After Apollo left Evangeline in the tent alone, she studied the glass cuff that wrapped around her wrist. It was magical. She’d assumed as much, but she hadn’t known what it did until she’d seen Apollo double over in pain.
She held the glass closer to the candlelight. She had seen it light up with curious writing when Apollo had been clutching his stomach. She couldn’t make the letters appear again now; all she could see were the little cherry blossom flowers etched into the glass.
She wondered if it had been specifically enchanted against Apollo—if that’s why the strange words had appeared minutes ago when he’d touched her and she hadn’t wanted him to. It seemed like just the sort of enchantment Jacks would place on an object.
What she didn’t understand was why. If Jacks didn’t want Evangeline with Apollo, then why did he leave her with him? Why didn’t Jacks take me with him? she wondered. But she already knew the answer to that.
You and I aren’t meant to be.
Sorry to break your fairytale, Little Fox, but ballads don’t end happily, and neither do the two of us.
Every girl I’ve kissed has died, except for one. And you are not that girl.
I want to erase every moment you and I have spent together . . . because if I don’t, I’ll kill you, just like I killed the Fox.
Jacks had already given her all his reasons for leaving.
Although the last reason she recalled gave Evangeline pause. Jacks had wanted her to find all the Valory Arch stones, not so that he could open the Valory, but so that he could use them to turn back time and be with Donatella, the one girl he’d kissed who he hadn’t killed. But Jacks hadn’t done that. If he had, she wouldn’t have ever met him, and he’d be with Donatella in Valenda right now.
What had happened, then? There were four arch stones. Each one had a different magical power, but when all four stones were combined, they had the power to turn back time. But they could be used for this purpose only one time.
Had Jacks changed his mind about turning back time? Was he waiting to use the stones? Or had they already been used?
Before she’d gotten her memories back, Chaos had told her: I’m here because a friend of ours needs help—your help. He’s about to make a horrible decision and you need to change his mind before it’s too late to save him.
Clearly he’d been speaking about Jacks. But what was the horrible decision?
Evangeline had been heartbroken and terrified when she’d learned that Jacks wanted to go back in time and change the past so that she and he had never met. But this didn’t sound as if he was going to do that—this sounded like something else. Something possibly worse.
Evangeline needed to get out of this tent and find him.
She considered setting the tent on fire and then escaping in the melee. But fires could too easily get out of control, and she didn’t want to hurt anyone.
Unless it was Apollo. She did want to hurt him.
“I hope you appreciate just how much trouble I’ve gone to in order to break into this tent,” said a wonderfully familiar voice as Evangeline’s tent flapped closed.
She hadn’t even heard it open, but it must have. A girl dressed like a guard stood in the center of the tent, hands on her hips as she scanned the lavish space with a shrewd twist of her lips, which were painted with a sparkling gloss.
“LaLa!” Evangeline exclaimed, too loud. But she could not contain her excitement at the sight of her friend. “What are you doing dressed like a
guard?”
“I kept trying to visit, but they wouldn’t let me. Some nonsense about how you were too overwrought to see friends. So I had to fashion a costume.”
LaLa twirled around, and as she did, her three-quarter-length skirt lifted just enough to reveal that underneath the plain burgundy fabric was a shimmery sequin petticoat that sparkled like firelight. She’d also added little puffed sleeves to her bronze jacket, and a matching belt that tied into a bow in the back.
LaLa was a number of things. First and foremost, Evangeline thought of her as a friend, so sometimes it was easy to forget that she was also an immortal Fate, like Jacks.
She was the Unwed Bride.
She’d once confessed to Evangeline that the Fates were always fighting the urge to be that which they were made to be. LaLa’s urge was to find love. She wanted it more than anything, even though she knew that it would never last. Because her love always ended with her alone at an altar, bawling poisoned tears. Because no matter how many loves she found, the love she really wanted was her first love—a dragon shifter who had been locked away in the Valory.
To deal with her urges to find love, she sewed. She sewed a lot. And she was very good at it.
“I know it’s not exactly the same uniform,” she said with another swish of her skirt, “but I think I’ve improved upon it.”
“I love it,” Evangeline said. “And I love seeing you even more.”
With her memory back less than a day, Evangeline had not had time to properly miss her friend. But now that LaLa was here, Evangeline could feel that the missing had been there all along, part of the emptiness inside her that was only now starting to feel as if it was filling up. She hugged her then, so tightly she might have feared hurting her, if LaLa wasn’t a Fate.
“Where’s your dragon?” Evangeline asked. She realized then that even though she now remembered opening the Valory Arch, she still didn’t know exactly what had been inside of it, apart from LaLa’s dragon shifter. She also had no idea if LaLa had actually reunited with him.
“Oh, he’s around,” LaLa said vaguely as she pulled away. “I’m sure you’ll meet him soon,” she added, but it was a little half-hearted, which wasn’t at all like her.
LaLa might have been a Fate, and thus her emotions weren’t quite human, but Evangeline knew that LaLa had loved her dragon shifter; she’d loved him so much that she’d actually been the one to put the Archer’s curse on Apollo, misguidedly hoping to ensure that Evangeline opened the Valory Arch.
Evangeline had been quite hurt at the time, but like LaLa, she had also made terrible decisions because of love.
“Is everything all right?” Evangeline reached out again and took her friend’s hand. “Do you need to talk?”
“It’s fine, really. It’s just . . .” LaLa paused to exhale. “The world has changed a lot since Dane was locked away, and apparently so have I. But it’s fine. Truly. What’s that saying about love? You know the one that mentions the sugar, the fire, and cost of desire?”
Evangeline shook her head. “I’m not sure I’ve heard that one.”
“Well, perhaps it’s not that much of a saying. Now, don’t get me wrong, my friend, I’m thrilled you’re asking about all of this. But I’m perplexed. I thought you had lost all of your memories?”
“I did,” Evangeline said softly. “I only just got them back.”
She then quickly filled LaLa in on how it was Apollo who’d stolen them. How he’d tried to convince her that Jacks was the villain, and he might have succeeded if Jacks hadn’t kept returning to save her life. She told LaLa of every time he had visited and how her heart remembered him even when her head did not. Until at last she found the letter she’d written that Jacks had been carrying around next to his heart.
“That’s surprisingly sweet,” LaLa said.
“I thought so, too. As soon as I read it, I finally was able to will myself to remember. That was last night—or maybe it was early this morning. I’m a little mixed up on timing.”
She smiled, but it was wobbly. She was so relieved to see her friend. She just wanted to flop down on some of the cushions in the tent and talk about nothing and everything. But there wasn’t time for that.
Not if she wanted to find Jacks and try and stop him from doing whatever it was that Chaos had warned her about.
“I didn’t want to come back here with Apollo, but when I woke, Jacks had left me, and then Apollo was there with his heroes and his guards and his lies.”
“Bastard,” LaLa muttered. “I know princes are the worst, but I wanted to hope being cursed might do him a little good.”
“I do wonder if in his own way he thinks he’s doing good.” “But you still hate him, right?”
“Of course—I loathe him. I can’t stand the sight of him or the sound of his voice, and I want to get out of here before he returns so I never have to see him again.”
“Let’s do that then. Although I would love to wait until he returns so that I can stab him in the heart and then cook it over a fire. But I suppose I can do that another day,” LaLa mused. “So, what is our escape plan?” Her eyes gleamed as she clapped her hands together. “It’s been a while since I’ve been in a sword fight. That could be a fun route.”
“Tragically, I can’t wield a sword,” said Evangeline.
“What about those self-defense lessons you told me about? Did Jacks teach you anything, or was it just an excuse to put his hands around you?” LaLa waggled her brows.
Evangeline’s cheeks turned very warm. “He taught me a few things . . . but mostly it was a lot of his arms around me.”
“That’s what I thought.” LaLa smiled, but Evangeline could tell it was one of those trying-to-be-happy-for-a-friend smiles.
Only since LaLa was a Fate, it looked just a little more dangerous. It was a smile that also said: If he hurts you, you let me know and I will happily hurt him even more.
It reminded Evangeline of the last conversation she’d had with LaLa. Before Evangeline had lost her memories, LaLa had come to warn her about Jacks. As long as you are with Jacks, you’re not safe, she’d said.
“Do you still think Jacks is going to hurt me?” asked Evangeline.
LaLa’s forced smile faded. “Jacks hurts everyone. He hasn’t been the same since the day my brother died, and Castor died, and everything in the North went to hell.”
For a flash of a second, LaLa didn’t look like a Fate. She didn’t look vicious or powerful, or like she might kill someone just for making her friend cry. LaLa simply looked like a girl who needed a friend just as much as Evangeline did.
In addition to being a Fate, LaLa was also one of the original Merrywoods. Her brother had been Lyric Merrywood, who had been one of Jacks’s closest friends, along with Prince Castor Valor. They’d died on the
same day, and even though it hadn’t been Jacks’s fault, Evangeline knew Jacks blamed himself for being unable to save Castor.
“If anything could spark a change in Jacks, I think it could be his feelings for you,” said LaLa eventually. “But you still need to be careful. Because even his feelings are dangerous.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” LaLa looked at her seriously, her vivid eyes narrowed with concern.
There were three rules about Fates that Evangeline had been taught as a child. The most important of those rules was to never ever fall in love with a Fate.
Evangeline knew this rule, but she hadn’t thought about it for a while, and she wasn’t sure she’d properly understood it before.
But now it was making a new kind of sense. Earlier, when Evangeline had regained her memories but once again lost Jacks, she’d started to fear that maybe he was right and that they weren’t meant to be.
If they were truly meant for each other, shouldn’t it have been easier? Shouldn’t there have been less bloodshed and heartbreak and people trying to tear them apart? Shouldn’t love have won already?
But maybe the reason for the warning about falling in love with Fates wasn’t because loving a Fate could never work, but because it was so much harder. Nearly impossible.
All LaLa wanted was love, yet she was the one who kept leaving her grooms at the altar. Even now, after finally being reunited with her dragon shifter, LaLa didn’t seem to be sure that she wanted to be with him anymore.
Evangeline had once heard that Fates were not capable of love in the same way as humans. She’d taken it to mean they couldn’t feel the emotion. But she wondered if this also meant that Fates didn’t believe in love in the same way. Maybe they believed love with humans was doomed, and then acted in ways that brought that doom about.
“I’m not giving up on Jacks,” Evangeline said.
LaLa briefly pursed her lips. “That’s a very human thing to say.” “I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
“I think it’s a bit of both.” LaLa gave her another half hearted smile. “I know you like to do the right thing, but the right thing doesn’t always win with our kind. I think that was part of the reason Jacks became a Fate. He’d
always tried to do the right thing as a human, but it didn’t seem to matter, and the people he loved the most kept dying.”
LaLa paused to frown. “I want to be supportive. I really do love lost causes and terrible ideas. But I fear that if you try to save Jacks, you will die, too. I know you have your memories back, but just in case you need a reminder, Jacks is a supernatural being who will kill you if you ever kiss him.”
“Or,” Evangeline offered, “I could kiss Jacks, and he could finally see that he is not going to kill me.”
“No, no, no!” LaLa said furiously. “This is the world’s worst plan.”
“But what if it’s not? I know what the stories say about Jacks’s kiss being fatal to all except for his one true love—and I know he’s supposedly already kissed that one girl. But I also know the stories here lie and twist the truth, so that could be a lie. I am Jacks’s true love. I believe it with the same confidence that I believe that water fills the oceans and morning follows the night. I believe it with all my heart and soul. And there has to be some sort of magic in that.”
“I don’t think that’s how magic works.” LaLa looked at her sadly. “Believing something doesn’t make it true.”
“But what if the reason I believe this is because it is true? I know the stories all say otherwise, but my heart keeps telling me that Jacks’s story isn’t finished.”
LaLa continued to frown as she toyed with one of the buttons of her coat. “His story might not be over yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to end happily. I’ve known Jacks forever. He is excellent at getting what he wants. But I don’t think Jacks wants a happily ever after. If he wanted that, he could have it. But there’s a reason he doesn’t.”
“Well then, it’s a good thing he has me.” LaLa looked as if she wanted to argue.
“I know I seem naive,” Evangeline pressed on. “I know my faith in love might appear foolish. I also know it might not be enough. But I’m not doing this because I believe I’ll win. I’m actually a little afraid I’m going to lose. I no longer think love is a guarantee of victory or of happily ever after. But I think it’s a reason to fight for those things. I know my attempt to save Jacks could end in a fiery explosion, but I’d rather go up in flames with him than watch while he burns.”
At this, LaLa finally smiled. “This is perhaps the worst declaration of love I’ve ever heard, but I do believe your passion deserves a toast.” She picked up two goblets of wine from the table and handed one to Evangeline. “To foolish hearts and fire! May you and Jacks only ever burn with passion and desire.”
