Endure

by Carrie Jones

  Endure

  Carrie Jones

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Weekly Report: 12/14 To 12/21 Troop/Unit: Troop J

  Weekly Report: 12/14 To 12/21 Troop/Unit: Troop J

  Bedford Fire Department

  Weekly Report: 12/14 To 12/21 Troop/Unit: Troop J

  Yahoo! Answers

  Weekly Report: 12/14 To 12/21 Troop/Unit: Troop J

  FBI Internal Memo

  Interview with Holiday Inn Room #321 Occupant

  Safety Announcement on Flight 132

  Landing Announcement on Flight 132 To Iceland

  FBI Internal Memo

  Bedford County Sheriff’s Department Release

  Icelandic Press Release

  Officer Safety Bolo (Be on the Lookout)

  From Agent Willis’s Personal Log

  County Sheriff 911 Transcript

  Scanner Traffic, Bedford Police Department

  Probably Not Sane Blog

  FBI Internal Memo Excerpt

  Bedford Police Radio Traffic

  Bedford Radio Traffic

  NCIC Teletype

  CNNS News

  Four Months Later

  From Agent Willis’s Personal Log

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Carrie Jones

  Copyright

  To the fans of Zara who stuck with her for so long

  despite her flaws. You are all made of awesome sauce.

  And to my daughter, Emily, because every book

  I write, I write for her. “Remember upon the conduct

  of each depends the fate of all.” —Alexander the Great

  WEEKLY REPORT: 12/14 TO 12/21

  TROOP/UNIT: Troop J

  ITEMS OF INTEREST TO LOCAL AGENCIES:

  12/14: Trooper David Seacreast responded to a theft complaint in Brooklin regarding metal stolen from a rental property. Investigation continues.

  Trooper Jennifer Roberts responded to a missing-persons complaint in Bedford concerning a fifteen-year-old male last seen at the YMCA. FBI took over investigation, which continues.

  “Do you want some more spaghetti?”

  Nick’s voice is so abrupt and unexpected that it actually makes me jump in the dining room chair. As he pulls a hand through his snow-wet dark hair, I try to pretend like I wasn’t startled and everything is all fine and normal. This is a big lie. Even the weather isn’t normal. December in Downeast Maine isn’t usually this overwhelmingly snowy, but we’re battling a potential apocalypse and one of the signs is a “lovely” nonstop snow. That’s why there’s a plow attached to the front of my grandmother’s truck, and that’s why I have blisters on my hands from shoveling, and that’s why Nick’s hair is wet from snow that’s melted in the warmth of the house.

  “I’m good for now, thanks,” I say to him, and for a second I feel like we’re an old married couple that’s had some fight over shopping money or something, but it isn’t that easy. We aren’t old or married. He is my ex-boyfriend, I think. We never officially broke up and now the air between us is awkward with this crazy undercurrent of tension.

  He twists some more spaghetti around his fork and sort of grunts to acknowledge that I spoke.

  One of the conditions of my mom leaving me in Maine and finishing up her work contract in South Carolina was that Nick had to stay here in my missing grandmother’s house with me. Under normal circumstances a mother (especially a Southern mother—especially my mother) wouldn’t leave a teenage male and a teenage female in the same house together at night unsupervised, but these aren’t normal circumstances. Let me detail why:

  1. Evil human-sized pixies led by a pixie king named Frank/Belial are attacking us. They have additional help from Isla, Astley’s freaky mom. Astley is a good pixie king. Yes, there is such a thing.

  2. Frank and his evil pixies are kidnapping young guys and killing them, draining them of their souls and torturing them in the process.

  3. They have also just started kidnapping girls.

  4. This same evil pixie killed Nick, sending him to a mythical place called Valhalla where only fae can go.

  5. I had to turn pixie to go there.

  6. Nick hates pixies.

  7. Therefore Nick now hates me, even though I rescued him.

  Nick doesn’t actually say that he hates me, but he doesn’t really say anything to me. Even right now, he looks away while I push spaghetti around my plate. He stares down so intently at his food that it’s like he’s memorizing every single strand of pasta. The silence is a painful, solid thing that crackles the air between us.

  I push my bright yellow plate away, force myself to look at his rugged boy face: the stubble on his cheeks, the dark smudges beneath his eyes, the tight line of his mouth that makes his lips disappear.

  Flipping my fork over, I put it on the side of my plate and steel myself for whatever comes next, but seriously, anything has to be better than this silence.

  “You know,” I say. “You can hate me and still talk to me.”

  His eyes flick up and meet mine for a second, just a second.

  “I mean, you hated Ian and you talked to him. I hated Megan and I talked to her,” I say, referencing two evil pixies who posed as high school humans before they were killed in this escalating war. “Hate and rudeness don’t have to go hand in hand.”

  Ugh. I can’t believe I said “hand in hand.” I sound like my mother.

  My bamboo fork falls off the plate with a clacking noise. I didn’t balance it well, I guess. I pick it up again. I could kill Nick with this fork. That’s how strong I am now. Well, maybe not kill him, because he is one tough shape-shifting wolf, but I could hurt him. Not that I’d ever want to.

  “I don’t hate you, Zara. I hate this situation. I hate that when you first got here you were this normal, depressed, pacifist girl who cared about human rights and peace and now you’re this … Now you spend your nights hunting down evil. Now you kill without blinking an eye and it’s just part of your routine. I hate what you’ve become.” His voice cracks the tension between us, evaporates my random thoughts, and before I can even answer him, he stands up and heads to the sink, bringing his plate with him.

  My adrenaline pulses and I will myself to be calm, to not cry or fill up too much with the anger that comes from being offended.

  His metal fork rubs across the ceramic surface as he scrapes off the remnants of the meal. “I’ll clean up. You go get ready. It’s our night to patrol.”

  I know that. I know that it’s our team’s turn to look for pixies, but it doesn’t make me happy. I never imagined that I would dread spending time with Nick, yet I do. I wish Astley were here. He wouldn’t say he hated what I’ve become if I magically turned back to human, I don’t think. And what have I become that’s so hate worthy? A pixie. A killing machine who wears jeans with peace signs on them. A protector of my friends and this crazy town. Someone who eats spaghetti way too often. But that’s my life now and I’m totally okay with it. I just wish Nick was too. He’s the real killing machine around here, the big were warrior, and now that I can protect people too he gets all uptight about it. I think it’s because I lack testosterone. Just thinking about the whole double standard of it makes me cranky.

  “We need more people to help us patrol,” I say. I’ve said it about a dozen times in the last two days.

  “It would just put them at risk. Humans can’t fight pixies.”

  “We could make an army, train them. Devyn and I have been talking about it a lot.”

  “You’d be sending them to slaughter.”

  The argument is pointless. We’ve had it before. Standing up, I stare at Nick’s broad back as he faces the sink. The muscles of his shoulders work as he moves his arms to turn
on the faucet. The water runs down the drain, swirling the spaghetti bits into the trash compactor, where they’ll be ground into nothing. Everything leaves so easily. It is there and seems so real and then it can just get washed away. I miss my grandmother, Betty. She’s run off, turned into a tiger and left. Every patrol I look for her. She’s never there. And I miss Nick. He’s here but he’s always angry, nothing like the old Nick.

  I put my plate on the counter next to him and say, “It feels like you hate me.”

  “Well,” he says as he grabs the plate, runs it beneath the hot water. “I don’t.”

  Three words. He gave me three sort of positive words.

  That has to be enough for now, I guess, so I say, “Let’s go patrol.”

  He nods.

  Well, I don’t.

  That’s what he said. Usually when people hang on to three little words, those words are “I love you,” but for me it’s “Well, I don’t.” That’s pretty sad, even I know it, but as I get dressed to go outside, I still hold on to those words like they are some magic lifeline to happiness.

  We have to replow the driveway first because of the snow that keeps trucking down, but once that is done we drive out toward the high school and the YMCA to hunt. Neither of us talks as we pass the First Baptist Church, which is currently a trailer because the real church burned down in the summer and they still have to rebuild. It’s hard to rebuild a church when people keep vanishing. We sludge past the self-storage place that has a big barbed-wire fence around it, past the Bedford Falls Minimart where they make the super-good butter rolls, the gas pumps where a state trooper is filling up his cruiser, all the little houses sided with aluminum and clapboard. Windows squared with light brighten up the night and the snowy scene. The world is quiet. Most people are too afraid to leave their homes after dark now. There used to be a curfew for everyone under eighteen, but things have gotten so bad that hardly anybody is around to break it.

  Nick doesn’t say anything as I park my grandmother’s truck in the school lot. We’ll head down the railroad tracks and into the forest, which is where we’ve found the biggest clusters. Frank’s pixies must be living back there or something. Tonight, Astley and Becca, and another all-pixie team of Amelie and Garret, will be hunting in town. They are stealthier, less likely to be seen than me and a giant wolf, which is why I’ve assigned us the woods. It made sense before, but right now it just makes me feel lonelier to face all these trees and the snow-closed sky.

  Nick turns wolf the moment he steps out of the truck. I pick up his clothes and put them on the seat before locking up. He takes off down the tracks and I follow. He always has to be alpha and tonight I’m too sad and stressed to really mind like I normally would.

  I’m barely out of the truck when I sense something. It’s a smell that I don’t recognize—rotting flesh, but that’s not it. There is vanilla mixed in. I stand still, completely creeped out. This is something different, something powerful. I survey around me, slowly turning three hundred and sixty degrees. The sensation that I’m being watched makes me hold my breath. I get back to my original position. The smell dissipates and I lope down the track after Nick, catching up pretty quickly.

  It’s dark and cloudy and snow is booming down out of the sky like it’s on some sort of world-freezing mission. I can still feel that something, somehow, is not right tonight, even though the rotting smell is gone.

  “Please let it be a wimpy pixie,” I mutter. “One that’s easy to fight.”

  My muscles rigid up while the wolf next to me pricks his ears, lifts his head, and growls. I reach out to touch his neck, to feel the fur bristle, but he moves away from my touch like he has over and over again these last few days. Something in my heart cinches up. Truth is, this is the only form where he’ll get even slightly close to me.

  It’s been half a week since I rescued this wolf/man from Valhalla, half a week since he lost his memory of what I did there to save him, almost a week since I turned from human to pixie. Just one week and my heart has been broken over and over again. My heart must hate me, because I swear it would almost be easier to die than to have to face Nick blowing me off again, turning away.

  No, not tonight. I’m not about to wallow in oh-my-boyfriend-doesn’t-love-me-anymore self-pity tonight. And I’m not about to die either. I’ve already hesitated too much, distracted by Nick. I’m off my game.

  I put my gloved hand on my knife, pull it out from the sheath thingy that’s attached to the belt on my jeans, and press my back into the tree, waiting, breathing as shallowly as possible.

  Nick doesn’t move either. He waits in wolf silence. Dawn is still hours away. The closest road is about a mile behind us. It’s just us and the woods. It would be the perfect time to make Nick listen. When he’s wolf, he can’t talk, but he still understands.

  No, I will not be distracted.

  I will focus. Nick paws the ground once, but doesn’t leave his spot.

  The fear of loneliness is eremophobia.

  I will not be eremophobic.

  My thoughts and mind will be still.

  Still.

  Still …

  “Nick,” I start. “I know that you are mad at me because I’m a pixie and that makes you think—”

  He growls. It’s soft and low at first. I glare at him, will him to be silent and just listen to me, but he’s either not psychic or he doesn’t pay attention, most likely both. I squat down, tap him on the flank.

  “Hey. I know you don’t want to hear this, but I need you to listen.”

  His eye flits toward me to see what I want. I raise a finger to my lips and then point at him to be silent. He growls again and that’s when I realize that he’s not growling because he’s trying to ignore me and make me shut up, which would be totally rude. He’s growling because he senses something.

  I groan. I’ve lost my focus. Again.

  “What is it?” I whisper far too quietly for human ears, but I know Nick can hear me. “How many?”

  Suddenly, I can sense it again too. Something heavy moves through the woods behind us. There’s a rasping noise to the footsteps, almost like the sound of paper on fire. Nick’s body tenses. Then to our left is another noise. Something else creeps through the trees. I sniff, trying to smell something, but all I know is that it’s not pixie or human or a wild animal or what I smelled before in the parking lot. I stand again, step forward as gently as I can on the snow. The air smells of burning and frost and snow-wet dog, balsam and spruce. Fire. I think that’s what it is. Whatever is coming behind us smells of fire.

  Nick and I turn simultaneously. I peer around the tree. An orange glow creeps closer. It smells of death, burning, anger. It takes the shape of a man, a man twice the size of a normal man. He marches in a straight line right toward us. His sword burns with flame and he holds it in one hand as he walks. He’s getting close, maybe thirty feet away from us.

  What the hell is he?

  This is not a pixie. I still don’t know a lot about us but I know that we can’t change into this form. We aren’t so tall. We aren’t made of fire but instead, like humans, we are made of flesh and bone and need.

  I swallow hard and grab Nick’s fur to keep him from lunging forward. He doesn’t pull away because he probably knows that to pull away would give us up for attack. He grunts softly just as another giant man-thing steps into the first one’s path. This one’s not on fire but he’s just as huge. Blue hair hangs from his head. Bare forearms that are larger than my thighs ripple with the movement of his muscles. His boots strap up his legs and seem to be made of fur. His skin is as white as the snow and a helmet obscures most of his head. He raises a two-headed ax thing that’s covered with ice. He roars.

  The woods bristle.

  These things are way worse than pixies.

  Way.

  Worse.

  I will not be afraid of monsters … I will not be afraid of monsters … I will not be afraid …

  But fear overtakes me. It’s like a punch t
hat comes from the inside and tries to pound its way out. One second passes. It is the longest second in the universe. Nick’s muscles tighten the way they do right before he attacks. I drop to the ground and wrap my arms around him. He struggles against me halfheartedly, I think, and then gives up just as the first giant man, the red-hot one, swings his sword toward the icy guy. They clash. The sound is almost as loud as thunder, but more metallic. Steam rises from where their weapons meet.

  I think my mouth drops open, because my teeth suddenly hurt from the cold and snow is falling on my tongue. The orange giant raises his sword above his head and charges. The frosty one lifts his ax and deflects the blow. Metal hits metal. Again, steam rises from where their weapons meet. One of them, the fiery one, roars and the trees shake. A branch above our heads catches fire, it pops and sizzles and then the entire thing is engulfed, flames raging high.

  I stagger backward, pulling Nick with me. And he actually lets me. He would never do that before; he’d be surging forward, joining in the fight or guarding me. Now he is just as scared as I am, I think. The fire sizzles above us and to the left, and suddenly the air is much warmer. The branch cracks off the tree and falls to the snow, smoldering. It’s black and twisted.

  That’s when it hits me: they really are giants, not just giant men, but giants. Both warriors wear chain mail; links and links of it surround their massive chests. Weapons slash against each other, and the mail seems to withstand it until … They both thrust forward. The ax cleaves down on the frosty one’s shoulder and neck. The movement leaves the fire giant open for a thrust to his chest. The sword sticks into his pecs and stays. Steam flies up to the air as the fire giant falls to the ground. One second later the frosty giant slumps to his knees and then keels over backward. Blood gushes out of his neck.

  The world is quiet except for the frosty giant’s harsh, gurgling breaths. Nick whimpers. I let go of my hold around his neck. “Okay. Be careful though.”

  He rushes forward, sniffs cautiously at the fire giant and abandons him. He must be dead. He is still. I don’t hear him breathing. But the other one?