Endure (10 page)

“Zare?” Issie nudges me with her hip as I stand there motionless in front of the spaghetti sauce. There are two options squeezed in between diapers and boxes of macaroni and cheese. One is Ragú. Nick loves Ragú.

“Yeah . . .” The word leaves my mouth super slowly. “I’m fine. Just . . . just tired of spaghetti, you know? And that whole draining-my-soul-energy thing last night to save Astley. I am fine.”

She studies my face like she knows I’m lying. She throws her arm around my shoulders and gives me a one-armed bro hug since we’re both carrying things. The door to the store opens, making a jingly bell noise. I can smell it’s a pixie. Pushing Issie behind me, I stand up as straight as I can to see over the rows of flour and sugar and Maxwell House coffee. The moment I see him, I relax. I even smile.

“Hey, Astley!” Issie says, popping out from behind me. “Long time no see.”

He tilts his head. His blondish hair flops a bit onto his forehead. “I saw you this morning, Isabelle.”

She cringes at the use of her full name.

“It’s an expression, dude. Geesh.” She turns to me. “He is sweet but way behind the times.”

“I know.” I smile at Issie and then at Astley.

He’s closed the distance between us. “Spaghetti? Again?”

I nod.

“You could have dinner with me,” he offers.

“I would, but . . .”

His expression hardens just a little. Nobody else would notice it, but I do.

“But you have to feed him.” Astley nods, grabs a water bottle out of the refrigeration unit, and then takes my spaghetti and sauce out of my arms. “Well, then at least let me pay.”

I do because, since I am technically the queen to his king now, his money is half my money or something like that. I don’t know. All I know is there’s a bank account in Switzerland that has my name on it. Austin’s working at the counter, and he’s firing away eight thousand questions about training. As Astley pays, I read the flyers tacked up on the wall next to the checkout counter. There are old ones for spaghetti suppers. There are newer ones about grief.

MISSING LOVED ONES? JOIN US. If the mystery and disappearances are getting you down, you aren’t alone. Come join others who share in your sorrow and long for answers. Don’t grieve alone.

I touch the yellow piece of paper without even realizing it. It’s only when skin meets paper that I know what I’m doing.

“Zara?” Astley’s voice is at my ear. His breath rustles softly against my hair, the skin of my earlobe.

“Yeah?”

“Nick isn’t dead anymore,” he whispers low, calm. His voice is like a heater rumbling to life in a car. It holds the promise of comfort and warmth. I’m not sure if that promise is because he is my king and I am pixie-bound to him in ways I don’t understand, or if it’s just because he is nice.

Either way, he is right about Nick. I swallow hard. “I know. I know he’s not dead.”

And then Issie says the words that I can’t say. “It just sometimes still feels like he is, right?”

Before I can respond Astley sniffs the air. “Zara . . .”

The way he says my name makes the tiny hairs on my arms bristle. I hand Issie the bag of food and step back from the wall, turning just as Frank comes in the door. He slams it open so hard that it hits the wall.

Austin curses behind us. “Dude, you’ve got to be more careful. The glass on that thing cracks.”

Frank glares at him. “Shut up.”

I don’t know if there’s something in his voice or his gaze, but the very talkative Austin actually stops talking, which is too bad, because he could have distracted him. I try to move in front of Issie and Astley, protecting them, but Astley makes the same move. We bump hips.

“Brilliant. You are so out of synch you collide,” Frank snarks.

He starts laughing. It’s a crazy person/pixie laugh, the kind that just rumbles through his chest and splurts out into the air, uncontrolled and revealing how wild he is inside.

“That’s one of them, isn’t it?” Austin says behind us. Austin wants to be a cop. He’s gone to the junior trooper program in Vassalboro with state troopers and everything. He’s pretty tough and calm in a crisis.

“Yep,” Issie answers while taking a step forward.

I direct my attention to Frank. “You could at least shut the door behind you.”

“My apologies.” He kicks it shut with his foot and then looks Astley up and down like he’s sizing up a piece of meat. “The question truly is: should I kill you now? It’s a shame the poison didn’t work, isn’t it? Good waste of time. And time is ticking, isn’t it? As your mother would say, Astley, ‘Always ticking. Always ticking.’ ” He mimics Isla’s demented singsong voice as he says it.

“Oh, I do not think that is the question,” I say, stepping one more foot forward. “I think the question is should
I
kill
you
?”

“Crap. She’s a badass,” Austin says pretty admiringly, while both Issie and Astley say my name in a warning voice.

“So tough now. I miss the innocent, crying princess pining over her dead wolf.” Frank tsks at me and then leaps, showing teeth. He hits me right in the stomach with his foot, but I grab it at the ankle, pulling him down with me and then pushing him back. His body arches and hits the jars of penny candy even as my own body thumps to the ground. Glass smashes on the floor. Gummy worms and fireballs free themselves and splat or roll across the wooden floor. I feel bad about that. Poor Austin. Poor gummies.

“Zara!” Astley roars, but instead of helping me up, he flings himself toward Frank. Frank’s already standing and ready. He moves like he’s going to rip Astley’s neck out.

“No!” Everything that happened to Nick flashes back to me and I scream the word as I make a football-player tackle, hitting Frank midstomach. We both schlump into the edge of a row of shelves. The wood cracks and the shelf breaks, cans of corn and spinach topple onto us.

“Zara!” Astley yanks me backward by my legs. He must overestimate the amount of force needed, because I slide all the way across the snow-puddle-wet floor to the counter, bumping into Issie’s boots.

As I scramble back up, Astley and Frank begin to fight with fists. Astley’s obviously still weak. His blows aren’t as powerful as Frank’s. He’s faster, but not full form. If this turns out to be a battle of pixie kings, Frank is going to win. I start to rush back over there, but Issie grabs me by the arm.

“Get out of the way, Zara,” she says.

“But—”

She’s holding a gun. A gun! Where did she get a freaking gun?

Austin yells at Issie, “Aim at his head.”

Issie says, “Dude! Evil dude! Stop now or I’ll shoot.”

She looks at me for approval. For a second, I contemplate taking the gun out of her shaking hands. Astley roars in pain as Frank’s fist comes at him.

“Astley, get back!” I yell.

And he leaps away, not asking why, just trusting.

And Issie pulls the trigger.

The noise is deafening and the recoil of the gun thrusts Issie back against the counter. Grabbing her by the waist, I make sure she doesn’t fall over.

“I mean it. Next one is in your head, psycho pixie guy!” she yells.

“Just do it!” Austin’s reaching for her. “Give me the gun, I’ll do it. Issie!”

But she hesitates, and as she does Frank stands up, wipes off the front of his long leather coat. The bullet didn’t hit him, at least not anywhere critical. He says, “The clock is ticking. Time is running out. Tick. Tock. Tick.”

“What?” Astley starts for him again but he leaps out the now-broken window and rushes off.

I stare at the door blankly. “I should chase him.”

“No.” Astley shakes his head. “He was just toying with us. They do that. Try to make us afraid. It makes the death better.”

“N-nice,” Austin says. “Oh crap. I better go erase the video. We have a video camera up there.”

He points to a blinking red light on the ceiling and leaps over the counter, rushing off to the back wall and a door marked
employees only
, yelling at us to watch the register.

Issie plops the gun on the counter.

“Where did you get that?” I ask. “And awesome job, by the way.”

“My mom. She bought it off some guy behind the library.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

We stand there for a second. I try to let everything that happened sink in. Some woman with mall hair comes to the door, peeks in, and backs right back out. Astley has grabbed a broom and is sweeping at the glass and gummies on the floor.

“That’s kind of sexy, man doing domestic duties,” Issie whispers. She turns and looks at me full-on. “I can’t believe I fired a gun!”

“I can’t believe you had a gun and didn’t tell me.”

“I know! My mom made me promise not to tell anyone. It’s completely illegal to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. Plus, she’s made me take it to school.”

Grabbing a dust pan so Astley can sweep the glass into it, I throw her a look, and she lifts her hands into the air in mock surrender. “I know! I know! I still should have told you, but did I or did I not rock back there? I missed his head, though. I was aiming for his head.”

Astley has this terrified look on his face. “Have you ever shot a gun before?”

“No.” Issie starts picking up fallen cans. “But I remembered how to get the safety off and everything. Go me.”

The door slams open again and we all stop midcleanup, but it’s just Nick, albeit Nick looking frantic and energized. He’s so focused he doesn’t even ask what we’re doing and we’re all so stunned we don’t even ask how he found us.

“I saw the truck outside. I’ve been monitoring the police dispatches on my laptop,” he says. “There’s been another tiger sighting outside some woman’s house on Elm Street by the river. I guess it happened last night. The state police came.”

My stomach pits into something hard and I dump the glass from the dustpan into a trash can behind the counter, beneath the lottery tickets. “Did they find her?”

“No.”

I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I hand Issie the dustpan for a second so I can fix my coat and I explain that to him. “It’s like if they find her we know she’s safe and out of the woods, but then you know—”

“They might put her down because she’s an animal.” He grimaces.

“Exactly.” I shudder. “We should go look near there. I’ll check the river through town. I’ll start at the harbor park where the boats get put in and work up to the library and the jail. Can you go up past the dam? In the more wooded areas?”

He nods. “Of course.”

Austin tells him what happened as I check with Astley and Issie that this is an okay plan, which it is, and Astley will come look too as soon as he’s cleaned up and gets gun-toting Issie home. Nick and I actually walk out together and he tells me that Cassidy and Dev are running a training again early this evening. Two in one day may seem like a lot, but it’s essential.

“It’s nice to be on the same team,” I blurt when we get to Gram’s truck.

He nods and does this little half-smile thing. “Yeah. I figure there are bigger things going on here than our romantic issues and, um, my ego.”

“And my ego.”

“More my ego.” He laughs. He runs a hand through his perpetually messed-up hair.

“I think so too,” I quickly correct myself. “I think we need to focus on saving the world, getting things safe, you know?”

“I know.” He looks around.

“But maybe after this, maybe we can figure things out again. Make it so you can talk to me?” I hate how my voice lifts up at the end of that. I sound so weak.

“Maybe. Yeah.” He shakes his head. “But we are talking now, Zara.”

“Oh. True.” But it isn’t the same. I wave good-bye and then I open up the door, turn on the truck, and drive away.

I drive past the Y, and the tow-truck place where the guy puts anti-government stuff on his signs, the old school that’s now a daycare center, and the lawyers’ offices. I look for pixies and a tiger grandmother the entire time. It’s late in the day. We aren’t as active in the daytime because, like most predators, we like night. Still, I look for them and her, for signs of the apocalypse. And the signs are hard to see. You could fool yourself into thinking this is just any regular smallish Maine town in the winter. Houses line up in spaced-out rows along the three main streets. Sidewalks are shoveled or plowed. It looks so normal. Cold but normal.

Slush kicks up beneath my tires. The wipers slowly move back and forth across my windshield, pushing the snowflakes off the truck and back into the air, free for another second before they fall to the ground.

I stop at the red light, watch an oil truck slide through the intersection, think about my grandmother out there attacking pixies, out of her head with grief because of Mrs. Nix’s death. The tip said that they saw her by the river, and they weren’t wrong. As I drive into the harbor parking lot, she comes into view, prowling back and forth in a straight line by the metal docks. One lobsterman in a heavy gray coat and hat is stalled out in a dinghy that floats halfway between the land and a lobster boat. The little white boat bobs as he frantically tries to restart the outboard engine. The poor man probably thinks he’s had so much coffee brandy that he’s hallucinating a tiger.