Endure (17 page)

I am really hating this.

The rest of the room holds cross-country skiing equipment, big and white hotel towels, bins full of toiletries. It’s a supply building. They lured us into a supply building? Maybe the snowcat people who told Astley about the skis in here were paid off, which is horrible. How can people do this sort of thing for money? And now that the lights are on, I can see that there are three male pixies all dressed in wool sweaters. They crowd around Isla, putting chains on Astley. One more, a brooding ugly giant of a man, is closer to me.

Nick will be trying to get in here once we’ve been gone too long. He’ll try to bash down that door, but it looks pretty strong and who knows how long I’ve been out. He may have already given up. Amelie would think to go find a key. Maybe they’ll be here soon . . . that is, if they’re still alive. Swallowing hard, I promise myself that they have to still be alive if we are. It’s obvious that Isla wanted us for some reason—I just don’t know the reason yet.

Isla’s tiny, golden-haired self yanks one more arrow out of Astley and then she nods to her pixie henchmen, who drag him even farther away from me and a tiny bit closer to Issie. He doesn’t even grunt. His whole body is defenseless and still.

“You could at least put a towel under his head,” I say, nodding toward the mountains of them. “There are enough.”

She gives me her attention and melodramatically raises an eyebrow. “That’s very sweet, Zara.”

“What can I say?” I fire back. “I’m a caregiver by nature.”

The larger of the pixie men grabs a thick white towel and shoves it underneath Astley’s head. The entire time he does this, Isla watches me. Occasionally her tongue darts out between her lips, which makes me think of a snake, or Jared Leto during a television interview. And while she watches me, I desperately try to come up with a plan. My cell phone is still in my pocket, which means nothing because there is no signal here. The only weapons I can see other than my own hands and feet are some cross-country skis and poles that hang from the walls. To get them, I’d have to get my wrists free in order to remove the ankle chains. Struggling against the binds, which are simple iron chains, sears my skin even more. Gasping from the pain, I try to think of another way. We should have taken extra anti-iron pills this morning. Our stupidity only makes me angrier and more desperate.

Why doesn’t Astley move?

Why doesn’t anyone come help us?

All sorts of horrible scenarios of what’s going to happen to Issie and Astley twist around in my head, which only serves to freak me out when I need to be calm, need to find a way out of this.

Isla wipes her hands on a towel, which she delicately folds back into a perfect square before depositing it on the floor. All that time she took making it perfect was wasted. It crumples and lies there flat and discarded, close to Astley, who still doesn’t move.

Move,
I try to order him.
Move.

His finger twitches, but that is all.

Issie shuffles an inch closer to him. She makes eyes at me.

Isla’s voice shifts my attention to her, which is good because I don’t want to give Issie away. “You expect me to kill you, don’t you? You think I followed you out here where there would be fewer witnesses?”

She steps on another towel as she flits closer to me. It slips a bit on the floor but she doesn’t lose her balance, just holds my gaze as I don’t answer her.

“I do not need to kill you,” she says, smiling.

Her breath smells of mint and basil. It is beautiful breath and she is a beautiful creature, but beauty doesn’t equal good and it certainly doesn’t equal sane.

“Did you hear what I said?” she asks. Her voice loses its lilt, so she’s losing patience with me. “I said that I do not need to kill you. Are you listening to me? You don’t seem to be paying attention.”

“I heard.” I swallow hard. My thoughts are scattering about like the towels.

“Well, would you like to know why?” she asks.

For a second I’m not sure if she’s asking if I want to know why my thoughts are so scattered, but then I realize that she’s asking whether I want to know why she won’t need to kill me. I force my voice to sound noncommittal and say, “Not really.”

Anger ripples off her, red and full of heat. I try to focus on Astley, give him some of my power somehow, the way he did to me when I fought Frank, the way I did when he was poisoned. If I can make him stronger, then maybe he can move, attack them from behind—

She interrupts my thoughts again. “The point is not to kill you but to make my son weak and to torture him in the process. The poison was a good attempt. But you are too strong together. So the question becomes, how do I make him weak if poison did not accomplish that goal? I take away his queen. I’ve done it before.” She smiles. “But that way was too easy . . . killing her like that. Instead, I have watched how his heart aches because he cannot attain you—not for real—because of your foolish pining for that wolf. Silly girl. It will be even harder for Astley’s fragile little emotions if you are not his kind. He will lose you a little more. Love is his weakness.”

Guilt pushes into my heart as she takes a fingernail and taps my chest. The tiny crescent of it hits just below my collarbone. She’s right. I hurt Astley constantly because I hadn’t loved him back the way he needed me to. And why? It’s Astley’s face I see now when I close my eyes. It’s Astley I hope for right now, right at this scary moment. Not Issie, not Nick or Amelie on the other side of the door somewhere. It’s Astley I worry about the most. Now that it’s too late, my feelings are suddenly, completely clear. I love Astley.

“Don’t you hurt him,” I say like I’m in a position to demand anything, tied to a wall, wrists sizzling.

She lifts an eyebrow as if to say I am too silly for words. And I have to admit that it’s nice she’s stopped talking, but then she starts again. And the eyebrow lifting is a little overdone, anyway, and . . .

She says, “Do you know what I shall do?”

“Talk me to death?”

“Snippy. Nice. You always are spunky, so unlike my son.” She spits out the word “son” as she trails her fingernail up to my chin and then grabs my face violently in her hand. “I shall make you human again.”

I stutter, trying to turn my head out of her grasp, but I’m weak. The pain from my wrists, the iron in my system, has made me vulnerable. “Human?”

“You did not know I could do that, did you?” She flings my head to the side as she lets go of me. My ear pounds against the wall. Pain spirals through my head and it makes it hard to focus, but I manage to keep listening, and she, of course, keeps talking. “Let me inform you of something, Zara of the White, Zara of the stars. I collect clocks because that is where people of our race have always hid our secrets. We hide papers, spells, inside the mechanisms of time. It’s fitting, I think, to hide the secrets of the past inside the machines that count us into the future. Tick-tock.”

I slowly move my head back to look at her. She’s smiling. Her lipstick has smeared just the tiniest bit and left a dot of pink on one of her front teeth.

“And I just thought it was because you were crazy,” I sputter through the pain. “Maybe had some weird clock fetish.”

“Never underestimate the people you think are crazy. They are the ones who see things you fail to see.” She cocks her head and switches gears. “The point is that in one of those clocks I found out a secret. Any pixie can make a pixie if they kiss them with intent, but only queens can take a pixie and turn them back into a feeble nothing.”

“Back?” I don’t follow her.

“Back to human.”

I must stare at her blankly for a second, because she smiles and taps my cheek gently. “You’re in shock, dear. Close your mouth. You’re gaping. It is unattractive.”

“So . . .” I try to wrap my head around it. “You’re going to unpixie me?”

She reaches up a long, delicate arm and pets me on the head. “Exactly.”

I have a tiny and quick internal debate about whether or not I should ask her how this process happens, and as I do the wind rushes through a window that I hadn’t noticed, blowing dust from the outside and pieces of dead grass across the floor. A mouse scuttles in the wall, probably looking for a safe place to hide from the cold or maybe to hide from us.

“Won’t that keep me from starting the apocalypse?” I blurt.

She giggles. “So very stupid and so very wrong.”

Issie scoots even closer to Astley. The pixie henchmen ignore her. She’s human. She’s obviously not a threat and Astley is unconscious, so even if she somehow manages to free him, what difference will that make? Still, I love her for trying. I just want her to be careful.

Isla’s full focus is on me. A watch on her wrist ticks away seconds and then she asks, “Would you like to know what I have to do?”

I don’t answer.

“A queen merely has to kiss with intention, just the same as before.”

“You’re going to kiss me?” I croak out the question. The thought is beyond revolting. Not because she’s a girl, but because she’s old and she’s crazy-evil or maybe it’s evil-crazy, one of the two.

She smiles. “I kiss you. You become human. Astley loses his power and the prophecy has no hope of becoming true.”

Finally! She’s finally said something important. “Prophecy?”

“You still don’t know even that? But what can one expect from a group of heroes that can’t even remember BiFrost is the bridge and not BiForst.” She giggles. The mouse scuttles around some more. “So silly.”

“It was both ways on the Internet,” I spew back. “And the newspaper spelled it the BiForst way.”

She arches an eyebrow. “The Internet? You base your defense against the apocalypse on information you’ve gathered from the Internet and a tiny local newspaper? Oh, that’s so precious!”

She starts laughing for real this time, which really doesn’t make me feel much better about myself, or the situation. If she’s confident enough to laugh, then I really don’t have a way out, do I? Issie’s tied. Astley is passed out on the floor, bound up in iron, skin sizzling. There are two goons blocking the door that leads out of here, all massive muscle. There’s been no sign of Nick and Amelie. And Isla is right in front of me, rubbing her hands together like she’s about to get a brand-new clock or something.

“You just said that if I were human I could still start the apocalypse. But now you’re saying that if I’m human the prophecy won’t come true.” Damn. She is so convoluted.

“The prophecy isn’t about starting the apocalypse. It’s about stopping it. If you are human you can no longer stop it.” She backs up, away from me and closer to Astley, and pokes at him with her foot. Anger and despair flood into me as she says, “It’s too bad he’s unconscious. I’d like him to witness what I’m going to do to you. But at least the human will see. She’ll be a witness to tell my son how horrible it was, how painful, how you screamed and begged for mercy. You will do that for me, won’t you, Zara? You will scream? Or maybe just beg. I do have sensitive ears.”

Swallowing hard, I wait as she approaches me. One step. Another step. Another. I look over at Astley and relief spreads into me. I don’t want him to see this, I realize. I don’t want any more hurt for him. He’s endured so much. Just having a mother like this . . .

Her face hovers in front of me.

“Are you ready to be human?” she whispers.

The smell of lilacs engulfs me, overwhelming my senses. I don’t answer, just close my eyes as her lips move closer. I turn my head, clench my own lips, though it won’t matter. She snaps her fingers and the two goons stride away from the door and toward me. Large, strong hands move my head so I’m facing her again. She giggles and I can tell from the sound that she’s just a couple of inches from me. I try to think of some last-minute way to get away, some compelling argument to keep her from doing this, but sometimes you can’t argue with crazy, sometimes you can’t dissuade evil. Sometimes you just have to clench your lips, close your eyes, and pray. I focus on my power, the branches that Astley and I have twisted together. I try to take all the pixie energy in me and shape it into wings that take flight to Astley. I can almost imagine it, but then her lips touch mine.

Soft and minty smelling, they push against mine for a second before the sensation changes. Pain sizzles through my face and brain and then my body. Screaming, I jerk back against the cold wall, jerk sideways against the hands of the men, try to flee the kiss, but there’s no escape, no escape at all. My hand yanks at the man closest to me, grabs fabric, rips at it, frantically trying to find something. I hear more scuttling of mice, the ticking of a clock, and Isla’s giggle. A goon guy laughs. My heart slows. One beat. Another. I’ve failed. I’ve failed us all. Something wet touches my face. It’s tears. My tears. I refuse to die like this. But no, it’s not dying . . . I refuse to change like this.

My hand loses its hold on the fabric even as she keeps kissing me. Something skitters across the floor and hits my foot. Did Issie kick me a weapon? Blindly, I toe it up onto my boot and then kick whatever it is up into my hand, a maneuver I would never have been able to do as a human because I am not much of a soccer player. But for the moment I am still pixie and it works. Something cold and hard meets my fingers, which clutch at the metal of it. The back of my head knows what it is—a knife. It’s a knife that must have been on the floor. Issie was going for that, not Astley. I clench it, solidify my grasp around it while the world spins. Opening my eyes, I see Isla’s face, her beautiful, evil face that’s kissing mine and that’s when I do it—I plunge the knife into her chest. I plunge the knife and try to yell, but there’s nothing left of me—no pixie left, maybe no human either.