The Nixie’s Song (5 page)

The creature lifted easily.

“Okay,” Nick said.

He heaved and was surprised to find that the creature lifted easily, despite it being about as tall as Laurie was.
They shuffled a little and lowered it over the wheelbarrow.

“Is she in there?” Nick asked, backing away.

Laurie nodded.
Nick forced himself to grab hold of the handles and push the wheelbarrow carefully toward the lake.

“Nick!” Julian called from the house.
“Laurie!
Get in here!
Dad’s been looking for you!”

Nicholas bit his lip and helped Laurie lift the nixie, then wade out and drop her in a deep enough part of the lake for her body to go under.
As soon as his fingers left her skin, the Sight was gone, but he saw the water displace when she slid into it.

“Won’t she drown?” he whispered.

Laurie shook her head.
“They can breathe water.”

For a moment the ripples seemed to still, and then the water thrashed and both of them jumped.

“What happened?” Nick asked shakily.

Laurie was smiling hugely.
“She swam away!
She’s okay!
We saved her!”

“Nicholas!” his father shouted from the doorway.
He stepped out into the yard.
“Didn’t I tell you not to mess with that wheelbarrow!”

“Sorry, Dad,” Nick said.

“Don’t give me that crap.
You looked right at me and lied.
Now get in the house!”

“Dad, I—”

“I don’t understand what’s the matter with you!
Are you trying to show off for Laurie?”

“No!”

“I thought you had more sense; you always
acted like you had more sense!
Go eat your dinner and then get up to your room.
No TV, no video games, no nothing for a week.
And if you touch another piece of equipment, you’ll spend the whole summer in that room!”

Nick’s face felt hot as he walked into the house.
His eyes stung.
Nick’s father said nothing to Laurie, and when they sat down at the table, Charlene didn’t say anything either.
They all ate in miserable silence.

As he lifted the fork to his mouth, Nick looked out at the lake and wondered if there were more creatures like that nixie, with froggy hands and feet, watching him invisibly from the shadows.
He was glad that he couldn’t see them.
He only wished they couldn’t see him either.

She sang the words.

It was hard for Nick to work on his model boat with Jules’s dirty clothes and surfing magazines covering the floor and thrown across the dressers, not to mention Julian himself slumped on the bed with his earbuds in, but Nick had cleared a space on their shared “homework desk” and covered it with newspaper.
He was assembling a model of a Viking ship, and he planned on attaching a motor to the bottom so it could really move.
As he pictured it revving
across the lake, he kept imagining green, webbed hands reaching up to pull it down.

Thoughts of those hands had kept him up the night before.
Even the light snoring of Jules on the other side of the room hadn’t been reassuring.
Outside, the rain had come down in sheets, and
he pictured amphibious things moving through it and peeking through the windows, their finger pads sticking to the glass.
He’d tossed and turned in his bed until the light showed on the horizon.
Only then had he finally collapsed into sleep, which caused him to wake up late—which meant that today the dark would come even sooner, making him jittery all over again.

Earlier that afternoon, when Laurie was out with Charlene getting keys made, Nick had snuck into his old room and looked through Laurie’s field guide.
According to the book, nixies didn’t eat people—although there seemed to be plenty of other creatures that might.

As he’d stood in the middle of the room with the Guide, looking around at the map of Narnia tacked up on his old wall, noticing Laurie’s stuffed animals spread out on the bed and her junk cluttering the counter of his bathroom, he’d
been overwhelmed by the suffocating desire to smash all of it.
This was his room.
His house.
His family.
Laurie and Charlene didn’t belong.
But all he’d done was drop the field guide and walk, trembling with rage, back to his desk.

Now he tried to attach another oar with a drop of glue, to concentrate on that activity and not on Laurie and his bedroom or the hideous creatures in the Guide or on the trolls and goblins and dragons that could be crawling around the development.

A knock on the door made Nick’s fingers twitch with surprise.
He snapped the thin piece of wood in his hands.

Laurie peeked her head in.
“I’ve been talking to Taloa, and she explained that—”

“Taloa?” he asked, hoping that she meant another kid and not some not-nearly-imaginary-enough friend.
He looked over at Jules, but he
was flipping through a car magazine and nodding his head in time with music they couldn’t hear.

“The nixie,” Laurie said, and Nick felt his stomach twist.

“Don’t tell me.
Go ahead and talk to it all you want, just don’t ever say anything about it to me ever again.”

Laurie’s eyes widened.
Her glasses made them look huge.
“But there’s more of them.
Other faeries.
They were running from something.”

“I don’t care,” he said, wishing she would leave him alone.
“I’m not allowed to play video games or watch TV for a week because of her and you.”

“It’s just a week,” said Laurie.
“Anyway, aren’t you excited?
We saw a real, live faerie.
Just like Simon, Jared, and Mallory.
A real faerie that needed our help.”

Nicholas glared at her.
How could she be so
stupid not to be afraid of that thing?
It was horrible.
It was alien.
“Get out of my room.
You already made me mess up my boat.
You’re not my sister, so stop acting like I care about what you have to say.”

The color seemed to drain from Laurie’s face.

Julian looked up from the bed once she left.
His earbuds were still in, but Nick wondered how much he’d heard.

That night, Charlene got Chinese food for dinner.
Nick picked at his lo mein until his dad finally told him to eat already.
As Nick started shoveling down the noodles, Laurie cleared her throat.

“Um, mom?” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears.

Charlene stopped dipping her egg roll in hot mustard to look at her daughter.

“Mom, Nick promised me that he would go out to the big lake with me.
We were going to sail one of his boats.”

“I never said—” Nick sputtered.
He hadn’t promised anything like that.

“I thought you kept those things mint,” Julian said, using one of his chopsticks to skewer a dumpling.
He grinned.
“What if the paint gets scratched?”

Nick glared at him and then turned his glare on Laurie for good measure.

She acted like she didn’t notice, smiling like the suck-up she was.
“I know that Nick’s in trouble, but he can still go, right?”

Charlene looked over at Nick’s dad expectantly.
“Sure,” he said slowly.
“Fresh air.
Better than sitting inside moping.
Just make sure that you two get back before dark this time.”

“But Dad—,” Nick started.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Nick’s dad said.
“You’re the one who made the promise.”

Nick put down his fork, completely outmaneuvered.
He couldn’t believe it!
She’d lied.
Underneath that bizarro sparkly exterior, she was a devious, conniving liar.

He actually found himself grudgingly impressed.

When Nick stepped out onto the lawn the following morning, he did so with a sense of dread.
“Why are you always making me come with you?
Don’t you have friends of your own?” He vaguely recalled girls shrieking with laughter in Charlene’s backyard, when he and Jules had been forced to go there for dinner after the engagement.
The house had been small, cluttered with handmade crafts and suncatchers.
He’d felt like he was suffocating.

“Don’t
you
?” Laurie snapped.

He stepped past Jules’s spray-painted green car with two surfboards bungee-corded to a homemade roof rack.
His dad’s car sat in the driveway beside it, freshly waxed and gleaming.
“I have lots of friends,” he said, hoping she’d leave it alone.

Nick didn’t like to think about the kids in the development he’d lived in before this one
and how they were probably having tons of fun this summer.
He used to clown around with them, just doing whatever.
But that was a long time ago.
Before his mom got sick.
Before they moved.
Before he started not bothering anyone.

Laurie sucked in her breath.
“See her?” She held out her locket.

Nick snatched it, and the Sight sharpened his vision abruptly, making him dizzy.
Where there had been only ripples before, he could clearly see a nixie frolicking in the lake.
The melody that he’d thought was wind blowing through leaves and frogs croaking and birds singing changed in his ears to her song.
It filled him with a swelling sense of longing for something that he couldn’t quite describe.
Still singing, she swam toward where he stood.

“Oh, crap,” he said.
He couldn’t understand the words, but the melody shivered up his spine.

Laurie shifted the knapsack off her shoulder and took out two sandwiches and a bottle of soda.

“What’s that for?” Nick asked.
“You planning a picnic?”

Laurie shrugged, her freckled cheeks abruptly mottled with red.
“I thought Taloa might like them.”

“I looked in that book of yours,” he said.
“Don’t they eat scum off the bottom of the lake or something?”

“Maybe she’s never
had
a sandwich,” said Laurie defensively.
“It’s just got celery in it.”

“Ooo-la-le-la, Nicholas.”
Taloa turned her froggy head to the side, clear membranes
blinking across her amphibious eyes.
It seemed like she sang the words instead of speaking them.
“The heroic Nicholas.
Ooole-la Laurie has told me the tale, of how you found my withered body.
La-le-la and how the great Nicholas risked punishment from his elders for my sake.”