“Take Zach to the place of the pixies,” I said. “Only Zach. Let him see that I’m alive and unharmed. It’s not right to make them worry about me.”
Spring’s body glowed suddenly. She sang out. Her voice carried, a poignant note that made all the humans instantly quiet, and the pixies gathered above us. I touched Zach’s palm with the back of my clubbed hand and rubbed. It didn’t help him much. He didn’t know. Furthermore, I was in the land of dreams.
“Is this real, Spring?” I asked suddenly. “Or is this simply a dream? Am I dreaming about Zach?”
“Dreams are but another segment of reality, Soophee,” Spring said solemnly. She landed beside me and gazed up at Zach with a sincerity I found touching. “Sak has a darkness inside him. Soophee can free this darkness but it will try her sorely.”
“A darkness,” I repeated. Zach was staring intently at us. His perfect face was no less perfect with the shadows under his eyes and the tension lines bracketing his mouth. “Will he hurt the pixies? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?”
“Sak is not a threat to anyone but himself and perhaps the one you call ‘the burned man.’ We won’t talk about him, for talking about evil tempts evil to talk about us.” Spring launched herself into the air. She sang to the other pixies and they began to form lines to lead Zach with them. When the others tried to follow, a group of pixies prevented them by forming a line across their path.
“Only Zach then,” Gideon called, understanding immediately. “Get him some water. A pack with emergency gear. Get it quickly.”
A man ran for the pack and brought it back within a minute. Zach painstakingly put the pack on while carefully holding me in his hand. I clutched one of his fingers and he glanced down at me curiously. “You’re taking me to her, to Sophie?” he asked imperatively.
I nodded my head. I wished I could tell him. He seemed so disconsolate.
“Is she all right?” he asked earnestly. A light in his eyes revealed his eagerness.
Slowly, I nodded my head again but he noticed the hesitation and his face became grimmer. He didn’t trust me or perhaps he didn’t trust my hesitation. Since I couldn’t explain to him, I only touched his finger once again and then launched myself into the air.
“Wait,” he said softly. I hovered midair a few feet away. His steps faltered as he watched me. His face twisted again, the perfect visage was tortured. He stared at me as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. After what seemed like an eternity he said, “Oh, my God. Sophie? Is it…?”
For a moment I stopped flying and, like all flying things that stop flying, I instantly fell. His hand shot out and he caught me in the palm. Winded, I laid there and panted. I had landed half on my side and the pain radiated throughout my body. His palm had felt like I had landed on a sheet of iron. Spring appeared straight away, jittering anxiously. “Soophee,” she said with heartfelt urgency. “Is Soophee all right?”
I coughed and then sat up. Everything seemed all right. I remembered the pixie that I had caught once. She hadn’t been very happy either. It might seem inconsequential to the larger intelligence, but it wasn’t to the smaller one. Still it was better than hitting the ground and the pain was fading faster than I could have imagined.
“She said, ‘Sophie,’” Zach muttered. He stared down at me, still half crouched as he had been when he had reached out to save me. Then he called rapidly over his shoulder, “Gideon!”
Gideon appeared over Zach’s shoulder and looked down at me. The pixies looped above in restless circles. His teenage face was the epitome of astonishment. He stared and finally he said, “It is her. How can this be?”
I stood up shakily and let my wings flutter.
Spring landed beside me and said apologetically, “We forget how new Soophee is to the fine art of flying. She took to it so well, we forgot.”
“I’m all right,” I said, finally. “Spring,” I added. “We must go back to the midnight pool. I need to leave the world of dreams now. Can we do that?”
Spring buzzed straight up into the air. “Fly, Soophee. Fly with the sisters once more. We will bring Stern-Affectionate-Handsome-One-Who-Pines along as we return Soophee to where she belongs. Fear not for this one. He will soon receive what he wishes most in this world.”
I only thought about it once as I sprang into the air. Zach’s agonized cry of protest only gave me the slightest pause. I looked back and his hand was extended toward me in mute appeal. I couldn’t tell him that I was hurrying along so that I could return all the quicker, but I felt it all the same.
Chapter Twenty-One – The More Things Change…
I didn’t pretend that I understood how the firefly pixies could do the things that they did to me. I know that in one moment I was flying faster than I had flown before. I had a contingent of pixies spread out behind me, an arrow of green light that pointed the way to my destination. The urgency that I felt was secondary to the guilt over leaving Zach and Kara in a state of worry. Had I known that I was going to be gone for days, and not hours, I would have told someone. I would have left a note. I would have mentioned it to Lulu in passing so she could have leapt with cheerleader-like glee and passed it on to her cohorts with elementary school age reveling. Something, anything, to alleviate the unintentional pain I had caused.
Regardless of my guilt, one moment I was flying. The next moment I was lifting my head from my bent arm and moaning at the pain of stiff muscles. I was inside the cave again, stretched out along an uncomfortable lava floor, not far away from where the pixies were busy with their day to day activities. My mouth was dry and my body was screaming with remonstration. It didn’t feel like four days had passed, but my body was yelling at me that undoubtedly I had been lying there entirely too long.
The pixies flew toward me in a rush, their singsong voices lifted in supplication. I heard several different ones asking, “Is Soophee all right?” “Is Soophee all right?” “Soophee recovers?” I gathered by their level of concern that this was not something they did every day of the week.
I said, “I’m okay.” The voices immediately shushed. It took me a second to realize what I had done. Without thinking about it, I had unerringly replied in their language. The honeyed tones were the same. The pitch was much lower and sounded gravely in comparison to their dulcet voices. It didn’t sound exactly the same, but it was their language. I started in surprise. “You did that?”
One of the pixies flew in front of my face. I had thought that they looked identical, but having spent time with them, I could see the marginal differences in the shapes of their wings, in the iridescent spread of colors there, and in even the shapes of their eyes. I knew that I had met this pixie before, and I struggled for her name. Ah, it came to me. Flies-With-Red-Gold-Pink-Flowers. She sang to me, “This and more, Soophee. Now all will be clearer for us.”
“Okay, girls,” I muttered. “I’m going to go back outside and I don’t want to accidentally mush someone.”
There was a singsong yell. “Soophee is TURNING AROUND! We will get CLEAR!” It made me smile although I was achingly tired. Feeling like a giant in the land of the really teeny-weeny, I was extremely careful going out the same way I had come in. I couldn’t understood why it was a little easier squeezing out until I realized a few pounds must have melted off me inside the cave while I was dreaming.
Dreaming? I couldn’t have simply survived in there for four days without food and water, and especially without water. That meant I hadn’t really been asleep or that the pixies had done something to me. Whatever it had been had left me voraciously hungry and thirsty
“Couldn’t we have dreamed of eating?” I plaintively said in English. The pixies clouded the outside and cast curious glances at my words. Well, I didn’t know what they ate, but I was craving a pizza. Large, thick crusted, with extra cheese and don’t forget the mushrooms. Maybe Gibby had figured out some way of making cheese that would stay fresh while I had been gone.
Once I got outside it was dark. N
ot still dark, but dark again. The stars twinkled above and the moon was only a sliver of a thumbnail. It was an indicator that the four days that I had been in there weren’t my imagination.
I fumbled for water from the pool, cautious not to disturb the merman-like pixie counterparts in the current. They rushed me as well, their little bodies glowing greenly in the black waters, eager to see what I was doing. After my thirst was sated, I stumbled into the nearby woods and hoped that the pixies would give me a little privacy. Whatever had happened to me inside the pixie’s world hadn’t taken care of personal business and I couldn’t wait another minute.
When I came back to the pool the pixies were still aflutter with excitement. Several of them were calling elatedly, “Sak! Sak! Sak!”
I shivered. The air had become cold and I didn’t have an ounce of energy. But I did notice that my breathing was easier. My lungs felt completely normal and I knew that the pixies had done something about that as well. “Thanks,” I said softly. I was hungry, tired, and cold, and I couldn’t imagine why it was that I was tired, considering what I had been doing for four days. My muscles burned with disuse and I was wondering how I was going to make it back to the campground without lying down to get some real sleep.
Zach to the rescue once again. Oh, he couldn’t carry me all the way back, but he did have one of the emergency packs. It had a sleeping bag in it and some emergency provisions. That would take care of anything I needed, provided I could wait for him to show up.
I looked around slowly and went to replace the ferns over the opening to the pixie’s cave. Just in case anyone else wandered by and decided to take a looksee.
“Hey,” I sang to the pixies who were still buzzing about. “How long before Zach comes to us?”
The answer was typically pixie like. “Once Stern-Affectionate-Handsome-One-Who-Pines gets here, he will be here.”
Knowing that I didn’t have the energy to try to meet him, I huddled by the base of a tree and gathered my arms around my body. The pixies circled the tree and myself and droned comfortingly. Of course, I fell asleep with my head against the tree, not even caring that it was cold or that I was sitting up.
♦
Oh, I was warm. It felt good. I snuggled closer to my heat source and suddenly I could smell something masculine and heady. It was a combination of perspiration and spice and outdoors smell. Half-asleep, I didn’t even wonder at the origin. I had been in this position before. I had been held here in a comforting dream. It was a protected place and one that didn’t threaten me.
I smiled sleepily and listened for the sounds that would reveal where I was. For the moment my mind was still half lost in the throes of sleep. There weren’t the regular sounds of the camp – my bunk mates thumping out of their beds and struggling into cold clothing with barely repressed curses at the temperature. Outside wasn’t ringing with the sounds of people chopping wood or changing duties. Dimly I perceived I wasn’t at the camp. Not being there didn’t really bother me, either.
Then there was a memory. Walking, or rather, flying in the dream world with the firefly pixies came to me like a shot. It wasn’t exactly like a dream and it wasn’t exactly like a memory but a vivid twisting of both that seemed like a remarkable tale. I realized that I wasn’t in the cave because the cave wasn’t exactly warm. And the birds were chirping happily far above me.
I grasped that I was inside a sleeping bag and that I was lying on the ground next to something that was very warm. For a split second I was waking up on the side of a mountain, expecting to hear my father moving around nearby. It frightened me and I jerked abruptly, forcing the thought away. It had been long before and the time was over.
Then there was the undeniable and distant trumpeting of a Big Mama as it coursed the Redwoods trail to the grasslands where they fed. I opened my eyes and saw a blue t-shirt. Sky blue. A pocket on the right side. No logo. I lifted my head and saw that the blue t-shirt was covering a broad chest. The muscular arms that came out of the shirt sleeves were wrapped around me. My thigh was lying across both of his. I lifted my head up further and saw, “Zach.” I breathed out his word like an accepting sigh.
His eyes were open. The chocolate brown orbs were studying me broodingly. We were wrapped together in the sleeping bag. If I got any closer I’d have to crawl inside his skin. And did I want to crawl inside his skin. Well, yes, I kind of did. That was weird. Really, really weird.
“Thank you for the book and the candy bar,” I said inanely. Goober, I told myself.
Zach appeared confused for a moment, and then he remembered what he’d left on my bunk some four days before. I guess it was his way of giving me jewelry and flowers, except not, or maybe I had just read too much into that.
“Why didn’t you come out the front door, Sophie?” he asked instead of commenting on my thankfulness. He meant after I was done talking with Gideon and the steering committee. Because Zach had been waiting for me there and I had known it.
I looked into his eyes. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to face you again,” I said truthfully. Slowly I glanced away from him and saw that we were a few feet away from where I had fallen asleep. The pixies had brought him to me and he had wrapped me up in the sleeping bag and then joined me. It wasn’t the first time we’d slept in the same bed. It wasn’t the first time he had held me comfortingly either. But it was the first time it felt different.
“Ouch,” Zach said. “Why don’t you hit a guy when he’s down?” His face became grim. “I was worried sick about you, Sophie.” One of his big hands inched up and tenderly cupped the side of my face. “I thought…I thought that maybe it was him. That he’d come in the night and taken what he couldn’t get before. That he’d taken you away.”
The warmth of Zach’s body didn’t hold a candle to the searing heat of his hand on my face. I wanted to tuck my face into the calloused flesh and just take in his distinct aroma. For hours, for days even. “The pixies,” I said slowly. “They had to tell me something important. Something critical to us and to them.”
His hand caressed my face as if my words were irrelevant. “After I got here, you slept for hours,” he murmured. “Your skin was ice cold, but your breathing was normal. I couldn’t wake you up.”
“The pixies did something to me,” I interjected.
“I’ll say,” he said back. “For a moment I was certain that you were one of them.” He gave a little ironic laugh. Zach had been sure at that moment but now in the bright light of morning with me alive, whole, and very human once again, he wasn’t so sure. How had he known? I wondered at what interior instinct had told him that the pixie who had sat in his palm was not just any pixie.
Did I want to say that I had been? Did I want to explain to him everything? Did I finally trust Zach? Yikes. I was in big trouble again. But it wasn’t the same kind of trouble that I was used to having. Yes, it was a whole NEW trouble. A four-lettered word kind of NEW trouble. Double yikes.
“You died,” I blurted, and then asked myself, Where the heck did that come from? Then I could hear Kara saying, ‘Explain why you drugged us.’ And then, ‘Not to me. You have to explain to him, to Zach.’
“I-what?” Zach said helplessly. His hand stilled on my face. “I didn’t die.”
Now I was the helpless one. The right words didn’t want to seem to come from my mouth. Worse was that I couldn’t think of what the correct thing was to say. “The day that we saw the sign near Crescent City,” I said finally, sputtering the words out. “The sign that said, ‘You are not alone.’”
Zach nodded at me, still trying to understand.
“I saw it in my head,” I told him, my eyes fixed on him, willing him to comprehend me, willing him not to have doubt about what I was saying. “At the sign, you went to face the burned man alone, trying to protect me, and he killed you. That’s what I saw.”
Bewilderment distorted his beautiful face. He was desperately trying to realize what I was saying. “You mean, something like the dreams I had of you, the
dreams I have of you,” he corrected himself wryly. “It’s like that?”
“It was a premonition,” I said firmly. “It would have happened. But I made it not happen.”
“By drugging us,” Zach said incredulously. “You saved my life by slipping me a mickey?” His other hand cupped my other cheek and he gave my head a little shake. His eyebrows slanted downward in a fierce glower of disapproval. “How did you know he wouldn’t kill you instead?”
“I didn’t know. Not definitely,” I said honestly. “But I couldn’t allow you to die for me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked insistently. “Why? I would have-” His words cut off as he realized that he wouldn’t have listened to me. He wouldn’t have taken me seriously.
“You were so angry with me,” I said. “I don’t think you would have believed me. You didn’t trust me to tell you the truth. Because of what I didn’t tell you when my shoulder was ripped open again. Because it would have sounded so out of this world. Because it would have told you just too much for me to bear.”
His eyes were like guided lasers, shooting into the depths of my soul.
Oh, no! Me and my big, big, BIG mouth! There it was, out in the open, as open as it could be without me actually saying the words. I tried to move my head away but he wouldn’t let me. His dear hands were bracketing my face, just as he had done the first time he had kissed me. Desperately I could see that the wheels were turning around in his head.
“You…care for me that much?” he asked delicately, framing the words as if he was building a house of cards. His tone was uber-carefully neutral. I think he was fighting with his normal urge to be sarcastic or to use the words to his immediate advantage.
I dropped my eyes to his chest. No one liked being rejected. I couldn’t see what the ultra perfect Zach, four years older and wiser, would want with geeky, little, paranoid teenager, Sophie. I didn’t compare to Lulu’s lush figure and adorable Cupid’s bow lips. I wasn’t tall and sleek and wonderfully groomed. I wasn’t a conversational whiz kid. I was irritable, close-mouthed, grieving, and obstinate.
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