The Nixie’s Song

by Tony DiTerlizzi

  “Shut up!” Jared grabbed his collar, fist cocking back for a punch. Nick closed his eyes, throwing up his hands.

  “Stop it!” Laurie shouted. “Stop fighting, you morons!”

  Nick opened his eyes. Jared was breathing hard, fist still clenched.

  Laurie laughed. “Oh my god, you are just like the books! You really are Jared Grace.”

  “You better shut up, lard ass.”

  “Jared Fennelly*, actually,” Jared said, letting out a long breath. “Mom made them change our last name.”

  Its enormous eyes fixed on Taloa.

  Chapter Nine

  IN WHICH They Go According to the Plans, but the Plans Go Awry

  Nick, Laurie, and Jared ran back to the development, the plans for subduing the giant rolled and tucked away in Nick’s backpack.

  The giant was still squatting beside the pond when they got there, its enormous eyes fixed on Taloa as rainwater ran off its rocky back. The water faerie’s song sounded slower and more subdued, and her voice seemed rough. The nixie looked at them with desperation as they came to the edge of the water.

  “Just a little longer,” Laurie promised.

  “I can sing a little longer lo-le-li,” sang the nixie, “for you that saved me.”

  Jared stared at her and said nothing.

  Wire cable would be strong enough to hold the giant once they’d lassoed him. It was easy to get rope from the construction site, but Nick worried it’d snap. They took what wire they could find and bound it together.

  Rain fell in sheets, making the knotting slippery. Nick took a quick look back at the house. He didn’t see his father’s car, but that didn’t mean much. He hoped his father and Jules and Charlene stayed far enough away that even if this didn’t work, they’d be safe.

  “Who wants the foot and who wants the head?” Jared asked.

  Nick thought about horseshoes. He used to play horseshoes on the lawn with Jules and his mom and dad long ago on summer nights. Lassoing a giant couldn’t be very different from that. It wasn’t really athletic. As long as he could get up the tree.

  “I can take the head,” said Nick.

  “What are we going to do when he’s tied up?” Laurie asked. “How are we going to drag him away from here?”

  Jared looked over at the construction area. “Maybe one of those lifts?”

  “You want to steal a lift?” Nick demanded.

  “Okay, what’s your genius plan?”

  “Shut up, please,” Laurie whispered. “We can worry about what to do with the giant later. Taloa’s not going to last much longer.”

  “You’re right,” Nick said. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” said Laurie.

  “Ready,” said Jared.

  Nick put his foot on the lowest branch of the oak tree and shoved himself up. The bark was rough under his hands, and he wished that he’d picked throwing the wire over the giant’s foot. He hadn’t climbed a tree in years, but he couldn’t let himself think about failing. With a grunt, he pushed himself higher.

  Looking down, he had a dizzy impression of how far he would fall if his foot slipped. He felt cold all over.

  By testing the limb twisting in front of him, he’d inched his way close enough that he could smell the giant’s mineral breath, which was like freshly dug soil. He felt smaller than a mouse. If he could barely find his way out of a field full of bloated fireflies, he had no idea how he was going to manage this. He looked down and nodded to Laurie anyway.

  Holding the knotted circle of wire between them, Laurie and Jared crept to either side of the giant’s massive foot. Nick tried not to breathe, conscious of every sound. If it stopped looking at Taloa and looked at its foot right now, it could crush Laurie and Jared like ants.

  The nixie’s song swelled nervously, as if trying to keep the giant’s attention.

  Together, Laurie and Jared threw their cord. It went over the giant’s foot just like the directions said it should.

  Nick’s palms went damp with sweat. He lifted his own loop of wire. Somehow, he had to swing it over the giant’s head without getting the giant’s attention.

  Take deep breaths, Nick told himself.

  Let out the breath you took, he told himself.

  It’s just like throwing horseshoes. Horseshoes aren’t really a sport. You might not be good at sports, but you’re good at horseshoes.

  Nick’s palms went damp with sweat.

  He concentrated and tossed the wire into the air. Swung it around. Aimed.

  The giant swung toward him, its black eyes gleaming with reflected light. Nick yelped, but he didn’t hesitate. He closed his eyes and threw it. The giant bellowed.

  Taloa stopped singing.

  Nick opened his eyes just in time to see the giant lunge at him, fists raised. One stone hand grazed close enough to smash a branch before the cord pulled tight around the giant’s neck. The enormous creature fell with a sound like the earth cracking open.

  Jared whooped and Laurie yelled—a sound that seemed more appropriate to terror than to victory. Nick swung out of the branches, coming down hard on one knee, scraping the skin.

  “Do not for-lo-le-la-get your promise,” said Taloa, sinking into the water. “You are indebted to me.”

  “We won’t forget,” said Laurie.

  “We did it,” Jared said. “Wow. Wow.”

  Nick turned to where the giant struggled against the bonds, kicking and scrambling. Each time it kicked, the wire pulled tighter. With growing horror, Nick realized what the diagram had instructed them to do. The trap was designed to make the giant strangle itself.

  “No, wait,” Nick shouted, but the giant didn’t seem to understand him. It thrashed again, kicking a sheet of water, pounding its head against the ground until it finally went still. Its features relaxed into slackness.

  No one cheered. They stared in horror. They’d killed the giant.

  A low chuckle from behind Nick made him turn.

  “Well, well,” said a black man with a huge machete in one sun-leathered and wrinkled hand. He stood just off the road, but he walked toward them. Even in the dim light, the dull metal of the blade gleamed.

  The man blinked cloudy eyes and grinned. “Good work, kids. Aren’t you gonna finish him off?”

  “What?” Nick said. The man actually saw the giant? The man with the giant knife?

  “I followed you over from my place. Wanted to see what you were gonna do with the papers you took.”

  “They were your papers?” Laurie asked.

  “We didn’t know . . . we didn’t know he’d die,” said Nick.

  “He’s not dead,” said the man. “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean?” Laurie asked.

  The old man walked up to the giant and shoved his machete through the giant’s eye. Its body twitched and then went still. The old man was right—now Nick could see that the giant hadn’t been dead before. This stillness was far more terrible. Laurie choked on a sob.

  “Now he’s dead,” said the old man.

  “Who are you?” Jared asked. His voice didn’t sound very steady.

  “Noseeum Jack, they call me,” he said. He smoothed back his white hair with one hand. “‘Cause I don’t see too good anymore. I hunt giants—just like my daddy. You kids aren’t half-bad hunters.”

  Jared swallowed. “Your dad must have been the one writing to my great-great-uncle. Arthur Spiderwick.”

  Noseeum Jack nodded his head. “Yep. Good man. And good on you for following in his footsteps.”

  Jared looked embarrassed, but pleased. Nick rolled his eyes.

  “So, you kill giants?” Laurie asked.

  “Yep.” He held up his machete. “Stick ‘em in the ear. Or the eye, like you saw. Or dynamite. Dynamite works pretty good.”

  “But can’t we just let them go?” she asked, looking over at the body.

  “Let them go where? They’re territorial, just like us. If we let one giant go, it’ll destroy anything it thinks of as on
its land.” Noseeum Jack shook his head. “You don’t understand. I been hunting giants for years, but they’ve mostly been sleeping giants. You search ‘em out, and so long as you’re careful, they never wake up. No chance to blow fire or smash things before you get the job done.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “You might think so, but that’s because you don’t understand. Giants are like cicadas. Just like the cicadas come up all at once every decade or so, giants wake up all at once, too, ‘cept they do it every five hundred years,” he said. “Good thing you kids showed up when you did.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Nick.

  “Me with my sight not being what it used to be, I could use the help. It’s time. The giants are all waking up.” Noseeum Jack put one wrinkled hand on Nick’s shoulder. “And if we don’t stop ‘em, all of Florida is going to burn.”

  Nick looked at Jack and Laurie and Jared, then at all the wood frames of half-finished houses in his father’s development. He looked over at the lake and the exhausted nixie resting in the mud on the bank. He thought of things, buried things, pushing their way up out of the ground. It seemed to him that no matter how much he wanted to keep things the same, no matter how good he was or what he did or how much he tried to contain, everything was going to change.

  And, somehow, he had to change, too.

  About TONY DiTERLIZZI…

  Tony DiTerlizzi is the author and illustrator of Jimmy Zangwow’s Out-of-This-World Moon-Pie Adventure, as well as the Zena Sutherland Award–winning Ted. In 2003, his brilliantly cinematic version of Mary Howitt’s classic poem “The Spider and the Fly” received stellar reviews, earned Tony his second Zena Sutherland Award, and was honored as a Caldecott Honor Book. His most recent picture book is G Is for One Gzonk! In addition, Tony’s art has graced the work of such well-known fantasy names as J. R. R. Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, Peter S. Beagle, and Jane Yolen as well as Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering. He, his wife, and his daughter reside in Amherst, Massachusetts. Visit Tony on the World Wide Web at www.diterlizzi.com.

  and HOLLY BLACK

  Holly Black’s first novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale, was published in the fall of 2002. It was a YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and made YALSA’s Teens’ Top Ten booklist for 2003. A companion novel, Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie, won the Andre Norton Award for young adult fiction from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her most recent solo venture is a New York Times bestselling companion to Tithe and Valiant entitled Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale. She has also contributed to anthologies by Terri Windling, Ellen Datlow, and Tamora Pierce. Holly also lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. She lives with her husband, Theo, and a remarkable menagerie. Visit Holly on the World Wide Web at www.blackholly.com.

  Beware, fair Laurie.

  Heed, young Nick. . .

  BOOKS BY

  Jimmy Zangwow’s Out-of-This-

  World Moon-Pie Adventure

  Ted

  ZENA SUTHERLAND AWARD WINNER

  G Is for One Gzonk

  BOOKS ILLUSTRATED BY

  Alien and Possum:

  Friends No Matter What

  Alien and Possum Hanging Out

  BY TONY JOHNSTON

  The Spider and the Fly

  BY MARY HOWITT

  ZENA SUTHERLAND AWARD WINNER

  CALDECOTT HONOR BOOK

  BOOKS BY

  Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale

  Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie

  ANDRE NORTON AWARD WINNER

  Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale

  BOOKS BY

  THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES

  BOOK 1: The Field Guide

  BOOK 2: The Seeing Stone

  BOOK 3: Lucinda’s Secret

  BOOK 4: The Ironwood Tree

  BOOK 5: The Wrath of Mulgarath

  THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES

  Notebook for Fantastical Observations

  Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the

  Fantastical World Around You

  THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES

  Care and Feeding of Sprites

  THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES

  Deluxe Collector’s Trunk

  The Chronicles of Spiderwick: A Grand Tour of

  the Enchanted World, Navigated by Thimbletack

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Tony and Holly would like to thank

  Kevin, our faithful, fantastical guide

  for this grand adventure,

  Linda, for mapping out Mangrove Hollow

  (and the spaghetti!),

  Cassie, Cecil, Kelly, and Steve,

  for their smarts,

  Barry, for all his help,

  Ellen, Julie, and all the folks at Gotham,

  Scotty and Johnny Lind, for keeping the art on track,

  Will and Joey B., for keeping Tony on track,

  Theo, for all the patience and encouragement,

  Angela (and Sophia)—more Spiderwick!

  More endless nights of discussion!

  At least it was on a beautiful, sunny Florida beach . . . ,

  and all the wonderfully talented folks at S&S for

  all of their support in bringing the next chapter

  in the Spiderwick tale to life.

  The text type for this book is set in Cochin.

  The display types are set in Nevins Hand and Rackham.

  The illustrations are rendered in pen and ink.

  Managing editor: Dorothy Gribbin

  Art director: Lizzy Bromley

  Production manager: Chava Wolin

  A SNEAK PEEK AT BOOK 2, A GIANT PROBLEM

  Chapter One

  IN WHICH NICK AND ,LAURIE GET ONE LESSON AND LEARN ANOTHER

  Nicholas Vargas had never been all that good at sports. He liked to play basketball, but he scored a lot higher with a controller in his hand and an animated character shooting the baskets for him. Same with baseball and tennis and even swimming. He saw absolutely no reason why anything would be different when it came to giant-killing.

  Nick’s stepsister, Laurie, had twisted her blond tangles into braids because she’d read somewhere that it was important to keep hair off your face in a fight. She was determined to learn how to kill giants, but Nick was pretty sure that she was bad at basketball and baseball and swimming both in real life and on the screen. A notebook was balanced on her knees and she had set a microcassette recorder on the ground so she could replay the whole lesson later. She chewed the end of her pencil thoughtfully, ready to take extra notes, as Noseeum Jack started to speak.

  “First you got to find the giant,” he said, sitting down on a stump. They were in the front yard of Jack’s ramshackle house in the middle of the day, and the humid air settled on all their shoulders like a heavy blanket. “If he’s moving, things have already gone too far. Your best bet is doing the slaying before they wake up.”

  Laurie raised her hand.

  Jack kept on talking. “Couple o’ ways to know there are giants underfoot. They like the swamps, but they like freshwater better than salt since they gotta drink it through their skin. Look for rocks and hills, especially if they’ve got odd-colored grass on ‘em. Lots o’ the time, that grass is really hair.”

  Laurie waved her hand a little, impatiently. Nick snatched her pencil. On the page of her notebook, he wrote HE’S BLIND.

  Jack’s eyes were cloudy with what Nick thought might be cataracts. His grandma had had cataracts and the doctors did some kind of laser surgery on them, but Jack’s eyes looked much worse than Nick’s grandmother’s had.

  Noseeum Jack. It was a really sad nickname. He’d had the Sight, and blindness took it away from him. Maybe he could see a little bit through the cloudiness, but obviously he couldn’t see enough to notice a hand waving in front of his face.

  “Are there girl giants?” Laurie asked, interrupting a story Jack had been telling about finding a giant by the way his mountainous head and weedlike hair were covered with dandruff.


  “Uh,” he said, and then scratched his head. “Sure. I guess. Mostly I never noticed any difference.”

  Laurie wrote something in her notebook, nodding.

  “Look,” Nick said. “This is dumb. We’re just two kids. And you said that more giants were going to wake up. All of them, maybe. All at once. We can’t stop that. This is useless.”

  “We all got to play the hand we’re dealt,”Jack said, picking up his machete. “This area’s where the highest concentration of giants is. Estimate’s maybe thirty still around. There are two good killing blows guaranteed to put down a giant if you just—”

  “What hand was I dealt? It’s summer,” said Nick. “My job in the summer is to have fun. School’s out. We shouldn’t have to come here every other day.”

  “But these lessons aren’t like school,” Laurie said.

  “Oh, come on,” said Nick. “It’s not like you really want to kill anything. You’re just excited because you get to talk about giants all day long. This isn’t pretend anymore.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I know that!”

  “Do you?” Nick looked over at Jack, but he was just shaking his head at both of them.

  “Wait! I have it!” Laurie said. “We have to get other people to join us.”

  “That’s crazy,” Nick said. “No one would believe us.”

  “We’ve got to make them believe,” said Laurie.

  Jack grunted softly. “You think you could?” He looked hopeful, which only made Nick feel more glum. Maybe Jack had already realized what bad students he had and how hopeless this was.

  “I know I could,” Laurie said, full of stupid certainty. “And we could get Jared and Simon to come back, and maybe they will bring Mallory this time. And maybe they’ve met other people who would want to help.”

  “Jared and Simon went home to Maine. They’re not coming back,” Nick said. “They got what they wanted. They got their uncle’s papers.”