“My whole family was in the Valory trapped in a state of suspended sleep. Why do you think I wanted to open it so badly?”
“I thought it was because of your helm,” Evangeline said. Before she had opened the Valory, Chaos wore a cursed helm that prevented him from feeding. But now that she thought back on it, it made perfect sense that Chaos also had a deeper motivation for opening the arch. He must have been the monster that some believed to be inside the Valory, but instead his family had been locked away.
“After the night that you opened the Valory Arch, Jacks was half-mad. He kept raving about you dying. About how he had to save you. I didn’t take him seriously.” Chaos paused to run a hand through his hair as he mumbled, “I might have bitten him, by accident, and I thought it was just the blood loss talking. Then, a couple of days later, I found out about how he’d made a bargain with my sister for the cuff. He wanted it for you, so that no one could ever hurt you again.”
“He’s been obsessed with that,” Evangeline said. She remembered him being protective of her before, but it seemed he was fixated now. Or he had been. Obviously, something had changed between tonight and when she had last seen Jacks at the inn. Chaos had said the protection cuff worked based on a person’s intent, and it had stopped Jacks just as he’d intended to kiss her.
“What did Jacks trade this cuff for?” Evangeline asked.
“I tried to stop him,” Chaos said. “I told him not to do it, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“What did he trade the cuff for?” she asked more forcefully this time.
Chaos looked at her but wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Evangeline reminded herself that you weren’t supposed to meet a vampire’s eyes because vampires took it as an invitation to bite, but in this instance, it felt different. Chaos didn’t look hungry now so much as he looked sad.
“Jacks traded the cuff for his heart.”
“His heart?” Evangeline repeated. “What kind of heart? Is this some sort of magical object? A trinket? Surely not his actual heart.”
“Everyone has two different hearts,” Chaos said. “There is the heart that beats and keeps you alive. Then there is the other heart, the second heart, the one that breaks instead of beats, the one that loves so that there is a point to all this living. This is the heart that my sister wanted.”
“Why would Aurora want that?” Evangeline asked, although she feared she already knew the answer and that it had something to do with two names she’d once seen carved into the walls of the Hollow.
Aurora + Jacks
The names had been carved into the wall hundreds of years ago, but for Aurora it must have felt like a few years, maybe just months, since she’d been trapped in a suspended state in the Valory all this time.
“She loves Jacks, doesn’t she,” Evangeline said.
“That’s what I’ve always suspected,” Chaos replied. “Aurora has never confessed it, but I imagine that’s only because Jacks has never shown any interest in her. Lyric Merrywood was the one who loved her, but I always thought my sister was with him just as a pretext to be near Jacks, who never even looked her way.
“If Aurora had really wanted to call off her engagement to Vengeance in order to marry Lyric, our father would have been upset, but he would have let her do it. He isn’t a tyrant. But Aurora enjoyed being the object of desire. She liked having both Lyric’s and Vengeance’s attentions, and I think she kept hoping it would make Jacks jealous.
“Of course it all went wrong. I don’t think it ever occurred to Aurora that after she left Vengeance he’d come after Lyric and raze the entirety of the Merrywood lands. But that’s the problem with my sister. She never thinks things through, and I know she’s not thinking now.”
“Do you know what she plans to do with Jacks’s heart? Is she going to put a love spell on it?” Evangeline guessed aloud. Although she knew from experience that a person didn’t need someone’s heart for that. Love spells could also be broken.
“I have a feeling she plans to do something more permanent,” Chaos said darkly.
“Like what? Give him an entirely new heart?”
“I don’t know. But I imagine when she’s done, Jacks will finally be hers.”
Evangeline wanted to throw up and pace, or maybe pace and throw up. She couldn’t stomach the idea of Jacks with Aurora—and she couldn’t imagine that Jacks would want that either.
How could he have done this? How could he give away his heart? How could he give up on her like this? Although she very much doubted he saw it this way. Jacks probably told himself he was doing something right, something noble by sacrificing his heart to protect her.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t what he’d really done. Jacks might have told himself he’d given up his heart to save her, but Evangeline feared he’d also done it to make it easier for him to let her go.
There had to be a way to change this. To fix this. To stop Aurora from forever changing Jacks’s heart or giving him another heart entirely. Who would Jacks even be if that happened?
“How do we get his heart back?” Evangeline said.
“Not we, just you. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
“I would, but I believe my sister has hidden the heart in the one place I can’t go. I think it’s somewhere in the Hollow.”
“Evangeline!” LaLa’s singsong voice trilled through the surrounding trees. “I hope you weren’t waiting too—” LaLa’s voice cut off abruptly as she stepped out of the wood and caught sight of Chaos on the other side of the glowing spring.
“What are you doing here?” Her lips twisted with displeasure.
“I just saved your friend’s life,” Chaos replied sharply.
And was it just Evangeline’s imagination, or did he puff out his chest? Until that moment, she’d still been thinking of him as Chaos. But now as he sat up taller, with his cape rakishly tossed over one shoulder, she could see him as Castor Valor, the cocky young prince of the Magnificent North.
“Well, I’m here now, so—” LaLa waved a hand toward the forest.
“Did you just dismiss me?” Castor asked.
“I tried,” LaLa said. She was the smallest in stature of the three, and yet there was something about the way she glared at Castor that gave the impression of her looking down upon him. “Don’t you have virgin blood to drink or something?”
“Virgin blood?” Castor smiled one of those devastating vampire smiles as he shoved a hand through his hair in very devil-may-care fashion. “What kind of stories have you been reading about me?”
“I don’t read any stories about you,” LaLa huffed, but Evangeline swore there was a deeper color on her cheeks.
“So it’s just a coincidence that you’re quoting one of them?”
“I know you drink blood,” she said.
Castor’s gaze turned heated. I’d like to drink your blood, it seemed to say.
And suddenly everything felt a little hotter than it should have been. LaLa did not seem to like Castor, but Evangeline surmised that the vampire felt quite differently about her.