He followed the lake around, listening to the raindrops hiss as they hit asphalt. The rain stopped as Nick stepped onto his own scraggly, brown lawn. He sighed. It hadn’t rained long enough to really make a difference, just enough to annoy him. He walked in the door and went up to his room, where there were games he knew how to win.
Lightning cracked, shooting horizontally throughz the sky, and thunder boomed. The rain hadn’t started up again, but it sounded like it was going to come down hard when the storm blew all the way in. Nick concentrated. If he just collected a couple more mushrooms, he could give them to the old wise woman and collect the Blade of Ultimates.
Suddenly, the room went black and his screen powered off before he could save or do anything but stare dumbly. He scrambled up off the beanbag in his new, shared bedroom. Downstairs, he heard his father’s voice but not what his father said. The lightning flashed again and, through the bedroom window, Nicholas saw a pale body out on the wide stretch of grass between the lake and the remaining wetlands.
He squinted. Laurie. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he came inside, and he wasn’t sure if the sky had gotten dark because it was late or because of the storm. But if that was Laurie on the grass, why was she just lying there? What could have—?
His mind shied away from completing the thought.
Nicholas saw a pale body.
After scrambling down the stairs, he ran out the back door. The lack of rain was a rippling, oppressive pressure in the air. The streetlights weren’t on, but flashes of lightning turned the sky bright enough for Nick to see. He ran as fast as he could toward the body before everything went black again. Then he kept running through the dark, only to stop suddenly as he got close. He choked on a scream.
A creature lay on its side—its green skin fading to white in places and dry as a leaf. Its eyes were closed and it didn’t seem to have a nose—just two slits above a slash of a mouth. Weird tendrils stuck up from the creature’s forehead, and brownish ribbons of grass covered its head like hair.
It wasn’t covered in purple glitter.
It didn’t have wings.
But Nicholas had a sinking feeling that it was going to turn out to be a faerie anyway.
He took a deep breath and pushed.
Chapter Three
IN WHICH Nicholas Lifts More Than an Eyebrow
Laurie,” Nick said breathlessly, opening the door to his old bedroom. She was lying on her stomach on the bed, with her clarinet in one hand and a book of music open in front of her. The fan turned lazily overhead. New posters were taped up on the walls.
“There’s something out there,” he told her, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “One of your stupid monsters.”
“You didn’t knock.” She frowned.
Nick sputtered. “It’s my room! Just because you’re in it doesn’t make it yours. I don’t have to knock on the door to my room!”
“I’m telling your dad!” she yelled.
“Fine!” Nick banged his knuckles against the wall. “Happy? I knocked!”
“You just left me out there without saying anything. I looked for you forever.”
“Laurie!” he shouted. “Shut up and listen!”
Her eyes went wide and her nostrils flared, but she pressed her lips flat.
“There’s a thing out there!” Nick could feel himself shaking as he pointed to the window.
Laurie got off the bed slowly and stuck her feet in her purple flip-flops. “Okay. Fine. Show me.”
He pointed out the window toward the pale body. Laurie shook her head even though she was so close to the glass that her forehead was pressed against it.
“It’s the whitish thing,” Nick said.
Laurie put her hand on her hip. “There’s nothing there.”
“I’ll show you up close,” he said.
“You want me to go outside? Now?”
Nick groaned in frustration. “Please.”
He led her downstairs and through the grass to the creature, pulling her to a stop when they got close. It didn’t seem as though it had moved. He wondered if it was dead. He wondered if they should donate it to a museum. “See?” he said.
If they did donate it to a museum, the plaque would say that he’d found it. Maybe they’d name it after him. Vargas’s whatever-it-was.
“Ha ha,” Laurie said, turning back to the house. “Stop making fun of me.”
“What?” Nick asked. “Can’t you see it?”
“Of course I can’t see it, jerk. There’s nothing there.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again, too stunned to know what to say. Then he realized she was going to leave him alone with the creature. “Wait!” he called after her. “Wait! Laurie, I swear it’s real. Look! It’s right there and green and really creepy and I promise I’m not making this up.”
She turned around and looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t understand.” She pushed her glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose. “You’re serious? How can you see something I don’t? You have the Sight? That’s so not fair.”
“No kidding,” Nick said.
“You’re not the seventh son of a seventh son. You don’t have red hair. How did you get it?” She stopped. “Did anyone spit in your eye recently?”
“That’s gross,” he said. “No way.”
She narrowed her eyes, and Nick suddenly thought she was going to forget her rainbow-y happy crap and strangle him.
“Well,” he said. “I did find one of those clovers you were looking for.”
“You found a four-leaf clover?”
He shrugged. “You mean, that’s why I can see it?”
“Of course.” She put her hand on her hip. “Give it here. Four-leaf clovers let you see faeries, you idiot!”
He reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts and carefully pulled out and unfolded the paper where he’d kept the plant. It was wilted at the edges but otherwise okay. Laurie held her breath as she carefully undid the string from around her neck and slid off her locket, thumbing it open. Charlene’s picture was on one side and a bearded guy that Nick guessed was Laurie’s dad was on the other. She put the clover over her mother’s head and closed the locket around it.
“Oh,” she said softly, her voice full of surprised rapture as she squeezed the locket in her palm. Nick’s vision faded to normal. The night seemed darker, less vivid. He told himself that he was relieved not to have to see the creature anymore before he realized he wouldn’t know if it moved. That sent a shiver of dread through him.
It creeped him out that the thing even existed.
Laurie bent down, eyes wide and shining. “She’s a nixie, I think. She must have left her pond and not been able to make it back.”
Nick thought of the dried husks of toads he sometimes saw on the newly paved roads. “Is it dead?”
Laurie reached out and stroked just above the grass, like she was petting the thing, smoothing its hair. Nick shuddered and took a step back. Thunder boomed overhead, but more rain still refused to fall.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Her heart’s beating.”
“Good. Fine. If it’s alive, then let’s leave it,” Nick said, but he was afraid Laurie wasn’t going
to be persuaded to go back to the house that easily. “Dinner’s probably going to be ready soon. They’ll start looking for us.”
“Get a wheelbarrow.”
“Get a wheelbarrow,” Laurie told him. “We have to put her back in the lake.”
“You’re not supposed to touch wild animals when they’re sick. They could attack you. They could be rabid.”
“She’s not a wild animal. She’s a faerie.”
“Fine.” When he’d gone back to get Laurie, this was what he’d been hoping—that she’d tell him what this thing was and what they should do with it. But walking across the construction site in the dark was far more frightening than it had been hours ago, when the only things he’d been afraid of were stepping on a water m
occasin or banana spiders dropping on his face.
Now he wasn’t sure what to be afraid of. He grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and tugged it out of a pile of dirt. As he was steering it back toward Laurie and the creature, his father opened the door to their house.
“Nicholas!” he yelled. “What are you doing? Leave that alone!”
Nick looked up. He never got in trouble. Never. He hated Laurie. She’d changed everything when she showed up.
“Get in here,” he said. “Dinner’s been ready for half an hour. We were calling you. Where’s your stepsister?”
“I’ll go get her,” Nick said.
When the door closed, he took a deep breath and pushed the wheelbarrow as fast as he could. He knew his father was disappointed in him. Disappointed, which was much worse than mad.
“Laurie,” he said when he got to her. “We have to go in. Dad’s calling us for dinner.”
“This is important,” said Laurie. “Please. I can’t carry her by myself.”
Nick shook his head. “We can sneak out after.”
“She could die,” Laurie said softly.
Nick thought of his mother, who did die. He didn’t want to cause anything’s death. Even this thing’s.
“Okay,” said Nick. “But we have to be quick.”
“Grab her feet.” Laurie reached down and seemed to lift something. Nick gritted his teeth and touched where he thought the nixie was. Under his fingers, her skin was dry as paper. When he looked down, he saw her with the same vivid, strange vision as when he had held the clover. His heart beat so loudly he thought he could hear it. He slid his hands up to her ankles and couldn’t help feeling her webbed feet. He had to force himself not to drop them.
The creature lifted easily.
“Okay,” Nick said.
He heaved and was surprised to find that the creature lifted easily, despite it being about as tall as Laurie was. They shuffled a little and lowered it over the wheelbarrow.
“Is she in there?” Nick asked, backing away.
Laurie nodded. Nick forced himself to grab hold of the handles and push the wheelbarrow carefully toward the lake.
“Nick!” Julian called from the house. “Laurie! Get in here! Dad’s been looking for you!”
Nicholas bit his lip and helped Laurie lift the nixie, then wade out and drop her in a deep enough part of the lake for her body to go under. As soon as his fingers left her skin, the Sight was gone, but he saw the water displace when she slid into it.
“Won’t she drown?” he whispered.
Laurie shook her head. “They can breathe water.”
For a moment the ripples seemed to still, and then the water thrashed and both of them jumped.
“What happened?” Nick asked shakily.
Laurie was smiling hugely. “She swam away! She’s okay! We saved her!”
“Nicholas!” his father shouted from the doorway. He stepped out into the yard. “Didn’t I tell you not to mess with that wheelbarrow!”
“Sorry, Dad,” Nick said.
“Don’t give me that crap. You looked right at me and lied. Now get in the house!”
“Dad, I—”
“I don’t understand what’s the matter with you! Are you trying to show off for Laurie?”
“No!”
“I thought you had more sense; you always acted like you had more sense! Go eat your dinner and then get up to your room. No TV, no video games, no nothing for a week. And if you touch another piece of equipment, you’ll spend the whole summer in that room!”
Nick’s face felt hot as he walked into the house. His eyes stung. Nick’s father said nothing to Laurie, and when they sat down at the table, Charlene didn’t say anything either. They all ate in miserable silence.
As he lifted the fork to his mouth, Nick looked out at the lake and wondered if there were more creatures like that nixie, with froggy hands and feet, watching him invisibly from the shadows. He was glad that he couldn’t see them. He only wished they couldn’t see him either.
She sang the words.
Chapter Four
IN WHICH Nicholas Sees for the Second Time
It was hard for Nick to work on his model boat with Jules’s dirty clothes and surfing magazines covering the floor and thrown across the dressers, not to mention Julian himself slumped on the bed with his earbuds in, but Nick had cleared a space on their shared “homework desk” and covered it with newspaper. He was assembling a model of a Viking ship, and he planned on attaching a motor to the bottom so it could really move. As he pictured it revving across the lake, he kept imagining green, webbed hands reaching up to pull it down.
Thoughts of those hands had kept him up the night before. Even the light snoring of Jules on the other side of the room hadn’t been reassuring. Outside, the rain had come down in sheets, and he pictured amphibious things moving through it and peeking through the windows, their finger pads sticking to the glass. He’d tossed and turned in his bed until the light showed on the horizon. Only then had he finally collapsed into sleep, which caused him to wake up late—which meant that today the dark would come even sooner, making him jittery all over again.
Earlier that afternoon, when Laurie was out with Charlene getting keys made, Nick had snuck into his old room and looked through Laurie’s field guide. According to the book, nixies didn’t eat people—although there seemed to be plenty of other creatures that might.
As he’d stood in the middle of the room with the Guide, looking around at the map of Narnia tacked up on his old wall, noticing Laurie’s stuffed animals spread out on the bed and her junk cluttering the counter of his bathroom, he’d been overwhelmed by the suffocating desire to smash all of it. This was his room. His house. His family. Laurie and Charlene didn’t belong. But all he’d done was drop the field guide and walk, trembling with rage, back to his desk.
Now he tried to attach another oar with a drop of glue, to concentrate on that activity and not on Laurie and his bedroom or the hideous creatures in the Guide or on the trolls and goblins and dragons that could be crawling around the development.
A knock on the door made Nick’s fingers twitch with surprise. He snapped the thin piece of wood in his hands.
Laurie peeked her head in. “I’ve been talking to Taloa, and she explained that—”
“Taloa?” he asked, hoping that she meant another kid and not some not-nearly-imaginary-enough friend. He looked over at Jules, but he was flipping through a car magazine and nodding his head in time with music they couldn’t hear.
“The nixie,” Laurie said, and Nick felt his stomach twist.
“Don’t tell me. Go ahead and talk to it all you want, just don’t ever say anything about it to me ever again.”
Laurie’s eyes widened. Her glasses made them look huge. “But there’s more of them. Other faeries. They were running from something.”
“I don’t care,” he said, wishing she would leave him alone. “I’m not allowed to play video games or watch TV for a week because of her and you.”
“It’s just a week,” said Laurie. “Anyway, aren’t you excited? We saw a real, live faerie. Just like Simon, Jared, and Mallory. A real faerie that needed our help.”
Nicholas glared at her. How could she be so stupid not to be afraid of that thing? It was horrible. It was alien. “Get out of my room. You already made me mess up my boat. You’re not my sister, so stop acting like I care about what you have to say.”
The color seemed to drain from Laurie’s face.
Julian looked up from the bed once she left. His earbuds were still in, but Nick wondered how much he’d heard.
That night, Charlene got Chinese food for dinner. Nick picked at his lo mein until his dad finally told him to eat already. As Nick started shoveling down the noodles, Laurie cleared her throat.
“Um, mom?” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears.
Charlene stopped dipping her egg roll in hot mustard to look at her daughter.
“Mom, Nick promi
sed me that he would go out to the big lake with me. We were going to sail one of his boats.”
“I never said—” Nick sputtered. He hadn’t promised anything like that.
“I thought you kept those things mint,” Julian said, using one of his chopsticks to skewer a dumpling. He grinned. “What if the paint gets scratched?”
Nick glared at him and then turned his glare on Laurie for good measure.
She acted like she didn’t notice, smiling like the suck-up she was. “I know that Nick’s in trouble, but he can still go, right?”
Charlene looked over at Nick’s dad expectantly. “Sure,” he said slowly. “Fresh air. Better than sitting inside moping. Just make sure that you two get back before dark this time.”
“But Dad—,” Nick started.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Nick’s dad said. “You’re the one who made the promise.”
Nick put down his fork, completely outmaneuvered. He couldn’t believe it! She’d lied. Underneath that bizarro sparkly exterior, she was a devious, conniving liar.
He actually found himself grudgingly impressed.
When Nick stepped out onto the lawn the following morning, he did so with a sense of dread. “Why are you always making me come with you? Don’t you have friends of your own?” He vaguely recalled girls shrieking with laughter in Charlene’s backyard, when he and Jules had been forced to go there for dinner after the engagement. The house had been small, cluttered with handmade crafts and suncatchers. He’d felt like he was suffocating.
“Don’t you?” Laurie snapped.
He stepped past Jules’s spray-painted green car with two surfboards bungee-corded to a homemade roof rack. His dad’s car sat in the driveway beside it, freshly waxed and gleaming. “I have lots of friends,” he said, hoping she’d leave it alone.
Nick didn’t like to think about the kids in the development he’d lived in before this one and how they were probably having tons of fun this summer. He used to clown around with them, just doing whatever. But that was a long time ago. Before his mom got sick. Before they moved. Before he started not bothering anyone.
The Nixie’s Song Page 2