by Carrie Jones
“Is this for real, Zara?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s for real.”
She sucks her lips in, nods just the tiniest bit, and turns around. I have no idea how she’ll ever be able to fight. Her glasses always fall off in PE class every time she runs. She skitters into the crowd and disappears between the taller, broader people.
Paul grabs a handbook and says to me and Is, “Got a turnout, huh?”
“Did you tell the entire school?” Issie asks.
He shrugs and then reaches up absently to touch his hair. “Basically.”
“Awesome sauce.” Issie bounces on her toes and hands out some more handbooks, passing one to Tara Bogue. “People! Get your handbooks here. Step right up and get your handbooks.”
She sounds almost like a circus barker or something and it makes me giggle. She giggles too. I turn into her and whisper, “I can’t believe we are training people to fight pixies.”
“I know!” She leans back a little and gives a handbook to Tonisha Walsh, who starts reading it before she even turns away. “Like, who would have ever believed it?”
She must see the doubt in my eyes, because she adds, “You’ll do a good job, Zara. No worries.”
“Yeah. We will,” I say, and wink at Cassidy, but I’m still sort of wondering where Nick is.
She holds up the box and yells out, “All gone, people. We’ll make some more for tomorrow. Share for now.”
People stand in clumps and alone. Their body lotions and perfumed soaps and deodorant smell like lilacs and baby powder and musk. Some of them are flipping through the manual. It seems so skimpy, like there isn’t nearly enough information in there to keep them safe. I blow the hair out of my face. It flops right back in it. I tuck it behind my ear and decide that this is it. It is time to take charge, time to prepare for war.
I clear my throat. People stare at me. Jay Dahlberg crosses his arms over his chest. He rocks a little backward and then comes up and stands right beside me. I resist the urge to grab his hand. Instead I give him a little sideways hug. He relaxes a tiny bit and I let go. Someone tosses his jacket into the basketball hoop. It hangs there and then drops hard to the floor.
I turn to the crowd and yell, “All right, everybody, let’s learn how to kick some pixie butt.”
First, Issie and I give a little introduction, explaining who the evil pixies are, what they are capable of doing. Then we go into the fitness drills, running the length of the gym, working on quick turns. I make them do sit-ups and push-ups and suicides. It’s all about coordination and strength, and sadly, a lot of people have none of it. The basketball players do well. Yeah. That’s about it.
Apparently, in every eighth-grade year the Bedford Middle School has a medieval fair. The boys make foam weapons and sell them to each other. Every guy here has about three swords made of gray foam that they’ve brought to practice with. We move into combat simulations and I watch them jump and lunge and parry, giving pointers where I can.
“Not something I’ll be putting on my college application,” I say as Callie totally beats down Paul with her foam saber.
Paul looks at me, momentarily distracted, and says, “You think we’ll live till college?”
Callie smashes him in the gut with her elbow. He falls to his knees and covers his head. “I give up! I give up!”
She does a happy dance and Nick strides across the gym. He must have just gotten here.
Nick leans toward me, crossing his arms in front of his chest. He hems and haws but finally says, “Real pixies won’t be this easy.”
I nod as Callie helps Paul back up into standing position. “I know.”
“And foam swords aren’t real weapons,” he adds.
Someone fake screams.
Someone else shouts, “Die, you pixie scum!”
“I know. We’ll get real weapons,” I say.
“How?” Nick scratches at his scalp, just above his ear.
“There’s a Web site. It takes two days to ship. They have axes and swords and crossbows and stuff.”
Nick nods. “Okay. Sorry I just got here. I was out hunting.”
“I know.” I don’t add that he smells like death, which is good because until today he’d been coming back not smelling like anything, smelling like he maybe froze in the woods, like maybe he wasn’t hunting at all. I think about how he didn’t do anything at first when we saw those giants. Maybe death changed him. Maybe he’s lost some of his bravery, but I don’t push, don’t ask like I would have before. Instead, I let him have his space.
“What about real weapons?” he asks.
It takes me a second. “You mean guns?”
“Yeah.”
“Only the kids who hunt are any good,” I explain, wishing he’d been with me and Dev when we talked all this out. “So there’s no point in training them to work with them. They can’t bring them to school, and legally they have to keep them locked up in their trucks when they’re traveling.”
“I doubt the law matters much anymore,” Nick scoffs.
“Well, yeah. But anyway, you can’t get handguns unless you’re over eighteen and pass a background check, and that takes time. Guns aren’t the most effective against pixies anyway, not unless you have iron bullets. Wait. What are bullets made out of?”
He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. It still slows them down at least.”
“True,” I agree.
We all stand there for a moment, a truce and trade-off, and then I decide enough is enough. Everyone is sparring, but it’s all too slow motion. It’s all too … human. I jump up onto the bleachers and yell, “Hey!”
Nobody notices.
I try again, cupping my hands around my mouth. “Hey!”
Nothing.
Issie rolls her eyes and scrambles up the bleachers next to me, nearly flopping sideways because she misjudges the distance between the steps. I catch her by the arm and she rights herself and murmurs, “Let me, ’kay?”
“Sure,” I say. “Good luck.”
“YO! PEOPLE! ZARA NEEDS YOUR ATTENTION!” Her voice is huge and powerful and not what I expect from super-quiet Issie.
“Wow, Is,” I murmur as everyone turns to stare. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Projection. Voice lessons in grade school.” She beams and promptly sits down. “Plus, I was trying out the Loud Person in Charge identity.”
Her sheer cuteness makes me want to hug her, but everyone is looking at me, expectant. I am the leader here right now. Me. Weird. I clear my throat.
“Look,” I start. “You all are doing an amazing job, but pixies are faster than humans. Pixies are trickier. They are the predator and you all are the prey. You need to be ready for that.”
“Who says we aren’t ready?” Austin asks, all basketball-jock cocky with his foam sword by his side.
It strikes me the wrong way. I bristle. Issie murmurs something like “uh-oh” under her breath, and I leap off the risers in one massive jump, landing softly and catlike on both feet, my knees slightly bent. Someone gasps. I take two stealthy steps toward Austin.
“You ready?” I ask.
“You don’t even have a weapon,” he scoffs as some people giggle.
“The pixies won’t need them,” I explain.
“Show-off,” Brianne Cox says.
“He’ll totally take her,” Paul says.
“Nope. I saw her fight the other night. She has mad skills,” Callie insists.
I ignore them.
“Fine,” Austin says. He raises his sword in front of him, all six feet, four inches of jock. “Show me.”
“Be gentle, Zara!” Cassidy yells.
In less than a second, I zip toward him. He lifts the sword and makes to lower it on my skull, but my skull is already past him. I’m behind him. He turns, but I reach up and grab his sword arm, twist it, and at the same time kick at his knees. I make sure it’s not too hard because I don’t want to actually hurt him. It’s just enough to make him lose hi
s balance and fall. As he does, I snatch his sword away, flip it in the air, catch it again. By the time he hits the ground, I am pointing the weapon at his chest.
He swears. Sweat beads on his forehead.
“Holy … How did you do that?” Cierra is basically hero-worshipping me.
Flushed, I step away from Austin. I don’t know how to answer as he scrambles up on his feet. He cringes like he’s embarrassed. I can smell fear coming off of him too. It smells like steak, which makes me shudder. I toss the sword back to him.
“That’s how pixies fight,” I say, ignoring Cierra’s question. “They don’t fight fair. They fight for life or death. They fight for fun. They do not fight like you.”
I back up, brush the hair out of my face.
“She’s not even winded,” someone whispers.
Sucking in my lips, I look to Issie. She takes the cue and claps her hands. “Okay. Everybody fight hard this time. Do not be afraid to bruise each other. These babies are foam. It won’t really hurt … too much.”
I walk back toward the bleachers and grab the training notebook we worked on last night. It’s time for drills. We get them to line up and I shout directions: lunge, extend your sword arm, recover. We do it again and again until people are rubbing their quads.
“With swords, when you want to kill, it’s all about closing the distance and making multiple parries,” I yell. “And when you want to survive, it is all about keeping that distance open, but always keeping your eyes on the predator. So, let’s do backward lunges this time. Pick a partner. One side offense, one defense.” I wait a second while they pair up. They are moving slowly, so tired from just a little bit of training. “Okay. Let’s go. Left side, defense. Right side, offense. Lunge. Lunge. Swords up! Swords up! Eye on the target. Faster. Lunge. Parry. Lunge.”
“Zara.” Cassidy grabs me by the shoulders and then fixes my hair into my ponytail. She tugs at it pretty aggressively, but it feels good—like she’s taking care of me.
“You have a visitor,” she says. With her elbow she points at the gym doors while her hands tug the elastic and twist it around my hair. Looking up I see Astley in all his blond regalness standing there. His hands are braced against the doorframe in a cross-like pose. His mouth is pulled in and he’s exuding the smell of pain.
“He doesn’t look happy, does he?” I ask.
“Did you tell him we were doing this?” she asks.
“No. He was busy dying. I was busy helping him live. You know … priorities.”
She pats my shoulder and pushes me toward the doors. I walk underneath the hoop, look up at its loops of yarn or netting or whatever it is. It’s all one string but twisted and manipulated to look like a bunch of diamonds. It has a purpose. All of us here are like that net—we have a purpose. And judging by his face, Astley has a purpose too.
Nick catches up to me in three strides, touches my elbow, and says, “You okay?”
“I think he might be mad,” I say.
“Good,” he chuckles. “Good.”
I could rush across the gymnasium in two seconds and get to him faster than the time it takes the humans to pull in a full breath. We both know that. But I don’t. Instead I walk slowly and remember the first day I ever saw him. It wasn’t long ago. I was running on the unused railroad tracks that cross the access road to the high school. I’d gone left toward Bedford Building Supply and the backwoods. There are cross-country trails in there. The snow covered everything but I had spikes on, which helped keep me from slipping. He’d been tied to a tree, dying and broken. I knew he was pixie, but I’d still let him go. Somehow I trusted him even back then.
Astley’s wearing his cargo jacket again. His hands rest on his hips. He’s got dark low-slung jeans on and he looks … he looks beyond mad and pale and not perfectly healthy.
“What is this?” he asks.
I stand close to him, right in his face so I can catch him if he wobbles or something. “We’re training, and you should be in bed resting.”
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 hav
e 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.”
