Evangeline didn’t even see where Jacks had taken the rope from. Suddenly it was just there in his expert hands, as if he always carried it around, in the event he needed to take a girl and tie her up. “How could I have ever been in love with you?”
It was an unkind question, but Evangeline was feeling overwrought. One second, she was on the floor with Jacks on top of her and now they were tied together, skin touching skin, which felt different than when there’d been a layer of clothing between them.
She imagined he could feel her pulse, racing against his.
Evangeline tugged on the ropes binding them, but instead of the ropes coming loose, little flowers started to grow on them, tiny white and pink buds on jewel-green vines that twirled around their arms, binding them even closer together.
“What are you doing?” Jacks demanded. “I thought you were doing this!”
“You think I’d tie us up with flowers?” He scowled as a little pink bud burst into a blossom.
“It must be this place,” he muttered.
It was then Evangeline noticed that they were no longer in the back room of the curiosity shop.
The confusion of crates was gone, and the shop had been transformed into a lovely cottage—or perhaps this peculiar place was an inn? The brightly lit entryway where Evangeline stood with Jacks looked a little too large for a family’s cottage. There were at least four stories of rooms above them, full of doors with curious carvings on them, depicting things like rabbits wearing crowns, hearts inside glass cloches, and mermaids wearing seashell necklaces.
She felt instantly foolish for not immediately noticing, for being unable to see beyond Jacks.
Directly across from her was a rounded door, and beside it was the most wonderfully irregular clock. It was brightly painted with gleaming jeweled pendulums, and instead of hours, the clock had names of food and drink. Things like Dumplings & Meat, Fish Stew, Mystery Stew, Toast and Tea, Porridge, Ale, Beer, Mead, Wine Cider, Honey Pie, Brambleberry Crisp, Forest Cakes.
“Welcome to the Hollow,” Jacks said softly.
Evangeline whirled on him. Or she tried to. Whirling wasn’t exactly possible with the rope of flowers binding their arms. “You can’t just tie people up and whisk them to wherever you want them.”
“I wouldn’t need to, if you would just remember.” His voice was still quiet, but it was a dangerous sort of quiet, one that gave his words a bite.
Evangeline told herself not to care. But instead she felt compelled to argue. “You don’t think I’m trying to remember?”
“Clearly not hard enough,” Jacks said coldly. “Do you even want your memories back?”
“All I’ve been doing is trying to get them back!”
“If you believe that, then either you’re lying to yourself or you’ve forgotten how to really try.” His eyes burned as they met hers; it was a fire like anger. But she could see hurt as well. It came in threads of silver that moved through the blue of his eyes like cracks. “I’ve seen you try before. I’ve seen you want something more than anything else in the entire world. I’ve seen what you’re willing to do. How far you were willing to go. You haven’t even come close to that now.”
Jacks ground his jaw as he stared at her. He looked angry and exasperated. He reached up, as if to run his free hand through his hair, but then he wrapped it around the back of her neck and dropped his forehead to hers.
His skin was cold, but the contact made her go hot all over. The hand at her neck slid into her hair and her entire body went boneless. He held her to him, fingers gentle and firm as they dug into her scalp.
This was so wrong, wanting the man who’d tied her to him and done countless other unspeakable things. But all she could think was that she wanted him to do even more.
He was like poisoned fairy fruit—one bite ruined a person for anything else. But she hadn’t even bitten him, nor was she going to. There could be no biting. She didn’t even know why she was thinking about biting.
She tried to pull away, but Jacks held tight, knotting her hair in his fist and keeping his forehead pressed to hers. “Please, Little Fox, remember.”
The name did something to her.
Little Fox. Little Fox. Little Fox.
Two simple words. Only they did not feel simple at all. They felt like falling. They felt like hope. They felt like the most important words in the world. The words made her blood rush and her head spin until once again it was only her and Jacks. Nothing existed except for the press of his cool forehead, the feel of his strong hand tangling in her hair, and the pleading, broken look in his quicksilver blue eyes.
The combination of it all shuffled her insides like a deck of cards, until all the feelings she’d tried to shove away were back on top.
She wanted to trust him. She wanted to believe him when he said the Handsome Stranger he’d just stabbed wasn’t really dead. She wanted to think that the murderous stories she’d been told about him were all lies.
She wanted him.
It didn’t matter that moments ago, he’d told her he enjoyed blood and hurt and pain. Those things were on the bottom of the deck. And she didn’t want to reshuffle.
Evangeline could have come up with reasons to justify this, reasons that went beyond just hearing a nickname.
But she didn’t want to defend her feelings; she just wanted to see where they led. She no longer wanted to pull away; instead she wanted to go down whatever dark path he was about to take her. And that had to mean something. Maybe it merely meant she was a fool, or maybe it meant that her heart remembered things her mind did not.
She tried once more to remember anything else. She closed her eyes and silently repeated the nickname like a prayer.
Little Fox. Little Fox. Little Fox.
Just the thought of Jacks saying the words made her heart tumble, but they did not bring back her memories.
When she opened her eyes, Jacks’s inhuman gaze was still locked onto hers. She could see something like hope in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I can’t remember.”
The light went out of his gaze. Jacks quickly untangled his fingers from her hair, straightened, and pulled away. All that touched now were their wrists and their arms where the vines bound them together.
He didn’t try to cut the vines curling around their arms, and Evangeline was strangely glad of it. She might not have had her memories back, but it seemed her heart truly remembered him, because she felt it breaking a little as he looked at her with a gaze that had gone cool as shadows in a forest.
The uncanny clock in the hall struck Mystery Stew, and the body of the Handsome Stranger on the floor shifted. Evangeline saw his chest shudder with something that wasn’t quite a breath. But it was definitely movement.
“We need to get out of here,” Jacks said sharply. He tugged on the flowering rope that bound him to Evangeline and several pale petals fell from the flowers.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “And how did we even get here?” “We’re here because I tied us together,” said Jacks. “If two people are
touching skin to skin, then they’re both brought into the illusion of the person with the strongest will. Otherwise we might lose each other. Since we were trapped in different illusions, you might encounter a wall, where I would have a door.”
“So, this is your best day?” Evangeline asked. She wished she realized it sooner, or that she had more time to look around this curious inn, to see what it was that Jacks held dear.
But he clearly didn’t want to linger. He didn’t even respond to her question.
She didn’t hear any voices calling for him, but she wondered if being here hurt Jacks the same way being so close to the memory of her parents
had hurt her. If he, too, felt the pull of something he wanted but couldn’t have.
He quickly opened the door leading out of the Hollow as if he couldn’t get away fast enough. Yet Evangeline saw a flicker of pain in his eyes, as if it also hurt him to leave.
Outside, he rushed down one of the cheeriest paths she’d ever seen.
Hummingbirds flitted, birds chirped, and tiny blue dragons napped on polka-dot mushrooms. The poppies lining the path away from the inn were enormous as well. They were as tall as her waist, with deep red petals that looked like velvet and smelled like the sweetest perfume.
When they reached the end of the cobblestoned path, the air turned from flower-sweet to mossy and damp. There was still a path, but it was made of nothing but dirt and lined in enormous trees that turned the world from sunshine bright to shadowed and cool.
Evangeline could hear a stream trickling in the distance—along with the sounds of voices and pounding horse hooves.
The Hunt must have been close, which meant Apollo could have been near as well.
With all that had happened, she’d forgotten about him. She wondered if he was a part of the Hunt, or if he’d gotten her message from Joff about waiting to join until she’d found him. She hoped very much he’d gotten the message and was waiting outside of the Cursed Forest. She didn’t want to imagine what would happen if he found her now, bound to Jacks.
“Where exactly are we going?” Evangeline asked.
“First we need to get out of this accursed forest before someone else tries to kill you.”
“About that,” she said, “someone else did try to kill me earlier, before I entered this place.”
Jacks gave her a baleful look. “How is it that every day someone tries to kill you?”
“I wish I knew. Maybe then I could stop it from happening.”
He appeared doubtful. “Who was it this time? Did you see them?” “It was Lord Byron Belleflower. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met. Spoiled, rich, mostly useless.”
“Do you know why he would want me dead? He said something about Petra?”
Jacks flinched. It was so quick, almost imperceptible, that Evangeline wondered if she’d imagined it.
When he spoke again, he sounded almost bored. “Petra was a nasty wench. She was Belleflower’s lover until she died recently. But you had nothing to do with that.”
“Then why does he want to kill me?”
“I have no idea.” Jacks sounded slightly annoyed now. “At this point, I’m just assuming everyone wants you dead.”
“Does that include you?”
“No.” There wasn’t even a second of hesitation. “But it doesn’t mean I’m safe.”
He looked at her then, meeting her eyes for the first time since he’d pressed his forehead to hers and pleaded with her to remember. He had the brightest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen. But as they stood there in the forest, his eyes looked paler than before, a ghostly shade of blue that made her think of lights on the verge of flickering out.
“I don’t believe you’re going to hurt me,” she said. The color of his eyes became dimmer.
You’ll feel very differently soon.
The words were only in her head, but they sounded just like Jacks’s voice, and for a second, there was a terrible falling feeling in her stomach.
A bird cawed above, loud and shrill. Evangeline looked up.
A dark, familiar creature with wings circled above them.
Her heart skipped over a beat as she had a flash of the very same creature biting her shoulder. “Oh no!”
“What’s wrong?” Jacks asked.
“That bird,” Evangeline whispered. “It belongs to the leader of the Guild of Heroes. He’s hunting you.”
With his free hand, Jacks pulled a knife from the holster on his leg. “No!” Evangeline quickly grabbed his wrist.
Jacks scowled. “Don’t tell me I’m not allowed to kill birds now.” “It’s a pet, and it shouldn’t be condemned because of its master.”
Jacks looked at Evangeline as if she made absolutely no sense to him. But he put away the knife. “Let’s just hope this pet bird is living its best day full of fat rabbits and not focusing on us.”
“Thank you,” said Evangeline.
“I don’t think I really did you a favor.” “But it was what I wanted.”
Jacks looked as if he wanted to say something else about her wants, but then he tugged her forward through the forest by her wrist.
Evangeline didn’t know how long they walked after that, but eventually the vivid forest turned to mist. The flowers and the vines binding them together disappeared, fading like a dream that could live only in the sun.
She could still see Jacks and feel his wrist pressed against hers, now tied with simple rope, but the world around them was growing dark. The sky was a swirl of gray and charcoal and hovering clouds about to break.
The first drop felt like a surprise. Then more rain began to fall in relentless silver-gray lines that muddled the stars and the dark of the night.
Evangeline quickly lifted the hood of her green velvet cloak, but the rain had already soaked her hair through. “Does this mean we’re officially out of the Cursed Forest?”
“Yes.”
“But where are all the tents for the Hunt?”
“We’re on the other side of the forest now,” Jacks said without pausing as it continued to pour.
Evangeline once again lost track of time as they trudged through the rain. It was dark when they’d escaped the forest and it was dark still. Jacks had grown very quiet, and she had become rather hungry.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten or had anything to drink. It hadn’t seemed to matter inside the Cursed Forest. But now her stomach was growling and her legs were tired, and every rock and acorn looked like something worth taking a bite of.
She was starting to feel the effect of going an entire day without eating or drinking. At least . . . she thought it had been a day. She wasn’t entirely sure how much time had passed since she’d gone to the forest.
All she knew was that it was night again, her mouth was dry, and her legs felt as if they would collapse underneath her. Jacks kept pace beside her, but she imagined she was slowing him down.
Her cloak was drenched and starting to leak through to her chilled skin. “We’re almost there,” he said. Rain dripped from the tips of his golden
hair to his cheeks before running down his neck to his doublet. Unlike Evangeline, he wore no hood or cloak, just the rain—and like everything else, it looked good on him.
He glanced at her sideways. “You shouldn’t stare at me like that.” “Then how should I stare?”
“You shouldn’t stare at me at all.” He abruptly looked away.
Evangeline felt a stab of something close to hurt. Jacks had tied her to him, he’d saved her life, and now he was saying not to look at him.
“What is it we’re doing, Jacks?”
“We need to get out of the rain,” he said.
As soon as he spoke, the inn appeared in the distance, like a picture in a pop-up book. A rainy pop-up picture book. But Evangeline didn’t care as long as it was warm and she could get something to eat. Her shoes were soaked; her cloak was drenched and clinging to her person; even the rope tying her to Jacks was sopping wet. But as they drew closer, she could see that even in the pouring rain, the inn looked warm and cozy.
The building was all glistening redbrick with overflowing flower boxes full of fluffy fox-leaf flowers covered in fat drops of rain. The chimney on the moss-covered roof, with puffs of gray piping from it, filled the wet air with a woodsy sort of smoke, as the sign in front of the inn swayed with the wind.
Ye Olde Brick Inn at the End of the Forest: for Wayward Travelers and Adventurers.
Beneath this sign was another swaying sign that contained the word:
Vacancy.
And then hooked beneath that was an even smaller sign that read: One Bed.
