Pretty much instantaneously, Betty turns tiger next to me, but I don’t watch. Instead, I’m up on my feet, knife snatched from beneath the seat in front of me, and I’ve jumped onto the edge of the stage. Behind them, Jay’s pulled out a crossbow from where it’s been hiding in the drum set.
“Let them go,” I order.
Frank laughs. “One move, I snap their necks.”
“You didn’t even let them finish their set,” I mock complain. “You know what they were going to play next?”
“‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’?” he taunts.
“ ‘Valhalla,’” I spit back at him. It has no effect on his cockiness.
“I sent him there once. I guess it’s time for him to go back.”
“You can’t go back, idiot. It’s a one-shot deal.”
Astley shoots me a warning glance. We’ve talked too much. I let my anger get the best of me, but I also bought us some time. A perfectly changed Betty pounces onto the stage next to me and hisses, ears back.
She gets a reaction from both the prewarned audience members and Frank. His lip actually curls in, and I can’t say I blame him. Betty is an intimidating tiger.
“Call off the cat, or I snap their necks right now,” he orders, and adjusts his grip.
I think for a second. “If you wanted them dead, you would already have killed them.”
He laughs. “True, true. But I prefer that you all watch the end.”
“The end?” Now it’s my turn to laugh. “You’re surrounded. It is over, Frank. Let them go.”
Betty’s muscles get ready to spring. Nick starts to turn wolf. His body shakes and his eyes close.
“You think we didn’t know that you were planning a little ruse? We have you surrounded.” Frank whistles and the back doors open. I look over my shoulder to see pixies start marching up the aisles, all blue, all deadly. They are not our pixies. Our pixies are strictly maintaining their glamours so the humans can make sure they’re good ones. These pixies are his.
“Attack!” I yell. “Attack!”
Our people and pixies start scrambling over chairs, grabbing weapons. The ceiling of the auditorium is suddenly splattered with blood as teeth meet flesh, weapons slice through limbs. My stomach clenches. It has begun. The horrible battle has begun.
BEDFORD POLICE RADIO TRAFFIC
Dispatch: All available units. I have a report of criminal mischief at the Grand Auditorium. Again. All available units, please respond to a report of criminal mischief at the Grand Auditorium.
In a battle, one of two things can happen to time: it can speed up so fast that it’s all over in an instant. Or time can move so slowly that you register every motion, every second—the blood and the screams, the opening of mouths, the ripping of flesh. That is how time works for me as Jay lunges over the drum set toward Frank. It’s horribly slow.
Thanks to what’s left of the National Art Honor Society, there are dozens of spears planted throughout the theater, taped to walls, painted the appropriate camouflaging colors. I yank up a spear that was hidden along the edge of the stage. The sound of duct tape ripping mixes with the screams. I turn to look. We are arming ourselves. Good. Issie stands with a knife, waiting for the attack that’s sure to come. Others are already engaged, trying to thrust the spears and knives into the trunks of fast-moving pixies.
I turn to face Frank, but he’s gone, just gone. Jay’s on the stage floor, grabbing his stomach. I pound over to him. “Where did he go?”
“Through the floor. It’s like a trapdoor or something. Astley and Nick and the Frank thing—they just all fell through it. And then it closed.” His sentences are gasps. He struggles back into a standing position and I help hoist him up.
“Are you okay?”
“He kicked me before he went through the floor.” He stands straighter. “I’ll be fine.”
Yanking off two cymbals from the drum set, I toss him one. We’ll use them as shields. We wait for maybe a second (that lasts a year) before the pixies begin to charge up.
“In 300, they don’t stand,” Jay mutters.
“What?”
“In the movie, with the Spartans, they rush to meet them.” His words are fast, nervous.
“Good plan.” I step forward, use my weight and momentum to help me drive the spear into the first pixie. It smashes into her chest and blood spurts as I yank it out. The pixie keens forward as soon as the spear is removed. She thuds at my feet, but I don’t stop, don’t look. I keep advancing, each step full of weight and purpose.
The sounds of yelling and dying, of wounding and fear, all mix into a din around me. I tune it out and just focus on the pixies. The next one I stab low and with such force that he is propelled backward as my spear goes all the way through him. I yank it out, spin, and look for attacks from behind me, all in one fluid motion, almost like I am still inhuman. Jay’s battling it out with a female. I pivot back and have a moment before the next is on me. I keep moving forward to greet her with the spear. Another step forward and there is a gap, a moment for me to see the carnage below me, for me to see Cassidy being yanked backward by a pixie that is still glamoured. His mouth sinks into her neck and he tosses her against the wall. She flops to the floor.
“No!” I scream the word and throw my spear before I know what I’m doing. The shaft arcs through the air and hits the pixie right below his collarbone. The point slices through fabric and into flesh.
I grab a sword that’s taped to the curtain, tear it off, and jump from the stage, but I can’t see Cassidy. I’m moving forward to get to her. Pixies rush me. My sword slashes one to the right, scraping across the chest. The wound isn’t deep. But the poison will kill her. I swipe one’s neck as he rushes my left side, not breaking my stride, just moving forward, right slash, left thrust, over and over again until I get close enough. I am a machine. Inside, I am nothing, feel nothing. I am a death bringer, nothing like the Zara I was before.
And then I see Issie.
And I feel again.
She’s flailing around. Her hair is caked with blood, which isn’t her own, thank God, but she’s panicky. Her eyes are wide and full of fear. Devyn’s swooping around her, fending off any pixie that comes close.
“Issie, listen to me,” I tell her, grabbing her wrist to keep her here, focused, listening.
“What?”
“No matter what happens, do not lose hope.” I nod as Devyn starts attacking a pixie’s face with his talons. “Make sure everyone takes care of each other, after—”
Cierra and Paul are hauling in a body from the side of the theater. Issie and I glance down at the same time and a pain shoots through my gut. “Cassidy …”
Cierra looks up at me and tells me what happened even though I already saw. “They bit her. In the neck. She bled. She’s bleeding everywhere. And Austin. I can’t find Austin.”
Cassidy’s yellow cable-knit sweater is stained with blood. A hunk of flesh is missing from her neck. I yank off my sweater, press it to her wound. “Hold this there. Keith! Keith!”
When he doesn’t immediately answer I order Paul. “Find Keith. Cassidy is a priority. Hear me? Text him your location if you don’t find him right now. Got it?”
I don’t even give him time to answer, just take one last look at Cassidy, who seems so small now. She doesn’t move. Her eyelids barely flutter.
“She must not die,” I tell them and then look at Issie, whose face is red with anger—an anger I’ve never seen in her before. I yank her into a hug and whisper into her hair, “You don’t die. You don’t die, Issie. You are not allowed to die.”
I don’t know if she hears me over the screams. I break away, hack through the pixies, barge past my friends, all these students, some parents fighting as well as they can, and jump back up on the stage. I have to get to them, get to Astley and Nick and Frank somehow. The fighting continues below me. Betty tears a pixie man in half, flinging his torso into another one, knocking it down. My friends are battling so bravely in
here, out in the lobby, out on the street. The sounds of anger and pain, horror and death and courage surround me. Each slash, each moan, each battle yell shoves the pain of this deeper into my heart. This is our stand. This is where we are brave.
But we are not enough. We’re nowhere near enough, I realize now. We are an army that has everything to lose. I think about what Hel said and suddenly I know what to do. I take the watch on my wrist, my father’s watch, and I pull out the timer. That’s like sounding an alarm, right? Isn’t that what Hel said?
At first nothing happens.
My dad wouldn’t let me down. And this had to be what he meant. I double-check to make sure I’ve pulled out the timer. I did. I press it back in again. Isn’t that how the alarm works?
“Come on,” I beg. “Come on …”
My lungs deflate, but then they come. They come through the crazy soundproof walls in waves, old and young, whole-looking and some with their bodies a bit worse for the wear. They glow with the transparency of the dead, not quite cartoon ghosts, but definitely not normal and solid. They do not carry weapons, but my heart beats a bit harder seeing them, as more and more appear—an army of spirits, an army that has nothing to lose.
They stand there, humans, pixies, animals that must be shifters. They stand there and wait. Some of the Bedford people stop fighting—and some pixies too—mouths open, stunned by the dead.
The dead stare at me.
“Fight,” I order them. “Please, I beg of you. Fight for us.”
And they do.
With fists and claws and teeth, with elbows and feet, they battle, surrounding the evil pixies and pulling them to the floor, engaging them with mouths and knees. I turn back to the trapdoor that Frank pulled Nick and Astley through.
There’s got to be a way to open it, but there’s nothing obvious—no hook, nothing to pull, just the floorboards that are part of the stage. How did he open it? Magic? No, it’s part of the theater, the human theater, so there’s got to be a way that’s mechanical, and it wouldn’t be here on the stage, it would be on the control panel.
I rush to stage left and then the wing where all the levers and buttons are. Most are labeled, but there’s one green button, way off to the side. I push it. The lights in the theater go off. It’s complete blackness.
“Crud!”
I push it again. The lights fizzle and come on again. Resisting the urge to check on Cassidy and Issie, to assess the battle, I keep looking for the trapdoor mechanism. My fingers run underneath the table next to the control board and find a lever. I flip it down. The stage door opens. I rush back on stage and a pixie smashes me to the hard, wooden floor. I don’t know where he came from, but it doesn’t matter. His hands smash into my shoulders, holding me down. He’s got a knee on my belly and I’m scrambling to find the pixie mace that’s in my pocket.
He’s a dark shade of blue and he laughs, moves his hand to grab mine.
“Nyuh-nyuh-nyuh,” he scolds.
“What are you, one of the Three Stooges?”
He cocks his head. “Who is that?”
“Classic comedians,” comes a voice from behind him, and the pixie is wrenched off of me. “That’s sad you don’t know that. What are we teaching our pixies these days?”
I blink hard and scramble backward. My savior cracks the pixie’s neck in a quick movement, killing him, and then he tosses him to a bear, a glowing, luminous dead bear who quickly rips him in half, which is beyond disgusting but effective.
“Hello, daughter.” The ghost offers me a hand.
“Hello, pixie father.” I take his hand and let him heave me up. It’s cold, but solid. He’s here, my biological father, the pixie king is here. “Thank you for the rescue.”
He shrugs and runs his free hand through his dark hair. “What are dead fathers for?”
“Hugging?” I suggest, and it’s true. I really do want to hug him. I never in a million years imagined that. We pull each other close and he sighs. And it’s then that I know what he wants, what he needs for him to leave Hel and to go to whatever is next. But as I start to say it, he puts a finger on my lips.
“Let me help you here first,” he says. His eyes flame with purpose. “Okay?”
The bear joins us as we stride over to the trapdoor. My father guards one side of me. The bear protects the other, and I know she must be Mrs. Nix. Her fur is scorched in places, scarred in others.
I place a hand on her back, touch the bristly fur, and say loudly enough to be heard over the battle, “I am so sorry. So sorry you died, that it was a trap, that it was my fault. I am so, so sorry.”
She swings her head to look at me. Huge brown eyes meet my own gaze and she winks. Then she bumps me with her front shoulder. She is so good and so kind, even in death, even in battle.
“Betty!” I call out, hoping she’s nearby.
I want Betty to see her, so I scream my grandmother’s name as we move.
It takes us maybe five seconds more to get to the door. Just then the air explodes. My body’s thrown across the stage and my head spins into some crazy half-conscious place for a second. Part of the curtain falls on top of me and Paul’s body slams down in front of me. “Paul!”
I scramble through the curtain to get to him. His eyes are glazed. His mouth is trapped in a forever grimace. Horror closes my throat as I try to see through the smoke, try not to dwell on poor Paul, try to keep fighting, keep thinking, keep going on. The explosion came from the front of the theater. A gaping hole to the outside is there now. Smoke mixes with snow. Still, even though it should be silent, the battle wages on. People cry and scream and attack. The cold rushes inside. The wind swirls programs into the stinking air.
At the center of the stage, a bruised and blood-stained tiger brushes her nose across a giant bear’s muzzle. The bear lowers her head even more and nudges the tiger’s shoulder.
My father grabs me by the arm. “Come on.”
We scurry back to the trapdoor and look down. Below us are pixies, at least a dozen. They snarl, waiting for us to attempt to get down there too. Austin is crumpled on the ground, bitten and dead. They step on him like he’s a piece of dust. Austin …
“There’s too many,” I say. “They’ll tear us apart.”
“We are ghosts.” My father stands there, obviously ready to jump. He nods at Mrs. Nix. “We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by helping you.”
Mrs. Nix rolls her eyes and plunges into the pit, snarling. She stands on her hind legs and roars. My father jumps down behind her and yells, “Give us a second.”
“Zara! Look out!” some guy yells.
Arrows fling at me. I just barely manage to duck down. More arrows come, diving into the wood. Frantic, I try to see where they’re coming from. It’s a pixie at the edge of the theater, hunkered down behind the seats. He only pops up to shoot. Issie’s parents are rushing at him, knives drawn. I can’t watch. Instead, I jump down into the space beneath the stage, landing soundly by Mrs. Nix. Pixies are still fighting them.
My father, the former pixie king, yells, “Go ahead. The tunnel. I can smell Nick that way. We’ll hold them off.”
“Dad.” I swallow. “Thank you.”
He smiles a tiny bit and snap kicks a pixie. “You are welcome.”
Mrs. Nix snorts.
“I love you. I love you both.” The words don’t seem enough.
“Zara! Go!” my father yells. “And tell your mother about this, okay? If the world doesn’t end? I’d like her to think of me more fondly.”
“You never give up, Dad.”
“Neither do you,” he grunts, grappling with another pixie. “It’s in the blood.”
I know it’s the last time I’ll see either of them, but still I run forward, down the cement hallway that leads from beneath the stage. My footsteps echo. I grab the mace I’ve stashed even though I know it probably won’t do any good.
There’s a wooden door at the end of the hall.
There’s a huge six-six pixie g
uarding the door. His teeth are plated with gold and they glint when he smiles.
“Finally,” he says, bringing his hands together and bending the fingers backward like he’s some actor in a movie getting ready for a bar brawl, which is actually incredibly intimidating even if it is a cliché. “I’ve been waiting forever.”
“You know what they say,” I quip. “We girls like to take our time, get ready for the big important events in our lives—hot dates, National Honor Society induction, killing pixie kings and their thugs.”
My hand clenches the pepper spray. The problem is that I have to be close to use it, which means with those long arms of his, he’ll get a good hit in. And now that I’m human again I might not be able to withstand it.
He yawns like I’m too boring for any more words. He lumbers toward me.
“Gasp! Scary.”
“You are just a little girl.” His voice seems like it deepens with the insult.
As I try to think of some witty comeback, he makes some sort of primal noise and lunges. I lift my arm and spray right in his face. The chemicals make contact. His skin sizzles, really sizzles. The smell of burned flesh makes me gag. His huge knuckled hands lift to his face, shaking, as he screams. I take my knife and plunge it into his chest, right through his Black Sabbath T-shirt, right in between the ribs and up a little. The force of blade meeting body battles through my arm. Stabbing someone hurts. I yank the knife back out as he falls. It worked better than the spears.
“Sorry,” I whisper as he thuds to the floor. “You chose the wrong side. Plus, you made ‘little girl’ sound like a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with being little or a girl.”
Quickly, I wipe the knife on my jeans to get the blood off. The jeans are goners anyway, full of bloodstains and dirt. I can’t believe I’m thinking about jeans. I can’t believe I lectured him on his terminology when he’s already dead. I’m a wreck. I’m such a wreck that my hand trembles as I turn the doorknob. But there’s no point in nerves, no point in trembling. Paul is dead. Austin. Cassidy is injured, and possibly dying. People are fighting out there, struggling with everything they have, doing things they’d never thought they’d do. I have to save Nick and Astley and then I have to save them, save the world, whatever the cost.