Captivate (24 page)

He takes my elbow. “I know.”

He tilts his head and stares at me. I stare at him too, take in the silver eyes, the blue skin, the thick hair, the scary-sharp teeth. He brings my wrist up between us and holds the door open with his foot. “Are you sure about this?”

“Do you think I’ll survive?” I whisper.

“The kiss?” he whispers back.

I don’t pull my eyes from his gaze. “Yeah. The kiss. All of it.”

“I shall make sure you survive, Zara. I promise.” His pupils don’t flicker. There are no obvious movements that show he’s lying. “I need you to be fine. If you are to be my queen, then I shall need you to survive, to be strong, to help me fight.”

“For the good guys, right?” I say all jokey loud.

“Right.”

From behind us a woman’s voice shouts, “There they are!”

We both whirl around. Deidre, the woman from the front desk, is standing with a tall, thin hotel security guard in a gray uniform and she’s pointing at us, which is ridiculous because we are the only other people in the hallway.

“Pointing is rude,”I whisper to Astley. “We should run.”

He shakes his head. “Hold steady. Maybe I can handle this.”

The security guard thunders down the hall toward us, his cheeks flapping like dog jowls, and I gasp/groan, “Maybe? What do you mean, maybe?”

Astley grabs my hand and takes a step in front of me. “Sir? May I help you?”

The security guard’s pupils flare. “You hold it right there.”

“Hold what?” Astley asks, and I swear I think he really means it.

“It’s an expression,” I hiss. “It means ‗stay still’.”

“Don’t get sarcastic with me, punk.” The security guard stands up straighter. He surveys us. “What kind of freak are you, dressed like that?” He gestures for me to step forward.

“Are you okay, miss? Has he hurt you?”

The hall seems suddenly miniscule and filled with the security guard’s cologne. It’s claustrophobic. Claustrophobia is the fear of—

“Miss?” his voice barks out. “Are you listening? I need you to step forward.”

“She’s in shock,” Deidre says. For a second I wonder if there’s anyone out front. I glance around while Astley starts talking again.

“Really, sir. We’re quite fine. We were at a masquerade party. My girlfriend became a bit carried away and—”

“Kid! I told you to let go of the girl.” Security guy turns to Deidre. “Go call the police.

I’ll hold him here.”

My fingers tighten around Astley. He squeezes back. “Sir, I can assure you—”

“Go now!” The guard’s mouth opens wide as he shouts at Deidre. She rushes off. He steps toward us and whips out his radio.

“Glamour him; he’s going for backup,” I hiss at Astley.

“I’m trying,” he hisses back. “I’m not the best at that kind of glamour.”

The guard stops right before re raises his radio to his mouth and stares at us hard. Well, stares at Astley, really. “You match the description of those freaks who went after the Sumner bus. You one of them? Don’t answer. You go up against the wall.”

Astley starts to move forward but I yank him back.

“Run!” I yell and throw the Skittles in my pocket at the guard’s face.

Astley actually listens. He turns and I yank him toward the exit sign behind us as the security guard keys up his radio, frantically calls for backup, and begins pursuit.

Piss kiss: the pivotal act of changing from human to pixie. It is often deadly, rarely sexy.

We rush up a flight of stairs and into another hall with the boring hotel carpet and beige wallpaper. We race past door after door until we stop outside room 259. He slides the key card in and yanks me through the door, slamming it shut behind me. We flatten ourselves against the wallpapered wall, motionless. I hold my breath. Thirty seconds later the sound of running feet fills the hallway.

“They didn’t see which room we went into,” he says. “We should be safe.”

I swallow hard, take in the two double beds with matching brownish comforter, identical twin pillows on each, the short pile beige carpeting. There’s a brass light. There are curtains, an air conditioning unit. It looks so normal. It’s just a hotel room. It’s just any ordinary hotel room, but it’s where I am going to lose my humanity and become….become something else.

“What if I am?” I blurt.

He grabs a white towel out of the bathroom and wraps it around my wrist. “What if you are what?”

“Like my father.”

“He is not the worst of us. Not by a long stretch.” He ties the towel ends together.

“I know.” I remember the king that almost killed Nick today. There was nothing human in him at all. “What if I become like that?”

He touches my chin. “You will not, Zara.”

“You sure?”

“I shall not allow it.”

He won’t allow it.

Eremophobia, fear of who you are.

Ereuthrophobia, fear of blushing.

Ergophobia, fear of work.

Eremophobia, fear of who you are.

“What are you chanting?” he asks. He sits me on the floor. He stretches his legs out so they touch the bed duvet thing that drapes between the mattress and the box spring.

“Phobias. I do it when I’m scared.” I cross my legs and then jerk away because my knee is touching his leg. Nick would hate this. A lump forms in my throat.

“I’m sorry you’re scared.”

“Yeah. Well, it’d be weird if I wasn’t, wouldn’t it?”

“It would.”

Felinophobia, fear of cats.

Francophobia, fear of France.

Frigophobia, fear of the cold, or of things that are cold.

Eremophobia, fear of who you are.

What is the name of the phobia for being afraid of becoming a monster? What is the name of losing who you are forever? Of your body changing so completely that you no longer recognize your former self? Because that is the phobia that is tweezing through me, plucking out all rational thought, all hope. Who am I going to be if I do this? Will I be cruel? Stronger? Will I still be me? If my body changes will I still be Zara White?

“I’ve been writing a book called
How to Survive a Pixie Attack
,” I say. I lean my head backward to rest against the wall. “Funny, huh?”

“Funny why?” His voice is hard and clear despite how close we are, despite the bitterness that’s in my own voice.

“Because if turns out I’ll be telling people how to survive me.”

When he doesn’t respond I lift up my head so I can stare at his face. He’s flushed.

“What is it?” I ask.

“You are so scared that you are shaking.”

“I think we should just do it,” I blurt. “Just kiss me before it’s too late to do any good.”

“You sure?”

I think about it, about what will happen to me. My humanity gone. My teeth no longer the same.

Genuphobia, fear of knees.

Gephyrophobia or gephydrophobia or gephysrophobia, fear of crossing bridges.

Eremophobia, fear of who you are.

“You’ll help me?” I ask frantically. “When I come back? You’ll help me so I’m not a monster like the ones who…like the ones that…I love Nick,” I insist. My heart flutters hopelessly in my chest. Tear threaten my eyes.

“Of course you do,” he says softly, not quite a whisper really.

I say it again. “I’m doing this because I love Nick.”

“I know.”

I bare my neck. “Okay, do it.”

He laughs. He actually laughs. “That is not how it works. We are not vampires.”

“So, where do you kiss me? This jerk pixie tried once. I can’t remember what happened really well, though.”

“It is your lips. Not your neck.”

I remember it now. Ian’s face coming closer and closer. The evil in him was like this gaseous substance in the air. He’d broken my arm. He wanted to break me. I push the memory out of my head and ask, “Will it hurt?”

“Probably. You are meant—”

Someone pounds on the door. “Security.”

Astley springs up, muttering a curse. “We have to hide.”

He motions for me to roll under the bed. He does too. His eyes are wide and haunted.

Above us dust bunnies mingle with metal springs.

The pounding comes again. “Security.”

Astley holds a finger to his lips and then grabs my hand. We are terribly close under here and I am super allergic to dust. My nose twitches. His eyes widen. A key card slides through the lock mechanism.

“Glamour us,” I whisper frantically, “Like when we’re flying, so he doesn’t see.”

He cringes as if he can’t believe he didn’t think of it himself and then squeezes his eyes shut for a second. I cross my fingers that it works.

Heavy shoes thud into the room. A security radio crackles. The closet door slides open.

The foot thuds become harder as the guard steps onto the bathroom’s linoleum floor. My nose explodes. I can’t help it. I start to sneeze. Astley grabs my nose hard in his hands.

My ears pop. Pain ripples through my eyeballs, but there is no sound as the sneeze shudders out of me.

Still, fingers appear at the end of the bed and the dust ruffle lifts. Two brown eyes and a thin nose appear. If he reaches in he could touch our feet. I try to send the security guard telepathic messages:
Do not reach in. Do not reach in.

The ruffle drops back into place. The feet retreat into the hallway. The door slams shut.

I yank my head back to get my nose free.

“That was so close,” I whisper.

His hands grab both sides of my face. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Nodding, I make the words come out. “I’m sure.”

“There is no going back, Zara.” His fingers run down my cheeks, twining into my hair.

“I know.”

His silver eyes are so close to mine. His breath touches the skin by my lips, just above my lips, really. “Is your wolf worth this, Zara? Worth losing your humanity for?”

“Yes, he is.” I close my eyes, picture Nick and then Is, Gram, and Devyn. I even imagine Cassidy and Callie and Giselle. “They all are.”

My words rest in the air for a minute. We scramble out from beneath the bed and sit there. My hands wait in my lap. My wrist is still bleeding. All that matters is that I buck up enough to do this, and that I survive; survive to get Nick back, survive and maintain my humanity too.

There is no failure allowed here.

And my fears? I’ve just got to push them away. Astley smells like mushrooms and man.

He smells like the earth and the cold wind. I open my eyes for a second, but his face is so close that it just kind of blurs.

“I’m going to do it now.” His lips are so near mine that they touch when he says the words ‗going’ and ‗do’.

My hand clenches into a fist. The blood seems to drip faster out of my wrist.

“Relax, Zara. It is far less dangerous if you relax. I promise.”

He backs away a half inch or so. I can feel it. The air shifts. I swear I can feel his longing, feel him trying to wait, to be strong.

“I feel like I’m cheating on Nick,” I blurt out.

“By kissing me?”

I open my eyes. “Yes.”

He has put his glamour back on. He’s a handsome guy again. His nose crinkles a little bit as he stares at me, trying to figure me out. “Do you think he’s even going to love you after this? Your wolf’s a bit of a bigot.”

“I was a bigot too.”

“Not anymore.”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Bigotry isn’t that straight and easy. It isn’t there and then suddenly gone. It’s like a bad germ waiting to pounce and infect you even when you think an antibiotic has eradicated it from your system. But that’s not the point. What the point is—is—Oh! Can we just do this?”

Without thinking about it, I reach up and grab his face with my hands. I’m not super powerful because let’s face it, one arm is hurt, the other arm is bleeding, but I manage to yank his head an inch toward mine. Our lips meet. Nothing happens. It is just lip touching lips. My eyes stare into his grass green ones. He isn’t too blurry now. I don’t know why. I start to pull away. I am going to ask him why nothing is happening.

I don’t get the chance. His hands, his uninjured hands, wrap around the back and side of my head. He pulls my face closer to him. Our lips press against each other. The world goes weightless. There is only our lips, just our lips touching each other. It is smoke. It is dust. It is light and earth and wind. The world spins away, losing itself layer by layer.

I know this. I know it, but I can’t stop it. I can’t stop anything about it. All I know is the kiss.

Need.

That is all there is. If I could move, I would press his lips closer to mine. If I could move, I would beg him to never stop. Words.

His lips move against mine, still kissing, but murmuring words in a language of wings and gods; the language of pixies. It has to be. His fingers spread across my hair. My whole brain throbs with words that I can’t give meaning to.

Pain.

And then it all changes. The words become fire stabbing into my head. My skin burns with some sort of flame that seems to shoot right out of my neurons. His lips leave my lips and I am alone. I am consumed. I am pain. I am lost, lost, lost.

“Astley!” I gasp his name.

His hands reach underneath me, lift me to the bed. I twitch. I know I’m twitching. He smoothes the hair off my forehead. “It has started. It will be okay, Zara. I will be here the whole time.”

“Make it stop,” I moan.

“I can’t. I can only share my strength, help it go more easily for you.”

“This. Is. More. Easily?”

He laughs. It’s a sad sound. I try to open my eyes to see him, but I can’t quite. It’s like someone is rubbing red dirt into a million little cuts all over my skin. I pant out the words. The cuts spiral deeper than my skin. They twist down to my veins, my muscles, my bones.

“The process is going quickly,” he reassures me. His hand rest on my forehead. “I promise you. You will survive this. Feel my hand. Feel my strength. It is yours now, my queen. I promise you. I am yours.”

My head swims. Images flash in front of my eyes. Issie hopping up and down in the hallway because she managed to get a C on her physics test. My stepdad opening his arms for a big hug after I broke the five-minute-mile mark for the first time. My mom brushing my hair with my Barbie princess brush. My mom swimming with me in the pool shouting