Carrie Jones: Entice

His hand reaches out and grabs mine before I can react. “I am not lying to you, Zara. She does this a lot.”

“Right,” I say as he tries to draw me closer. That’s not going to happen. I pull against him. Frustration rattles my teeth. “I refuse to dance with you.”

“I could force you.”

“But you won’t.” I say this like I’m certain of it, like I’m certain of who he is, but really I’m not certain of anything.

We stand there for a moment, staring down each other as the rest of the people in the cafeteria swirl and swoon and fall in love. We are at a stalemate. His eyes soften. He lets me go, dropping his arms away, and I feel suddenly, terribly alone. I almost kind of want to dance with him again, which is so wrong, I know.

For a moment his face is sad, but he covers it quickly with a smile. “I apologize. I have confused you somehow. I am going to patrol outside, make sure it is safe for the students as they leave.”

He bows and backs away, leaving me in the middle of the dance floor. He cuts through the throngs of people easily, bumping and jostling no one, as if he could do it blindfolded.

I reach down and check the clasp of my anklet. It’s still tight, still secure. I am not alone, not while there is still hope of finding Nick, not while I still have my friends. My will seems to solid up. There is so much to do and so little time to waste.

Despite my total dread over the big Grandma Betty confrontation that’s waiting for me, after forty-five minutes of dance hell I go outside and patrol around for pixies, just to make sure all the happy-dancing humans are safe when they leave to go home.

This is the world of a pixie-my world now, I guess-pacing and hunting, sniffing the air and looking for threats. I look for threats because I need to keep people safe. I look for threats because I do not want to be the threat. It’s a fine line, I guess-a fine line between good and bad, between savior and predator, between hero and villain. I do not want to be the villain and I do not want people dead, not on my watch, not ever. I have to believe that every step I take is a step toward good, because if I don’t-if I don’t believe that-then everything, absolutely everything, is lost.

Something thuds onto the snow. I dart toward it even as my fists start shaking again, imagining Frank.

“It’s just sludge,” I tell myself, and I’m right. It is only snow and ice packed behind the tire of a truck. It’s come loose and fallen to the ground.

Every noise I hear is a potential problem. Every smell I take inside me is a potential warning. Every squirrel leaping from one tree branch to another could be not a squirrel but a pixie. Now that I am pixie I hear so much better and I smell so much better-not me personally smelling good, but my sense of smell has improved-and so I sniff in. It’s not a sniff. A sniff is an involuntary action; this is an actual intentional sniffing in.

The whole time I’m thinking: How will we get to Valhalla? How will we find Nick?

I pace back and forth in the parking lot, listening for pixies, and then-the smell wafts through my nostrils. My muscles tense and I’m pacing right by Issie’s car when Astley jumps off a big streetlamp right in front of me. He stands beneath the light, which makes his hair seem more gold than ever. A fine coating of pixie dust mingles with the snow.

“I thought you left,” I said.

“Why?” he asks roughly. “I said I would be patrolling. You didn’t believe it?” He squares his shoulders and looks away from me.

“I thought maybe you’d given up. Too many evil pixies. Too many humans to keep safe.”

“I am not the sort who gives up.” He gives a half shrug. His shoulders seem to stretch out the hard fabric of his jacket. With all that blond hair and golden-tinted skin, he looks almost like he could glow, but he doesn’t quite. Instead he leaves tiny traces of glitter wherever he goes. It’s the sign of a pixie king. He squints his eyes, looking in the distance, and adds, “I decided I should stay and be assured that you’d manage to make it safely home. Are you leaving now without your friends?”

I squat down, drag my finger through the thin layer of snow. “No. I’m just patrolling too. I don’t want anyone to get hurt by-” I break off and don’t know how to say it without being rude.

“Pixies like us?” He half asks, half finishes after a slight pause.

I don’t answer and instead look down. I’ve been writing the letter N in the snow, N for Nick, tracing and retracing the three solid lines of it, and I hadn’t even noticed what I was doing. Standing up, I ask, “Have you seen any?”

“Quite a few. Amelie is out there patrolling about a half mile away. Between the two of us, we have pushed off a good number.” He rubs at the side of his face like he’s checking for stubble or something. “She loves a decent fight. It frightens me sometimes how much she loves it.”

Amelie is one of his subjects. She is tall and has dreadlocks. She is a lot older than us. She’s maybe around thirty. I don’t know much about her. I don’t know much about anything pixie, actually-things like how their society is set up or how they began. There are so many secrets, floating around me like the snowflakes. I try to catch them in my hand, discern their shape and identity, but they melt into tiny pools of water. It’s just long enough for me to know they existed but not enough to let me examine them.

“Zara? What is wrong?” Astley reaches out. His finger touches the bottom of my chin and he lifts my head so that I meet his eyes. I step backward to put some distance between us, but I don’t look away.

“I’m worried.”

“About?” he prods.

“That we won’t find Valhalla and Nick.” I make a rough motion to indicate myself. “That this will be for nothing and that my grandmother will kill me or kick me out of the house for going all pixie on her.”

I cross my arms over my chest. He nods. People start coming out of the school.

“That I can understand. She is fierce.” He pauses like he’s weighing his words, or maybe he has to burp. I don’t know. A clump of snow falls off a tree and onto the hood of a Subaru. He tenses and then continues. “But if she loves you, she will still love you despite your species.”

Right. I cringe. “Weres don’t like pixies.”

“Not everywhere. We aren’t always enemies.”

“Around here you are.”

“Around here things are not the way they should be. Your father was a weak king. He was a weak man. We are not all like that.”

I don’t want to hear it. I’ve already heard that my pixie father is weak so many times already.

“It’s just…” Struggling to find the words, I pull in my lips for a second and then start again. “I just… I want to be the same person I was before. I don’t want to be beholden to you because you’re my king-no offense. I don’t want to think that it’s cool to torture people. I want to be good. I want to have a soul.”

I kick at the snow around my N . Some of it ruins one of the lines. “I know that sounds stupid,” I mumble. I start to squat down to fix the N , but before I can he grabs me by the shoulders.

“Listen to me, Zara. I do not know what you believe. I believe each of us is a replica. Similar to the way Christians believe Adam was made in the image of God, replicated.” He pulls in a deep breath as car doors start to open. I can tell he’s trying to search for danger. I search too, but I can’t find any except right here with Astley, my king, the guy I kissed, the guy I let turn me. He continues on, placated, I guess, by sensing no immediate threats. “So too do pixies believe that we are replicated from Odin-”