The Bedford teen who was shot at a local bar has been released from the hospital and is said to be recovering at home. Police are still looking for the perpetrators as yet another boy goes missing. Unverified reports say his name is Thomas Steffan, a high school freshman…-NEWS CHANNEL 8
Wow. Okay. My mom is here. It takes me a second to actually accept this as reality, but I do as my mom quickly checks the perimeter of the woods. It’s so obvious she’s dealt with pixies before.
As I watch her half run, half power-walk toward the house, I wish I could make everything in our lives completely different, wish that this crazy epic that we’re living in never started, that my pixie king father never fell for her, that we never had to stare at the woods and wonder if danger was lurking in it, that the responsibility of knowledge was not ours, that we knew nothing, that we could live happy, peaceful normal lives.
That’s selfish, though.
And it’s too late for that to happen.
And if it did, I may have never met Nick.
It’s all pointless thinking.
I start to sway as my mother bounds up the steps. Astley’s arm goes around me, supporting me, keeping me upright a little bit better. Despite the cold, I think I’ve started to sweat from exertion. My mom eyes us and keeps coming. Her skirt flutters in the wind. She’s wearing a big red ski parka that looks like it’s left over from the 1980s. She must have dug it out of the closet. Her dark hair lifts from her face, revealing worried, narrowed eyes.
“Don’t you touch her,” she snaps at Astley. She points a long finger in his face. She has perfect fingernails. Today they are red like blood. She looks like she might scratch him. “I know who you are.”
“Mom, it’s-,” I start, but she yanks me into a huge hug. All I breathe in is parka and her coffee smell. For the tiniest moment I let myself just lean into her, like I used to do when I was little and needed her so much. Sometimes I’d be so tired after a day at kindergarten or nursery school that she’d come into the school and pick me up. I wouldn’t even be able to stand straight anymore because I’d be so worn out from a day full of kissing tag and coloring and those singsong finger games that the teachers always led. On those days, I’d just lean into her and she’d take my pink Hello Kitty backpack, hold it in one hand, and wrap her other arm around me. Sometimes she’d just carry me right out the door and into the car. That’s what this reminds me of right now when I lean into her: being little and not being responsible and just being able to let go, to be tired, to be scared, to just be …
“Oh, Zare Bear,” she murmurs into the hair by my ear. “You poor honey. What have these things done to you?”
Things. I am one of “these things.”
I force myself to move away enough so that I can look at her. She has more white hairs mixed in with all the brown. The skin under her eyes has little lines in it and her chin seems older too somehow, like it’s sagging maybe? I don’t know.
“I’m okay, Mom,” I say as she shakes her head. Tears collect in her eyes. She hasn’t seen me since I’ve changed into a pixie. And now she sees me like this-weak, injured, tired. Her lip curls up a bit and she steps away from me almost like I’m poisonous.
“My feet are kind of cold, though,” I say. I’d really like some shoes, actually.
Her eyes narrow and she whirls on Astley and the fiddler pixie guy, who really looks pretty casual for someone tied up on a porch. For a second she just stares at them. I sway backward once she lets go of me, and faster than humanly possible Astley moves to my side to catch the back of my head with his hand before it hits the cedar shingles of the house. My mother loses it.
“Don’t you touch her!” she says again. Her hands move into fists.
“It’s a little late to play the protective mother now,” he lashes back.
“What?” She spits the word at him.
“From what I have heard, you sent her up here into the heart of danger because you were too frightened to protect her yourself.” Anger boils up in him like I have never seen it before. I don’t know where that anger is coming from, but it rushes through the air, awkward and hard and surprising. I can feel it.
“Astley.” I say his name to try to get him to stop, but my voice comes out so weak that even I am not impressed.
He obviously isn’t either, because he just keeps going. “From what I have heard, you only come when it is convenient for you, too busy with your corporate job and life to take care of your own blood, instead entrusting her safety to elderly weres who-”
“Astley!” I yell his name this time. Why is he doing this? I think that maybe he’s not just mad at my mother but at all mothers. He stops, swallows, but does not apologize.
Crows alight from an oak tree near the corner of the porch. They caw as they flap away.
My mom steps forward. “How dare you!”
He opens his mouth again but is cut off by Betty, who is suddenly on the porch with us. She glares at Astley, probably because she’s not too cool with being called elderly by a pixie king, and roars out, “I think you should go.”
I sway, my body overwhelmed by everything. Astley lifts me into his arms. I’m too tired to protest much, but I manage to say, “I’m fine.”
“Let me bring her inside,” he says.
“You’re not stepping one foot into this house,” Betty says. “This is my house. You are not coming in. Give her to me.”
He hesitates. I nod slightly and he flinches, but leans me into Betty’s arms. I’ve got to say one thing for my grandmother: she is strong. My mother reaches out and moves the hair out of my face.
Astley stands in front of the door for a moment. His voice is soft and calm. “We are all on the same side here.”
“You turned my daughter into a monster,” my mother says. Her glare would kill lesser guys. “We are not on the same side.”
Something inside me breaks open and it hurts way more than my gunshot wound.
“She asked me to,” he replies, not backing down. The wind blows his hair back from his forehead. “We are not monsters.”
My mother doesn’t back down either. “You took advantage of her.”
He inhales deeply and steps away so that Betty can bring me across the threshold of the house.
“Maybe,” he says slowly, as if each word is an effort, “ she took advantage of me .”