13. Evangeline
Evangeline
Jacks. It felt like something more substantial than a name somehow. An incantation. A magic word. A name that Evangeline told herself not to speak, as if it might give him more power over her.
Decks of Destiny, featuring all the Fates, had recently become popular in her father’s curiosity shop, so Evangeline was quite familiar with them.
There were sixteen immortal Fates, all jealous and possessive beings.
Before they’d vanished centuries ago, it was said they ruled over part of the world with magic that was as malevolent as it was marvelous.
The lore said they never broke a bargain, although they often hurt the people they helped.
Evangeline wasn’t sure how Marisol—who seemed terrified of anything magical—had managed to track a Fate down. But Evangeline was fairly certain she knew which Fate this was. He was the Poisoner, obviously.
Evangeline’s head was too muddled to remember everything she knew about the Poisoner.
She thought he had a reputation for being a trickster.
She also thought that this young man didn’t look at all like his image from the Decks of Destiny.
He looked like someone who had been kicked out of the circus, or maybe he’d poisoned the circus, leaving him all alone in his ringmaster gear.
Not that he looked lonely. In fact, from the way he carelessly leaned an elbow against the frozen body of Luc’s father, the Poisoner—Jacks—looked as if he didn’t feel much at all.
Luc looked as if he were trying to hide how scared he was.
Marisol looked as if she still wanted Jacks to do something dastardly to Evangeline.
Jacks looked bored or possibly annoyed, as if he was thinking the entertainment was over and he was ready to leave this party once he found it in himself to shove off the statue and walk away.
And all Evangeline could think was How dare he?
Her hands formed into tight fists. She wasn’t sure how much harm they would do against a Fate, but it felt like a good idea to try, to show him that he might possess magic but humans had passion and emotion and fire inside.
“How do we fix this?” she demanded.
“Eva—we need to get out of here.” Luc held out a hand that had gone a little gray.
She gaped at him. “We can’t just leave them like this!”
“I don’t want to. But—” Luc took one look at his frozen parents, shuddered, and started to back away.
Marisol followed like a nervous pet.
“Eva, please, I don’t want to leave without you.
” Luc held out his hand one more time. He looked as if he desperately wanted her to slip her fingers into his.
And for a second, she remembered the first time they had held hands.
She’d been so nervous her palms had gotten sweaty, but he hadn’t let go.
And she remembered thinking that if he could hold her hand like that, he could hold her hand through anything.
But she couldn’t take his hand now. He was going in the wrong direction. She couldn’t follow him into the midday sun while everyone they loved was standing frozen in the growing shadows.
Her heart sank as he took another backward step. She couldn’t entirely blame him for leaving. She knew he was scared. But she wished his love for her was bigger than his fear.
Evangeline probably should have been more scared, or more upset at Luc. But as he left, all she felt was the burning need to undo what Jacks had done to everyone in the garden. She needed to save Luc’s family and friends, and her father.
She had already lost her mother, she could not lose her father.
He was standing there with his frozen smile, and she wondered if he could still feel, if he could still see, if he was watching her now.
She hoped he wasn’t. She wanted to make him proud, but she imagined that he wouldn’t like what she was going to do next.
She took a deep breath as she turned back around to face the Poisoner—Jacks. “I’m not going anywhere until you fix this.”
He grinned, as if her human attempt at ire entertained him. “I don’t really fix things, pet. In fact, I’m quite good at ruining anything I touch.” He flicked his fingers against the cravat around Luc’s father’s neck.
“Stop that!” Evangeline cried. “These are people.”
“Do I strike you as caring?” Without another glance at all the people he’d frozen, he sauntered away, crushing more flower petals beneath his leather boots.
“Wait—stop!” Evangeline chased him as he strolled out of the garden. “Let’s make a deal. What do you want in exchange for fixing this?”
Fates were known for their love of making deals, but Jacks continued striding forward as if he didn’t even hear her.
The air in the city was still butterscotch-sticky from the Sun Festival’s daytime merrymaking, which was starting to die down.
Rainbow lollipops, dropped throughout the day, had melted and turned the cobblestoned streets of Valenda into rainbows.
Tired children with candy-stained smiles ran through streamers and past tents of vendors trying to sell what remained of their wares.
Evangeline couldn’t tell what district she was following Jacks through.
Everything looked the same today. There were so many booths and street games and—bunting.
She’d never paid much attention to bunting before.
In fact, she’d never more than glanced at all the cheery cloth triangles hanging above her in shades of peach and mint and pink, but suddenly she was struck by how festive it was.
She needed more bunting. She needed polka dots and stripes and tiny little stars.
She wasn’t sure where the thought came from, or what she needed more bunting for. But for some reason, the bunting struck her as necessary. Perhaps she would use it to celebrate after she convinced Jacks to unfreeze all of her family and friends. Or … if she and Luc ever actually got married.
The idea that it was now a question hollowed out a pit inside Evangeline.
Their ruined wedding was hurting more now than before.
Earlier, she had been so upset by the sight of everyone frozen in the garden that she hadn’t truly felt the pain of Luc walking away.
She also supposed that it had felt more like he was leaving momentarily, not as if he was leaving forever.
This couldn’t be the end of their story. This was supposed to be the beginning.
“Why are you still following me?” Jacks spared Evangeline the barest of glances as he effortlessly moved through the crowd the way someone else might move through a party, drawing eyes without even trying.
Conversations would stop as he approached and then start up again as he passed.
People didn’t quite know what they were seeing, but they knew they were seeing something.
“I’m not going to leave you alone until you undo whatever it is you’ve done to my friends and family.” Evangeline spoke firmly but a little breathlessly as she finally caught up to him. Her bare feet ached from the hot cobblestones.
Jacks speared her with a sideways look, blue eyes turning a piercing shade of silver. “Are you always this absurd?”
“Hopeful,” she corrected.
He scowled as if she’d just used a filthy word. “Hope is a conspiracy.”
“A conspiracy by who?”
His jaw clenched, making his face appear even sharper.
He looked as if he would have rather done anything else than continue this conversation.
He walked a few more steps in silence, then muttered, “Everyone. Hope is a lie that people are told so that they waste their lives on things they shouldn’t.
Hopefully he’ll change. Hopefully it will be better next time. Hopefully—”
“Stop,” Evangeline interrupted.
Jacks’s eyes darkened, as if he couldn’t believe she had the audacity to interrupt a Fate.
But he had already ruined her wedding and hurt her friends and family, and he was wrong. Very, very wrong.
“You’re missing the point entirely,” she said.
“Hope is like fire. It always has the potential to be misused. But without it, without flames, without heat, without fuel, the world would be dead. Without hope, we despair. We give up. We stop trying. We believe there is no reason to go on. So even though you claim hope is a lie, it has to be alive in you somewhere. Otherwise, why are you doing anything? You have to be hoping for something.”
He made a sound like a groan. “That was a pathetic speech.”
Evangeline flinched at the ugly tone of his voice, but she refused to cower. “You really don’t hope for anything? What gets you up in the morning?”
“I have difficulty sleeping,” he deadpanned.
But then she once again noticed that his too-sharp eyes were bloodshot, so full of red it seemed he really didn’t sleep. Or if he did, Evangeline imagined it was fitful. Haunted. His dreams took place in a far bleaker universe than hers. And for a second—
“Don’t do that,” he snapped.
“Do what?”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” she asked innocently.
Instead of stepping farther away, Jacks took a step closer.
“Don’t look at me and search for hope. I won’t be your hero.
I will be your ending.” He took another menacing step.
Untamed locks of golden hair fell across his forehead above eyes the color of a storm.
And then those eyes dropped to her lips.
Heat rose to her cheeks.
He shouldn’t be looking at her so intimately. She shouldn’t let him. She needed to stop or back away. But she also needed him to undo what he’d done.
“If there’s no hope for you, Jacks, then what is there?” she said. If her stubbornness wasn’t going to get through to him, maybe her softness would.
Jacks’s steps faltered. It wasn’t quite a trip, but he was suddenly just a little less graceful. A little bit human. As though there was a working heart inside him. Maybe Evangeline had gotten through to him at last.
But then she followed his gaze to a girl.
The girl was up in the distance, beyond the festival tents, near a set of the city’s famed ruins.
As a child, Evangeline had been fascinated by the great granite ruins scattered throughout the city, but her parents had warned they were places that she shouldn’t play.
Old magic lingers there, they’d whispered, and they didn’t whisper it the way they whispered other things, as if it were a fun little secret. They whispered it like a warning.
But this other girl did not look scared. Unlike the rest of the crowd that had started to flag, this girl moved swiftly, with purpose. And she was very beautiful. Honey-blond curls bounced around a pretty face as she skirted the edge of the ruins.
Jacks’s entire countenance changed as he watched her. He looked at her the way a person might watch an incoming storm, unsure if it would swerve away or charge toward them, leaving their world decimated.
Back in the garden, Evangeline had imagined that Jacks didn’t feel, that he didn’t care. But from the way he reacted to this girl, it was clear that Jacks did feel—he felt things for her.
Evangeline wanted to know why. She wanted to know everything about this other girl—and why she was suddenly upset by her appearance, why she felt a very uncharacteristic urge to dislike her on sight. Evangeline should have been glad that she’d clearly discovered Jacks’s weakness.
The other girl paused as she shot a look around, and suddenly Jacks’s arm was circling Evangeline’s waist.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked. Her heart jumped as he pulled her close. “Who is that girl?”
Jacks’s only response was to take a fistful of Evangeline’s dress. He was no longer looking at the other girl, but he wasn’t looking at Evangeline either. His gaze had shifted, and he was now watching, with a little too much intensity, a street peddler selling fizzing drinks.
Evangeline asked once more, “Who is that girl?”
“What girl?” said Jacks.
Evangeline tried to point to her, but the girl had disappeared, and so did Jacks’s arm from around Evangeline’s waist.