27. Evangeline
Evangeline
Evangeline didn’t even see where Jacks had taken the rope from. Suddenly it was just there in his expert hands, as if he always carried it around, in the event he needed to take a girl and tie her up. “How could I have ever been in love with you?”
It was an unkind question, but Evangeline was feeling overwrought. One second, she was on the floor with Jacks on top of her and now they were tied together, skin touching skin, which felt different than when there’d been a layer of clothing between them.
She imagined he could feel her pulse, racing against his.
Evangeline tugged on the ropes binding them, but instead of the ropes coming loose, little flowers started to grow on them, tiny white and pink buds on jewel-green vines that twirled around their arms, binding them even closer together.
“What are you doing?” Jacks demanded.
“I thought you were doing this!”
“You think I’d tie us up with flowers?” He scowled as a little pink bud burst into a blossom.
“It must be this place,” he muttered.
It was then Evangeline noticed that they were no longer in the back room of the curiosity shop.
The confusion of crates was gone, and the shop had been transformed into a lovely cottage—or perhaps this peculiar place was an inn?
The brightly lit entryway where Evangeline stood with Jacks looked a little too large for a family’s cottage.
There were at least four stories of rooms above them, full of doors with curious carvings on them, depicting things like rabbits wearing crowns, hearts inside glass cloches, and mermaids wearing seashell necklaces.
She felt instantly foolish for not immediately noticing, for being unable to see beyond Jacks.
Directly across from her was a rounded door, and beside it was the most wonderfully irregular clock.
It was brightly painted with gleaming jeweled pendulums, and instead of hours, the clock had names of food and drink.
Things like Dumplings it was a fire like anger.
But she could see hurt as well. It came in threads of silver that moved through the blue of his eyes like cracks.
“I’ve seen you try before. I’ve seen you want something more than anything else in the entire world.
I’ve seen what you’re willing to do. How far you were willing to go.
You haven’t even come close to that now. ”
Jacks ground his jaw as he stared at her. He looked angry and exasperated. He reached up, as if to run his free hand through his hair, but then he wrapped it around the back of her neck and dropped his forehead to hers.
His skin was cold, but the contact made her go hot all over. The hand at her neck slid into her hair and her entire body went boneless. He held her to him, fingers gentle and firm as they dug into her scalp.
This was so wrong, wanting the man who’d tied her to him and done countless other unspeakable things. But all she could think was that she wanted him to do even more.
He was like poisoned fairy fruit—one bite ruined a person for anything else. But she hadn’t even bitten him, nor was she going to. There could be no biting. She didn’t even know why she was thinking about biting.
She tried to pull away, but Jacks held tight, knotting her hair in his fist and keeping his forehead pressed to hers. “Please, Little Fox, remember.”
The name did something to her.
Little Fox.
Little Fox.
Little Fox.
Two simple words. Only they did not feel simple at all.
They felt like falling. They felt like hope.
They felt like the most important words in the world.
The words made her blood rush and her head spin until once again it was only her and Jacks.
Nothing existed except for the press of his cool forehead, the feel of his strong hand tangling in her hair, and the pleading, broken look in his quicksilver blue eyes.
The combination of it all shuffled her insides like a deck of cards, until all the feelings she’d tried to shove away were back on top.
She wanted to trust him. She wanted to believe him when he said the Handsome Stranger he’d just stabbed wasn’t really dead. She wanted to think that the murderous stories she’d been told about him were all lies.
She wanted him.
It didn’t matter that moments ago, he’d told her he enjoyed blood and hurt and pain. Those things were on the bottom of the deck. And she didn’t want to reshuffle.
Evangeline could have come up with reasons to justify this, reasons that went beyond just hearing a nickname.
But she didn’t want to defend her feelings; she just wanted to see where they led.
She no longer wanted to pull away; instead she wanted to go down whatever dark path he was about to take her.
And that had to mean something. Maybe it merely meant she was a fool, or maybe it meant that her heart remembered things her mind did not.
She tried once more to remember anything else. She closed her eyes and silently repeated the nickname like a prayer.
Little Fox.
Little Fox.
Little Fox.
Just the thought of Jacks saying the words made her heart tumble, but they did not bring back her memories.
When she opened her eyes, Jacks’s inhuman gaze was still locked onto hers. She could see something like hope in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I can’t remember.”
The light went out of his gaze. Jacks quickly untangled his fingers from her hair, straightened, and pulled away. All that touched now were their wrists and their arms where the vines bound them together.
He didn’t try to cut the vines curling around their arms, and Evangeline was strangely glad of it. She might not have had her memories back, but it seemed her heart truly remembered him, because she felt it breaking a little as he looked at her with a gaze that had gone cool as shadows in a forest.
The uncanny clock in the hall struck Mystery Stew, and the body of the Handsome Stranger on the floor shifted. Evangeline saw his chest shudder with something that wasn’t quite a breath. But it was definitely movement.
“We need to get out of here,” Jacks said sharply. He tugged on the flowering rope that bound him to Evangeline and several pale petals fell from the flowers.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “And how did we even get here?”
“We’re here because I tied us together,” said Jacks.
“If two people are touching skin to skin, then they’re both brought into the illusion of the person with the strongest will.
Otherwise we might lose each other. Since we were trapped in different illusions, you might encounter a wall, where I would have a door. ”
“So, this is your best day?” Evangeline asked. She wished she realized it sooner, or that she had more time to look around this curious inn, to see what it was that Jacks held dear.
But he clearly didn’t want to linger. He didn’t even respond to her question.
She didn’t hear any voices calling for him, but she wondered if being here hurt Jacks the same way being so close to the memory of her parents had hurt her. If he, too, felt the pull of something he wanted but couldn’t have.
He quickly opened the door leading out of the Hollow as if he couldn’t get away fast enough. Yet Evangeline saw a flicker of pain in his eyes, as if it also hurt him to leave.
Outside, he rushed down one of the cheeriest paths she’d ever seen.
Hummingbirds flitted, birds chirped, and tiny blue dragons napped on polka-dot mushrooms. The poppies lining the path away from the inn were enormous as well. They were as tall as her waist, with deep red petals that looked like velvet and smelled like the sweetest perfume.
When they reached the end of the cobblestoned path, the air turned from flower-sweet to mossy and damp. There was still a path, but it was made of nothing but dirt and lined in enormous trees that turned the world from sunshine bright to shadowed and cool.
Evangeline could hear a stream trickling in the distance—along with the sounds of voices and pounding horse hooves.
The Hunt must have been close, which meant Apollo could have been near as well.
With all that had happened, she’d forgotten about him.
She wondered if he was a part of the Hunt, or if he’d gotten her message from Joff about waiting to join until she’d found him.
She hoped very much he’d gotten the message and was waiting outside of the Cursed Forest. She didn’t want to imagine what would happen if he found her now, bound to Jacks.
“Where exactly are we going?” Evangeline asked.
“First we need to get out of this accursed forest before someone else tries to kill you.”
“About that,” she said, “someone else did try to kill me earlier, before I entered this place.”
Jacks gave her a baleful look. “How is it that every day someone tries to kill you?”
“I wish I knew. Maybe then I could stop it from happening.”
He appeared doubtful. “Who was it this time? Did you see them?”
“It was Lord Byron Belleflower. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met. Spoiled, rich, mostly useless.”
“Do you know why he would want me dead? He said something about Petra?”