by Kresley Cole
Though she will never leave this house alive, at least she would survive longer than the scholar.
Jackson wanted Evie to teach him to court her; perhaps she could teach me how not to kill her.
Or would she be too much of a distraction from my work? I have never tolerated distractions.
It is time to decide her destiny, to play God with her future. I ask one last question: “Are you in love with Jackson?” Earlier, when she described that kiss with him, I barely quelled the urge to slice off her lips.
Subject or companion, Evie?
She seals her fate when she whispers, “Every time I close my eyes, I see his. Even after what happened . . . Jackson still has my heart.”
Rage boils up inside me. “Not quite, dear. But I will have it. I will squeeze it in my hand.”
She can barely keep her head raised. “Hmm?”
“It’s time, Evie.” I rise, slipping one of the scalpels from my case.
She squints at it, but the sight doesn’t even register in her foggy brain. She slurs, “What’s that?”
“A scalpel, which I will use to carve up your pretty face if you don’t stand this instant.”
She gasps, opening her eyes wider, shaking her head to clear it.
I have to admit that this is my favorite time with a new capture. I can only imagine the nauseating, sinking sensation as comprehension dawns. That gut-wrenching sense of betrayal.
Then the bone-chilling terror. “Stand. This instant, girl.”
With a cry, she rises on quaking legs, collapses back in her chair, then attempts again. Adrenaline is beginning to pump through her system. She’s a touch more alert, but her movements remain sluggish.
“Arthur, wh-what’re you doing?”
I snatch her upper arm. “Walk. Now.”
“Oh God, oh God, where are we going?” She shuffles clumsily beside me.
“Into the dungeon.”
“D-dungeon?” She sways as if she’ll faint, but I yank her upright. “Wh-why are you doing this? What’d I do?”
“You entered my lair, as good as offering yourself up to use for my studies, for my . . . experiments. Your body equals knowledge not yet harvested. That is your only value.”
“Experiments?” She sounds like she’ll vomit, but I have a powder in the lab to prevent that.
Ever mindful of my corduroys. “You were doomed as soon as my front door closed behind you. I need you, Evie. My work is everything. I must know everything.”
“Please don’t hurt me, Arthur! You heard my story—did I survive all that just for you to . . . hurt me now?”
“You told me lies. All lies! Again and again, I was on the verge of punishing you. You cannot lie on your patient history!”
As I unlock the cellar door, she cries, “What’s down there?”
“Below. Now!” I force her down the stairs. She trips, almost pitching into a fall before I catch her.
Once we’ve made it down to the lab with all my simmering potions, I relish her horrified look. Then I drag her past the plastic sheeting into the dungeon. “Your new home.”
With her pupils the size of dimes, she stares at the other girls, huddling against the walls. “You . . . kidnapped them?” Then she catches sight of the scholar’s remains.
Evie tilts her head at the putrefied body, as if she can’t reconcile what she’s seeing.
Here’s the part where comprehension dawns. . . .
Her eyes go blank, her trembling hand shooting up to her mouth. Realizing that will be you one day?
“Come, Evie, let’s get you settled.” I shove her toward the scholar’s corner, pointing to the decomposing pile. “Fish out your new collar from that mess.”
She recoils. “Wh-what?”
“Accept your fate, and you’ll live for a time.”
“You don’t want to do this to me, Arthur.”
“Retrieve the collar NOW!” I yell, spraying spittle. The other girls ball up into fetal positions in their nests, all openly crying.
But not Evie. She chokes out one word: “No.”
The other girls whimper, the youngest crying for her mother as usual.
“No?” With a flick of my wrist, my scalpel will bring my new subject to heel. “Just for saying that to me, I’ll cut out your tongue and put it in a jar for you to see every day.” I advance on her, rage clouding my vision.
To herself she whispers, “Ah, God. I’m lost.”
“Utterly lost! This is the last time you will ever disobey me.” I reach for her with one hand, my scalpel raised in the other—
“Come, Arthur,” I dimly hear her murmur. “Touch.”
What’s this? She’s recited those words before, in her timid girl’s voice, but hearing them in this new sultry tone rocks me.
She finishes, “But you’ll pay a price.” A streak of movement between us.
Just as I perceive her irresistible rose scent, four parallel slashes appear across my torso.
I gape down, dropping my scalpel. Hot blood gushes from me. My flesh is a curtain, one opened to my probing gaze. “H-how?”
Evie straightens, unaffected by any drugs. Her eyes are alert and bright . . . green. A line of vine appears over her cheek and down her neck, blazing across her pale skin like a glowing green brand. Locks of her hair are turning red.
Tipping each finger is a razor-sharp thorn, now dripping with my blood.
She hadn’t been hallucinating. Evangeline is filled with power, thrumming with it.
I clasp my palms over my wounds; blood spills between my fingers. “Y-you made me believe you were lying—or delusional!”
“I told you not all of my tale was true. For instance, I left out the parts concerning you.”
“Me?”
“I didn’t want to have to hurt you, Arthur. But you left me no choice!” She is visibly shaking, seething. “Not after you struck out at me. Just like Jackson said, I am DONE!” The entire house begins to quake, plaster raining from the ceiling. “I am sick of this world, sick of being attacked and kidnapped!”
Blood loss is making me cold—just as she said.
“All I ever wanted was to be normal. But tonight I’ve accepted that’s not possible. Even without Death and the Arcana, I now know that I have no hope of it. As soon as I saw these girls chained down here, it suddenly hit me—I’m not like them. I’m not normal. I don’t have to be trapped. I just have to become the vicious Empress I was born to be. And as you pointed out, the one thing holding me back—Jackson—is gone.”
She stalks closer. I stumble back toward the lab. I have tonics to heal myself. This isn’t over!
“During the last two days, I had a lot of time to consider my choices. I thought about my fierce mother. She would have embraced these powers. I thought of Clotile—what she wouldn’t have given for them in her final moments! And then telling you my story solidified my feelings.”
I’m almost to the plastic sheets. If I can reach my workbench . . .
“I’m ashamed that I thought about surrendering, burying myself in the earth to hide from men like you. But no longer. The Empress doesn’t get collared, or caged, or tortured. How artfully she beckons, how perfectly she punishes. I punish.” Evie’s fury begins to ebb, the house settling. “I’m not going to get mad at you for poisoning me. I’m simply going to make you pay a price.”
“How . . . how did you know?”
She makes a tsking sound. “Using a plant-based toxin in the chocolate? I could smell it, could sense what it’d do. Remember my titles? I don’t get poisoned, I do the poisoning. I’m the Princess of it.” Leaves are now tangled through her wild red hair, those spellbinding glyphs winding along her arms as well. She’s a pale, terrible goddess. “I poured out my mug when you took the tray away. Probably wouldn’t have affected me anyway. Oh, but you? You’re definitely poisoned from my claws. Dying right now.”
“No. Not possible,” I bite out, though I already perceive her volatile toxin racing through my veins. Now I feel
the betrayal and terror I’d only been able to imagine before. “Why visit this upon me? Why come here?”
“As I drove north, I began hearing a new voice. Yours.” She taps her chin with a sinister claw, saying, “I might have forgotten to mention that one tiny detail. In any case, yours grew louder, above all the others, above even Death’s—who was quite chatty once I was alone at last.” She frowns, shrugs. “But your voice was drawing me near. A wise man in the guise of a boy. Does that sound familiar?”
I make a strangled sound. “You couldn’t have heard me.”
“You’re one of the Arcana, Arthur. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out which one, couldn’t remember my grandmother’s cards well enough to match one to your tableau. Not until I saw your experiments down here in your creepy little lair. You’re the Hermit. The old man holding a lantern.”
“One among your number?” I draw my lips back from my teeth. “Never!”
“You’re denying it, just like I did. No wonder Matthew grew so frustrated with me.”
“If you believe I’m one of you, then you came here intending to do me ill!”
“No, I sought you out, hoping you knew your destiny as one of the Arcana and could teach me mine, hoping that you’d actually be good—unlike most everyone else I continue to encounter. But I was prepared to defend myself if you weren’t.”
One of my knees gives way; I reel and catch myself on the operating table. I spy my reflection in the stainless steel. I am . . . transformed. I see an aged man, holding a lamp in the dark. My own tableau? Then my appearance returns to normal.
“Arthur, you are the Hermit, also known as the Alchemist.”
“Alchemist?” A dull roar begins in my head. The Alchemist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be!
Yes. That is who I’ve always been. Never has it been clearer to me.
Of course Evie looked special to me when I first encountered her—because I’d seen her card. I hadn’t envisioned her with open arms in my bed; I’d seen the Empress’s tableau—the one with her beckoning.
“I kept dropping hints, waiting for you to recognize some aspect of my story, for you to make a move.” She tilts her head, and that length of silken hair sweeps over her shoulder, drowning me in her luscious rose scent, threatening to subdue me even now. “My guess? You’re so high from your wacky concoctions that you haven’t been hearing the voices.” She leans down, tells me in a confiding tone, “Drugged till your brain is soup? I’ve been there, buddy.”
“High? I wanted focus!” Bloody saliva flies from my mouth. “The voices . . .” Suddenly I remember that hated cacophony, those useless repetitions. “They distracted me!”
“It’s like Matthew said. If you don’t listen to the voices, then you’ll die with their gloating whispers in your ear.”
Just as the other Arcana have supernatural abilities, so do I. Reminded of that, of the powers I wield, I lurch toward my lab.
Behind me, the girls beg Evie to free them, though they sound as petrified of her as they’ve ever been of me.
As Evie stupidly obliges them, I hunch over my workbench, grasping for every vial I can reach. I guzzle their colored contents, one after the other.
Black to counteract her poison. Blue to make me stronger, more aggressive, faster. Red to heal my wounds.
I have underestimated her; she’s done the same with me. If I can get upstairs, I can reach the weapons strategically stockpiled throughout my home.
I will sear her to a puddle, just like Father.
Though she must hear me slamming through my potions, she has no fear, patiently telling my subjects—mine—that she’s going to cut their chains with her claws now. “Don’t be afraid,” she assures them. “You’re almost free.”
Three slashes later, the girls clamber out of the dungeon, giving me a wide berth, fighting each other to get up the stairs.
I start for the stairs myself, crawling across the floor, fleeing to buy the elixirs time to work.
“Where were we?” Evie asks as she appears from behind the plastic sheeting. She’s brushing her hands off, as if she’d just dusted.
At the base of the stairs, I twist to keep her in sight. “Why toy with me?” Must keep her talking. Already I can feel one potion neutralizing her toxin. Under my clutching arm, my torso begins to heal. “Why act as if the poison had taken hold?”
“Just as I told you, sometimes I play roles. I portrayed a breezy caretaker when my mom was dying; I pretended indifference about Jackson and Selena, though I was about to go mad with jealousy. I acted drugged so you’d show me what you planned to do to me. And what was down in your cellar.”
“Why tell me your story?”
“Did you not listen to me at all?” she asks with a sigh. “My MO is to await, remember? To beckon. You had to make the first move.” As I fight to climb the steps, she calmly trails behind me. “And it took me a while to wrap my head around the idea that you’d tried to drug me—that only one of us was leaving this house alive. Besides, I needed time to recuperate from my busy day . . . gardening.”
“Gardening?” I frown, can’t make sense of her words.
“Then you struck. You tipped the scales.”
At last, strength begins to pump through me, my muscles swelling. “This isn’t finished. I’ll strike again. I’ll slaughter you, girl.”
“Will you?” Her expression is hard, her green eyes devoid of pity. “Don’t you see, Arthur? Jackson was wrong. It might not be my way, but I can hunt. I’m hunting you.”
41
Arthur is inching up the stairs, wheezing, still threatening me at intervals, baring his bloody teeth.
Had I ever imagined it could come to this?
I arrived here an emotional mess, fresh from sobbing for two days. Little wonder. I’ve never been alone like that before, friendless and without family. I’d never felt the stab of betrayal from a boy.
Yes, I came here seeking answers from Arthur, but I was also yearning for more—a sympathetic hug, a pat on the back, any scrap of kindness.
And worse, I still expected it.
I’ve been good to people in the past, and even after the Flash—after all the times I’ve been wronged—I still nurtured this naïve belief that people wanted to be good to me too.
When I first gazed at Arthur with his aw-shucks modesty, I thought: New friend.
As simple as that.
God, how badly I needed a friend. Instead, I found a psychopath.
Even now those three girls are upstairs shrieking for help, unable to get out of this lair. I hear the youngest one bawling, begging for her mother. I can only guess how long he’s been torturing them.
Tonight Arthur has changed me forever. He’s pushed me over the edge, forcing me to become what had once been my worst nightmare.
I am altered. Before Arthur. And after. There’s no going back.
I hate him for that.
As we reach the top of the steps, he weakly lunges across the threshold, landing on his lacerated belly with a grunt. Then he begins to scrabble crablike across the floor, half looking at me, half looking at the front door he’s keen to reach.
When he nears the entrance, the girls scream and bolt into a corner.
At the door, he drags himself to his knees, stretching for a doorknob that isn’t there.
“Caught by your own trap? You creepy, filthy fiend.”
Darting glances over his shoulder at me, he reaches into the back pocket of his pants, snagging a pair of pliers.
I continue stalking closer, which makes him more and more agitated. This power is heady. No wonder the red witch laughs so much. I’m beginning to see the appeal. “I followed you around town before I came here—but you knew that, didn’t you? What you didn’t know is that we were both getting ready for this meeting.”
Matthew warned me of lures; the Alchemist used several to coax me into his lair, and I was wary.
The bright lantern on his house—a light in darkness. The stew I’d sm
elled—a feast when I was starving. But while he’d been stoking his fire in anticipation, he’d left me plenty of time to call for my special kind of backup.
Just as I’d seen the red witch do.
With my blood, I revived dead plants—and it felt delicious to bring them back to life. Then I’d practiced with them.
Arsenal.
Now roses, vines, and oaks await just outside, ready to storm the Alchemist’s hold. A tornado of thorns swirls above. “You thought I was so pale and weak,” I tell him. “Yet I was only recuperating from blood loss. Thank you for giving me the TO.”
At that, he bobbles his pliers up . . . up; they land several feet away. In a panic, he grips the metal rod—all that remains of the inner half of the doorknob—twisting with all his might. Blood begins to drip from his palm.
“Ask yourself, Alchemist, do you really want to make it out that door?”
Over his shoulder, he sneers, “You are an aberration, a freak! That’s why your precious Jackson chose another, because he could sense how wrong you are! He spurned you.”
I don’t deny that. Fair’s fair. Hell, it could be true—what do I know? Apparently, nothing about boys.
Even after seeing Jackson kiss Selena, I still miss him. I wonder how long that ache will last—
Arthur begins to rise, lumbering to his feet. This is . . . surprising. I’d heard him drinking stuff downstairs, but I didn’t figure he could counteract my poison.
When he stands, I realize his torso is healing with a speed matching my own regeneration.
“I’m not without talents, Evie.” Before my eyes, his muscles are growing, straining against his clothing.
He casts me such a triumphant smirk that I wonder if he can outgun me and mine.
“You couldn’t guess how strong I’d be.” With a bellow, he plucks the door from its frame like a piece of lint.
He hurls it overhead at me; I scream when it connects with my shoulder, slamming me into a wall.
As my vision wavers, I imagine that I hear Jackson’s echoing voice in the distance. “Evangeline!”
I breathe through the pain, grappling with the weight of the door, frantically squirming to get out from under it. I’m still so weak in body, a scrawny little girl!
