“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.