Need (29 page)

Devyn grabs more wire, starts another flight. A group of pixies leaps for him, screaming, a wild, chaotic mess. They start clawing at each other, lost in fear and hunger, angry. A pixie in a pink dress shrieks when another wearing a black gown lashes at her, slashing through the skin on her arm.

“Zara?” The king tries to be calm and nice. He tries to look human. It doesn’t work. “Do you know what this means? Do you know the power that I’ll lose? The need? We will fight in here. We will kill each other.”

“I know,” I say and my voice shakes as I stare at him, this man who is in my blood, but not me. He is not me. Still, I understand his need, his fear. He is stuck in this awful place where there is no moral way to move forward. “I’m so sorry.”

And I am.

I let go of the tie. I turn my back.

He rushes at me. The moment he moves my mother screams, lunging forward. She can’t help. She’s too far away. His hands curl around my arms and he pulls me closer to him. His hands and arms are burned and blistered from going over the iron. He’s still strong, though. My broken arm jostles. My teeth clench. The pain is crazy. Snarls come from my right and left.

“Stay back, Mom.” I yank a fork out of my pocket and jab it into the king’s leg. He screams and loses his grip, toppling backward.

“Get in there,” I demand.

He glares at me. Steam comes from his burning skin.

My mother stands next to me. She’s holding a bread knife. “She means it.”

He stands up and moves back. His face flinches. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would do anything for my daughter.” She says. Her hand doesn’t even shake.

“In the house,” I order. “All of you. Now.”

They turn and move like ants, streaming back into their nest. He is the last one to go inside. He waits.

I offer him this, “If I can think of something else to do, I’ll come back. I promise.”

His head barely moves. His voice is a whisper in the cold, bitter wind, but I can still hear it. “Are your promises like your mother’s?”

“No,” I say. “My promises are like mine.”

My mother wraps her arm around my waist. She kisses the side of my head. I’m not sure which of us is trembling more. She doesn’t say anything as he shuts the door.

“Okay. Fast,” I order. We hurry. Nick turns human again, climbs up to the second and third floor, duct-taping knives and forks to the windows, taping wire across the panes. We do the same thing on the lower floors.

“I hope it holds,” lssie says, ripping duct tape off and slapping it on some wire, sticking it to the wall.

“We’ll come back every day and check,” I say, twisting the wire over a window.

A pixie smashes her face against the glass. She shows her teeth, growling. Nick leaps down, jumps toward the window, snarling, protective but still human. I slap a spoon right where her tongue is. Even though there’s glass between us, she leaps away.

Gram and Mrs. Nix finish sealing off the door. Bear paws are like hands. I never knew that.

We all step back and step over the wire. The entire place is full of wire and iron and railroad ties, duct tape and silverware. It looks bizarre, like some sort of Disney house warped by an angry filmmaker.

“Good,” I say.

“Good.” My mom grabs my hand and walks me back to the snowmobile.

The pixies howl in the distance.

“I can’t see it anymore,” lssie says.

l can.

“You’re too far away from it now,” Gram says. “The glamour hides it from humans and shifters.”

I can still see it.

A pixie screeches from somewhere inside the house. The woods seem to tumble under the weight of the noise.

Nobody says anything, not even when we get back on the sleds and ride away. Sometimes there are no words. Sometimes you just face your fears and you capture them, locking them away.

Days pass. We struggle through them. My mom and I head out on snowmobiles and stare at the house. “I can’t see it,” she says.

“That’s because you’re actually human,” I say.

“If the glamour hiding it is still there, he must still be alive.” She shuts off the snowmobile and we just stare. “I can’t even see the wire.”

I can see it all. It must be that pixie side. It looks ridiculous. A beautiful house circled by railroad ties and barbed wire. Forks and knives and spoons duct taped to windows.

Wind blows some loose snow in swirls around us, tiny snow twisters. I close my eyes against the cold.

“You okay, sweetie? Does your arm hurt?” she asks.

“I’m good,” I answer and open my eyes. There’s no point trying to shut out the house. I can see it in my dreams.

“It’s safe, right?” I ask. “They can’t get out.”

She nods. “They can’t get out. It was a smart idea.”

She leans off the snowmobile and grabs some snow in her hands. She balls it up and throws it. The snowball splats against the side of the house. She suddenly looks younger, more powerful, more like she did when my dad was still alive.

“That felt good, even if I couldn’t see it hit.” She smiles. “Want me to make you one?”

It’s crazy how we can change, how even your mother-who you thought was the wimpiest of all wimps-can pull out a hard-ass stance against a supernatural being. Like even you yourself can be tough.

I reach out my hand for her snowball. ” Yeah.”

Everyone can be brave, right?

I’m into that. I throw the ball. It smashes into the side of the house, splats, and falls. My mom throws her arm around me for a second and we stand there.

The pixie king stood in my grandmother’s living room just a week ago. I’m back at school again, but things are different. My arm is in a cast. I can’t run anymore so Issie has roped me into planning the annual Harvest Ball that is on Halloween.

My mom and I don’t know if we’re going to go back to Charleston. We think we might stay. It’s not fair to Devyn and Issie, Mrs. Nix, Gram and Nick to be the only ones to check that the pixies are still trapped in the house.

“I’m so sorry about all of this,” she tells me, right before she starts the snowmobile. She tells me this every single day.

And I say what I say every single day, “I know.”

My mom drops me off at school. She’s commandeered Yoko, which is totally unfair.

“Hurry. You’re late.”

I rush through the doors as the bell rings and try to get to homeroom, but Nick catches me by the arm and pulls me into the gym supply closet. Soccer balls and nets surround us. The air smells like leather sports equipment and mold and Nick. We have to stand close. I look up into his face. There’s stubble on his chin, rough edges to the straight lines of him.

“Jay Dahlberg’s doing better,” he says. His eyes are dark and sad. “He doesn’t remember anything. Devyn’s parents say it’s his brain’s way of protecting him.”

I swallow. “That’s good.”

“Everyone thinks Megan has moved away. Nobody knows what happened-that Betty killed her. And they think that Ian was kidnapped by the same guy who got Jay. His family is out of control, going on
CNN
, Fox News, everything,”

I stare at a Scoreboard. There is no score, just blank places where the numbers should be. There’s no winners, no losers, nothing.

“Zara?” his voice sounds gruffs. “I’m sorry.”

“About what?” I shrug like I have no clue.

“When I freaked about your father.”

My eyes meet his eyes.

“You were a jerk,” I say.

His hands move to my cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

I pull away, but I can only go an inch before I bump into lacrosse sticks, not that I really want to go any farther. “Nope. No way. You do not get to kiss me yet.”

He pouts.

“Do you admit that my idea of how to trap the pixies using iron was good?” I say using my best lawyer voice.

“I do.”

“Do you admit that you are not the only person, or half-person genetically, that can save other sentient beings?”

He crinkles his nose. “I do.”

“And do you admit that you have a bad temper, a cute car, and a nice girlfriend?”

I hold my breath.

“I have an amazing girlfriend,” he says. And then he kisses me, which is, you have to admit, the perfect boyfriend thing to do. The kiss is soft and speckling like star promises in a night sky. I stretch into it, wishing that I could hold onto it forever, even though I know that kisses can’t last forever-can they?

But it’s not kisses ending that really scares me.

No. The only thing that scares me now is me. The Zara I might become. The Zara I don’t ever want to be.

Everybody has fears, right? But how many of us have my fear?

Enough, it seems. Because there’s a name for it.

Autophobia fear of oneself