My head spins from the stress of it all and I sit back down. I try to figure out who would vote what way if we did have a group vote. I can’t predict anyone’s response except Nick’s. How can he be so bossy? He ignores me and then boom! he’s all protective again? Maybe this isn’t even about me. Maybe this is about him losing his place as alpha, as pack leader and protector.
“People are so complicated,” I groan into my hands.
“What?” Cassidy asks.
“Nothing,” I say, pulling my head back up to look at everyone.
As usual, Devyn has been pretty much blowing off all of the tension and says in a totally level way, “A ton of people have already postured that the gate to hell—and I am saying hell with two l’s, not the Viking Hel with one l—has been in numerous places. Some believe it’s in the Fengdu County in the Chongqing Municipality, some believe—”
“Where?” Betty asks.
“China,” I say. One good thing about writing all those Urgent Action letters for Amnesty International trying to protect people’s human rights is that it makes me good with geography.
“Then there are people who think it’s in Africa,” Devyn continues, pressing the screen on his phone. “Specifically Erta Ale in the Afar Region of Ethiopia. It’s a volcano. Locals call it ‘the gateway to hell.’ “
“That sounds promising,” Astley says.
We all agree and Devyn tells us that some people think hell’s entrance is in Clifton, New Jersey, where there are Satanic sacrifices and a thousand-pound ax allegedly blocking the doors to hell. Once you get through the doors you have to battle a glowing skull.
“But the best option is Iceland,” Devyn finishes. “Iceland is where we’ve had activity before. They have an entire three-hundred-year period called the Viking Age in their history. There’s a connection there that doesn’t exist with Guatemala or Kansas.”
“Damn it, but no.” Betty puts her hand over her eyes and then recovers. She walks to the wood stove and opens the door, pokes the log into submission, and puts another one on top.
“Iceland,” Astley repeats, looking at me. We both remember what’s happened there, I bet. That’s where my biological father died, eaten by a giant wolf that was meant to kill us. That’s where Astley learned there was a traitor in our kingdom. We hadn’t realized then that it was Isla, his own crazyass mother.
“It’s a volcano again,” Devyn begins.
“Of course,” interrupts Nick. He throws up his hands like it’s all too ridiculous and frustrating for words.
“A volcano by a resort—Namaskaro is the volcano. Lake Myvatn is the resort. This is named after the lake, which is entropic,” Devyn continues, but Issie interrupts him and demands he speak in English, understandable third-grade English. Basically, there is a volcano in a remote area of Iceland that has some interesting geographical aspects to it.
“And people think it’s an entrance to Hel why?” I ask.
“Well, close by is a crater called ‘Viti,’ which means ‘hell’ in Icelandic.” Devyn’s eyes stay fixed to the screen as he paces back and forth in front of the fire.
“It does not seem definitive enough,” Astley says.
“True.” Devyn meets his eyes.
“It’s more than we usually have,” I say. “It’s been called an entrance to Hel. It’s got a Norse/Viking connection. We know there’s activity in Iceland from the last time we were there.”
Astley smiles at me, maybe because I’m being Optimistic Zara, I don’t know, but it distracts me and I’m completely unprepared for Nick’s freak-out.
“Don’t smile at her!” he snaps.
Astley’s eyebrows lift up toward his hairline. “What did you just say?”
“I said, ‘Don’t smile at her.’” Nick stands up again. “You keep smiling at her and touching her like she’s your possession.”
“Touching someone does not indicate ownership.” Astley stands up too. “Your logic fails you.”
The air ripples with male anger, all testosterone charged. Betty’s hand rests on my shoulder as I announce, “I’m nobody’s possession, Nick. People don’t possess each other. They care about and support each other, but they don’t—”
He stomps one step closer, finally making eye contact with me, and in those eyes is such pain and such anger that my heart breaks all the way down inside as he declares, “I want the pixie out of here.”
Astley answers before I can. “You do not get to make that decision, friend.”
“Don’t call me ‘friend.’ You aren’t my friend,” Nick spits back.
Dropping her hand, Betty arches up and you can see the tiger in the way she shifts her eyes into something serious and wild and deadly calm. “Nick Colt. You are acting like a brat.”
The clock on the wall chimes eleven. Cassidy breaks it with her singsong voice. Her braids sway, casting spells in the air. Her words soften the air just a bit. “You know, Nick, we are all working toward the same goal here. We all want the same thing.”
“I know what he wants. He wants her.” Nick points at me.
“This is ridiculous,” Devyn says, finally acknowledging the situation. He looks so bird thin standing in between them. Either could knock him over with a punch. “We are all on the same team.”
“Are we?” Nick huffs out as I close my eyes for a second, overwhelmed by the clichés and the tough-guy talk.
“I could ask the same,” Astley says. His hands go to his hips in such a man pose as he talks. “Since you have returned you have spent more time glowering and undermining Zara’s new power than you have supporting us in our efforts to eradicate Frank and determine what exactly the Ragnarok threat is.”
“Nick just died,” I start to explain. “He’s had a lot to adjust to.”
“Don’t make excuses for him,” Betty says.
Devyn gasps. On the computer screen Issie moans, “I can’t see anything! Someone turn me around.”
I reach over and pivot the laptop, although I don’t know why Issie would even want to see this. The refrigerator makes a creaking noise that is so loud it echoes in here. It doesn’t make them even pause.
“It’s your mother and her brother who are the threat,” Nick says, talking right over everyone else. “It’s you who is the threat. I can’t believe you’re even in this house!”
“This is my house, Nick. He is allowed here. You need to calm yourself down.” Betty stands up to her full height and looks at the door.
“Nick …” I start to walk over to him, to touch his shoulder and calm him down like I used to, but he jumps away. How can this be real? How can he act like this? “Nick.”
But saying his name doesn’t help. He brushes past me, slams outside. A second later the MINI starts up and headlights sweep down the driveway.
“Wolves have such tempers,” Astley says, crossing his arms over his chest. It’s not a kind thing to say at all.
“Don’t,” Devyn warns. “He’s been through a lot.”
Astley turns and looks at me. “We all have been through a lot. We all need to maintain our dignity and work together.”
I tune them all out, go to the window and press my nose against the cold glass. My breath fogs it up, so I can’t make out any shapes, any movement in the darkness, which is okay I guess because Nick is already gone. There is nothing to see.
Everyone leaves before midnight because it is a school night and their parents have rules. I trudge up the stairs, feeling physically better thanks to Cassidy but still kind of woozy. Even though it’s not very green of me, I leave the porch light on and the one in the stairs. I don’t want it to be dark when Nick comes back—if he comes back—and honestly, I don’t want it to be completely dark either. It’s just for tonight, I rationalize. Just one night I want to spend in the light. Betty says nothing about this. At the top of the stairs she hugs me and says, “You should take a bath. It’ll help with the aches.”
The house is quiet except for the humming of kitchen appliances and h
ot water pushing its way through pipes. The fire in the wood stove only makes occasional popping noises. Outside, the snow falls down and the wind eases into something sleepy.
Betty leans against the wall, and in her pajamas it’s so obvious that she’s lost weight in the time she was gone. The cotton fabric dangles from her bony shoulders. Deep, tired circles rest beneath her eyes.
“I’m not happy about this Iceland idea,” she says.
I nod, holding up my towel. “I know, Gram.”
“And I’m not happy about you being so important to whatever the hell is going on around here.”
“The end of the world? The invasion of crazed-out pixies?”
“Yeah.”
We stand there for a second and then I prod her, “But?”
“How’d you know there was a ‘but’?” She almost cracks a smile.
“There’s always a but or a butt.” I make a movement with my free hand to mimic a big one.
She really smiles. “Damn, I’ve missed you.”
“I missed you too,” I say as the lightbulb in the overhead fixture flickers. “Are you going to tell me about your but?”
She wiggles her finger. “You watch it, young lady. Yes. But I don’t want her death to be for nothing. I don’t want the world, however messed up it is, to end. I don’t want this town to be destroyed like this, and I don’t want the poison of that Frank thing to spread beyond here. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I say quietly.
She moves toward me, kisses the top of my head. “Good. Now good night. And do not die in Iceland or I will kill you.”
Laughing at her own silly logic, she sends me off to bed and I’m barely beneath the covers when a car rumbles into the driveway. The headlights flash through my window, illuminating the poster-strewn walls of my room, and flash out just as quickly, turning everything dark again. I can tell from the engine that it’s Nick’s MINI. A car door opens and shuts. I strain to hear his footsteps on the snow, then on the porch. The front door knob turns. A door opens. A door shuts. He sighs. And then he climbs the stairs, one, two, three. I want him to stop outside my room, open my door, and tell me he’s sorry. I want him to come and … four, five, six … say my name and tell me how brave I was to save him, to thank me … seven, eight … He is at the top of the stairs, and for a second he actually hesitates, but it is just a second and then his feet move swiftly past my door. He goes into his bedroom, and another opportunity for real reconciliation—another hope for it all to go back to how it was—is gone.
It doesn’t matter. We have a world to save, and if I have to go to Hel and back to save it, I damn sure will, no matter what the cost.
INTERVIEW WITH HOLIDAY INN ROOM #321 OCCUPANT
Investigator: So why are you visiting Bedford?
321: Sightseeing.
Investigator: In winter?
321: Yes.
INTERVIEW WITH HOLIDAY INN ROOM #322 OCCUPANT
Investigator: So why are you visiting Bedford?
322: Sightseeing.
Investigator: In winter?
322: Yes.
Having Betty back shifts something in all of us, gives us a sense of purpose, and yes, even a bit of hope. We are all a flurry of happy text messages and phone calls. In a meeting at the hotel’s conference room, I manage to convince our pixies that having people fight with us is a good thing. Astley acts all proud of my leadership/speaking skills. Our pixies join in the training, showing all the humans how hard pixies are to fight in hand-to-hand combat, how weapons are pretty much necessary.
Austin looks over at Becca, who basically resembles a small cheerleader—the kind they toss around in the air. “This is our scary enemy?”
Amelie leaps in front of him. “Do not be an idiot, boy. Size does not matter.”
Austin laughs like she’s made a dirty joke. “What matters then?”
A light flickers in the high ceiling of the YMCA gym. “Fierceness.” Amelie twitches almost imperceptibly—a signal to Becca, who leaps over Amelie’s six-foot-tall frame, landing catlike in between Amelie and Austin. Her hand grabs his neck. His eyes bulge.
“You are all very slow,” she says. “Too slow for even a scary enemy like myself.”
Becca has the best time doing this fighting stuff and she struts around like a vampire slayer or something, yelling out pointers and directions. Keith participates. So do Devyn’s parents but mostly to check on Astley’s health, I think.
Amelie groans as Callie tries to karate chop Sherman, a male pixie, in the knee. “What are you doing? What?”
“If you take out their knees, they fall,” Callie explains.
“But you expose yourself, your neck, your back, and the movement is so slow.” Amelie looks at me with a frantic, exasperated expression. “You must kick at the knee if anything. Go for the eyes. Blind us. Go for the head. Bash our skulls. This is child’s play! Child’s play!”
“We need better weapons,” I say.
“We need a freaking army,” Nick agrees.
“This is pathetic.” “This is our army,” I tell him. I cross my arms over my chest and look at everyone trying so hard.
“It is pathetic,” he says again.
“The rifles will help,” I say.
“Not everyone has a rifle.” He states the obvious a lot, that Nick.
Later that day, Betty joins us for a pow-wow in the living room. We have a lot of new people here in the house—Becca, Amelie, Callie, Paul, Jay Dahlberg—along with the old standbys, and it’s strange and sort of beautiful how Grandma Betty is letting pixies inside the house when not too long ago she refused to let Astley cross the threshold. And I like it—I like that most of us are trusting each other. I like that there are shifters and pixies and humans all in the same space. And it’s during this meeting, with people in chairs and on the couch and even sitting on the floor, that we realize what the issues are.
1. We have to calm Frank’s pixies the hell down so that they stop killing people. We need to round them up and get them out.
2. We have to stop the apocalypse.
SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENT ON FLIGHT 132
Flight Attendant: In the event of a water landing, your seat-bottom cushion may be used as a floatation device.
She demonstrates.
Flight Attendant: After exiting, slip your arms through the straps and hug to your chest as shown on the safety card in the pocket in front of you.
She pauses.
Flight Attendant: Have any of you heard about the strange news in Maine? All those disappearances. I bet you’re glad to be getting out of there.
Awkward laughter.
For the flight to New York we are not seated next to each other. Amelie and Issie are in the middle and back of the plane, the plane-phobic Astley is sort of on the side, while I’m in 1F next to a thin man with shiny shoes and crisp suit pants, a bright pink shirt. He looks like he should discover the next social networking site and make billions. He helps everyone who comes on board.
You need to wait right outside the door to get your ticket claim for your carry-on.
You want to stow that up here.
He is nice and helpful, but I want to be next to Astley, who is five whole rows behind me, because something doesn’t feel right. There’s a heaviness, a watching, a creepy feeling that just seems to keep following me around.
As the stewardess glides down the aisle, the guy next to me watches way too intently, checking her out. I can feel his need for her. It hangs in the air. Pixie transformation byproduct I guess—feeling people’s wants, emotions, but only when they are super-strong, super-intense. His eyes move to me and I shift closer to the window.
“Do you want water or anything?” she asks him.
“No, I’m good.”
We drive by U.S. Air Force jets, dark gray and parked pointing at us, each has canvas green covering their engine parts.
“Excuse me.” Astley stands over the man, then crouches to his level, whispers in his ear
. The man unbuckles and vacates the seat, glancing at me.
“What did you say to him?” I ask.
“That you are gassy and that it would soon be quite obvious to him that he should switch seats with me.”
I hit him in the arm, groaning. “Nice.”
“I know.” He buckles up. He’s so pale, so afraid of flying in planes. The last time we were in a plane it was also to Iceland, and I had been the one who embarrassed him. I guess this is payback. Even so, he looks scared and nervous.
I grab his hand in mine and squeeze, trying to be reassuring. “I’m glad you’re here.”
He squeezes back. “So am I.”
And since I know he doesn’t mean “here in this plane,” it has to mean that he’s glad that he’s here with me. I should be uncomfortable about that, but I’m not. I just keep holding on to his hand as the nose of the plane lifts up and takes us forward.
“Does it seem weird to you that we’re going back to Iceland and searching for Hel?” I ask.
“Everything seems weird to me.”
He settles into himself once the plane levels off at its cruising altitude. “Like you, I never imagined I would grow up without a father. I never dreamed that my mother would lose her mind or betray me this way.” He drops his voice to a whisper. “I never thought that I would be the pixie king that would have to try to rein in others, that would have to stop Ragnarok, or that I would find you.”
“Find me?”
“As my queen.”
“Oh.” As his queen. Is that because I’m so unqueenly? Or because he’s worried about being stuck with me forever?
There’s an awkward silence, which fortunately the flight attendant interrupts by offering us a drink. I pick juice. Astley picks water. Once she’s moved the cart past us, I ask him, “Why do you think you have had to do this? You’ve said you’re one of the youngest kings, which probably means you’re one of the least experienced. And why aren’t there any other kings helping you?”
“They have their own territories. This is mine.”
“Yeah, but you’d think this would be a bit more important. It is the end of the world.”