Entice (3 page)

Amelie is one of his subjects. She is tall and has dreadlocks. She is a lot older than us. She’s maybe around thirty. I don’t know much about her. I don’t know much about anything pixie, actually—things like how their society is set up or how they began. There are so many secrets, floating around me like the snowflakes. I try to catch them in my hand, discern their shape and identity, but they melt into tiny pools of water. It’s just long enough for me to know they existed but not enough to let me examine them.

“Zara? What is wrong?” Astley reaches out. His finger touches the bottom of my chin and he lifts my head so that I meet his eyes. I step backward to put some distance between us, but I don’t look away.

“I’m worried.”

“About?” he prods.

“That we won’t find Valhalla and Nick.” I make a rough motion to indicate myself. “That this will be for nothing and that my grandmother will kill me or kick me out of the house for going all pixie on her.”

I cross my arms over my chest. He nods. People start coming out of the school.

“That I can understand. She is fierce.” He pauses like he’s weighing his words, or maybe he has to burp. I don’t know. A clump of snow falls off a tree and onto the hood of a Subaru. He tenses and then continues. “But if she loves you, she will still love you despite your species.”

Right.
I cringe. “Weres don’t like pixies.”

“Not everywhere. We aren’t always enemies.”

“Around here you are.”

“Around here things are not the way they should be. Your father was a weak king. He was a weak man. We are not all like that.”

I don’t want to hear it. I’ve already heard that my pixie father is weak so many times already.

“It’s just …” Struggling to find the words, I pull in my lips for a second and then start again. “I just … I want to be the same person I was before. I don’t want to be beholden to you because you’re my king—no offense. I don’t want to think that it’s cool to torture people. I want to be good. I want to have a soul.”

I kick at the snow around my
N
. Some of it ruins one of the lines. “I know that sounds stupid,” I mumble. I start to squat down to fix the
N
, but before I can he grabs me by the shoulders.

“Listen to me, Zara. I do not know what you believe. I believe each of us is a replica. Similar to the way Christians believe Adam was made in the image of God, replicated.” He pulls in a deep breath as car doors start to open. I can tell he’s trying to search for danger. I search too, but I can’t find any except right here with Astley, my king, the guy I kissed, the guy I let turn me. He continues on, placated, I guess, by sensing no immediate threats. “So too do pixies believe that we are replicated from Odin—”

“The Norse god?” I feel one of my eyebrows creep up. “You’re telling me there are other gods? I don’t believe in other gods.”

” ‘Gods’ might be the wrong word for them. They are creatures like us, but not like us, maybe not like your God either.” He crams his hands into his pockets. “My point is that we believe we are made in Odin’s image—as pixies, not humans. We are made in his image and he is not evil, Zara. He is supposed to be wise and good and kind.”

“Supposed to be?”

“Well, I have not met him.” Astley smiles. “He is also one of the keys to finding Valhalla, because it is his home.”

“So we just have to find him—and that’s basically as difficult as finding heaven?” I say as hope pretty much deserts me. “And how do we do that, since you can’t even find your own mom, our one big lead?”

His lips flatten into a hard line that matches his eyes.

“I’m sorry. I sound so harsh. I’m just scared that we won’t find him.” I hide my head in my hands for a second. “I appreciate your help. Please don’t think that I don’t.”

He gently moves my hands away from my face and says, “This is not easy for you, Zara. I am aware of that. You have lost your wolf. You have lost your humanity. Your reality has shifted and your town is under siege. It is unprecedented what is happening here.”

A car engine starts, then another. Someone yells, “It is
so
freaking cold!”

This kid, Sam Cambridge, shouts, “Crap! It’s snowing again.”

And I hear other voices: talking about ugly dresses, how this Stephanie girl totally hit on this other girl’s date, people who were flirted with …

“I cannot believe her,” someone shrills. “She was totally all over him.”

I feel the air change. My muscles tense.

Astley cocks his head. “What?”

Reaching out to grab his arm, I feel dizzy with the enormity of everything that has happened, that is happening. “You’re right. They are all so innocent. I used to be like that. Now I don’t fit in.” He opens his mouth but I stop him. “Do not say that I fit in with you, because that would be super cheesy.”

He nods and I let go of his leather sleeve. We stand there for a second, and then I ask, “Can you patrol in the air? Glamour yourself so nobody sees you and circle around? I’ll stay on the ground. Man, I wish I could fly.”

“Occasionally a queen is capable of flying. My mother is capable. We shall talk to her about Valhalla as soon as I can locate her, and I
shall
locate her,” he insists. He gives me a probing look, but I can’t tell what it is about. “I have already asked Vander, one of my top lieutenants, to look into it.”

After just a heartbeat, he lifts into the sky and blinks out, glamoured.

“Thank you!” I yell after him, staring into the darkness and all the tiny flecks of snow tumbling down toward me. My tongue darts out and I catch one. It melts instantly, cold and wet in my mouth.

Then I smell them. Two pixies. One is coming from the woods at the right edge of the parking lot. The other is simply walking up the access road to the high school.

“Astley!” I yell.

Some freshman kid looks at me. His eyebrows lift up.

“Sorry,” I mutter as he walks by. “Looking for a friend.”

Astley appears above me for the briefest of seconds and whispers, “You incapacitate the one from the woods; I shall get the other.”

He’s gone before I have a chance to respond. Wow, though. He thinks I can handle one. That’s kind of a flattering big deal. Nick never let me fight alone. He always thought I’d get hurt, and I wasn’t good at it, really. But now I can, right? I just handled those two in the high school. I quickly walk toward the woods, trying not to draw attention to myself and following the scent while simultaneously waving bye to the people leaving the dance. In my head, I’ve got a ridiculous monologue going on, like a voice-over in a movie …

My name is Zara White and I’m almost seventeen years old. I’m a pixie, and my boyfriend was killed by a pixie king with the ludicrous name of Frank.

Sometimes I worry about my mental health.

There’s a line of parked cars in front of the woods and a slight narrow incline with grass that separates those cars from the trees. I stare into the darkness, trying to isolate the pixie. It isn’t easy.

People talk behind me, distracting me. I don’t want them to get hurt. I’m trying to magically will them away when the pixie emerges from the dark, slipping between two trees. He doesn’t seem to smell me and starts toward a girl from the volleyball team who is skipping through the parking lot with a friend while their dates straggle behind. The pixie is wearing jeans, a winter coat, a red wool hat pulled low over his ears—human clothes—but he’s not glamoured, so he looks like some sort of blue humanoid devil. His teeth glint under the parking lot lights. He smiles slowly and it’s obvious that his attention has turned to the guys. Pixies prefer to torture and drain guys. I am not sure why—it’s another one of those secrets.

I race up the little hill in two quick steps and rush him, tackling him at the knees. His entire body makes an
oomph
sound, like all the air has just been knocked out of him, but he quickly whirls around. His hands go toward my throat. My hands go toward his and I try to pin him down. He flips me over and I smash his face with my elbow, which feels super violent and horrible. Crunching bone sound fills the night air. His hands loosen. I take the opportunity to grab his throat and apply just enough pressure to hurt his vocal cords, to cut off air but not to kill him. He tries to snarl at me, but it comes out more like a whimper.

Bringing my face just a few centimeters from his, I whisper, “Do not touch the humans. Got it? No killing. No bleeding. No torture. Or you die.”

I can’t believe I’ve just said that. I squeeze a tiny bit more and then let go, shoving his head into the snow. He growls at me, but his eyes are defeated and he scrambles to his feet, then runs off. I wipe my hands against the side of my dress, turn around, and look behind me. Callie and Paul—Mohawks covered by matching orange hats—are standing there, mouths wide open. Their eyes are large and confused, a bit panicked. Crud.

“What the hell?” Paul manages to say. His hand is clutching Callie’s arm like he’s holding her back, and she’s one step ahead of him like she is protecting him or was going to intervene or something. Tiny snowflakes swirl around them.

“Just, um— Hey, guys! He just got—he just—he just gave me an opportunity to show off my fine wrestling skills …
WWF
domination for me! Um, yeah … boys …” I stumble for an explanation. I am obviously not doing well, because they keep staring.

Callie’s mouth closes and opens again like she wants to say something, but no actual words come out. The silence is beyond awkward.

I keep trying. “You have a good time at the dance? Need me to show you any wrestling moves? Oh! There’s Issie. Got to go.”

I race off toward Issie’s car before they can ask any questions. I’m not sure how long I’ve officially been a pixie, but it’s less than a couple days and I’m already outing myself. Great. I rush up to the group and stop. I stand still and try to sense pixies. All I get is Astley.

Is grabs my arm. “Where were you? Do
not
make me go all nagging mother on you. You can’t just disappear like that. The last time you did you were gone—”

“Issie, she was out patrolling. I told you that,” Cassidy says, pulling her wrap around her shoulders. It starts to fall off. Devyn catches it and fixes it.

Issie lets go of my arm and opens the door to her Toyota. “My heart can’t take all this patrolling, disappearing, dying, morphing into new beings—”

“Callie and Paul just saw me take down a pixie,” I interrupt as we pile into the car. Cassidy and I get in the back together.

“Shut up!” Issie shouts as she gets in behind the steering wheel. She accidentally honks the horn and starts babbling like she always does when she’s nervous. “Oh my gosh! What are we going to do …? What are we going to— This is like that time on
Buffy
when—”

“Is …” Devyn tries to comfort her and make her stop talking, I think. His hand rubs circles on her back.

“I told them he hit on me and that I was showing him my wrestling moves. I think they maybe believed it.” I pull on my seat belt and roll down the window even though it’s cold. I need to be able to smell for pixies. “We can’t leave until everyone’s out. I want to be sure nothing happens.”

“Did they really believe you?” Devyn asks.

My breath whooshes out with the reality of it and I adjust my previous statement. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, there’s another lovely complication.” Devyn groans. “You have to try to be more careful.”

“Devyn!” I yell back. “I am not making quote-unquote complications. He was going after someone in the parking lot. I couldn’t ignore that.”

“True,” he admits.

Issie cringes. “Guys. No fighting. We are all on the same side here. Dude, it’s cold. I’m turning up the heat.”

Issie hates conflict, and out of respect for that we shut up and wait. Devyn and I sniff out our windows for threats as the stragglers head to their cars in their dress-up clothes and fancy shoes. It breaks my heart with worry to watch everyone, even the people I don’t like very much. Like Brittney, who has tormented me since I moved here. She’s always mocking my peace jeans and my love for Amnesty International, the human rights organization.

Eventually everyone, except the maintenance guy, is gone. Their trucks and cars roll out on the roads, heading to distant points in Bedford and neighboring towns.

I sigh as Issie pulls onto the access road to the high school.

“What is it, Zara?” Devyn asks. He puts up our windows with some buttons up front. Heat blasts through the little fan thingies, struggling to make the car warmer than subzero.

“I just can’t keep them all safe,” I explain. “That kills me.”

I see the kindness in Cassidy’s eyes, and my words trail off because there really is no point in continuing this discussion. How can I keep everyone in town safe? I couldn’t even keep Nick safe. My heart feels dizzy in my chest.

“You mean ‘we,’ ” Devyn says stiffly.

I push away the image of Nick bleeding on the snow and lean forward. “What?”

“You should say ‘we,’ as in ‘we can’t keep them all safe,’ ” Devyn explains. He opens up his window a crack again. Cold air rushes in.

“What he’s saying is that you are not in this alone, that we are a gang of four like in
Buffy
or in
Scooby-Doo
or in
Heroes
or something,” Issie says as she rounds a corner a little too sharply. The car swerves. Cassidy bangs into me. Devyn holds on to the door frame as he pulls himself out to get a better look.

“He’s following the car,” Devyn says.

“
He
would,” Issie snorts. “Wait. Who is ‘he’?”

“The pixie king.” Devyn pulls back inside the car, pushes up the window, and sits forward. “What an imbecile. How dare he follow—”

“Guys, he’s letting us see him,” I explain. “He could glamour himself if he didn’t want us to. He’s not being sneaky.”

Devyn twists around to look at me. Even in the darkness his eyes flash. “What? They can make themselves invisible? All pixies or just kings?”

“Just kings, I think.” I’m not sure. “They all hide pretty well in the woods, though.”

“And why didn’t you tell us this?” he demands. I feel like all the progress I’ve made with him up to now is in danger of being erased.