The Pixie Prince Read online

  THE PIXIE PRINCE: An Affinities Novella

  Copyright © 2019 by Kirsten Krueger

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the author, with the exception of short quotations in book reviews.

  Editing by: Mikaela Pederson, A Step Up Editing

  Cover and Interior Art by: Ilona Parttimaa

  AFFINITIES NOVELS

  Blood

  AFFINITIES NOVELLAS

  The Pixie Prince

  CONTENTS

  Map

  1: Drying the Rain

  2: Surrender

  3: Origins

  4: Lightning and Water

  5: Two Marduruses

  6: Equals

  1

  Drying the Rain

  Every droplet of rain that fell upon the rooftop of Calder Mardurus’s house felt like a bullet pounding his skull, piercing his soul.

  Nixie could feel it, too, he knew; she had flopped on the worn, gray sheets of her bed and now rubbed her temples with thin fingers while she hummed in displeasure. Her dark hair was in two short pigtails, and she wore a mini skirt and fish-net crop-top—the outfit she’d wanted to wear to the concert they’d planned to sneak out to this evening. The weather, however, had drowned their plans; the overwhelming sensation of water was mentally debilitating for the twins, leaving them capable only of lounging and groaning.

  With barely enough space for two small beds and the desk Calder sat at, their bedroom was on the second floor—not an ideal location on days like today. The basement would have been better, removed enough from the influence of the rain that they could focus and function. But, as usual, their parents occupied the basement this August afternoon, and the Mardurus twins knew the consequences of interrupting their parents’ habits.

  The sudden rapping on the front door was nearly inaudible to the twins as they strained to block out the downpour. Minutes went by before Calder finally distinguished the sound and, with his eyes closed and head tilted back, mumbled, “Someone’s knocking.”

  Moaning, Nixie gradually inclined to a sitting position, and they both squinted out the foggy windowpane. An unmarked white van sat on the road before their townhouse; one person, hooded by a red umbrella, stood on the sidewalk while another, hidden under a black umbrella, stood on the front steps.

  “Drug dealers?” Calder wondered aloud, but Nixie shook her head.

  “Stella and Doug would’ve gotten the door by now if they were,” she said. Wincing, she swung her bare, lengthy legs over the side of her bed and fumbled to stand. Once steady, she started toward the door, but Calder jumped up to grab her arm.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To answer the door.”

  “You know what Doug’ll do—”

  “Both of our parents are high in the basement, Cal,” Nixie reminded him, raising her dark eyebrows as she wrapped her hand around the door handle. “Let’s go see who’s here.”

  With a tight jaw, Calder released her, and the pair stumbled into the narrow hallway and down the creaking steps. Breathing came easier when neither of their parents was in the living room, but Calder’s lungs constricted again when he yanked open the door with the peeling paint and personally greeted the rain.

  The storm would have been clamorous even without their indefinable ailment, but the noise was amplified in Calder’s brain, and he and his sister both struggled to perceive the man on the other side of the threshold. His black suit matched his slicked-back hair, as well as his umbrella. The waterproof contraption seemed not to have done him much good so far, however, as his skin was glossy with liquid.

  “Calder and Nixie Mardurus?” the man asked while his beady eyes glanced repeatedly between the twins and the clipboard in the crook of his arm.

  “Yes…” Nixie confirmed tentatively, her gaze flickering back to the other man standing on the sidewalk. Like his umbrella, his hair and eyes were a startling shade of red that, along with his ruby red suit, made him stand out wildly against the gray backdrop of their street. To add to his oddness, a smile was plastered on his lips, and he dipped his head in acknowledgement when the twins peeked over at him.

  “Finally,” the man on the steps sighed as he hugged his clipboard to his wet chest. “We have checked almost every house on this street for you two. They all look identical.”

  “That’s typically how townhouses are,” Calder noted with a tinge of sarcasm, though his brow was still scrunched as he combatted the impact of the rain.

  “Come along then,” the man in black prompted, as though the boy had said nothing. The twins exchanged glances.

  “You… You’re taking us?” Nixie questioned, stepping closer to the doorway.

  “You know our parents are drug addicts?” Calder added with mild disbelief.

  “No,” the man replied, momentarily frazzled. “That is…unfortunate, but that’s not why you must accompany us. Have you not noticed your hair is very nearly blue? Youths these days—”

  “What my associate is trying to explain is that both of you possess an Affinity,” the man in red informed them from behind. His voice was calmer and much less snooty than the man in black. “Your blood was tested this spring; you both have the Affinity chromosome.”

  “Yes, yes, this is all information we can discuss in the van.” The other man spun around and began retreating toward the white vehicle. “Chop chop, children! Move along.”

  “Let’s go,” Nixie muttered to her brother as she nodded toward the van.

  “Go? Do you even know what the hell an Affinity is?” Calder hissed, watching warily as the mysterious men hopped into the front seats.

  “No, but anything’s gotta beat being here.” Glancing forlornly at the basement door, Nixie grasped his hand and looked into his eyes, identical to hers. Perhaps he had been pointedly ignorant before, but there was certainly a hint of blue to his sister’s dark brown irises now, seemingly amplified with the rainy weather. Her crazy, black pigtails had faint highlights of the same hue, and Calder wondered if his unruly locks did, as well.

  Gingerly, Nixie pulled him toward the exit, and together they submerged themselves in the rain. As he’d grown accustomed to when showering, the water that doused his body was almost immediately absorbed, leaving his skin dry but his clothes soaked as they approached the van. Calder couldn’t comprehend why this happened, or why it had been happening for the past few years, but he had never dwelled on it much, since the sensation of the surrounding water blocked out all other thoughts.

  Upon opening the van’s door, the Mardurus twins were greeted by the sight of three teens: a girl and a boy who looked like they could be twins seated in the very back, and a gangly girl sitting alone on the bench that faced theirs. Nixie chose the seat beside the lone girl, who smiled timidly, while Calder carefully positioned himself beside the other girl, whose grin was far more feral.

  “Well, aren’t you cute?” were her first words to Calder as the van’s door slid closed and the vehicle began to move. Like the boy on her other side, this girl had full lips, calculating eyes, and dark skin with even darker freckles on her cheeks. The main differences between them were that his stature was thin while hers was thick, and her glossy, braided hair was tinted a deep aqua rather than the dark, hunter green of his short hair.

  After the initial surprise of her statement, Calder recovered by suavely appraising her grease-smeared overalls, sly expression, and lax demeanor. “Not as cute as you.”

  Nixie’s eye roll was instantaneous. “Really? That was lame, Cal. Your flirtation skills are getting weak.”

  “What, I’m not allowed to call her cute?” he challenged, raising hi
s eyebrows so they disappeared beneath his shaggy hair. “You have to admit she’s my type: blunt, gritty, dirty—”

  “I’ll give you dirty, if you want it,” the girl whispered in his ear, provoking a dramatic shiver from him.

  “See, Nix? My lame pick-up lines have won once more. Thank you for forcing us into this van. If we aren’t brought to our deaths, this might end well for me. I’m Calder, by the way,” he added to the girl as he held out his hand. Her palms were calloused when she shook it, and his grin broadened.

  “Demira. This is my cousin, Colton.” Cocking her head, she gestured to the boy on her other side, who scrutinized the twins with dark green eyes. Calder noticed then that Demira’s eyes were tinted aqua, like her hair—an odd color for the pigment of her skin, or anyone’s skin, really. The strangeness of it was diluted, though, by the girl beside Nixie, whose blue hair and eyes were as bright as a cloudless sky.

  “Who’s she?” Calder whispered to Demira.

  “Lana, apparently. She can fly.”

  He could only blink as his twin spluttered, “F-fly? What the hell does that mean?”

  “That’s her Affinity,” Demira replied with a shrug. “Not the coolest one I’ve heard of, but judging by her hair, she’s mastered it pretty well. I’m still working on mine. I can only control metal when I’m touching it, unfortunately, but I’ve been improving over the past few months—”

  “Control metal?”

  “It’s part of my Affinity,” she said slowly, her eyebrows furrowing as she studied his baffled face. “You don’t…know what Affinities are? Haven’t you heard about the Wackos?”

  “Of course we have,” Nixie scoffed as she crossed her arms. “They’re all over the news, causing mayhem with their…superpowers…” Pausing, she glanced around at the three strangers and then the two adults in the front. “Are you all…part of the terrorist group? Are you…recruiting us?”

  “We aren’t terrorists,” the man with the red hair stated from the driver’s seat. “But we all have ‘superpowers,’ as do you.”

  “We’re taking you all to Periculand,” the man in black snapped back at them, “a place where you can learn about your powers and harness them. No further questions. Mr. Certior must concentrate on his driving in this busy city—”

  “We’re in the shady outskirts of Cleveland, not New York City,” Calder interjected harshly. “Tell us about this place we’re going. Will our parents be able to track us there?”

  “None of the Reggs know how to get to Periculand—except for those high up in the government, that is,” the man in red clarified.

  Calder’s expression was still cagey as he turned his attention back to his new female acquaintance. “So…you have a superpower…and it’s that you can control metal? Prove it.”

  Pursing her lips, Demira surveyed the vehicle for an object to use in her demonstration. When her aqua eyes latched onto the chain tucked into Calder’s black t-shirt, she placed her rough, grease-stained fingertips on his clavicle and walked them toward the necklace. His mouth gaped, but the distraction of her touch disavowed any protest. As her fingers grazed the cool metal, the chain unclasped instantly, and the necklace slithered out from beneath his shirt and hovered in the air before him, tethered only to the dull edge of her nail.

  “What the fu—” Nixie began to blurt, but her words were swiftly cut off when the van stopped short at a traffic light. The chain still dangled in the air, unperturbed by the momentum of the vehicle. Demira flashed a wicked grin as the necklace began to undulate, even as her hand remained stagnant, as if she’d simply willed it to. Calder was so stunned that his back slammed violently against the seat when the van started moving again.

  “That’s nothing, pretty boy,” she purred, allowing her fingers to graze his bare throat when she refastened the chain around his neck. His swallow must have been audible to every passenger.

  Eyes locked on Calder, Demira reached to the white roof of the van and ran her finger along the metal, slicing it in a way only a sharp, heavy tool should have been able to. By the end, her nose twitched, and she glanced up at the incision, frowning at the jagged edges of metal.

  “That wasn’t as smooth as I’d hoped,” she admitted sourly.

  Shrugging off the displeasure, she lifted both of her hands to either side of the opening and cleaved the roof in half, tearing the metal into the van and curling it, producing a gaudy void—a sunroof. What would have been a sunroof, anyway, if there had been glass. Instead, it was just a hole that permitted the rain to pour into the van, renewing the twins’ headaches and causing them both to grimace up at Demira’s creation.

  “I needed a bath,” she said to Calder with a smug little smirk as she extended her grease-coated arms into the shower that soaked the interior of the van.

  The man in the driver’s seat had noticed through the rearview mirror and smiled with faint amusement. The man in black was too engrossed in his clipboard to realize what she’d done—until the van pulled over and he spun around to address them, only to gawk at the damage that had been inflicted on this precious vehicle.

  Bristling, he rapidly flipped through his clipboard and then snipped, “Miss McCoy, the usage of your Affinity to destroy Periculand property is strictly prohibited.”

  “What if I don’t use my Affinity to destroy the property?”

  “Just—fix it!” With slick fingers, the man fumbled to unbuckle his seatbelt. “Mr. Certior and I are leaving for a moment to retrieve another student—Naira Steele. You will all stay put, except you,” he added with a pointed glare at Demira. “You will fix that roof!”

  The girl merely rolled her aqua eyes as the two adults exited the van; then she resumed scrubbing the grease from her arms with the rainwater. When the doors shut, she flicked a few droplets of water at Calder with a frisky grin, too preoccupied to notice when his skin absorbed it.

  “Are you going to fix it?” Nixie ground out as she massaged her temples.

  “Later,” Demira responded with a noncommittal shrug.

  Nixie nearly growled, and Calder was ready to groan with the ache growing in his skull, but then, as if an invisible veil had been draped over the van, the rain ceased to enter. Demira scowled up at the nonexistent roof, watching as the water avoided that patch of missing metal completely, swerving in odd directions just before it could penetrate the vehicle. Her eyes cut to Nixie then, who let loose a breath of relief.

  “What are you doing?” Demira asked carefully.

  “What?”

  Lips curling, the turquoise-haired girl assessed Nixie’s dry legs and Lana’s drenched legs. “You have a water Affinity.”

  Nixie tugged at her mini skirt and straightened her back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You aren’t the one stopping the rain from dripping through the hole?”

  “It isn’t raining, anymore,” was Nixie’s snide response. She reached out to where the rain should have been pouring and smirked at the girl when her skin remained dry. Though Demira’s eyes stayed narrow, Calder knew she was very aware of the rain still sliding down the windows—and he knew Nixie was, too.

  “All of these look-alike houses!” the man in black fumed as he and his colleague returned to the van. He glowered out at the townhouses along the road when he slammed his door shut, and then his vision redirected to Demira with equal animosity. “Why haven’t you fixed the roof?”

  “No need—it isn’t raining anymore.” Demira shrugged one shoulder, but her gaze wasn’t trained on the man; her challenging eyes focused only on Nixie.

  “We stopped at the wrong house?” Calder prompted before the man in black could splutter about how it was still raining.

  “No, it was the right house,” the man confirmed as the van set into motion once more.

  “Well, where is she? Does she have an invisibility power?”

  “No, she isn’t coming.”

  “She had a choice?” Calder questioned in surprise. “I wasn’t unde
r the impression we had a choice.”

  “She made her choice before we came,” Mr. Certior informed him solemnly. “Her father said she left to join the Wackos a few weeks ago.”

  The van settled into an uncomfortable quiet, without even the patter of the rain to fill their ears, since some unnatural force was deterring it from nearing the vehicle completely.

  “So…you really aren’t taking us to the Wackos?” Calder finally asked.

  “No, boy,” the other man sneered as he rifled through the papers on his clipboard. “We’re taking you to a safe haven for Affinities—a town created by the prestigious Angor Periculy. We are taking you to Periculand.”

  2

  Surrender

  The man in black was apparently named Fraco, and he did not like being called such. He preferred being addressed as Mr. Leve, which Calder and the other teenagers avoided calling him at all costs.

  During the three-hour car ride from Cleveland to Periculand, Fraco explained the specifics of the Affinity town to the students, who soon discovered they would be referred to as primaries. The founder of the town, Angor Periculy, was also the principal at the school they would be attending, and after they asked multiple times, Fraco reassured them they would not be permitted to speak with the principal unless he requested the meeting himself. This prompted Calder to call Periculy a few nasty names that sent Fraco into a frenzy.

  When they finally arrived at Periculand’s gates, the rain had ceased and the sky was as dark as the Mardurus twins’ hair. As he climbed out of the van, Calder couldn’t help but notice, even in the dim glow of distant streetlights, that his sister’s pigtails were distinctly blue now. Perhaps it was just the reflection of the cloud-covered moon—or perhaps Demira had been correct about Nixie’s…power. If she was, he didn’t want to know.

  An endless cluster of white buildings littered the landscape to the left of where the man in red, Aethelred, had parked the van. None compared in height, however, to the towering cylinder on the right. Encircled by three cubic buildings, the pale tower—which Fraco had informed them was the Residence Tower—was a thin, twenty-story shaft dotted with circular windows, and it was their new home. Calder could have pointed out how such a frail building would be a danger to reside in, but after living with Doug and Stella his whole life, nothing seemed particularly dangerous.