So many things made sense now: We sucked at being heroes because the Evil One, Greg, was orchestrating our every move. Greg was even the one who’d sneaked under the dungeon’s key room door to steal the keys and kidnap Winston. Yet I still wasn’t sure why a mouse wanted to take over the world. A severe case of little man syndrome? And I also wasn’t sure why he’d kidnappedWinstonof all people. Maybe because he thought Winston’s predisposition toward chicken violence made him more likely to join his cause, but he ended up escaping instead? Or maybe he was just an easy target at the time, and it didn’t really matter.
I looked at the potion book in my hand. It should have easedmy mind to know I wasn’t the real bad guy in this story. Yet it almost felt like another failure, like I wasn’t even good enough to be bad. I was, as I always had been, a peasant—that nobody in the middle. At least Bryce was here with me. He clearly wasn’t the Chosen One I thought he was either, considering we’d both been summoned by Greg to be pawns for his evil schemes.
Settling myself onto the bed beside Bryce, I laid the potion book between us. “We’ve been trying to save the world for days. If we took this potion, things could finally be easy.” Bryce started to protest, but I cut him off. “Neither one of us is a hero, but we could be with the potion.”
Bryce grasped my hands. “The mouse was steering us wrong before. We can defeat him now.”
I raised my eyes to meet his gaze. “We can’t know that. I know myself. I screw up everything I do. Maybe someone like me isn’t good enough to save the day… and live happily ever after. I want to be better for you. Ineedto be better if there can be anusafter this.” I bit my lip. “That is, if you want there to be an us after this.”
He shook his head, and for a moment, my heart dropped, but then he said, “Of course I want anus. There can be anuswithout the potion.”
I pulled my hands away. Everything I ever wanted was within reach. One drink, and my life would stop feeling like an exhausting hamster wheel where I ran and ran and ran, achieving nothing, only to get spat out onto the dust.
“We have to be honest with ourselves,” I said. “One day, things will get too hard, and I’ll quit, or things will get too good, and you’ll push me away.” Ducking my head, I tried to catch his eye. “Bryce? No miscommunications, remember?”
“I’m thinking,” he said, bloodshot, tortured eyes meeting mine.
I nodded grimly. “I will alert your grandmother as soon as we get home so she can document this occasion in your baby book along with all your other firsts.”
A stunned moment passed before he broke into a smile. He tugged me onto his lap, and I wrapped my legs over his hips. “After we take this potion, and it turns you into a nice person, you’re not going to have much left to say, are you?”
“Isn’t that the point?” I settled my hands on his shoulders, serious now. “The potion will fix me. As the selfless epitome of human perfection, I won’t ever leave you.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Now it was my turn to smile. “And you, you’ll be so brave you won’t think about pushing me away because heroes don’t worry about things like girls abandoning them, crushing their souls, and smashing their hearts.”
“That’s really comforting, Court,” Bryce said brightly. “I’m touched. Like, by a taser in a hurtful way, but still touched.”
“Look.” I slathered a go-getter fun-loving tone into my voice that made me sound like a math teacher who unironically uses words likehip. “It’ll also get us out of here. If we become good people, the citizens will like us, and our powers will grow stronger. We could even assemble a band of quirky misfits. The more unlikely heroes you assemble, the higher the chance of defeating Big Bads. That’s Newton’s fourth law of motion or something.”
“Will the hero potion fix your compulsive lying—” Bryce began.
The bedroom door slammed open, revealing the servant we’d left to guard the library door. “There you are.”
I sprang up. “What happened?”
“Amygronkphopoulozeetrop has left the library.”
Bryce swept the book off the bed. “We need to make that potion and get the hell out of here. Now.”
I nodded. Amy was probably fetching guards to throw us in prison for treason. It wouldn’t take him long to realize we’d been working for the villain.
I expected finding the ingredients the potion book listed would send us on the most intense scavenger hunt of our lives—a whole side quest that involved prowling through gloriously blooming castle gardens to snip blooms of wolfsbane or trudging through squelching swamps to pluck the eye of a newt—whatever a newt was.
Instead, Bryce and I found everything we needed in a kitchen cupboard, resting on a shelf that was neatly labeled: Potion Stuff.
Bryce ground herbs with a mortar and pestle while I cracked an egg into a bowl. Since the city was under siege, everyone was distracted, and there were no servants in the kitchen to ask why we were making the grossest-looking cookie dough ever. The recipe suggested mixing the concoction with your favorite ale to mask the flavor, but as we had no ale handy, we’d just have to shoot it down.
After five minutes of the least interesting potion-brewing scene of all time, all that was left was infusing the mixture with magic, which would add an extra kick of toxic positivity that would make us ooze likability and heroism.
I tried to conjure up some feelings to spark Bryce’s magic, but I couldn’t focus. I kept expecting Amy to barge in at any moment, or to hear the clank of bone or feel the heat of dragon fire as Greg came to destroy us.
I walked over to look at the chunky sludge inside the bowl. “God, that’s disgusting.”
“—said an angel, after god crafted your soul,” Bryce finished without missing a beat.
It took me a second, but then I forced a smile. “Get it out while you still can.”
