Chapter 12 #2
“I don’t want to leave him.” The confession fell out of her like a stone dropped into still water. “And I hate myself for it, because it means I’d rather stay trapped in a fictional hellscape with a beautiful idiot who patrols evil bogs than go home and live my actual life.”
Sasha tightened her arm around her twin. She didn’t have an answer for that. How did you comfort someone who’d fallen in love with the embodiment of every hero ever written?
“We’ll figure it out.” It was the only thing she could say. It was what she always said, because it was the only promise she could make that she had any control over keeping. “We’ll figure it out, Sid.”
Sidney sniffled and wiped her nose on the edge of her cloak, which was probably sacrilege to some elven society somewhere. “You always say that.”
“And I’m always right. Eventually.”
“Yeah, after a bunch of people die first.”
“Details.”
Sidney laughed. It was wet and broken, but it was real.
They sat in the quiet for a while. The fire popped and crackled, and outside, the bog made its unpleasant bog noises. Dundle woke up from his nap, fell off the table with a pathetic little thump, and waddled over to curl up on Sasha’s boot.
“Sasha.”
She knew the tone. She knew what was coming. “Don’t.”
“Do you have feelings for Vile?”
There it was. The question she’d been dodging since Peter Pan. Since Moriarty had kissed her in a dark London flat and she’d let him. Since Vile had pinned her to a table in his library and she’d kissed him back. Since the Dark King had taken her apart in ways that transcended the physical.
Since she’d whispered I forgive you to the monster who wanted to kill her sister, and meant it.
She stared at the far wall of the cottage, at the jars of ingredients and the faintly glowing vials and the mess of a life she’d created for a character who was going to die before the story ended. Her reflection stared back at her from the dark surface of a bottle of something thick and viscous.
She looked tired. She looked like someone who’d been through too much and hadn’t come out the other side yet.
“I don’t know.”
It was the most honest thing she’d said in a long time. Maybe since all of this began.
Sidney didn’t push. She just waited.
“I don’t know what I feel.” Sasha pulled her cloak tighter around herself, mirroring her sister without realizing it.
Twins. Always twins. “There’s something there.
I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t. But I don’t know what to call it because I’ve never—I’ve never felt anything like this before, and I don’t trust it.
I don’t trust him. I don’t trust myself around him.
” She exhaled slowly. “But it doesn’t matter. ”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not capable of it, Sid.” Sasha said the words carefully, like handling something fragile that she knew was already cracked.
“He’s not capable of falling in love. He can’t have feelings for people.
Not real ones. Not the kind that matter.
” She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve.
“Virtue got all of that. The ability to care. To love. To connect. That’s the whole point of him.
He’s the hero. Vile is the villain. Villains don’t get to feel things. ”
“Sasha…”
“Lust.” She said it flatly. Clinically. Like a diagnosis.
“Lust is about as far as he can go. Desire. Obsession. Possession. The thrill of the chase and the satisfaction of the catch. All of that, sure, he’s drowning in all of that.
But love? Real, actual, give-a-damn-about-someone-else’s-happiness love?
” She shook her head. “It’s not in his programming.
It’s not in his nature. He is what humanity made him, remember?
He said that himself. And humanity didn’t write villains who fall in love and mean it. ”
The bitterness in her own voice surprised her. She’d spent more time than she wanted to admit turning that over in her head, looking for a crack in the logic.
She hadn’t found one.
Sidney was watching her with an expression that Sasha really, really didn’t like. Because it was the expression Sidney wore when she saw something that Sasha was refusing to see.
“I just think…you seem really certain about what he can’t feel. For someone who says she doesn’t know what she feels herself.”
That landed like a punch to the solar plexus.
Sasha opened her mouth to argue. Closed it. She’d just been philosophically outmaneuvered by her twin sister on a cot in a bog witch’s hut. “He still chopped me into pieces in the regency romance. He still put a meat hook through my leg. He strapped you to a train, Sid.” Her voice had gone hoarse.
Shutting her eyes, Sasha continued. It was her turn to confess the truth. “And then he touches me like I’m the most important thing in the universe and I don’t know how to hold both of those things in my head at the same time.”
The words had come pouring out before she could stop them. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and let out a long, shuddering breath.
“Well.” Sidney’s voice was impossibly gentle. “That’s a little more than ‘I don’t know.’”
“Shut up.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Shut up, Sidney.”
But there was no venom in it. And when Sidney reached over and took her hand, Sasha let her. Their fingers laced together, the way they’d done since childhood. Two halves of the same whole. Mirror images of each other, standing on opposite sides of a war neither of them had asked for.
Sidney squeezed her hand. “We’re a mess.”
“The biggest fucking mess.”
“Falling for immortal fictional demigods. That’s a new low, even for us.”
Dundle, sensing the emotional tenor of the room, chose that exact moment to attempt to climb up Sasha’s leg.
His claws snagged on the fabric of her dress and he hung there, dangling at an awkward angle, his glass-toothed maw opening and closing in what was the lizard equivalent of “a little help here.”
Both sisters looked down at him.
“Your child is broken,” Sidney observed.
“He’s not my child. He’s my…emotional support taxidermy.
” Sasha gently detached him from her dress and settled him back in her lap.
He immediately rolled over and demanded a belly rub, tail swishing across her knee.
She obliged, because what else was she going to do?
Say no to the horrifying little disaster she’d made?
Just like whatever this is with Vile.
She shoved the thought away. Hard.
“Sash?”
“Yeah?”
“Promise me something.”
Sasha looked over at her sister. Sidney’s face was earnest and open in a way that it rarely was—stripped of the sarcasm and the bravado and the defense mechanisms that both of them wore like armor. This was just Sidney. Just her twin. Just the person who’d been with her through everything.
“Promise me that whatever happens with the spell, and the book, and…all of this…we go home together. Both of us.” Sidney’s grip on her hand tightened. “Both of us, Sasha. Or neither.”
Sasha’s chest constricted painfully. Because she’d been thinking the exact opposite. She’d been thinking about the witch’s role in the story. About expendability. About the cost that dark fantasy always demanded.
But she looked into her sister’s eyes—the same eyes as her own, just a little more hopeful—and she lied.
She fucking lied.
“Both of us. I promise.”
Sidney let out a breath. “Thank you.”
Sasha said nothing. She just kept petting Dundle and staring at the fire, trying not to think about all the promises she’d made that she had no idea how to keep.
The silence stretched between them, comfortable for once. A rare and fragile thing.
Outside, the bog was quiet.
Too quiet.
The door of the cottage exploded inward.
Not opened. Not kicked. Not knocked upon with the dignified urgency of a fantasy hero requesting aid.
Exploded.
Wood splintered and flew. The iron latch went skidding across the stone floor. One of the hinges ripped clean off the frame and embedded itself in the wall above Sidney’s head. Dundle shrieked and launched himself under the table. Lundle vanished into the shadows behind the potion shelves.
Both sisters were on their feet in an instant, Sasha grabbing the fire poker and Sidney grabbing—well, nothing, because the only weapon she had was her supposedly prophetic moon magic that she still didn’t fully know how to use.
Virtue filled the doorway.
He was winded. His tattered cape was torn in new places, his armor dented. The golden sword in his hand was drawn, and the blade was slicked with something dark and viscous that was not blood.
It was shadow.
His eyes found them—wide, urgent, and stripped of every ounce of the patient heroic calm that usually defined him.
“The Dark King’s forces.” He was breathing hard. A cut above his eyebrow was dripping crimson down the left side of his face. “They’re coming. All of them. We have to hide. Now.”
“There’s a hatch.” Sasha didn’t know there was a hatch in the floor, until right that moment.
But she’d declared it to be so in a panic, so…
rules of the story, right? However, it made no sense.
Why would there be a hatch in the floor in a cottage in a bog?
The water table was way too high for there to be a basement in—
Virtue threw aside the fur rug on the floor.
Yup, there it was.
Fucking fantasy stories.
He already had the hatch open and Sidney was already halfway down the ladder by the time Sasha was done being annoyed by how nonsensical the architectural likelihood of the situation was.
“You must not give away our presence,” Virtue said, the drama in his voice suddenly going on thick. He was back “In Character.” It made her want to kick him in the face.
“Then do your best to keep the Princess silent, hrm?” She planted her hands on her hips. “And touch nothing while you are down there!”
Virtue shut the hatch behind him as he disappeared into her extremely-unlikely basement crawlspace. God only knew what the hell she’d just blinked into existence by saying that last sentence.
But she didn’t have any time to think it through. Covering the hatch with the rug, she turned just in time to see the shadowy fog of the Dark King begin to gather at the edge of her bog.
Gritting her teeth, she lifted her chin, and braced herself for what was about to happen.
“Hello…husband.”