Captivate (2 page)

We don’t know why.

We just know we have to stop them too.

Pixies do not look like Tinker Bell. Although they occasionally wear tutus. Seriously, who doesn’t?

Instead of getting real lunch in the cafeteria, Devyn and I grab some bagels and head into the library to do some research. I wave to the librarian, whose name I can never remember, which is just so wrong because she is super nice, and then we set up our laptops on one of the polished wood tables. The wood is so light it’s almost yellow.

Devyn clunks his head on it when he plugs his computer’s power cord into the outlet.

“Ouch.” He drops the cord.

I grab it. “Here, let me.”

Little sparks of electricity flutter out and Devyn says, “Thanks.”

“Not a problem.”

The library is half full of people. Nobody’s whispering, but yelling is against the rules.

There is a bunch of girls around one girl’s computer, giggling. The computer clicks.

They are taking photos, I think. Some guy with dark clothes is bent over his screen. Two other guys are typing frantically away on their screens but I don’t know what they’re working on or playing. Dev and I are here to do research for our pixie book. It isn’t easy. Most of the stuff on the Web is about Tinker Bell and this old indie rock group from Boston.

“Why are all my hits about cats and rock bands? I ask.

“Be patient”

I try another site and scan it. “Okay, patience has shown me that this site is about a woman who is trying to get a PhD and wants to retire to Scotland and has a thing for cartoony images of women working while wearing short skirts.”

Devyn’s eyes light up. “Let me see that. Maybe she actually is one.”

“I doubt it.”

“You don’t know.” He pokes his head out from around his screen and pulls apart a bagel.

In the last month we’ve checked out about twenty blogs that have to do with pixies.

None of them have been actual pixies. Most of them have been people who really like fantasy novels, which is cool, but not what we need. “I am tired of this. I want to do something. Be more proactive.”

He pauses before he sticks the bagel in his mouth. “Research is proactive.”

I snort. I can’t help it. “And so is patrolling.”

My phone vibrates. I smile. I can’t help that either.

“Nick?” Devyn asks. “It’s been how long since he’s seen you? Five minutes.”

“Five minutes,” I announce as I press the button that retrieves the message, “is a very long time.”

He actually rolls his eyes. “What’s it say, “I love you, baby’?”

“Shut up. It says, “Meet me by poetry.” I bounce up, searching. “He’s in here.”

Devyn starts laughing. “You’re blowing me off, aren’t you?”

“Yep,” I say, trying to remember where the poetry books are. “You’re a better researcher than I am anyway.”

“Not true.”

I start walking toward the far back wall and then hustle back, lean over the desk, and whisper, “Look up pixie invasion. There’s far too many of them right now. It’s not normal.”

“Good idea.”

I fast-walk past the circulation desk, where the librarian is talking about source citation or something, and duck down one of the rows of Fiction Ca-Cz. Then I make a right.

There are a lot of stacks in here. They reach the ceiling. Sometimes you have to use a step stool. It’s an amazing library for a high school actually, and I think—but I’m not sure—that poetry books are at the very end in the far left corner.

My phone vibrates again. I check the message. You coming?

I respond: Yes, impatient one.

The library smells like old and new books, coffee, and bagels. The light shafts in through some evenly spaced windows and it’s that perfect golden kind of light that makes everything seem like a big, happy glow. I step around the corner.

Nick smiles at me. He’s leaning against a big gray radiator. His thick black sweater rubs against the wall. For a second I want to be the wall. Okay, it’s longer than a second.

“Hey,” He says.

“Hey,” I smile back. “I thought you were blowing off lunch to go out patrolling with Issie.”

“I lied.” He squats down and picks up a small black backpack that I don’t recognize. He pulls out a beach towel and starts laying it on the floor.

“Here, let me help.” I grab at a bright blue towel that has a wave design on it. Our fingers meet. We get a shock but neither of us twitches away.

“Static electricity,” he murmurs. His mouth moves when he says it. It moves slowly, like he’s kissing me. His mouth is long lines of good. I lean forward. He holds up a finger. “One second. Sit on the towel, baby.”

“Bossy.” But I sit down anyway.

“You are just as bossy.”

“True,” I concede.

He laughs and pulls out a big Ziploc bag of something dark and round. Cookies!

I lunge forward. “Are these—?”

“Chocolate with peanut butter chips,” he finishes for me. I keep staring at his lips, but I slide open the baggie. “I love these! My mom always made these.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me once.”

He sits down with me and before I can get too heart fluttery he pulls out a cookie and lifts it toward my mouth, teasing me. “Do you want it?”

I open my lips. He slides the cookie in a little bit. I chomp down, It melts on my tongue.

He whispers, “You know we’re not supposed to eat back here.”

I swallow. “We are totally naughty.”

“Absolutely.” He bites into my cookie. “So there’s this annual dance in a couple of weeks.”

“The Winter Ball,” I interrupt. “There have been signs up everywhere.”

“You want to go?”

I think about it for a half second. “Will you dress up?”

He nods.

I move forward so my hands are flat on the towel and my face is much closer to his face.

Something inside my chest warms up like a nice kind of heartburn and I say, “And will we slow dance?”

He nods again. His bottom lip turns in toward his mouth for a second, just disappears and then comes back.

Stretching out my spine so my lips are nearly touching his I say, “And will you press yourself against me and we’ll move really close together and then your hand will stretch out across the back of my head and your fingers will wrap into my hair and then…”

He doesn’t nod. He just tilts his head down, moves his fingers into my hair, and his lips touch mine in a forever kiss. His lips are soft and hard all at once. His breath mixes with my breath. Everything inside of me whooshes out. It’s just him and me and books and cookies.

“Is that what you want?” He asks when we finally break away. I breathe in deep and then lift my lips to his ear. “That’s what I want.”

“And if I promise you that will happen you’ll go to the dance with me?”

I sit back on my heels. “That and if you promise not to go patrolling alone.”

For a second he freezes, then he smiles and crosses his arms in front of him. “You are a pain, a royal pain in the -”

“But that’s why you love me, right?”

He tosses another cookie at me. “That and because you give me an excuse to make cookies.”

I catch the cookie in my left hand. “Good reasons. And do you want to know why I love you?”

“Because I am a fantastic cookie maker?” He breaks his cookie in half and puts it in his mouth.

“That’s part of it,” I admit. I nibble on my own cookie. I swallow. “But not all of it.”

A crumb falls onto his jeans. I brush it off for him as he says, “You’re making me wait for it, aren’t you?”

“Okay. I won’t torment you.” I cross my legs and smile at him. “I love you for the way you care about everyone, for how stubborn you are, for how you love Issie and Devyn.”

He leans down and kisses my forehead and then each of my eyelids. They are tender, these kisses. They are light and true. “I love you too, Zara.”

“I am so, so glad,” I sigh out. And I am.

The rest of the day is pretty uneventful. Nick works at the hospital after school and Issie and Devyn are a French Club, so I go running by myself. We’re allowed to run outside again because boys are no longer going missing. The school had stopped outdoor track practice for a while because Jay Dahlberg and the Beardsley boy were abducted by pixies. Nobody knew that it was pixies, they just knew boys were disappearing from the woods. Even now, only a few of us know what actually happened; everyone else thinks it was a serial killer.

Each time my foot hits the ground I hear my stepdad’s laugh. But running on snow, even hard-packed Maine snow that’s been flattened by snowmobiles, is just not as cool as running the streets of Charleston, my hometown, where it’s warm and smells like flowers, even in the winter.

Bedford is nothing like Charleston. My mom sent me up here because I couldn’t deal with my stepdad’s death. It was hard to get adjusted. There are about six thousand year-round residents here and the ocean is a cold menace that roars beyond the peninsula.

Everything is trees and dirt and cold, at least in winter. I’ve never seen it in spring.

Right now the bare branches of trees look like drowning arms reaching up for help. I stare and stare at the bark and see the shapes of spirits there. The dark knots where limbs used to be remind me of screaming mouths.

Still, I zip past the trees that line the track, swerve up the hill behind Bedford Building Supply, and keep following the trail. I’m thinking about how Devyn better not like Cassidy because he and Issie are so meant to be together. I’m thinking about how everyone in the universe seems to know this except Devyn. And that’s when I hear it.

The sound is muffled but it’s definitely human.

Mrphh
.....

Little spider feelings prickle along my skin.

“Crud.”

I stop. I listen. I pull out my cell phone, punch in 9-1-1 but don’t hit send. Because, seriously? What would I say?

Hi, operator/dispatcher person. This is Zara. I’m by the railroad tracks just past BBS

and I think I hear something and I’ve got this prickly skin feeling. It’s like, um, well…..I
think it means the pixie king is nearby.

But that can’t be true. Because the pixie king is trapped in a house on the other side of town, which means….

“I’m imagining things,” I announce.

Mmrph. Mrupph.

The sound is off to the left. My head jerks up. I scan the wood for tracks. There are no tracks. No footprints at least, but something catches my eye. I squat down and touch the snow. There’s dust, just a tiny bit of it. It glitters.

Okay. Not imagining things.

Pixie kings leave gold glitter in their wake. Regular pixies? Not so much.

The wind blows through the naked tree branches. One of them creaks like the pressure is just too much and it wants to break right off and plummet to the earth. I know that feeling.

Mrmph!

The sound is urgent and I know what it is. It’s a voice. It’s a muffled voice, which means that someone is probably in trouble. I press my speed dial for Nick. He’s at work so he doesn’t pick up. Cell phones aren’t allowed at the hospital. Right. Duh. His voice mail comes on.

“Hey, Nick. It’s me,” I whisper, turning slowly in a circle, looking for predators. “I’m near
BBS
by the tracks, running. I think….I hear something. Okay. Yeah. I’m going to check it out. If I don’t call again, I’m probably dead or something. Yeah. Right. Bye.”

Mrmph.

I slink forward across the crunchy whiteness, cautious, looking up into the branches of the trees to make sure nothing is waiting to jump down and attack. It’s paranoid, I know, but a lack of paranoia can be hazardous to your health. I start thinking about phobias.

It’s my thing. I chant them to make me less nervous.

Albumimurpphobia, fear of kidney disease.

Philemaphobia or philematophobia, fear of kissing.

Genuphobia, fear of knees.

It’s not helping. I’m about twenty feet when I spot the source of the noise. It’s a guy.

He’s tied up to a big spruce tree. He’s blond. There’s duct tape over his mouth, and barbed wire wrapped around his body. The only thing that’s keeping him upright is the wire and what’s left of his will, I guess. The pixies have almost killed him.

Unless
he’s
the pixie. Maybe he’s the one Nick had the run-in with, but Nick wouldn’t just tie him up and leave him here, would he?

The answer: maybe.

My stomach falls. The guy’s eyes plead with me. He looks like he’s about to die. Pixie or not, I run toward him. I rip off my gloves. They flop on the ground near his feet, a puddle of blackness by his leather boots. It starts snowing down on us, big heavy water-filled flakes the size of my thumb. I work on the wire, but it’s so cold that it stings my skin. I jump back. My fingers curl upward, protecting themselves.

“Mrrphh….Mrr…..”
His voice is desperate and matches the look in his eyes. Somehow I know what he wants me to do.

I uncurl my fingers and reach up. “This might hurt.”

I feel bad ripping the tape off him, but I do it. I get my nail around an edge and yank. It comes off in a big sticky rush.

“Put your gloves on and then untie me.” His voice is low and has a slight accent that I don’t recognize. Almost Irish. Almost not. “Please. She is coming for—”

“Was it pixies? Did they do this to you? I saw the glitter. Or are you the pixie? I need to know.” Guilt rushes into me. I know they are evil but to see one so hurt, if he is one—okay, he probably is one, but it doesn’t matter. “I need to know if you’re still in danger.”

Every word he speaks seems to take incredible effort. His lips move so slowly. “What?

She is….I am not prepared to die.”

“You won’t die.” I grab my gloves off the snow, shoving them on again. He’s a pixie, I know it, but I can’t just let him die. Something in my heart hitches for him. It would be awful to be here, tied to a tree, waiting to die. “If you promise not to hurt me, I promise I won’t let you die.”

“I am attempting not to, but if she comes, then—”