“What do I have to do?” My question comes out flat, almost robotic.
Frank bounces up and down with glee, stomping his heeled boot on Nick’s finger.
“Stop it! Hurt him any more and I’ll refuse,” I yell, taking a step forward.
Frank presses his boot into Nick’s finger again. A bone cracks. “I hardly think you’re in a state to bargain. I truly wish my sister hadn’t humanized you. I wanted you for my queen. But maybe I could turn you back; it might be worth the risk.”
And then Astley steps into the room from another chamber. He is uninjured. He meets my eyes. “She’s too puny and too easily manipulated by her heart. She is an unworthy queen, hardly worth anything, let alone a risk.”
“Astley?” I gasp out his name. Why isn’t he hurt? Why is he smiling like that? What is he doing?
He walks right up to Frank’s side and says, “She’d be so fun to torture, though.”
“You can torture her later.” Frank brushes a bloodied hand against his own cheek, stroking it. “Let’s bring her to Loki.”
“But … But … Astley?” Pixies start grabbing and pushing me forward. I try to plant my feet, look to Nick for help, but he’s on the floor, trapped and injured.
“He lied to us,” Nick says.
“You think?” I snap. Astley shrugs as I say it. He motions for the pixies to let me go and they do, almost as if he’s their ruler now.
“But they poisoned you,” I say. “You were fighting with us. Your mother—”
“All that happened,” he says. “All that happened and then I saw the error of my ways. The Council convinced me. They were on his side all along. They sent me here because they wanted to keep up appearances, make it look as though they were on the side of continuity, but Frank and my mother had paid them off, convinced them that the end of humans would be the beginning of a true pixie realm, where we would not have to hide who we are anymore, where we could take our rightful places, where love and matters of the heart are unimportant, where our needs are always met, our energy always strong, untainted by humans and iron and technology.”
He comes closer to me, but not close enough for me to attack him, which is totally unfortunate because I’d really like to rip his gorgeous hair out.
“How could you do this?” I gasp and say the obvious, “I trusted you.”
Nick growls on the floor, which probably means that I’m an idiot or something. My heart breaks in half.
“We were going to lose,” Astley says. “The Council was on their side. It seemed—It seemed the only way. And Frank is so much more powerful with me.”
“And he is more powerful with me, especially since he’s lost his little queen,” Frank says. “So, we made a deal. He comes to my side. I do not kill his second, Amelie. His pixies survive in a world where they do not have to pretend to be things that are beneath them.”
“Humans,” Nick sputters.
“And what does he give you?” I ask Frank.
“You.” Frank points at me.
“Me?” Anger makes me want to tear off my own skin. “I am not a possession that someone can give.” I turn to Astley and spit out, “You don’t own me. You are nothing to me. Don’t you realize what you’re doing? You’re condemning all of us.”
Astley’s face twitches and for a second his eyes almost look like they’ll cry. But the moment passes and then his face hardens again, and when he speaks his voice is nasty, condescending. “No, you are the one who condemns us, Zara.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“He means,” Frank finishes for him, “that the fate of all pixies lies in your hands. You’re the key to Ragnarok, pure, innocent Zara of White.”
“Why me?”
Frank laughs. “It’s because of the prophecy. It is because you are the child of the willow and the White, the stars. You are human. You were pixie. You are the one who changes. You are the one who would sacrifice everything so that those she loves survive. The only thing you lack to complete the prophecy is your fae blood and the magic. You are sadly without magic now. It makes you far less interesting and less useful to the do-gooders of this pathetic world.”
“You tell her too much,” Astley barks out.
“It matters not. She will do what we ask. I can tell her it all.”
Glaring at him, I mutter, “Then do it. Tell me how to stop the end of the world.”
“You have to die.”
“Duh.”
“You have to jump into the mouth of Hel, Zara,” Astley says. “You have to sacrifice yourself.”
I look around.
Frank starts laughing. “She’s looking for it! How cute. It is not here yet. You have to free Loki first. Come on, idiotic Zara White. Let’s go free the god.”
I want to process the information Frank just gave up, figure out Astley’s traitor ways, but I will myself to focus on the moment. I try to remember everything Devyn has ever told me about Loki. Different sources say different things about Loki’s relationship to the other gods. He was helpful and problematic. He is the father of Fenrir, the wolf that ate my pixie dad, just swallowed him whole.
“She is thinking,” Frank says as we walk through a tunnel. The surface is uneven, the stalactites are glowing orange like there is fire buried deep beneath them.
“She is always thinking.” Astley says this scornfully, like thinking is a bad thing.
That’s obviously his spiteful way of trying to make me stop thinking, but I won’t. I focus. Loki. He was a shape shifter, some say the first of the shape shifters, and has been cited as being a fly, a seal, a salmon, a horse. But when we enter the second cavern, he is shaped as a man, a suffering man.
I must gasp out loud, because Frank says, “Horrible, is it not? And yet, this is what the good gods have done to him.”
“For punishment?” I squeak out as the pixies pull me forward across the wet stone floor.
Frank indicates for them to let me go. They do, but hover behind me, in case I decide to make a run for it. Frank moves to my side and whispers almost in my ear, “You remember what he did?”
I can’t.
“He is said to have engineered the death of the much-loved god Baldr. So, to punish him, the other gods bound him here. Do you know what he is bound with?”