Selfish Elf Wish (28 page)

“Don’t you think they deserve to know the truth?” Mom asks.

“I’m glad you like them well enough to trust them, but after everything that’s happened with Clay and Dawn, don’t you think . . .” I rant.

“Zap the fire!” Mom commands.

Out of fury, I zap the fire with all my might, yelling “Burn!” Giant flames leap in the hearth.

Timber and Kenji jump back in their seats. “Whoa, what the . . .” Timber says.

“How’d you do that?” Kenji asks.

“Your turn, Bri,” Flora says. “Change this rock into water.” She pulls a smooth river stone out of her tunic pocket and plunks it on the table in front of us and I realize that they’ve been planning this.

“Fine,” Briar says. “Liquid.” She lazily zaps the rock, which melts into a small pool.

“This is starting to freak me out,” Kenji says, his voice a little shaky.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing.” I pull at my own hair, frustrated. “They have to go back to Brooklyn and you’re trusting them with too much information—”

“Once you started casting spells,” my mom says, angry now, “you set this all in motion.”

“But we didn’t know what we were doing,” Briar says again.

“Exactly,” says Flora, her voice tight. “So the next time you better make sure you know what you’re doing before you start mucking around with magic in front of your erdler friends!”

“So what are we supposed to do?” I ask, pissed off at my mom and aunt and a little bit scared for Kenji and Timber. “Tell them everything now? Should I tell Timber he’s got a
hamrammer
mark?”

“A what?” Timber asks.

“You’re a werewolf,” I say, just to spite my mom. “Or really, someone in your family a long, long time ago was. You carry a mark. My grandmother can see it. And yesterday when you jumped out of the woods, it was the wolf coming out in you.” I watch my mother as I spill all of this, but she doesn’t react. “Happy?” I ask her.

“What kind of crazy . . .” Timber says, half under his breath.

“Is that true?” Briar asks me.

“Fawna says it is,” I tell her.

“I’m feeling very uncomfortable.” Kenji slowly scoots back from the table.

“Do you want to go back to Brooklyn yet?” my mom asks.

Kenji looks from Mom to Flora to Briar, then he hesitates.

“What about you?” Mom asks Timber.

His eyes rest on me and he doesn’t answer.

“Can you leave these girls?” Flora asks.

“Do they have to willingly leave in order for us to break the elf circle spell?” I ask, starting to catch on. “What if they say no?”

My mom nods at me. Now I understand. I turn to Timber. “I cast a spell on Dawn in the club. She’s an elf, too. A dark elf, which is bad, and she was going to zap us. And in the woods, I froze them stiff so they couldn’t chase us,” I admit, but as I say it my eyes fill with tears because I know exposing myself will push Timber away. “And I zapped you once, too. In the van. Remember when your ears clogged up? That was me.”

His face clouds over and he looks perplexed, as if he can’t decide if I’m being serious, and if I am, if he wants to be near me anymore.

“Did you ever cast a spell on me?” Kenji asks Briar.

She hangs her head. “Just the one,” she says, chagrined.

“So?” Mom asks. “Do you guys want to stay?”

Timber’s jaw is set and his eyes are cold, hard blue disks. “I’d like to go home now.”

I bury my head in my arms and try to swallow the sobs I feel coming.

“Kenji?” Flora asks.

“I don’t know,” Kenji says.

“What’s going to happen to them?” Briar asks.

“We’ll take them back to Ironweed,” Mom says. “And take away their memories from here.”

“Come on, man,” Timber says, pushing away from the table. “This place is nuts.”

Kenji looks torn, turning from Timber to Briar, back to Timber.

“She’s not like you,” Flora says and dips her finger into the little puddle on the table. Then she flicks the water, turning the droplets into tiny pebbles, which rain down on the table with a soft clatter.

Kenji jumps back from the table. “I’m ready to get out of here.”

Briar runs from the room wailing.

 

“It’s time,” my mother says. She pulls her cloak hood over her head.

Kenji and Timber stand at the trail head, awkward and unhappy in their own clothes, which have been washed and dried for them.

“I know it’s hard.” Flora hugs Briar tightly on Grandma’s front porch later that morning.

“You’re ruining my life!” Briar yells at her mother and struggles away.

Flora steps back and crosses her arms. “Oh, my love. I’m so sorry it hurts you, but this is what has to happen.”

“Come,” Mom says, so Briar and I reluctantly follow.

Dad and Grove come with us, too. We all carry our walking sticks with our bow and arrows slung over our backs. We move quickly and quietly through the forest, keeping our eyes and ears open for Clay and Dawn. The search parties were out all night scanning the woods, but no one found a trace of them anywhere.

“You’re sure they won’t remember any of this?” I whisper to my mom.

“Nothing except coming to Ironweed to look for you,” she says.

“But what about what he saw in Brooklyn?” I ask. “Like when I zapped Dawn?”

“I don’t know, honey,” she says. “Erdlers have a way of integrating weird occurrences so they seem logical. I think the idea of magic is very scary to them, so they explain those things away.”

“Like when he thought Dawn was drunk when I gave her the limp fish hex?” I ask.

She nods. “Like that.”

I sigh as I watch Timber walking. “Now I know more about him than he knows about himself, but he’ll never be able to truly know me.”

Mom puts her arm around my shoulders. “I’m afraid that’s right.”

All of this seems horribly unfair, but the funny thing is, it doesn’t change how I feel about Timber. Werewolf or not, I love the essence of who he is. I can only hope that’s the way he feels about me, spell or no spell.

I hurry up to where he plods through the snow. He looks over his shoulder at me with those cold blue eyes, and my chest aches as if someone has dunked my heart into freezing water. I want so badly to reach out and weave my fingers into his, because this might be the last time I ever get to hold his hand, but I know that I can’t. Instead, I hold my walking stick out to him. “Here,” I say. “This will help.”

Reluctantly, he takes it from me. As our hands brush against each other, I wish there was something I could say to make him understand that I really do care about him and that when I said I loved him, it was true. “Timber, I . . .”

“Don’t,” he growls at me.

I stumble back on the path and let him walk ahead. My mom catches me in her arms and huddles me close to her side as I walk through the quiet forest with tears streaming down my cheeks.

 

In Ironweed, Briar and I take Kenji and Timber into the bait shop as planned. We order them ham and eggs even though no one’s hungry. We wait in awkward silence until their food comes. Then my mom and dad come in while Grove keeps watch outside. Dad chats with the guy behind the counter, asking him for advice on deer rifles. When Mom walks back to our table, Dad zaps the man with a paralyzing spell, then he reaches over, turns the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and locks the door. Briar and I stand up and join hands with Mom. We whisper the reversal chant, circling Kenji and Timber, who stare at us, worried but strangely trusting. “
Sha we no, dally per, um vaden sim la folly. For shaden bing um fladen fling, um vaden sim la folly.
”

Like the other times I’ve been in an elf circle, I lose my sense of time and place, but this time my heart remains heavy. We chant and chant and chant until my mom tugs on our hands. I open my eyes to see Kenji and Timber slack-jawed and frozen, eyes wide but unseeing as we back out of the bait shop slowly and quietly. When we’re on the porch, Dad brings the man back to his senses. “Thanks for the advice,” he says. “I’ll be back if I want to buy a gun.” We all slip off the porch and around the back of the shop, where we disappear among the trees to where Grove has been keeping watch.

We wait. Ten minutes later, Kenji and Timber walk into the lightly falling snow. Timber messes with his phone. “I think my battery died,” he says.

“This was such a stupid idea,” Kenji says as they head down the street away from us.

“It was your idea to try to find them.” Timber pockets his phone.

“My idea?” Kenji says. “I don’t think so.” We watch them walking, leaving footprints in the snow to their car parked across the street. “You just had to see her.”

“What was that all about?” Timber asks with a snort.

“I don’t know, bro. You’re whipped.”

A little stab goes through my chest. Now that the spell has been reversed, I know that Timber’s feelings for me have changed, but I won’t know where we stand until I get back to Brooklyn. If I get back. But as Kenji brushes snow from the windshield, Timber leans against the roof of the car and takes in a deep breath. “Yeah,” he says. “She’s pretty awesome.”

My heart swells and I hug my walking stick to my chest because that’s the last thing he touched.

Then he fishes the keys out of his pocket and I hear him say, “But I’m not going to drive all over the country trying to find her.”

I nearly laugh at the folly of it all.

“Yeah,” says Kenji as he opens his door. “This place gives me the creeps. Let’s get back to New York.”

Timber climbs into the car. Before he shuts his door, he says, “My mom is going to kill me.”

THE MOON WILL
rise early tonight, and long before the sun begins to set, we see its faint outline peeking through the branches of snow-covered pines. Usually we would be getting ready for a three-day solstice celebration, one of the biggest festivals of the year. Instead, when we get back from Ironweed, everyone is tense and glum. For one thing, there’s still been no sign of Clay and Dawn, despite the fact that search parties have continued combing the woods and standing guard outside each settlement. I’m beginning to feel like I made them up because I’m the only one who’s ever seen their dark elves side in action (except for Timber, and we wiped away his memory, so that’s no help). For another thing, the fox has been fighting off a fever, so we have to get her to Mama Ivy as soon as possible.

I curl in a chair by the fire to pout because everything seems 100 percent sucky right now, but as usual, my mom and dad have something up their sleeves. “Come on,” Mom says, bustling into the kitchen and pulling me out of the chair. “Bundle up and pack a bag. We’re heading out.”

“Are we going back to Brooklyn?” I ask, shocked.

Mom levels her gaze at me. “Are you seriously asking me that?”

“Right,” I say. “Didn’t think so.”

Poppy tears through the room and zips up the stairs, yelling, “We’re going to Grandma Ivy’s! We’re going to Grandma Ivy’s!”

“Is that true?” I ask.

“We’re taking this show on the road,” Dad says as he sweeps through the kitchen.

“Is everybody coming?” I ask.

Mom nods. “An exodus,” she says. “Now go help the little ones pack.”

 

“We haven’t done this in so long!” I say happily from the trail among my entire extended family.

We look like one long weirdo parade in our long, hooded cloaks, our walking sticks, and our soft boots that make no sound on the freshly fallen snow. We’re each carrying a rucksack filled with clothes or food, plus small gifts for our faraway family. In the back of our long line, Grove and three of my cousins pull a sled with the fox, wrapped in blankets and cloaks. My mother walks beside her, chattering away as if the fox understands everything she says.

The hike is ten miles, so the little ones take turns riding on long sleds that we pull, or we carry them on our shoulders. Sometimes they scurry around, picking up sticks and rocks, antlers and bones, or other treasures they find scattered on the forest floor. As I watch my little sisters and brother and all my younger cousins playing, singing, laughing, zapping one another with harmless spells, I miss being a little kid when I never had to worry about things like,
Is my erdler boyfriend really a werewolf, and did I just cause my entire world to collapse by leading dark elves to Alverland?
No pressure here. Just an ordinary teenage life.

Good granite, life is rough sometimes. Except for now, when despite all the problems swirling like a blizzard around me, I’m happy to be on our way to the solstice celebration.

We come out of the woods into Mama Ivy’s clearing just as the sun fades to pink above the pine trees. I grab Willow’s hand. “I forgot how beautiful this place is,” I say.

We stand on the crest of a small hill. Ivy’s house sits in a hollow that is filled with wildf lowers in the spring. Now the hill makes the perfect sledding slope for the little ones, who climb up and swish down on their birch bark toboggans. Below, wisps of gray smoke swirl out of Ivy’s stone chimney. Her house is an old-style Alverland house, one of the earliest built by our first mother, Aster. It’s made of logs, stuffed with moss, and covered by a thick thatched roof. Behind it is the gathering place, much like Fawna’s, with tree stump chairs, long tables filled with food, a cooking pit, and a small platform decorated for the coming solstice performances.