Captivate (23 page)

The pixies are closing in. I hack at the one closest to me and miss. He back away. His long black leather jacket flaps in the wind.

“Fashion faux pax right there, buddy,” I sneer. I lunge forward and yank the arrow out of Betty’s fur. She howls and turns on me. Our eyes meet. Fear stills my breath. I back away one step. Something hits the wrap around my wrist. Betty’s muscles tense and she leaps over my head. All I see is the white fur of her belly, giant claws, and she’s gone.

Turning, I watch her land—claws out—on another pixie. Mrs. Nix has barrelled back toward the house, swatting a path clear of pixies. She leaves them writhing and bleeding in her wake. Issie stands at the door holding a crossbow. She’s not saying anything, just squinting, focused. She pulls back an arrow. I don’t get a chance to see where it goes. A pixie on my right has yanked back my arm. Another one bites my wrist. Pain spirals through my arm. I drop my sword. I kick back and make contact. The hold doesn’t loosen.

“Fall back!” Issie yells. “Fall back! There’s more! Get inside!” Mrs. Nix lumbers up the stairs of the porch. Devyn swoops down after the pixie attacking me. His talons rip into skin. The flapping wings smash the air around us. The pixie loosens his grip to swat Devyn off. But the other one is still sucking on my wrist. I don’t have anything to hit her with. My knees. I pull one up and smash it into her chest. Nothing. I scream, still trying to reach my sword, which has sunk in the snow.

“It’s got Zara!” Issie yells. “Damn you, evil pixie jerk!”

Someone yells. I can’t tell if it’s me or Is. “Betty!”

One of Issie’s arrows zings through the air but goes wide. I kick at the pixie. She doesn’t let go. Her fingers turn into claws. And she grabs for my waist, pushing me down. The pain is crazy. I’m trying to cause some serious pixie pain, but I’m failing big-time.

“Zara!” It’s a male voice.

Nick? No, not Nick. It’s a little lower. It’s a little more husky. Something wild and blue yanks the woman pixie off of me. It’s a man. A male pixie. He’s howling, ferocious. His forearm smashes the woman pixie in the face. Bones break. He smiles, satisfied, and turns for me. There is blood in his mouth. It stains his teeth. He lunges for me.

“No!” I scream.

He yanks me into him. I smash my arm against his chest. Pain shudders through me. I don’t care. I haul back again.

“Zara, don’t.” His voice is deep and familiar. His eyes, his silver eyes, meet my own.

“You were supposed to call.”

I recognize him even without the glamour. “Astley?”

“Hold on.” He’s insisting. I’m clutching at him as best I can, but my wrist wound is making it hard. He’s shoving me into his chest. Pain makes me whimper. Every part of my being feels painful, sharper, while the craziness all around me dulls into a haze. It’s just me and him.

“Zara, hold on!” he orders.

My face smushes into his chest. His chest is smaller than Nick’s. He doesn’t smell like Nick either. He is not Nick. He is Astley. My slippers aren’t touching the ground anymore. He’s taking me out of here, taking me somewhere safe? But just rescuing me is not good enough.

I struggle against him, try to push away. “What about Issie and Gram? I have to help.”

“They’re going inside. Look.” He angles his body so I can see down. “They’ll be okay.”

Betty and Mrs. Nix can’t be seen. Only Devyn is circling around the pixies, back outside again.

“He’s searching for me.”

“He cannot see you. Glamour. I couldn’t fly anywhere without it.” Astley smiles. “Do you want him to see you? I can make it so.”

I think about it for a second and shake my head. “No. Then he’d come after us.”

I image Devyn arguing with me, his eyes dark and condescending. His long fingers pointing and gesticulating. It would just slow the process down.

Astley’s rib cage moves as he takes in a large breath and then he starts flying faster, rushing over treetops. I hide my face in his chest so I don’t have to deal with the cold.

My toes ache with the chill. I must have lost my left slipper somewhere. My wrist still bleeds but the sharp stabbing pain has morphed into a dullish throb. When he tells me that he’s taking me to his hotel room, it does not make that throb any better.

He tightens his arms around me. “Something in your pocket is buzzing.”

“My cell phone. I don’t think I can get it now.”

“Don’t try, I might drop you.”

I sneak a peek down at the earth below us. We’re a good twenty feet above the tiny pointed spears of the treetops. “I don’t want to be dropped.”

“I shall not let you fall, Zara. I promise.” His muscles shift. “Hold on. We’re landing.”

“Can you do me a favor?” I ask. My phone starts buzzing again.

“Saving you doesn’t count?”

“Do not tease. We don’t know each other well enough for you to tease.”

“I am the king. I should be allowed to tease.”

“A king. Not
the
king. Right?”

“Right.” He pauses. “Is not teasing you the favour?”

“No. The favour is—can you not call me princess?”

“But you are.”

I shudder. His arms tighten around me and I say, “I know, but—my father calls me that and you know I….”

He finishes for me. “You do not wish for me to remind you of your father?”

“Yeah.”

He nods. “Good idea. Brace yourself, we are landing now. Hold on.”

I do.

Pixies can out-nasty the nastiest, even on a good day.

Astley leans forward to touch my face, maybe apologize for the hideously bad landing, I’m not sure. I pull away a little bit. His hand falls. The motion is slow, as if we’re both accident survivors, badly dazed, looking to each other for comfort but afraid to move, afraid to even exist. For a minute we don’t say anything. Then my cell phone buzzes again. I can’t quite get it out of my pocket because my arm is so bloody. Astley reaches down and pulls it out for me.

“You’re blushing,” he says.

“You just reached in my pocket. It’s kind of intimate.”

He smiles a wicked smile and hands me the phone. “There is candy in here as well.”

“Skittles,” I explain. “I like them.”

We’re still all tangled up. I check the monitor. I have five missed messages, all from Issie’s phone. They all say the same thing. R U OK? Where R U? When I ask him to, he texts back that I am fine. His fingers seem so mammoth on the phone’s tiny keyboard.

It buzzes again right away. Small Injuries. Where R U?

That one I am not going to answer because then I’d have to deal with a rescue. Still, I look around me, take in the Dumpster, the big blank two-story wall, the snow, the heating unit. Astley leans back on his heels and waits.

I wait too. I’m not sure what to do. I check out the scene a little more. He’s staying at the Holiday Inn, which is kind of funny. You never expect pixies to do normal things, but I guess they do…or at least some of them. Megan and Ian went to high school. I’m sure some must have jobs, or else how do they get clothes? I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know about them.

“You’re staying here?” I ask as we disentangle ourselves from behind the Dumpster.

“I admit it is not the snazziest of hotels, but there are not a lot of choices in your town,”

he says, snapping my phone closed. “I can fly us somewhere better if you would like.”

“No.” I shake my head. I brush snow off my arms, and that just makes my wrist bleed more. “I’m good.”

“You are far from good.” His hand clamps around my wrist, pressing against the wound, trying to stop the blood. “You are shaking. You have lost blood. It is dangerous to even attempt to kiss you now.”

My heart stops. “You have to. We have to hurry.”

“There are no certainties here, Zara,” he says as he ushers me toward the hotel lobby door, past all the cars in the parking lot that are covered with snow. I’m a little slow because of the whole one naked foot on the snow thing. He notices. “You want me to carry you?”

“No!” Flying was enough contact.

“You are going to get frostbite on your toes.”

“No, I’m not.”

He stops and starts yanking off his shoes. “Take these.”

My mouth drops open. He’s squatting down and pushing my naked foot into this leather shoe.

“You are freezing,” he scolds.

“I’m fine. Your shoes are too big anyway.”

He tugs off my slipper and puts my foot in the other shoe like I’m a baby. “Then shuffle.”

I protest, because truthfully I feel badly about it, even though I know that pixies can handle the cold really well. I shuffle forward. With his feet all shoeless and vulnerable, he walks next to me past a big old Chevy Suburban and some other cars. Someone’s key fob clicks a car unlocked. The little beeping noises echo in the parking lot. He holds the door open for me.

As we enter the lobby, the woman at the front desk looks at us and staggers backward.

She puts a shaking hand over her mouth. Her eyes are scared deer-in-the-headlights big and kind of match her over-the-top hair. Her other hand reaches out and points at us.

Her bracelets jangle against each other because her hands are quaking so much.

“You’re—y-y-you’re—,” she stutters. She shifts positions and knocks something heavy to the floor with her hips.

Astley leans into me and whispers, “I forgot to reassert my glamour and you are blue.”

“Plus, I’m bleeding and you’re barefoot. It looks weird,” I agree as we shuffle past the rose-covered hotel lounge couches. “Poor lady.”

The woman’s hand, the one that’s been pointing at us, drops to her side. She makes a tiny whimpering noise.

“Hey!” I scan her name tag as I approach the desk in my bizarre weird shuffly step.

“Deidre. It’s okay. We just came back from the freaking wildest party ever. It was so insane. Check out my skin. To die for, right? I hope the freaking dye washes off.”

“Oh…,” she sputters, trying to recover. “Wow. Wow. Those teeth….”

“I know. His outfit is way better than mine. Totally unfair.” I nod and use my arm to nudge Astley past the desk. Then I throw over my shoulder a little bad-girl-to-bad-girl banter. “He is so going to freaking pay for that.”

“That’s right, honey,” She shouts to me. “Make him pay real good.”

We hurry down the carpeted hall and a couple steps to where the rooms start on both sides. Astley looks at me with a completely amused expression. “Why are you saying all those freakings?”

I let out my breath. I’d been holding it, I guess. “That’s what adults expect teens to sound like. The whole dumbing-down thing.”

He smiles. There’s a lot of teeth in there.

“Your teeth
are
scary,” I say. “I do not want teeth like that.”

“So…you are saying you do not want to do this?” He stops me with a little extra pressure on my wrist. We are in the hallway by rooms 125 and 127, according to the brass number plates on the doors. “This is your choice, Zara.”

My legs don’t feel steady at all. I silently start reciting phobias, trying to get a handle on things, on my fear, but it’s not doing any good. I lean against the wall. “Give me a second.”

He blinks and turns so I can see his face better, then seems to change his mind. His voice is calm but his eyes are super focused and hard looking. “It is an enormous decision.”

Swallowing hard, I get my cell phone back and call my grandmother. The phone barely rings before she picks it up. Her voice is like a pitchfork jabbing through the air. “Zara!

Where the hell are you? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m okay. Are you?”

“Fine. Fine. I can take more than that crap they dished out. But where are you?”

“I’m with Astley.”

“She’s with Astley,” she says. It’s muffled. She must have turned away from the phone.

“He’s the king? You are with the king? Has he kidnapped you?”

“He saved me,” I whisper.

“Zara White, you are far too smart a girl to believe that a pixie king would ever save you.

You are not, I repeat, not to let him kiss you,” she orders. “I will go to Valhalla to get Nick. I understand what you’re thinking but this is all a manipulation. You are not strong enough to do this. Think of the long-term repercussions.”

“I interrupt. “I love you, Gram. You know that right?”

“Zara!”

“I love Issie and Dev and Mrs. Nix too, and Mom, okay?” My heart lumps into my chest.

It’s like a hand stuck in a snowbank—raw cold pain. “I love you.”

I click the phone off before I can understand what she’s yelling into it.

His voice comes from behind me. “You okay?”

Am I okay
? Blood from my wrist seeps through his fingers and drips on the floor. I have no choice but to be okay: I have to be the one to do this because I am the one responsible. I went inside the house. Nick followed me there
and then he died
. And if I don’t get him back, then everything inside of me will be dumped into the cold snowbank and nothing could ever pluck me out. Yeah, I am okay. I am peachy. I push the thoughts aside, stare at the ground as we shuffle walk down the hallway a little more and say, “I feel bad about the blood I’m dripping. It’s on the carpet.”

He laughs. “You are kidding, right? You are about to turn and you are worried about bloodstains?” He cocks his head and studies me, which makes me feel super self-conscious, and he says, “Aren’t you worried about being my queen.”

I pull in a deep breath. “Look. I am scared to freaking death about all of this, okay? I am terrified about what it means to be a pixie, about being your queen and the long-term repercussions of what I’m doing. I am scared about Valhalla, that I might fail to get Nick, that he won’t love me once I’ve turned anyway. I am scared about all the pixies running loose. I am scared that you’re lying to me. I am so freaking scared. But I just have to do this. I have to do it one step at a time and if I think too much, then I won’t be able to do anything. The fear will paralyze me, you know?”

He chuckles and pulls open a stairway door. “You said ‗freaking’ twice.”

“I’m upset.”

“Most people swear when they are upset.”

“I’m not most people.”