5. Evangeline
Evangeline
There are many things that could be said about Merrywood Village, but all one really needs to know for this story is that it was once considered the most delightful village in the North. It was said to be such a lovely place that, at night, more stars covered it than any other spot in the world.
Then it was burned to the ground in a whirl of fire and tragic mistakes.
For years, you could feel the sorrow when you traveled through it. People avoided it, barely even whispering about it.
And then it was rebuilt. The forest around it regrew, and everyone tried to pretend that it had never burned at all. Except for maybe one person.
LaLa’s original last name was Merrywood. The village and the forest were named after her family. She’d grown up in the original Merrywood Manor, until it had burned along with everything else.
“I miss the way it used to be,” LaLa said wistfully.
“I miss the Old Well, the pond with the broken bridge, the old outdoor market … I’d love to go back, just for one day.
” Her long hair blew in the wind as she watched a trio of girls jumping rope in the square.
They were singing a nursery rhyme that echoed through the air while flower vendors sold bouquets and news merchants hawked papers.
“Get the latest and the greatest on the new royal family!” The young paper peddler waved the latest scandal sheet close enough that Evangeline could see a picture of stoically handsome Prince Dane next to a headline that read OOH LA LA!
The paper was moving too fast for Evangeline to catch more than those words, but it seemed obvious the headline was hinting about her friend.
LaLa had been in love with Prince Dane for centuries.
He was one of the Valors—the first royal family of the Magnificent North.
Everyone in the North believed the family to be long dead, but they had really been locked away in a magical prison where they had been preserved in a state of enchanted rest.
With Evangeline’s help, the Valors had finally been freed, and they were once again ruling over the Magnificent North. Although no one knew they were the original Valors. They went by the name Vale now.
Each member of the family had a magical ability. Dane could shift into a dragon, which was why LaLa had dragon fire tattoos covering her arms. Evangeline had always found it tragically romantic.
It made her think of the little heart-shaped scar on her own wrist. The one Jacks had given her on the day they’d met. She ran a thumb over it, smiling, before she pointed at the scandal sheet with the picture of Prince Dane and the headline with her friend’s name. “LaLa, have you seen this?”
Usually, LaLa was drawn to scandal sheets like a child to sweets, but today, after one look at the paper, her large brown eyes pinched and immediately welled with tears.
“Oh no—what’s the matter?” Evangeline asked. “What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” LaLa said. “If I talk about it, I’m just going to cry, and we know what happens when I cry. And I really don’t want to cry. So let’s not talk about it.”
“Of course,” said Evangeline. “You know how I feel about the scandal sheets.”
LaLa nodded, grateful, and took a deep, shuddering breath, sucking back her tears, as she quickened her pace, clearly wanting to leave the square and the papers behind.
“I’m just going to say, if I could do it all over again, I would have done things differently.
I might have done it all differently,” LaLa rattled out, her words moving faster with each step, as if she could not stop them.
“Do you ever think about that? Oh, of course you don’t.
You and Jacks are perfect. I mean, other than the fact that he’s Jacks and an absolute disaster.
But you two really seem to love each other.
It doesn’t even seem to bother you that you’re growing older while he stays young. ”
Evangeline winced at that, because it did actually bother her. But not to the degree LaLa was bothered now.
Looking into LaLa’s tear-filled eyes, Evangeline could remember what it felt like to be so deeply in love and so very afraid that her love wasn’t enough.
She could recall with aching clarity all the ways it had hurt—in her chest, in her heart, in her eyes when she’d cried, and even worse when she’d tried to hold back her tears.
Love could be devastating.
And LaLa looked devastated. Her face was gray. Her eyes were red. Even her cheerful sleeves of bracelets had stopped making their music.
It pained Evangeline to see her friend like this.
No one would ever describe LaLa as fragile, but she seemed hollowed out, as if her heart was all alone in her chest, echoing too loudly as it tried to find its matching heartbeat, and Evangeline wondered if maybe LaLa’s tears weren’t for Dane at all.
Perhaps there was someone else, maybe a certain handsome vampire who always seemed particularly hungry whenever LaLa was around.
Which made things quite tricky. Vampires were terrible love interests.
They came with a high likelihood of having your throat ripped out, or your blood drained, or your heart stopped as you turned into one of them.
Chaos was a dangerous man to love. He wasn’t even safe to go near. But the same could have been said about Jacks—not the throat-ripping-out bit, but the life-ending bit. Jacks was a deadly choice for anyone … except for Evangeline.
Fallen leaves crunched beneath Evangeline’s feet as she thought back to before, when it had been unsafe to love Jacks, when her heart had raced and her skin had gone hot and she’d felt a treacherous thrill every time she stepped closer to him, knowing it was most likely a mistake, but hoping against all reason that she was wrong.
She didn’t miss those feelings, but they seemed far less terrible now than they had at the time. And despite herself, she could understand falling in love with a vampire.
Even more unfortunately for LaLa, her vampire also happened to be Prince Dane’s brother.
“I’ve been fighting my whole life for love,” LaLa said on a sigh.
“But I’ve started to wonder: If some loves truly are meant to be, then perhaps there are some loves that are also doomed to never be.
Maybe all the impassible obstacles are there for a reason.
Maybe they aren’t meant to be overcome. Maybe love is not supposed to be something we fight for. ”
“No,” Evangeline interrupted sharply. She had believed some untrue things about love, but there was one thing she had learned to be unequivocally true. “Real love is always worth fighting for.”
“But how do you know if it’s real?” LaLa asked.
“When it’s real, you can’t walk away, even if it goes against everything you’ve been told.
” Evangeline thought about her and Jacks.
Even when he’d thought his feelings for her would kill her, he hadn’t been able to stay away for long, and she’d never been able to stay away from him.
She still couldn’t stay away from him. She remembered, when she’d first arrived in the Magnificent North, seeing Jacks across a clearing and feeling like the tide drawn by the unstoppable force of the moon, and that feeling had never gone away.
“When it’s real, the only thing that feels impossible is giving up.
Do your steps keep taking you toward him, even though you fear it can never end well?
If you are able to walk away, then you should.
But if it’s really truly love that goes deep down to the core of who you are, and you believe the other person feels it too, then you should do everything you can to fight for it. ”
LaLa smiled wanly. “That sounds a lot like what I’ve always believed.
But”—she closed her eyes—“I think I made a mistake. I think some of my feelings were lying to me.” She rubbed the golden bracelets that covered her dragon fire tattoos.
“You know, I don’t even remember getting these marks.
I tell people they’re because of Dane, and I think they probably are, but I can’t really remember.
They’re just there, along with this knowledge that I love him.
But I don’t feel it anymore. Not with him. ”
Her eyes went glassy again, but this time, instead of sorrow, it looked like pain. As if her heart was holding too much and beating too fast and she was feeling all the unbearable things a person feels when they are in love with someone they aren’t supposed to love.
Another feeling that Evangeline was well acquainted with. “Does Chaos know?”
LaLa’s cheeks flushed, then she quickly shook her head as if she could erase the reaction. “I don’t have feelings for Chaos. I mean, I do—but not those kinds of feelings. Chaos is a monster.”
“I know,” Evangeline said gently.
“No, you don’t,” LaLa replied. “You think you understand because of Jacks. And, yes, Jacks has done monstrous things. But it’s not the same. When Chaos became a vampire, things inside of him changed, fundamentally. He didn’t just do terrible things; he became a terrible thing.”
The color drained from LaLa’s face, as if all the heated feelings that had been surging through her before were now turning to ice. “Chaos is Jacks’s closest friend, but there’s a reason Jacks won’t let you near him and there’s a reason I—” She broke off and shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Eva. I said I wasn’t going to talk about all this and now I’ve spent our entire walk rattling on and on about all sorts of things that aren’t very fun.”
“LaLa, I’m your friend, and friends can talk about anything.”
“Yes, but I really don’t want to talk about all this. I meant what I said about crying.”
“But you didn’t cry,” Evangeline said.
“You’re right.” LaLa gave a decisive nod to dislodge all hints of sadness. “I think I perhaps deserve a trophy for that.”
“Undoubtedly,” Evangeline agreed. “A shiny one!”
“Oh, yes! It must be shiny, perhaps with some jewels. Do you think they’ll have any in this Emporium?
” LaLa took another look at the little postcard, consulting the map on the back.
According to it, the Emporium of Else was beyond the edge of Merrywood Village, at the end of one of the paths that led into Merrywood Forest.
Most of the new forest was all dappled light and trees so young you could hear them growing, but the part of the forest that LaLa and Evangeline stepped into now was drenched in shadows and dark.
It was full of trees so tall they blocked all the light.
Leaves so old they were shades of green Evangeline had never seen in nature: gray-green, and stone-green, and green so dark it was almost black.
Either no one had told this part of the forest that it was supposed to grow slower, or this was a section of the original forest that hadn’t burned.
There was a sign that read Home of the Archer, and Evangeline felt a pang.
It was a strange sort of pang. The little reminder of who Jacks had once been conjured a brief flutter of feelings, including a peculiar sort of sadness, for everything he’d lost and all he had been through, even though all the pain of Jacks’s past had ultimately led him to her.
And for that, she felt guiltily grateful.
Evangeline rubbed the broken heart scar on her wrist. Jacks had once confessed that he could feel it when she touched it, and she liked the idea that he could feel her now. That they had a permanent link, which couldn’t be severed.
After listening to LaLa, she also felt incredibly lucky that she was so certain Jacks was her true love. Of course, she’d once been certain that Luc Navarro was her true love.
“Now you’re the one who’s looking upset!” LaLa raised a concerned brow.
“Oh no! I’m not upset.” Evangeline just hadn’t thought about Luc in a while. There had been a time when he had been everywhere she turned. But after Luc had pretended to be the heir to the throne, only to be quickly replaced, she’d lost track of him.
She told herself it didn’t matter. She had Jacks.
And she loved Jacks in a way that her feelings for Luc could never touch.
But a part of her felt responsible for what had happened to Luc.
If Luc had never met Evangeline, he would never have been cursed by Marisol or mauled by a wolf or turned into a vampire.
At the thought of vampires, Evangeline suddenly realized how dark the forest had grown. She and LaLa had gone deep enough that it was all purple shadows, save for a few bits of light sparkling up ahead.
At first it was just a bit of twinkle.
A shimmer here, a shine there.
Then the sparkles glimmered closer, swirling like fairy dust.
“Look at that.” Evangeline dropped her voice to a whisper. “I think it’s a little group of night sprites.” Night sprites only lived in the Magnificent North. They were incredibly shy, and this was perhaps Evangeline’s third time seeing them.
She and LaLa stilled, watching as the sprites fluttered about until they began to form words:
EMPORIUM OF ELSE