Page 157 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“He was supposed to bring the two of you together much sooner than he did. Even in Siah’s visions, it was hard to tell which way you’d go in the end. So, when Aura was old enough to see the Oracle’s prophecy in her dreams, Wrenlock was meant to find her and bring her into Faerie, but he delayed it by months.”
“Owain,” Lucais chastised. “Why don’t you speak less in riddles and more in words that might actually make you seem clever?”
“I’m talking about the decision you need to make, Lucais.” Owain tutted under his breath. “Now that you understand the reason you couldn’t fix what your parents did, what will it be? You can save your family, or permanently condemn them to thenoxaeterna.”
Lucais stared at the High Lord, panic and confusion flaring in his eyes. My heart thundered.
“Who are you going to kill?”
The High King shook his head feverishly.
“Her, or them?”
Before thenoxaeternawas named, I might have been surprised to learn the cost of breaking it, but deep down, I’d already known what it would take. It was buried at the bottomof a still lake in my mind alongside everything else the curse suppressed—including the fire in my veins that the dark voice around my wrist had snuffed out.
I couldn’t speak through the curse. I couldn’t eventhinkthrough it. But I knew—I had always known in one way or another—that I carried life and death inside of me. That I was destined to do something so impossible it didn’t matter if it was good or evil. And that Lucais would love me enough to choose me and damn the millions of consequences trapped in flesh and bone, living within houses, greeting the sun and bidding goodnight to the moon as if a selfish, redheaded girl from a bookstore didn’t stand with a pair of scissors hovering over the thread that tethered their souls to the realm. The thread that gave them a right to life, the thread that would one daysnapbeneath her razor-sharp edges whether she meant for it to happen or not.
Like the vision the Court of Darkness had shown me.
The Little Folk had known, too.
The trinkets they used to bring me as a child were bribes. I remembered with sudden clarity the pleading of their little eyes as they approached me with caution in the backyard of my first home, beseeching me to find fantasy in books so that I might never go searching for it in the real world. So that the bomb inside of me may never be activated.
But I never liked fantasy books. I never liked them much at all.
There was always a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was always a problem that required a resolution, and a team of characters would work together to figure it out in some kind of impossible scenario. It was tense. There were close calls. Sometimes, there were heavy losses, and I followed different plot points around in a maze until I reached the one inevitable conclusion—
That it was going to end.
That not even magic could make things last forever.
I didn’t want to read about that, so I closed those books, and I moved on to contemporary romances and thrillers—
Until fantasy found me.
Like it was always going to.
Because the page could not be turned over unless it did.
The mask of defiance on Lucais’s face melted away. “No,” he whispered, and his eyes were pleading as they bored into Wrenlock’s. “No,” he repeated desperately. “Tell me he’s wrong, Elumos. Tell me right now that he isfuckingwrong—”
“It’s true.” Wrenlock’s throat bobbed, and he averted his gaze from both of us, tucking his hands behind his back. “The only way to break the curse on the Malum is for Auralie to die, and they are aware of it.”
That’s why they killed all those girls.
Lucais laughed bitterly. “So all of that was fornothing,then?” he yelled at his former Hand’s side profile, pointing at me with his bound hands as he stalked Wrenlock’s guilt-ridden eyes. “Everything you ever said to me about loving her and wanting to protect her—that all gets thrown out the window now? For what? ForMargot? Answer me!” he bellowed, and the very ground beneath our feet shook.
“Guards!” Owain called. “Restrain him!”
“Unhand me, you crispy slices of mutton!” Lucais shouted, shrugging them off with his shoulders. His eyes were blazing with power, but he lifted his arms, shaking his bound hands in the air for emphasis. “The only threat I pose is to your fucking egos! I’m in irons, for the love of the Elements! Standdown.”
The guards halted their attempts to force him to his knees, exchanging a fleeting glance.
Lucais gazed at me with such burning desire and intensity that I thought it might kill me. “You are, without a doubt, theworst thing that ever happened to me,” he said. Then he paused, his eyes ablaze. “But if anyone tried to change it, and they tried to take you back from the absolute train wreck that catapulted you into my life, I would hunt them to the end of the world. I would hold their hearts in my bare hands and squeeze until they threw you back to me, little beast.”
“What are you saying?” I hissed. “What are youdoing?”
He shook his head gently, smiling at me like he was in love. “Even knowing how this ends now, bookworm, I swear to you that it is the truth this time.”
