I stir my eggs around my plate a little bit and then fork up some hash. It warms my mouth. “This is good.”
He smiles. “Thanks.”
“So you can cook, too?” I ask. “You’re perfect, aren’t you?”
“I am a werewolf,” he says between bites. He bends his head.
“That just gives you a totally good excuse for your pathetic temper.”
He wiggles his eyebrows. “True.”
“If I become the pixie queen, you’ll have to call me your majesty,” I tease.
“Never.”
“You’ll never call me your majesty? That’s mean. You are just a common ol’ werewolf, you know, and I’d be royalty.”
The fire crackles and a log moves. I jump but Nick doesn’t move at all. I guess it’s hard to faze a werewolf.
“You’ll never become the pixie queen. I won’t let you.” He locks eyes with me.
He does have the alpha-dog thing going for him. I can’t look away. Even if I did, I’d still feel them. Eyes. His eyes.
“Ugh. I hate this. I feel stuck.”
I thought I was moving forward finally. I mean, I thought I was stuck in Maine, but really slowly I was edging closer to the future, a future without my dad . . . but my future still, mine. Issie and Devyn are my friends. Nick is here. All that could just vanish. I wince. I don’t want to die.
Nick puts his plate down on the bricks. It wobbles a little on the unevenness. Free of things, he leans forward, hands flat on the floor, like the downward-dog yoga position.
“Zara?” His voice mellows out against me, but I decide to study my eggs. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“You can’t promise that. People can’t keep other people from getting hurt or killed.” Swallowing, I face him. His mouth is so close to mine. His eyes seem hungry and calm and strong, so I tell him, “A couple of weeks ago, I wouldn’t have cared. If I died. You know?”
He nods.
He waits.
My lips wiggle because I can’t find the right words. “I just missed my dad so much.”
I swallow again. Why is it so hard to swallow? “But now,” I move forward. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be scared. I just want to live.”
He lets my words settle and then he asks, “What changed?”
“I don’t know. You, maybe? Or maybe it was watching Issie being so happy and brave all the time? Or . . . ,” I move closer so my forehead touches his. “Maybe it was just being so scared. I knew. I just knew that I didn’t want to die.”
He kisses my nose. His lips trail to my cheek and then down to my lips, where he whispers, “I’ll keep you safe, Zara.”
I grab his shoulders in my hands. “But what about you? Who will keep you safe?”
“I’ll be fine.”
His lips brush against mine, pushing themselves into me. I push back. My hands leave his shoulders and move into his hair.
Gently I tug his face away.
“Do you promise?” I breathe against him. “Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
“We have to leave,” he says.
We stand in the cold kitchen, putting dishes in a waterless sink. Snow keeps piling up outside. My fingertips touch the cold window. “You’re kidding.”
I place the corned beef hash pan in the sink. The metal matches. Corned beef hash crud cakes the bottom of the pan in a brown crunchy mess.
I rip a paper towel off the roll. “Disgusting.”
“Zara? We can’t hide in your room again all night.” Nick reaches around me to grab the pan’s handle. He swirls the detergent around in there, spreading it out, so it touches all of the crud. “We have to get rid of this problem now.”
“Now?”
“While it’s still daylight.”
“Look at Mr. Proactive.”
“I’m serious, Zara.”
He puts the pan back in the sink. We can’t do anything with it, not now, not without water.
“I know. I know you’re serious, but I am not a snow person.” I rearrange my ponytail. My hair is not at its best due to the lack of a shower. I pull up my wool socks. I wear two pairs and they scrunch beneath my toes. “And where are we going to go? And what about Betty?”
“She should have been here by now,” he says and my heart tries to hide behind my lungs, not listening, but I do. I keep listening even though I’m so worried about Betty. “We’ll go to my house. We’ll get Issie and Devyn and make a plan.”
I point out the window. “And how are we going to get there?”
“My car.”
“The roads are bad. Betty said not to drive.”
“I know, but sometimes you have to break the rules.”
I give up. I don’t want to stay here without Betty. Especially not if the pixies are going to come back for a happy little return visit. I dash upstairs and get my Urgent Action letters.
“You have mail?” Nick scoffs.
“They’re Urgent Actions. They have to be sent out right away or else people could be tortured or killed or—”
He touches my lips with his fingers. “You are worse than I am.”
“Not true.”
We bundle up and head outside. We wipe the snow from Nick’s MINI. The trees worry me. Not the trees, really, but what might be beyond them.
The snow covers everything outside. It covers the branches and the cars, the land and the water. It covers the houses. Beneath it the world is lost. Beneath it the people are lost, the animals, the grass. Everything is just white. Blinding. White. Everything is gone. The hard lines of rooftops and tree limbs, the straight lines of roads, everything is blurred, covered, lost.
“My dad would have loved this. Just pulled out some skis and said, ‘Let’s have an adventure,’ ” I say.
“He sounds cool.”
“He was cool.”
“Must’ve been a were.”
“Yeah, right,” I say, letting that additional piece of knowledge bounce around the room, finally spoken out loud. “He said ‘Shining One’ in his note.”
Nick grabs a brush out of the MINI and whisks off the fine remains of the snow, but there’s a crust of ice that covers the windows. He gets back in the cab and turns the defroster on full blast.