“You ready?” I ask.
“You don’t even have a weapon,” he scoffs as some people giggle.
“The pixies won’t need them,” I explain.
“Show-off,” Brianne Cox says.
“He’ll totally take her,” Paul says.
“Nope. I saw her fight the other night. She has mad skills,” Callie insists.
I ignore them.
“Fine,” Austin says. He raises his sword in front of him, all six feet, four inches of jock. “Show me.”
“Be gentle, Zara!” Cassidy yells.
In less than a second, I zip toward him. He lifts the sword and makes to lower it on my skull, but my skull is already past him. I’m behind him. He turns, but I reach up and grab his sword arm, twist it, and at the same time kick at his knees. I make sure it’s not too hard because I don’t want to actually hurt him. It’s just enough to make him lose his balance and fall. As he does, I snatch his sword away, flip it in the air, catch it again. By the time he hits the ground, I am pointing the weapon at his chest.
He swears. Sweat beads on his forehead.
“Holy … How did you do that?” Cierra is basically hero-worshipping me.
Flushed, I step away from Austin. I don’t know how to answer as he scrambles up on his feet. He cringes like he’s embarrassed. I can smell fear coming off of him too. It smells like steak, which makes me shudder. I toss the sword back to him.
“That’s how pixies fight,” I say, ignoring Cierra’s question. “They don’t fight fair. They fight for life or death. They fight for fun. They do not fight like you.”
I back up, brush the hair out of my face.
“She’s not even winded,” someone whispers.
Sucking in my lips, I look to Issie. She takes the cue and claps her hands. “Okay. Everybody fight hard this time. Do not be afraid to bruise each other. These babies are foam. It won’t really hurt … too much.”
I walk back toward the bleachers and grab the training notebook we worked on last night. It’s time for drills. We get them to line up and I shout directions: lunge, extend your sword arm, recover. We do it again and again until people are rubbing their quads.
“With swords, when you want to kill, it’s all about closing the distance and making multiple parries,” I yell. “And when you want to survive, it is all about keeping that distance open, but always keeping your eyes on the predator. So, let’s do backward lunges this time. Pick a partner. One side offense, one defense.” I wait a second while they pair up. They are moving slowly, so tired from just a little bit of training. “Okay. Let’s go. Left side, defense. Right side, offense. Lunge. Lunge. Swords up! Swords up! Eye on the target. Faster. Lunge. Parry. Lunge.”
“Zara.” Cassidy grabs me by the shoulders and then fixes my hair into my ponytail. She tugs at it pretty aggressively, but it feels good—like she’s taking care of me.
“You have a visitor,” she says. With her elbow she points at the gym doors while her hands tug the elastic and twist it around my hair. Looking up I see Astley in all his blond regalness standing there. His hands are braced against the doorframe in a cross-like pose. His mouth is pulled in and he’s exuding the smell of pain.
“He doesn’t look happy, does he?” I ask.
“Did you tell him we were doing this?” she asks.
“No. He was busy dying. I was busy helping him live. You know … priorities.”
She pats my shoulder and pushes me toward the doors. I walk underneath the hoop, look up at its loops of yarn or netting or whatever it is. It’s all one string but twisted and manipulated to look like a bunch of diamonds. It has a purpose. All of us here are like that net—we have a purpose. And judging by his face, Astley has a purpose too.
Nick catches up to me in three strides, touches my elbow, and says, “You okay?”
“I think he might be mad,” I say.
“Good,” he chuckles. “Good.”
I could rush across the gymnasium in two seconds and get to him faster than the time it takes the humans to pull in a full breath. We both know that. But I don’t. Instead I walk slowly and remember the first day I ever saw him. It wasn’t long ago. I was running on the unused railroad tracks that cross the access road to the high school. I’d gone left toward Bedford Building Supply and the backwoods. There are cross-country trails in there. The snow covered everything but I had spikes on, which helped keep me from slipping. He’d been tied to a tree, dying and broken. I knew he was pixie, but I’d still let him go. Somehow I trusted him even back then.
Astley’s wearing his cargo jacket again. His hands rest on his hips. He’s got dark low-slung jeans on and he looks … he looks beyond mad and pale and not perfectly healthy.
“What is this?” he asks.
I stand close to him, right in his face so I can catch him if he wobbles or something. “We’re training, and you should be in bed resting.”
He ignores that. “Training for what?”
“To fight pixies.”
There is this horrible pulse of anger that seems to fill the air. It’s red and hard and I can almost smell it. His face hardens but he doesn’t yell. Instead he just bangs out the words like bullets. “You cannot do things like this without telling me.”
“Why not?”
“Because, Zara, this has broad implications.” He turns his head away. A muscle in his jaw beats against his skin.
I wait for him to say more. He doesn’t. There’s a fire alarm on the wall. I resist the urge to smash the glass, pull the lever, and have the alarm sound just because I so badly want to rush out of here and away from this horrible tension. Instead I just say, “And …?”
He groans, leaves the gym, and enters the corridor. I follow him as he paces away, flashes up the stairs to the second floor, and then jumps down to the ground next to me again in a total display of pixie speed, pixie power despite last night’s near-death experience. “I have no desire to insist that you check with me before you do things, Zara, but this? This is huge. We will be sanctioned by the high council for this. You have revealed us to all these humans. You have no idea of the implications. We have hid our existence for centuries, Zara, centuries! And now you have undone all that hard work in a day.” He pauses, sways a bit. “This is what occurs when I am poisoned.”