But I didn’t know if I loved him.
More than anything, knowing that Love had inadvertently been the reason Myriana’s heart had turned evil and cold, I was terrified. Zach said it was worth it—worth the danger, the risk, the heartache…but I wasn’t sure, especially when I still didn’t know if these feelings were Love or just the intense effects of Lust.
“Don’t say it,” I pleaded.
Zach took my hand from his mouth and traced the mark with his lips. “I want to say it. It’s what you do before going to fight evil queens and deadly dragons: you confess.”
I drew away my hand. “No, you want me to say it back. That’s why you told me.”
He leaned his head back against the rocks. “Can you blame a fellow for trying?”
My hands curled into fists on my lap, my shoulders hunched, like I could somehow make myself smaller. “Oh, Zach,” I whispered, my voice echoing in the confines of the small cave.
“I want so much more than your lips, Ivy. I want your heart.” Zach leaned close and brushed his lips against my hairline. “Because I love you…desperately.”
Desperately. My fingers loosened from a fist as I remembered the night he told me about his parents, the night he swept me up in a beautiful story.
“Zach, I—”
He cut me off by kissing under my ear, and I shivered in response. His hold on me tightened. “I know you want me, but do you love me?” His hand slid onto my neck, and his thumb rested on the base of my throat. “After all this, I’ll want your answer. So we’ve got to survive.”
Once he released me, I instantly missed his arms, but his words pulled me back to reality.
First, get out of this cave. Beat Myriana to the egg. Defeat the dragon. Survive. Then think about all this later. That’s all I could promise him at the moment and—bless him—that’s all he was asking for.
“Okay. After.”
What felt like hours later, Brom showed up with the rope. Climbing out of the cave went surprisingly smooth. Zach’s shoulders scraped against the rock, but it wasn’t anything some shassa root salve couldn’t fix.
I wondered, as we maneuvered over rocks on our way back to the mountain path, if Myriana had just been a normal girl, then why did her heir and Raed’s and Saevalla’s heirs all possess the power of a Royal’s Kiss? Zach had said the Romantica believed it did more harm than good, but I couldn’t begin to understand how that was possible, unless it was similar to the Curse of Jecep where a poisoned crop multiplied once pulled from the roots and…
I tripped on a stone and scraped my palm catching myself, making both Brom and Zach stop in their climb.
“Ivy?” Brom asked.
He asked me something else, but I didn’t hear him clearly. My brain was speeding through the memories I’d seen in the mirror. The last thing Myriana’s Heart remembered was something called the Hydra Curse. What if that glowing ball of purple energy hadn’t just been the queen’s power manifested?
“What if all the Royals are cursed?” I whispered, staring down at my injured hand now seeping blood. Droplets ran down my wrist, coloring the stag antlers of Zach’s mark with crimson.
“It’s why every time we use our Kiss, the creatures we defeat are multiplied, and more curses spread. Because our blood—our blood is cursed.” My hand started shaking so hard my whole arm trembled. It was like the mountainside was crumbling under my feet. Like I was falling with no hope of ever hitting the bottom.
Zach reached for me, probably to steady me over the sharp rocks, but I recoiled from his touch.
The mark on his outstretched hand was exactly the same as the burn from the hand of Myriana’s first host once she touched the curse.
Our marks were physical evidence of the curse. And Zach, with the Mark of Myriana, was now the most cursed of all. Oh Sisters, I cursed them. My partners, my Kisses—nothing but tools to spread more darkness. Perhaps the irony was the worst part of it all.
Brom took my hand and doused water over it, making the scrape sting. I barely flinched.
I stared at Zach, all hope that he’d given me in the cave snuffing out like a candle. “How can we defeat someone who has literally put her curse, her own power, in our blood?”
And if it was in our blood, maybe that’s how the Sense worked. The evil that called out to me—resonating in my chest—connected to the Hydra Curse that lay within us.
I clutched the front of my tunic as if I could somehow rip out the darkness tainting my lungs. In a way, I was one of the Queen’s creatures—born from her wickedness. We all were.
The wind whistled in my ears, carrying over the mountains and whipping back our hair and cloaks.
Zach tore his gaze from me to stare at the gray scenery before us. “The Hydra Curse works only through our Kiss. So we just…we can’t Kiss.”
I already knew we couldn’t Kiss, but it didn’t seem as simple as what Zach made it out to be. We still had no concrete plan of defeating her if she reached the egg before we did.
If only she had a weakness. Something to exploit.
Again, I turned to her memories. Was there something in there…something I had missed that we could use? What had crippled her heart so much that made her want to cut it out?
Had it been Raed sleeping with Saevalla?
No, surprisingly, I didn’t think that was it. I’d been her. I knew what had killed me the most and it had been…
The miscarriages. Losing the babies, one after another. Feeling them grow inside me, then losing that second heartbeat.
It made me want to rip out my own.
I felt Brom wrapping my injured hand with a clean bandage, but he seemed so far away. Everything felt disconnected from me. For a moment, I was Myriana again.
The idea of losing a baby was all-consuming. There was nothing else in the world that mattered except protecting a new life.
“It’s babies,” I whispered.
Brom leaned close. “What?”
I looked up and focused on Zach. “That’s her weakness. Babies.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that I had proof. Solid, indisputable proof that the Evil Queen would go to any length to protect an unborn child—like weaving spells into her creatures and curses to prevent them from harming a woman with child.
“Rochet,” Zach and I said at the same time.
In the cursed village, Rochet had been pregnant and the only one not to have any symptoms of the curse, even though she’d been drinking the well water like everyone else. A witch’s power was derived from the Evil Queen’s Forces of Darkness, so her Curse of Venera hadn’t affected Rochet or her unborn child.
“Patrice, too,” I said, grabbing Zach’s arm in an iron grip. “The griffin attack. She’d been pregnant and was the only survivor.”
“And the pregnant girl in the burning house—at the attack at the wall. She’d survived a burning, collapsing house,” Zach said, breathless.
There was no way they were all coincidences—all miracles.
Zach and I shared a grim smile. It wasn’t an all-powerful Kiss or even mage magic. But it was something. We could work with something.
…
When the stars were just beginning to wink at us, the pain in my chest grew so heavy I struggled to stay upright. At one point, I staggered forward, and Zach lunged to catch me.
But I’d found it.
As Zach steadied me, I pointed up the mountain’s face. It looked like a few hours’ hike to a large cave. Even at night, the darkness congregating at the mouth of the cave was almost tangible. Like an army of wraiths could step out of it at any second.
We camped roughly a mile from the cave, then woke up to a sky of pink and red, as if predicting the blood that would be spilled.
No, don’t think like that, Ivy.