“She can’t leave!” Frank hisses.
Loki puts out his arm, but doesn’t even look at them.
“Inconsequential little slugs,” he murmurs, and then they freeze—all of them—Frank, Astley, their little groupies. Loki cocks his head a tiny bit and says, “I am still weak. You should hurry.”
“Nick?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I do not have the power to heal.”
“Okay.” I start to rush across the thin sheet of hot water toward the cavern opening but then think better of it. “Are you going to be okay?”
His eyebrows raise almost all the way up to his hairline. “You truly are a compassionate one, princess. Perhaps that aspect of the prophecy was true.”
He hasn’t answered my question, I notice. I hesitate one more time and then beg, “Please don’t go on a killing spree. At least not with humans. Please … I don’t want to be responsible.”
Slowly he nods, and his wife moves to hug him fully again. He hugs her back and whispers, “I promise. I hold no ill will toward your kind. Hurry.”
I have no idea if I should trust him, but right now I have no choice. So I run. Nick’s on the floor, a wolf, barely breathing. Two pixies stand over him, frozen, but with lit cigarettes in their hands. They’ve tied up his limbs. There are burn marks in his fur and it smells of pain, burned flesh. I swear at them, and bend down and start yanking Nick backward, dragging him across the floor, but he’s heavy … so heavy, and I am just human. It’s just like when he died, I couldn’t move him quickly enough, couldn’t save him.
“Not this time,” I mutter. The ground shudders beneath me. I turn and there is Loki and his wife. He’s a wolf now, giant and huge. With one swipe he knocks down the wall. His wife rides on his back.
She reaches down. “Hand up your wolf. We will get him to safety.”
“Promise me?” I say, struggling to lift Nick. I can’t do it.
“I promise you. It is the least we can do for you.” She reaches lower, but I still can’t raise him up.
“I’m too weak,” I complain.
Loki growls and turns. He reaches down and takes Nick in his mouth, gently, carrying him by the scruff of Nick’s neck, as if Nick were a puppy.
“You are strong, Zara White. So strong. You should know that now.” She shakes her head at me. “Af kvöl er friðr. From suffering, peace.”
And then they are gone, leaping out of the room and down the hall. I text Issie and hope she has time to read it: Do not kill giant wolf. Good guy.
And then I have two choices. I can rush after Loki and his wife while Frank and Astley and the rest are still frozen or I can go back and try to stop them for good.
There is no choice, really.
I grab a sword off one of the frozen cigarette-holding pixies and head back down the tunnel and into the second cavern room. Astley and Frank stand where I left them. Astley’s eyes reveal a near panic, and his back is hunched a little bit. I should kill him right now, drive the sword right through his heart, and then do the same to Frank. Raising the sword, my hand starts to shake. I believed in him. I believed in him so much.
The air smells like sulfur. It shimmers. It’s like the entire world twitches, and I panic, scoot backward, and hide behind a giant rock formation. I don’t have time to do any more because the world just starts again. Loki’s power wasn’t strong enough to keep the bad guys still. Frank laughs with joy.
He hugs Astley to him. “We did it! We did it!”
“There is no mouth to Hel,” Astley says, deadpan. “I hardly see what you have achieved.”
I flatten myself against the wall, hide partially behind an outcropping.
“I achieve it now,” Frank says, raising up a sword and chanting something fast and crazy sounding. His eyes flash red and then glow a pretty sort of silver color that spreads around him like a ball of magic. A silver aura emanates from Frank and then spreads throughout the entire room, sounding with a pop. Black ooze creeps around his feet.
“Nice,” I mutter, thinking this must be the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the world and it’s my fault. I was too slow. I should have killed him at least.
As I’m thinking this, Astley lunges for Frank, knocking him down. “No! You cannot! You cannot! Fool! Do not do this!”
“It is already done.” Frank laughs as the earth shakes around us, and that’s when I do the only thing I can think of doing.
“Astley!” I step out and throw him my sword. He catches it by the hilt and plunges it into Frank’s chest. Frank gasps as blood splurts out and then begins to trickle away more slowly.
“It is too late,” he whispers. His arm grabs Astley by the cloth of his shirt. “It has begun.”
“No!” Astley shakes his head, yanks out the sword, and with one smooth movement he slashes the blade across Frank’s neck, silencing him forever. I turn away as he whispers, “It is never too late.”
The ground continues to shake as one moment passes and then another. Astley comes up beside me. “I am so sorry.”
I whirl around, stare into his grimy, grief-stricken face. His face is beautiful and so good. How could I have believed he’d betray us? Relief floods into me, pushing tears to my eyes. I rub against them with the heel of my hand. “You should have told me what you were doing. I thought—I thought—”
“That I had betrayed you all. I know. But Nick and I—”
“Nick knew!” I interrupt as the floor cracks.
“It was his idea. We thought it was the only way we could get all the information we needed. I learned how to stop the apocalypse, Zara. I learned about this room, about Loki. That’s why we didn’t fight him more on the stage. We let him take us here.”
I swallow hard as the floor dips beneath us and slants. “I am so mad at you.”
He grasps me by the waist as we start to lose our footing. “I know.”
His eyes are so honest and upset. The color of them changes, but the truth of him doesn’t. He is always Astley, and sometimes he does stupid reckless things, but so do I. Forgiving him, and Nick too, is easy. If we survive, I can yell at them later.
Clutching each other, we scramble toward the hole in the wall that Loki escaped through. Pixies, the bad pixies, are screaming and trying to run too. Looking behind me, I see what Frank did. There’s a pit, a hole into the earth. Icy blue flames leap out of it. It’s what Hel showed me before. It isn’t getting bigger, but there are cracks radiating out from it. Something explodes and I stop moving, my heartbeat fast.
As we reach the auditorium, people and pixies are scrambling toward the exit doors. A curtain falls, flaming. Betty’s feline form leaps over the tops of chairs and toward the outside. Then the building starts to crumble down around us. We dodge and duck and scurry, but make it to the street. It looks like it’s been bombed. Buildings smoke. Some blaze. Sirens go off. With a roar, the Grand collapses into rubble.
Issie and Betty hobble from the ruins. Issie’s hand clutches the fur on Betty’s back. More people, survivors, teeter and moan. Some film things on their cells. Some stand and stare, sobbing. Betty sees me and howls. A frazzled-looking FBI agent makes eye contact with me. I hold his gaze for a moment, but look away. There’s dead all around us. So many dead. My insides break with the loss of them, all of them, good and bad.
“Zara!” Astley orders at my elbow, trying to pull me toward the end of the street, where there seems to be less disaster. “Come.”
My voice is calm, quiet. There is no more fighting, just doing. I let go of my hold on Astley’s arm. “No.”
Head lowered, Astley looks at me. His eyes meet mine and there’s a chill inside his. He understands.
“Zara, no,” he repeats, even as a piece of road topples into the slowly expanding hole. “You can’t. I can’t.”
Orange haze from fires colors the white snowy air.
“I am the one who has to close it up, Astley. Me. That’s what the prophecy said. It’s what I’m meant to do.”
He gro
wls, an inhuman noise, full of fear and pain. “I cannot lose you.”
“You will lose me either way. At least …” I stare into the pit that’s growing now, growing even as we speak. It’s engulfed every bit of the rubble from the Grand. It’s like the theater never existed. “At least this way the world will survive.”
“You aren’t even pixie.”
“Isla said I didn’t have to be.”
“You’re going to trust my mother now?”
“Then make me pixie. Make it so it works. So there are no uncertainties. Just turn me, Astley.”
The ground shakes beneath us. I grab him by the front of his shirt. He’s so alive and beautiful. I need him to stay that way.
“I need to do this. It is my destiny to do this.” I am determined even though my stomach is cramping. I can feel my expression grimace.
“Zara.” His eyebrows raise up and he pulls me backward, away from the ever-expanding edge. It tugs at me, just as it did in Hel’s home. Doesn’t he feel it too?
From the top of the Maine Grind, two of our hunters have their rifles loaded and they are calm enough to shoot every blue pixie they see. Most of them have turned blue. Most are running away. They must feel Frank’s death. They must know everything is different now. Humans scream down the street. Sirens blare. Astley and I sink to the ground, clutching each other.
“I have to do this, Astley.”
“But—”
I cut him off. “You know I have to.”
“I love you,” he says. “You have to know I love you.”
He loves me, and that is such a good, lovely thing, and it makes me happy to know, but it can’t change who I am, can’t change my priorities, can’t change what I have to do even if I wish it. Part of me just wants to run away with him and go to that castle place he talked about—the one with the flowers and the seals. But the world will end if I don’t stop it right now. There will be no more warmth, no more flowers.
“What if I survive this?” I ask, even though I know I won’t. I might not be able to even stop it since I have no magic. “What if by some crazy luck I survive it and I’m a pixie? Or I don’t change and I’m a human?”
He holds my shoulders in his hands. His thumbs move slowly back and forth. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters.”
“No. No it doesn’t. Pixie or human, either is just your outer shell, Zara. It does not affect your soul—the essential thing that makes you, you. That is what I love. I love the girl who could not stand to see the enemy suffer, the girl who risked her life to untie me from a tree.”
“That’s not who I am anymore, Astley. I killed. I’ve killed pixies.”
“Evil, murdering pixies who wanted to hasten the end of the world.”
Good point, but still Chogyam Trungpa says an enemy should only be killed “once every thousand years.” I totally didn’t follow that rule. Instead I fought to become a pixie queen, killed to keep my town safe. I wonder if we could have found another way to survive, found a way to deal with my father, and then Frank and Isla, more peacefully. It is too late now to wonder anymore. What is done is done.
“Zara!” Devyn and Issie are approaching from beneath the Maine Grind. He is human again.
Holding up my hand, I try to stop them from coming any closer. I swallow hard. Fear battles against what I know I have to do. “What if I end up in Valhalla?”
“Then I shall come to you. But you won’t. You can’t because you have already been there. You would end up in Hel.”
“What if I just die?”
He groans. “I could not bear it.”
“Yes, yes you could. People you have loved have died before.”
“Not you.” Desperately he looks toward Devyn. “There’s got to be another way.”
Devyn shakes his head. “There isn’t. I wish there was but …”
“Zara!” Issie half sobs and half yells my name. “The watch! Look inside the watch.”
What?
“Yes,” Devyn says. “Remember what Isla told you. They hide secrets in timepieces.”
They’re right. I never thought of it. I pull up my sleeve to look at the watch my dad gave me. There must be a way to open it. I try to pry at the face with my fingers but it’s no good. Astley reaches out. His fingernails have turned into pixie claws and he gently uses the tip of one to pry open the watch face, revealing a message scratched underneath: LOVE IS MAGIC.
Holy— That’s it? A cheesy 1960s, hippie sort of message? Love is magic? It makes me groan. I snap the watch shut. Issie’s face is full of worry.
“It will be okay, Issie,” I lie. “It’ll all be okay.”
In her hands, she holds the branches that signify Astley’s and my souls. They glow, still entwined and solid, but shaking in the horrible, hot wind that blasts up out of the hole in the earth. All this time, Issie was the guardian and she never told me. There is so much about my friends, about this world, that I will never know.
“Where did those come from?” I ask Astley.
“In a safe, at the Maine Grind. They’d been in her home, but we moved them there for—” He starts to say more but I realize it doesn’t matter.
I grab Astley.
“Kiss me with intent,” I order him. “Change me.”
“It takes too long,” he says.
Grabbing his head, I force his face to mine and whisper over the screams. “Make me like you again, Astley. Let me feel your love before I die. It is all I want. Please …”
And he does. His lips, his soft and amazing lips, touch mine and the world spins with a different kind of magic. This kind isn’t evil or hard, but lovely and wild, and I melt into it. He melts into it too, I can tell. I can feel how much he loves me just by the touch of his lips. And it is a good love, a really good love.
I make myself move away just enough to say, “Change me.”
As soon as the words mingle with the screaming air, I push my lips against his again. The kiss morphs into something different, something filled with a new kind of power. My focus leaves and it’s just spinning, spinning until Issie’s scream and a tiger’s roar slash through the spinning, until Astley breaks away the kiss. I manage to open my eyes and see his beautiful, worried face. Blood is smeared on his forehead just below the hairline. I will miss him so much. I will miss all of them. I want so badly to have some sort of happily ever after where we don’t have to battle evil or save the world, where I get to finish high school and go to college and save the world by writing letters to dictators instead of killing monsters. I want a world where my body doesn’t feel like it’s about to implode, where I get to love Astley and be his queen, where there’s no crazy Hel pit right beside me. I want a world where I don’t kill. I want a world where I can live my life with kindness.
“I love you,” I say, and I’m saying it to all of them, to Astley and Issie and Betty and Devyn, to my mom safely far away, to Nick, to this crazy Maine town, to all of it, but especially to the king in front of me. “I love you and love is magic.”
He reaches out to me. “No. I can’t … You can’t do this, Zara. You—”
But I scramble forward out of his reach and fall, tumbling into the flames that are fire and cold, tumbling toward death.
“I love you, Astley.”
In the last second I remember my father, my pixie father, and how he came through for me. So with the last ounce of will that I have left, I whisper it, and hope that he and the higher powers can hear.
“I forgive you,” I whisper. “I forgive you and I thank you, Dad.”
The frosty fires of Hel wait below me. And I fall.
CNNS NEWS
Emergency Management Agencies from throughout the northeastern state of Maine responded to the town of Bedford last night when a mysterious sinkhole appeared beneath a local theater that was hosting a high school fund-raiser. Dozens were injured. At least twelve died and many remain unaccounted for today as authorities mounted cleanup and rescue operations. Bedford
has recently been the site of multiple abductions …
I wake up. There’s this smell of a man in the room—warm and crisp. The heat of a fire pushes against my skin and I can feel it against my face before I even open my eyes.
I clear my throat and then realize there are fingers touching my fingers, gently holding my hand on top of a soft, furry covering. My lungs haul in air. I manage to push my shoulders up and the fingers on mine squeeze gently, reassuring.
“How long have I been out?”
Opening my eyes takes effort, but it’s worth it to see him, right there in front of me. He’s so beautiful, golden. It’s so hokey, but it’s how he is. He is warmth to me. And he holds my hand. And he looks at me like he loves me. And he has tears in the corners of his eyes.
“You’re here.” My voice is hoarse and full of tears. “Are you dead too? Did the world survive?”
“It survived. The pit closed after you fell in. There’s a huge hole now. They are calling it a sinkhole.”
“But Issie, Betty … everyone else?”
“They survived.”
“Cassidy?”
“She is in a hospital in Boston, but alive.”
Beyond Astley is a window with an ornate gilded frame, beyond it is a world covered in ice and frost. It hangs from the trees, covers the ground. I’m in Hel.
“Am I dead?”
He moves forward, scooching up on the bed, completely obscuring my view of the world. “That’s debatable. You are technically half-dead, but the rules are being broken for you because you risked so much to save us. The moment you want to, Hel is allowing you to go back. She has a soft spot for you.”
That’s nice to know. My lips are dry but they manage to smile. Then I realize all the possibilities.
“Wait. Are you dead?” I ask.
Astley’s eyes flicker and widen and he leans forward, kissing my forehead; soft lips, cool against my skin. Then he settles back in a chair, never letting go of my hand, his gaze fixing me. One tiny tear leaks its way onto his cheek, slowly traveling down toward his lips.
“I am not dead. And this time, Zara White,” he says, “this time it is my turn to rescue you.”