“Help?” I rasp.
“The whole thing with ignoring your tale is getting to him.” Phillip lowers into a squat in front of me, holding on to the backrest of the chair. “He knew he couldn’t keep the Wolf inside for much longer, so he asked me to lock him down and make sure he didn’t wreak havoc. Neither of us knew what to expect, but we both hoped it would ease after a while. It hasn’t.”
Very slowly, I start taking in the rest of my surroundings. There’s a small, round table beside the chair. An open bottle of wine and a used glass on the surface suggest that someone must have been sitting guard here through the night.
“Jack didn’t want anyone to know what’s happening.” Phillip speaks in a calm but firm tone. “I couldn’t tell Rory. That’s why she’s still sleeping. I can’t engage in the story as long as my buddy is in trouble.” He heaves a sigh. “And he barred me from bringing you here.”
“Thanks for coming for me anyway,” I whisper. My gaze shifts, and I look over to the still raging Wolf. His animalistic scowl is focused hard on me. It seems he’s trying to tear the iron gate apart just so he can get to me. His roar shakes me to the core.
“Don’t worry.” Phillip interprets my look absolutely right. “He can’t get out of there. But we need to do something to help him.”
My gaze snaps back to him, and I pant in all sincerity, “Of course. We’ll go through with our tale. Well go to Granny and finish what began two days ago. I mean, that should stop his pain and bring him back to normal, right?”
The long silence coming from the prince makes me nervous. “What? You don’t think it’ll work?”
He sighs. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that. He isn’t himself anymore. For hours, he’s been changing back and forth, uncontrollably. If I open this gate now, he’ll descend on me.” A short pause. “Right after he eats you.”
Goodness, I can just see that happening. We’d never make it to Granny’s house. If the lunacy in his eyes is anything to go by, we wouldn’t even make it around the corner, and Jack would leave a bloody trail in his wake.
“What do you suggest?” I chirp, swallowing hard.
“I have an idea, but it’s a long shot.” He rises to this feet and starts pacing. The tension in his shoulders reveals that he doesn’t put a lot of stock in the plan.
“I guess we don’t have much choice right now. So…what is it?”
Blowing out a breath, he turns around to me. “Dr. Jekyll.”
A shudder travels down my spine at the name. Dr. Henry Jekyll is a brilliant ENT specialist and pediatrician in town, but I know Phillip isn’t speaking about getting sore throat drops for Jack.
The doctor also has a darker side. The scientist in him has been mixing dangerous potions in his laboratory all through his story. His most questionable masterpiece is an elixir originally meant to separate the good side from the evil in a person. In doing so, he ended up creating Mr. Hyde.
Now, I can understand why the idea puts Phillip on edge. “You want him to give Jack some of his mixture. Do you think it’ll bring him back?”
“Well, it can’t get much worse than this.” He gestures toward the Wolf repeatedly running into the gate, the clang echoing through the underground. “It’s worth a try. And maybe the only chance we have.” He lifts a brow, taunting me in the middle of this already dire situation. “Unless you want to get your bow and release Jack from his torture.”
Shoot my friend? “That’s not funny,” I growl.
Phillip comes closer and hunkers down in front of me again so we’re at eye level. “I know.” The honesty in his look says that he’s just plain overwhelmed and at a loss for what to do next. “I’d really like to get ahold of the doctor, hear what he has to say. Would you stay here and keep an eye on Jack while I ride to town?”
“Of course!” My heart is bleeding for my friend. I’m not going anywhere until he’s well again.
Phillip nods, standing. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”
What I like so much about the prince is that he never hems and haws when it’s clearly not the time to. The clip of the heels of his boots echoes and fades as he strides away, disappearing around the corner.
Still shaking from the shock of all of this, I sit rigidly and finally turn my head back to the cell. Jack snarls in the flickering light of the flame. He oozes danger but, for once, he retreats from the gate. We stare at each other for a lengthy moment. By all the rainbows in Fairyland, I wish I could help him.
The snarling ceases. He doesn’t bare his teeth at me anymore either. Not letting me out of his sight, he lowers to the cold stone floor in the shadows of his vault. Hope surfaces that he’ll soon change back to his human self, realizing that I’m not a piece of meat that Phillip brought here to tease him with.
Breathing in slow and deep, I grasp the backrest of the chair and brace the other hand on the table, pushing myself up. Cautiously, I walk closer to the cage. “Jack? Is that you now?” My voice is nothing more than a mouse squeak in the silent dungeon. “I’m so sorry. You have to know that I never meant to—”
The beast leaps forward once again and crashes headfirst into the gate, making it shudder and sending me back in terror. He falls to the floor, a labored breath puffing out through his snout.
Heartbroken, I press my fists to my mouth and scrunch up my face.
Ouch.
*
Hours must have passed since Phillip left us alone. My back hurts from hunching over the small, round table, peeling the label off the half-empty wine bottle. Merlot. I believe this is a much classier brand than the bottom-shelf liquor I bring to Granny every so often.
Jack became quiet over the last half hour. He stopped maltreating the iron gate to get out and is now lying in the shadowy corner at the back of the vault. Only his eyes sparkle in the dark.
Impatiently, I get up and look around the corner in hopes that the prince might be returning at last. But the cold corridor is still empty. Disheartened, I lower back onto the chair.
“Want to know what I’ve been wondering all this time, Jack?” I murmur after some time, concentrating on the final sticky bits of the label. “What Granny does with all the wine I bring to her? I mean, obviously, she can’t drink it all or she’d have long since conked out from alcoholic cirrhosis, right? So where does it go? Into a pool behind her house?”
I sniff, rolling the biggest piece of paper I peeled off into a small pellet. “And then I wondered what you do outside our tales. The other day when we had to play double was the first time I ever saw you drunk.” Okay, he wasn’t really drunk, just slightly tipsy, but it made me think about him anyway. About his private life that doesn’t include Granny or me. Or even the Huntsman. “We’ve spent an incredible amount of time together, yet I don’t know anything about you or what you like to do. Isn’t that odd? I don’t know what your favorite food is. If you’d rather sleep in wolf or human form. Or what you wish for when you see a shooting star.”
As an extended, dangerous snarl crawls across the stone floor from the farthest corner of the vault, I pull up my feet by instinct as if the sound alone could drag me into the shadows. And then Jack’s contemptuous voice flows out of the dark. “I wish I had eaten you that last time at your granny’s house.”
I stiffen in the chair and snap my head up, my heart beating in my throat. He doesn’t come out of the shadows, but his eyes gleam differently now. More brown again than pitch-black.
Three nervous heartbeats pass before my voice returns, and I slowly lift from the chair. “No, you don’t mean that, Jack.” It’s a mere whisper. A plea. I know he’s suffering because of my wanton decisions, but he can’t hate me that much. Can he? “We’re friends.”