“Crap.”
I flip open my phone. Press the speed-dial number two. It rings and rings.
“Issie?”
“Zara?” Her voice is muffled and I’m not sure why. It almost sounds like she’s been crying. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“Yep. Okey-dokie-Pinocchi . . .”
I smush the phone between my shoulder and my head and put both hands on the wheel. “I have the feeling.”
“The pixie feeling?”
“Yeah.”
Keep driving. Going forward. Moving.
“The ‘pixie king is near you so your skin feels like spiders are crawling on it’ feeling?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh-oh.” She mumbles something away from the phone and adds, “She’s got the wiggly feeling.”
“Would you hate me if I asked you to come over?”
“We’ll be right there. Devyn’s here. Call Nick right now!”
I click off the phone again and think for a second. I don’t want Nick in danger. Putting the phone away, I turn up the radio again and then round a curve. I’m barely through it when I slam on the brakes.
There’s a blond man standing in the middle of the road, waiting. Oh please, do not let him be waiting for me.
Definition
Pixie-led: to be lost, to be confused, to be led astray
Yoko skids out of control. She slides left, then skitters right, rushing toward a tree. The tree trunk is massive and thicker than my car. If I hit it? It won’t be good. It’ll be broken-bone bad. I’m going to hit it.
“No!” My voice is screaming the word but I don’t really hear it. I’m pressing harder on the brakes. The brakes are screaming too.
“Nick!” I yell his name without thinking about it. The car smashes into something huge and hard. The tree? My head whips back and forward or forward and back. I don’t know. The airbag smashes into my face and chest. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. The world is plastic and pain. Wires burn. The smell of acid hits my nose. I push at the airbag. My entire chest aches.
“Get out! Get out!” A guy’s voice yells at me.
The door wrenches free. Cold air rushes in. It smells worse now. More burning. Hands are reaching for me as I scream and flail, stuck. “Nick?”
“I am attempting to help you,” the man says. He is not Nick. Of course. Of course he’s not Nick. Focus, I need to focus.
I try to pull in a big breath. “I can’t move.”
“Your seat belt.”
Seat belt? What’s a seat belt? My brain can’t quite compute.
“Unclick it.”
Click? Seat belt? Right. Hands reach across my waist. Fingers push at my seat belt. His fingers. The guy in the road. Not Nick. The pixie. The young one, who was injured.
“I am unable to get it,” he says. “Damn, I despise iron. I should have taken my pills.”
I try to reach around too and free myself, but my arm’s not quite working. It’s the same arm this pixie Ian broke when he kidnapped me and tried to turn me. It feels broken or sprained again, judging by the pain spiraling up into my shoulder.
The pixie’s voice gets urgent and higher pitched. “Fire!”
“Yoko? Yoko’s on fire?”
“The car is on fire. Please, just stay still so I can help you.”
I don’t move even though everything inside of me is shrieking, Get out, get out, run! Something is ripping. The seat belt? How can he rip the seat belt? Hands are yanking me out of the car, into the cold. But there’s heat pressing at my back. Pain shifts from my arm to my chest. My nose burns from the smell of hot metal and rubber and chemicals burning.
He groans and falls backward into the snow. I tumble on top of him. There are all these pinging noises coming from the direction of the car. I manage to turn my head enough to look but my neck is all stiff and crazy slow. Yoko is a jumbled mass of steel. Her door is wide open. Flames shoot out of the hood. The smoke is heavy and dark, toxic and unworldly looking. Glass breaks and falls onto the road.
“It might explode,” I say, sounding like I’m asleep or I’ve lost forty IQ points or something. “Cars can explode.”
He nods and stands up. “Are you capable of walking?”
“I—I don’t know. I—That’s a good question.”
He bends and pulls me up into his arms. He drapes me over his shoulder and starts walking fast down the snowbank. His feet are barely touching the ground.
“You’re hurt,” I gasp. “Your stomach. You’ll hurt yourself more.”
More glass shatters.
“You are suddenly caring about a pixie?” He laughs. It’s a harsh, awful sound full of pain. I don’t know if the pain is mental or physical, I just wish I could fix it somehow, make it better. He smirks. “What is your boyfriend going to say about that?”
He falls to the ground in a sitting position. I slide off his shoulder, coughing. My hip hits the hard, packed-down snow. We’re a football field away from Yoko. She’s smashed into a huge tree. Her hood is crunched in and wrapped around the trunk. I struggle into a sitting position. My neck doesn’t feel like it wants to support my head. “We have to get the fire out. My car—”
She explodes. The sound blasts my ears. Before I know what he’s doing, the pixie guy grabs me and pulls me to him. His hands wrap around my head and he twists so his back is facing the car, like he’s protecting us from the impact, which is really nice of him, but I don’t know why he’s taking care of me, why—
“Oh man. Oh . . .” I can’t even begin to breathe. His jacket is in my mouth. It tastes like wool, bitter and nasty. I struggle to get enough room to look. Orange and black flames leap out of Yoko’s body. The first things I think of? My cell phone. My cell phone is in there. And my iPod. And my homework. And my laptop. My head throbs. Is this normal? Is it normal to think?
“This is why I hate technology!” he half mutters, half shouts. “It is ridiculously dangerous.”
Suddenly my head clears and I am furious-angry. “What? This is not technology’s fault. This is your fault,” I yell at him. “You were in the road. That’s why I swerved in the first place. You made me crash.”
He scoffs. His nose actually twitches.
“Why were you in the road?” I demand, trying to keep my arm stable. “Were you trying to kill me?”