by Sarah Cross
Viv backed away before Regina could grab her and drag her into the parking lot. Paranoid? Maybe. But she didn’t want to take any chances. Regina was the perfect example of how drastically someone could change, how quickly they could go from loving you to hating you. Regina had taught her that lesson years ago, long before Viv had known she would need it again.
CHAPTER FIVE
VIV CREPT INTO THE TOPIARY GARDEN and hid beneath a shrub shaped like a deer, trying to figure out which of her friends would drive out and get her if she called. Jewel was probably at a club—she’d never hear her phone. Layla had work in the morning. Mira didn’t have a driver’s license. Rafe was probably drunk or not wearing any pants. Blue didn’t have a car, but he owed her a favor, sort of …
She texted him, worried her voice would make it too obvious that she was upset. She didn’t have a confessional relationship with Blue. He was more like the irritating friend whose personality you tolerated, but didn’t really mind. They didn’t have heart-to-heart chats.
Remember when you woke me up at dawn because you needed me to get Henley to chop down the briar around your hotel? I need a ride to the city. Make it happen. Oh I’m at 7Oaks shitty party don’t ask.
He called a minute later. “You’re interrupting my date.”
“Liar,” she said.
“Okay, Freddie’s here, too, so it’s not really a date … luckily for you, since I don’t have access to the hotel car these days. Next time you need a ride you should just ask Freddie. His princely honor won’t let him say no.”
“So you guys’ll pick me up? Is Mira coming, too?”
“Of course. She’s the only one here who likes you.”
Viv heard Mira’s “Hi, Viv!” in the background. And Freddie’s “That’s not true!”
“We’ll be there in, like, half an hour,” Blue said. “Sooner if I can get Freddie to break the law.”
The sounds of BMW destruction had ceased, but Viv stayed where she was. Was Regina right? Did Henley hate her? She’d done worse things. But everyone had a breaking point and maybe she’d pushed him to his.
By the time Freddie’s car pulled up, the alarm was quiet. Henley was gone, Regina and the valet had disappeared, and a shocked and delighted crowd had gathered around the wreckage while Danny swore and Viv’s dad tried to do damage control.
Viv crawled out from under the topiary deer and ran to the car, climbing in before her dad had a chance to notice her.
Freddie Knight was behind the wheel, frowning into the mirror as he tried to guide an adoring ladybug out of his light brown hair and onto his finger—he had the same animal magnetism gift Viv did. Mira Lively, the newest addition to their group, sat in the passenger seat, her long, wavy blonde hair half-covering the logo of her Curses & Kisses T-shirt. Blue Valentine was stretched out in the back, his blue hair spiked straight up, one knee poking out of his ripped jeans. Viv shoved his feet to get him to move over.
“Did a giant fall on Mirza’s car?” Blue asked.
“No. But that’s what I should tell my dad if he asks me what happened.”
“What did happen?” Mira asked.
“Henley. With a shovel. In the parking lot.” She was surprised at how blasé she sounded.
“Should we even ask why?” Blue said.
Viv shrugged. “You can probably guess.”
She knew it was her fault. She’d wanted to make him angry—well, she had. Mission accomplished.
“I would’ve liked to see that,” Blue said. “Just to see how it’s done. I’d like to do that to Felix’s car.”
“I don’t think you’re really the shovel-wielding type,” Mira said.
“Besides, what purpose would that serve?” Freddie reached for his sword, his voice tense now that Blue’s older brother was the subject of conversation. “If you want to stop Felix, you don’t destroy his car. You cut off his head.”
“Whoa, Freddie,” Viv said. “You have really changed.”
“I’m just being practical.”
“Can we talk about something else?” Mira asked.
They went to Mira’s new house, because Viv hadn’t been there yet. Mira’s godmothers—who were her guardians, and also her fairy godmothers—were in the kitchen, and Mira stopped in to say hello. Freddie, who never missed a chance to make a good impression, went with her. Mira’s godmothers didn’t like Blue, so he slipped down the hall to Mira’s room and Viv followed. She usually avoided talking to her friends’ parents. Inevitably, if adults weren’t asking you about school they were asking about your family, and there was no way for that not to be awkward. How’s your stepmother? Still set on poisoning you? And your father, as useless as always?
Blue, at least, knew what it was like to have a messed-up family. All the Valentine men had the same murderous hereditary curse. Blue’s dad was a Casanova serial killer, his older brother, Felix, followed in their dad’s footsteps, and Blue had accidentally killed his crush at his sixteenth birthday party. Viv had been there, dancing, batting blue and green balloons into the air, unaware that in the other room a girl lay dead in Blue’s arms. The party had ended abruptly, Blue’s father had ushered everyone out, and gradually, people put the pieces together. If you knew curses, you knew what blue hair signified. That was why Mira’s godmothers didn’t like Blue—no one wanted their daughter dating a villain, no matter how reformed.
“So.” Blue flopped down on the bed. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Thought maybe you were in your glass coffin already.”
“Can you not tonight? I’m not in the mood.”
“Sorry. Habit. You okay?”
Viv glanced around the room, wishing Mira and Freddie would join them so they could all start talking about anything but her. The closet was open. A bunch of dance costumes were hanging on one side of the rack. Sequins and ruffles and flamenco madness.
“I’m just hungry,” Viv said. “The food at the party was gross. Pâté and caviar licked by a cat.”
“That’s what happens when you let a boots-wearing cat join your country club.”
“He wasn’t even wearing his boots.”
“Scandalous. What happened to no shirt, no tiny boots, no service?”
Viv laughed. “I don’t know. Standards are really falling at Seven Oaks. I’m going to see if I can find some food. I’ll be right back.”
She went to the kitchen where Freddie was winning points—or, actually, probably just being nice; he was ridiculously nice—by doing the dishes. Bliss, Mira’s blonde godmother, who dressed like a combination of Glinda the Good Witch and a connoisseur of Lolita fashion, was tapping her glass wand against her fingernails, giving herself a magical manicure.
Mira was standing in front of the table, arms crossed. Her mouth opened and one hand went up like, You’ve got to be kidding me, when Elsa, her brunette, jeans-wearing godmother, said, “And leave the door open.”
“With Viv here? What do you think is going to happen?”
“We won’t have an orgy,” Viv said. “Scout’s honor. I don’t like Freddie like that.”
Freddie dropped the plate he was washing. Soapsuds splattered his shirt. “Viv!”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Don’t break my plates, Frederick,” Bliss warned.
It was so easy to mess with Freddie.
Mira turned, a half smile breaking through her exasperated expression. “Fine, we’ll leave the door open. But I wish you’d trust me.”
“You’re not the one I don’t trust,” Elsa said.
“It’s that Freddie Knight,” Viv said. “He’s such a degenerate.”
“I am not a—” Freddie started, before he realized no one was taking Viv seriously. He was a Sleeping Beauty prince, and Mira was a Sleeping Beauty princess. And although he’d already broken her curse, and awakened her from an enchanted sleep, and Mira was dating Blue, not him, he still behaved as though his honor were somehow in doubt. There were some pretty perverse Sleeping Beauty stories, and he didn’t want Mira’s
godmothers to think he was one of those princes.
Viv asked about food and Mira found some leftover pizza in the fridge. “Sorry. We’re still getting settled so there’s not a lot here. Do you want me to order something? We have some takeout menus”—Mira turned to look behind her—“somewhere.…”
“No, this is fine. Thanks.”
“Everything’s been crazy since my curse was broken. First packing for the move, and then—I finally met my parents.” Mira smiled. “Well, for the first time since my christening party. We went on vacation together.”
“Was it fun?”
“It was. But also overwhelming. They wanted to make up for sixteen lost years in two weeks, which is kind of …”
“Impossible?”
Mira nodded. “But, I don’t think they were disappointed or anything. Which I worried about.”
“We told her not to worry,” Elsa said. “Why would they be disappointed? They were worried about disappointing her.”
“You’re very lovable for two weeks,” Bliss said. “That’s your limit, though. I don’t know how we put up with you for sixteen years.”
“Anyway,” Mira said. “They’re going to move here. So I’ll get to see them more, and see what they’re like when they’re not taking me around sightseeing. Um—do you want to eat that here, or bring it to my room?”
“Room,” Viv said. Freddie stayed behind to finish cleaning up.
They found Blue on Mira’s bed, shaping a stuffed unicorn’s mane into a mohawk. “Can you kick him out for a minute?” Viv asked.
Blue put on an appalled expression. “You want me to exile this innocent unicorn?”
“Um, sure,” Mira said. “Blue … go help Freddie with the dishes.”
“Freddie’s doing the dishes?” Blue sighed and got up. “Of course he’s doing the dishes.”
“Thank you,” Mira said, kissing his cheek and shutting the door behind him.
After another moment, Mira said, “So … I’m guessing you need to talk about something serious.”
“It’s kind of personal.”
“Okay.”
They sat down: Mira on the bed, Viv on a red beanbag on the floor. Mira was the only person Viv knew who had experience with this particular problem, but it wasn’t going to be easy to talk about.
Finally, Viv said, “Are there warning signs when a guy wants to kill you? Like, when he’s definitely decided to do it?”
Mira froze, lips parted. Then she lowered her eyes and started playing with the charm bracelet on her wrist. Each of the charms was a märchen mark symbol: the Sleeping Beauty spinning wheel, an apple, a heart, the Beast’s rose, Rapunzel’s braid. “Um. I don’t know if this would really be helpful, in your case. Because the circumstances were so different. But … yeah. There’s definitely a change.”
“I hate to even ask you about this. I don’t want to stir up any …”
“It’s okay.”
“But I don’t know who else to ask.”
Mira had been through a lot since she’d come to Beau Rivage at the beginning of summer. She’d gone from not knowing about curses to learning she was a princess, getting tangled up romantically with Blue’s brother, Felix, falling into an enchanted sleep, and waking up, all in about a week. After a brief, sketchy courtship, Felix had tried to kill Mira and almost succeeded. It wasn’t over between the two of them. Either Felix would finish what he’d started or someone would kill him. Felix was a villain, destined to be slain by a hero, but there was no telling when that would happen. It did explain, though, why Freddie was so gung ho about decapitating the guy.
“He’d get frustrated sometimes. Mad at me,” Mira said. “But usually he was really nice. Accommodating. Like, the way he’d treat a VIP guest, except … you know. And then, when I went into that room—triggered the murder part of the curse—he … was so angry. Like it was all my fault. Because if I hadn’t opened that door, he could have gone on pretending. I never would have known who he really was or what he’d done. At that point, I wasn’t Mira to him, I was just another girl who prevented him from being happy.”
Viv had never really talked to Mira about that day. She felt a little guilty for bringing it up, but it was too late to take it back.
“And he … changed. His whole demeanor. He was very—hard? Like, resolved. He was going to kill me, and there was no talking him out of it. You could see it. Like he’d turned a key, and locked us both into that fate.”
Mira glanced up, her fingers poised on the heart charm on her bracelet. “Did something happen? Did Henley—do you really think he’ll do it?”
“I don’t know.” Viv told her what had happened at Seven Oaks. “Sometimes I just want it to be over. Sometimes—I feel like the waiting is the worst part. But I’m not looking forward to the ending.”
“I could talk to him. See if he’ll …”
“Confess? That’s not going to happen. He might not even believe he’ll do it. That doesn’t mean he won’t.”
Viv’s gaze drifted to Mira’s bookshelves. They were packed with skinny playbooks, novels, DVD cases. Old movies like Casablanca and Now, Voyager. “I used to watch movies with Regina when I was little. We’d make popcorn and curl up on the couch. It was one of my favorite things we did together because it was just us, and she’d always find a movie I liked. Have you ever seen The Yearling?”
“Maybe, a long time ago,” Mira said. “It’s about a deer, right?”
“Yeah. This boy adopts a young deer. Brings it home, befriends it, takes care of it. It’s a really cute movie, at first. The boy even lets the deer sleep in his bed. And there’s this scene where the deer sticks his whole head into a pail of milk. Really adorable animal antics. Which I loved. But then the deer gets older and starts causing trouble on the family farm. Destroying crops, messing with their livelihood. They can’t control him. So, one day the dad orders the boy to take the deer into the woods and shoot it.
“I cried so hard. I don’t know if I’d ever sobbed like that at a movie. And Regina was stroking my hair, and I was wiping my face on her shirt … and then she told me that when a wild thing makes trouble, you have to turn it loose. You have to kill it so it never comes back. She told me I was like the little deer. She said, One day I’ll send you into the forest, and send a man after you to make sure you don’t come back. She told me I should like the movie. It was my story.”
“God, Viv …”
“Before that, I had no idea she felt that way. I thought she loved me as much as she always had. As much as she’d pretended to? I don’t know. And even after she said that, I didn’t know what to think. The two of us were a family. My dad was so shitty to her after the first year of their marriage—he was such a bastard, a bad father and a worse husband, leaving her to be my only parent, basically. I didn’t really mind that he was almost never home—I was glad, because I had Regina all to myself.
“I used to tell the mirror to shut up when it was mean to her. It was like a game to me back then. I didn’t understand why it would hurt her, just like I didn’t understand why she’d get so upset when my dad didn’t come home. I told her—I remember once, I had gone to her room to try to make her feel better. She was lying in the dark, her hair over her face, just … shaking, and I put my hand on her shoulder and told her she was still my favorite. No matter who my dad liked better, she was my favorite. I was so stupid; I can’t believe I said that. And then she started crying and she said, I love him. And I told her, Then don’t. As if it was that easy.
“I don’t want to be blindsided again. When—if—Henley decides to do it … I want to know it’s coming. He’s pissed at me a lot. But I don’t know how to tell if he hates me. I wish I knew. I wish it could just … be over, so we didn’t have to feel this way anymore.…”
Viv wiped her eyes, looked around for a mirror. She didn’t want Blue and Freddie to see her like this. “Are my eyes as red as blood?”
“They’re barely even pink,” Mira said.
Vi
v hung out there until Mira’s godmothers said the boys had to go home. Mira invited her to spend the night, but Viv didn’t want to leave her animals unattended. So Blue and Freddie drove her home. By the time they dropped her off around midnight, her anxiety had mostly leveled out, and it stayed that way until she went to put her key in the front door and noticed it was already unlocked.
CHAPTER SIX
VIV OPENED THE DOOR as quietly as she could and crept inside the house. She left her shoes on the mat so they wouldn’t make noise. Set her purse down on top of them.
The air in the hall smelled like a sweaty animal.
She could hear voices coming from Regina’s office—the room where her stepmother kept her yoga gear, her computer, the handwritten recipe books she’d gotten from witches: Five Delicious Ways to Braise a Heart.
“It was amazing,” Regina said. “The violence that boy is capable of. He’s come a long way from being her pet.”
“It’s about time.” A man’s voice. Worn, scratchy.
“You think I waited too long.”
“Not saying that. Some like the game. The chase. Me, I prided myself on being efficient. No queen should have to live like this as long as you have.”
“That’s sweet—I think. But we’re not all born ready to kill someone. It certainly wasn’t my life plan.”
“Just your destiny.”
“Some of us need time to warm up to our destinies. But, like I said, I think the boy’s ready. If you can call him a boy anymore.”
“He’s a boy, all right. But he’ll man up fast once he feels a knife in his hand.” The man’s low, dry laugh creaked like old leather. “He can have this one. Cuts through anything.”
Viv heard the scrape of one blade against another. Her breaths came harder and she skidded back, her bare feet sticking to the floor.
And then a voice crawled out of the wall behind her.
“Gorgeous. Sheer perfection.”
The voices in Regina’s office went silent. One heavy boot heel cracked down on the wood—and Viv ran.
