driveway.
“Someone’s coming,” I say.
The rest of them come to the door just as a silver sedan rolls into sight. The driver cuts the engine and leaps out of the car, her short legs rushing across the snow, her brown hair flying behind her.
I gasp. “Mom!”
The Bedford teen
The Bedford teen who was shot at a local bar has been released from the hospital and is said to be recovering at home. Police are still looking for the perpetrators as yet another boy goes missing. Unverified reports say his name is Thomas Steffan, a high school freshman…-NEWS CHANNEL 8
Wow. Okay. My mom is here. It takes me a second to actually accept this as reality, but I do as my mom quickly checks the perimeter of the woods. It’s so obvious she’s dealt with pixies before.
As I watch her half run, half power-walk toward the house, I wish I could make everything in our lives completely different, wish that this crazy epic that we’re living in never started, that my pixie king father never fell for her, that we never had to stare at the woods and wonder if danger was lurking in it, that the responsibility of knowledge was not ours, that we knew nothing, that we could live happy, peaceful normal lives.
That’s selfish, though.
And it’s too late for that to happen.
And if it did, I may have never met Nick.
It’s all pointless thinking.
I start to sway as my mother bounds up the steps. Astley’s arm goes around me, supporting me, keeping me upright a little bit better. Despite the cold, I think I’ve started to sweat from exertion. My mom eyes us and keeps coming. Her skirt flutters in the wind. She’s wearing a big red ski parka that looks like it’s left over from the 1980s. She must have dug it out of the closet. Her dark hair lifts from her face, revealing worried, narrowed eyes.