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.