After toasting, Evangeline and LaLa drank a little more wine than they probably should have.
Evangeline didn’t usually drink, but despite all the bold words she had said to LaLa, Evangeline was quite terrified that she might tell Jacks that she loved him, and then he still might leave her.
She had been turned to stone, poisoned, shot with arrows, flayed by a magical curse, and nearly killed over half a dozen times. But all those things didn’t scare her as much as the idea of Jacks deciding that he didn’t want to love her back.
Evangeline knew that LaLa was right, Jacks was excellent at getting what he wanted. When Jacks made up his mind, there was no changing it. The only thing that could make Jacks stay was Jacks.
“Having second thoughts?” asked LaLa.
“No,” Evangeline said. “In fact, I have an escape plan.”
Earlier, as LaLa had toyed with the buttons of her coat, an idea had come to Evangeline that didn’t involve swords or fire or anything related to fighting.
“That could work.” LaLa tapped her chin thoughtfully upon hearing Evangeline’s proposed plan. “You could leave right before the changing of your guard, when these guards are tired. I could escape right after the new
guards arrive. They’ll have no idea that I hadn’t been properly let in. And they’ll be too dazzled by my beauty to question it.”
Evangeline’s head was spinning a bit now. She’d definitely had too much wine. It was all a bit of a blur as she put on LaLa’s clothes and LaLa raided Evangeline’s trunks until she found a shimmering off-the-shoulder gown that definitely looked dazzling.
After that, LaLa took pains to tuck Evangeline’s hair under a cap. Then she darkened the roots with some of the table wine, just enough to change her appearance at a glance.
“If the guards look too long, they’ll recognize you,” warned LaLa. “So try to be quick—but not suspicious quick.”
“I don’t think I could be suspicious quick right now if I wanted to,” said Evangeline. But she also couldn’t dally much longer. The guards would be changing soon. If she wanted to leave, this was her window.
“I’ll be close behind you,” LaLa said. “And don’t forget this.” She handed Evangeline a map that she’d drawn of Merrywood Forest—it was mostly just a bunch of triangles for trees with a line cutting through them that led to a circle labeled the glowing spring. The plan was for them to reunite there, and then together they would search for Jacks.
“Thank you for doing this,” Evangeline said.
“What is the point of having friends if they’re not there to support your bad decisions?” LaLa gave her a final hug just as the bell tolled. “You should go now.”
Evangeline darted outside right on time for the changing of the guards. One appeared to glance her way, but the evening sky must have helped to cloak her. The torches everywhere filled the night sky with plumes of smoke that gave everything a slightly ethereal look. It made Evangeline feel as if she was skirting the burnt pages of a storybook. A story she was eager to leave.
The dinner hour was winding down as she wove her way through the royal encampment. The atmosphere was slightly drunken, celebratory, and flirty. Some of the merriment from the Merrywood rebuilding festival had finally infiltrated the royal encampment.
From a glance, it seemed that men and women from other camps had come to mingle with the royal guards, which was good for Evangeline. Yet she still held her breath until she reached the edge of the tents.
Her insides felt warm from the wine, but she was growing nervous again as she slipped behind a pile of lumber just off the path, to avoid the soldiers who watched the entrance to the camp.
She was careful to be quiet, although the night was full of songs and laughter and crackling fires. The noise died down as she entered Merrywood Forest, and soon there was only the crunch of her footsteps, the low croaks of frogs, and the occasional howl of a wolf, which set off a chorus of even more howls in the distance.
Evangeline held out her lantern to check the map that LaLa had drawn to the glowing spring.
She had thought the path on the map was an actual road. But Evangeline didn’t see any road in the forest. Either she’d missed it or LaLa’s path was just the route she was supposed to follow, not an actual road.
As Evangeline tried to memorize the path on the map, the forest grew very quiet—eerily quiet. The rustle of squirrels was gone, as were the sounds of the deer and the baby dragons. She couldn’t hear a thing save for the very loud crack of a twig.
She jumped.
And then Jacks was there. He was alive.
He wasn’t injured.
She couldn’t see so much as a scratch on his beautiful face. Evangeline felt as if she could breathe again. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized just how worried she’d actually been.
“Did I scare you, pet?”
“No—I mean, yes—not really,” she said, flustered, although she couldn’t have said why. She was going to go out searching for him and now here he was. Being very Jacks-like.
He tossed a pale white apple as he moved through the forest, the way a shadow might move at sunset. Slow and quick, all at once. He’d been several feet away, but now he was in front of her, looking down on her with clear blue eyes that shone in the dark.
“I remember,” she breathed.
“Do you now?” He smiled, and just like everything else, it was a very Jacks-like smile. Sharper at one corner, giving the impression of being both cruel and playful all at once. It reminded her vaguely of the first time they’d
met, when she’d thought he looked like a half-bored young noble, half-wicked demigod.
“Tell me, pet, just how much do you remember?” The tips of his cool fingers found the base of her neck.
Her pulse spiked. Just a little, and yet it was enough to erase some of the warmth inside of her as Jacks slid his fingers from the hollow of her throat up to the line of her jaw.
This, too, felt like Jacks.
And yet . . . her heart was beating wrong, wrong, wrong, and she was now thinking about how he’d called her pet twice. Not Little Fox, not Evangeline.
But the problem with wanting something you can’t have, or shouldn’t have, is that the second it seems possible, all reason flees. Reason and wanting go well together only when the reason encourages a person to get what they want. Any reason opposed to this want becomes the enemy. A distant part of Evangeline told her that Jacks was acting strange, and that she didn’t like it when he called her pet. But the part of Evangeline that wanted Jacks to love her tried to ignore this instinct.
“I remember all of it,” she said. “I remember everything from the moment we met in your church to the night at the Valory Arch. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jacks said flippantly, still smiling crookedly as he dropped the apple in his hand. It fell to the ground with a heavy thud.
“Evangeline. Back away from him,” called a smoky voice through the trees. It was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it until Chaos carefully stepped closer. “He’s not safe right now.”
“I’m never safe,” Jacks said. Then with a smirk toward his old friend, he added, “Playing the hero doesn’t suit you, Castor.”
“At least I don’t give up just because I fail.”
“I’m not giving up,” Jacks drawled. “I’m giving the girl what she wants.” His fingers moved down her jaw to Evangeline’s chin. For a second, time seemed to slow as he carefully lifted her chin in a way that made her think of only one thing: kissing.
Evangeline felt suddenly sober.
“Isn’t this what you want?” Jacks whispered.
Yes, she wanted to say. But again, she could hear that small, reasonable voice telling her that this was wrong. Jacks was supposed to tease her, taunt
her, touch her, but never try to kiss her. He didn’t believe they could kiss. He believed in doomed love and unhappily ever after.
And Evangeline still wanted to prove him wrong.
She might have felt suddenly terrified as he leaned in closer. Yet she couldn’t make herself pull away as Jacks brought his lips to—
He immediately doubled over in pain and cursed loudly, saying words Evangeline had never heard anyone utter. His face contorted, turning bone white as he clutched his ribs before dropping to his knees with a groan.
“What’s happening?”
She bent down to help him. And that’s when she noticed the words on the cuff around her wrist had started glowing again.
“Sorry about this.” Chaos’s hot arms went around her, nearly scorching her as he picked her up. “We need to leave before Jacks tries to kill you again.”
