“I heard.” I swallow hard. My thoughts are scattering about like the towels.
“Well, would you like to know why?” she asks.
For a second I’m not sure if she’s asking if I want to know why my thoughts are so scattered, but then I realize that she’s asking whether I want to know why she won’t need to kill me. I force my voice to sound noncommittal and say, “Not really.”
Anger ripples off her, red and full of heat. I try to focus on Astley, give him some of my power somehow, the way he did to me when I fought Frank, the way I did when he was poisoned. If I can make him stronger, then maybe he can move, attack them from behind—
She interrupts my thoughts again. “The point is not to kill you but to make my son weak and to torture him in the process. The poison was a good attempt. But you are too strong together. So the question becomes, how do I make him weak if poison did not accomplish that goal? I take away his queen. I’ve done it before.” She smiles. “But that way was too easy … killing her like that. Instead, I have watched how his heart aches because he cannot attain you—not for real—because of your foolish pining for that wolf. Silly girl. It will be even harder for Astley’s fragile little emotions if you are not his kind. He will lose you a little more. Love is his weakness.”
Guilt pushes into my heart as she takes a fingernail and taps my chest. The tiny crescent of it hits just below my collarbone. She’s right. I hurt Astley constantly because I hadn’t loved him back the way he needed me to. And why? It’s Astley’s face I see now when I close my eyes. It’s Astley I hope for right now, right at this scary moment. Not Issie, not Nick or Amelie on the other side of the door somewhere. It’s Astley I worry about the most. Now that it’s too late, my feelings are suddenly, completely clear. I love Astley.
“Don’t you hurt him,” I say like I’m in a position to demand anything, tied to a wall, wrists sizzling.
She lifts an eyebrow as if to say I am too silly for words. And I have to admit that it’s nice she’s stopped talking, but then she starts again. And the eyebrow lifting is a little overdone, anyway, and …
She says, “Do you know what I shall do?”
“Talk me to death?”
“Snippy. Nice. You always are spunky, so unlike my son.” She spits out the word “son” as she trails her fingernail up to my chin and then grabs my face violently in her hand. “I shall make you human again.”
I stutter, trying to turn my head out of her grasp, but I’m weak. The pain from my wrists, the iron in my system, has made me vulnerable. “Human?”
“You did not know I could do that, did you?” She flings my head to the side as she lets go of me. My ear pounds against the wall. Pain spirals through my head and it makes it hard to focus, but I manage to keep listening, and she, of course, keeps talking. “Let me inform you of something, Zara of the White, Zara of the stars. I collect clocks because that is where people of our race have always hid our secrets. We hide papers, spells, inside the mechanisms of time. It’s fitting, I think, to hide the secrets of the past inside the machines that count us into the future. Tick-tock.”
I slowly move my head back to look at her. She’s smiling. Her lipstick has smeared just the tiniest bit and left a dot of pink on one of her front teeth.
“And I just thought it was because you were crazy,” I sputter through the pain. “Maybe had some weird clock fetish.”
“Never underestimate the people you think are crazy. They are the ones who see things you fail to see.” She cocks her head and switches gears. “The point is that in one of those clocks I found out a secret. Any pixie can make a pixie if they kiss them with intent, but only queens can take a pixie and turn them back into a feeble nothing.”
“Back?” I don’t follow her.
“Back to human.”
I must stare at her blankly for a second, because she smiles and taps my cheek gently. “You’re in shock, dear. Close your mouth. You’re gaping. It is unattractive.”
“So …” I try to wrap my head around it. “You’re going to unpixie me?”
She reaches up a long, delicate arm and pets me on the head. “Exactly.”
I have a tiny and quick internal debate about whether or not I should ask her how this process happens, and as I do the wind rushes through a window that I hadn’t noticed, blowing dust from the outside and pieces of dead grass across the floor. A mouse scuttles in the wall, probably looking for a safe place to hide from the cold or maybe to hide from us.
“Won’t that keep me from starting the apocalypse?” I blurt.
She giggles. “So very stupid and so very wrong.”
Issie scoots even closer to Astley. The pixie henchmen ignore her. She’s human. She’s obviously not a threat and Astley is unconscious, so even if she somehow manages to free him, what difference will that make? Still, I love her for trying. I just want her to be careful.
Isla’s full focus is on me. A watch on her wrist ticks away seconds and then she asks, “Would you like to know what I have to do?”
I don’t answer.
“A queen merely has to kiss with intention, just the same as before.”
“You’re going to kiss me?” I croak out the question. The thought is beyond revolting. Not because she’s a girl, but because she’s old and she’s crazy-evil or maybe it’s evil-crazy, one of the two.
She smiles. “I kiss you. You become human. Astley loses his power and the prophecy has no hope of becoming true.”
Finally! She’s finally said something important. “Prophecy?”
“You still don’t know even that? But what can one expect from a group of heroes that can’t even remember BiFrost is the bridge and not BiForst.” She giggles. The mouse scuttles around some more. “So silly.”
“It was both ways on the Internet,” I spew back. “And the newspaper spelled it the BiForst way.”
She arches an eyebrow. “The Internet? You base your defense against the apocalypse on information you’ve gathered from the Internet and a tiny local newspaper? Oh, that’s so precious!”
She starts laughing for real this time, which really doesn’t make me feel much better about myself, or the situation. If she’s confident enough to laugh, then I really don’t have a way out, do I? Issie’s tied. Astley is passed out on the floor, bound up in iron, skin sizzling. There are two goons blocking the door that leads out of here, all massive muscle. There’s been no sign of Nick and Amelie. And Isla is right in front of me, rubbing her hands together like she’s about to get a brand-new clock or something.