Page 85 of Sugar & Sorcery
The mist thickened, slowly swallowing the space between us.
“What I’m trying to say…” She coughed, searching for breath. “I think I have feelings for you. I tried to fight it, but… I can’t hide them anymore. And I think you…”
I rose abruptly. “You only feel that because you’re cursed.”
“No! I know what I feel for you!”
“Sorry. But it isn’t mutual.”
I had said it.
She could have my eternity. But I could not have hers.
I was not cruel enough for that.
I had to die. End what should never have begun. Stop Zelda. And most of all, protect her. Even if that meant protecting her from myself.
“I could never make the elixir to kill you,” she whispered, her voice trembling as a tear slid down her cheek. “Please, Arawn… Don’t abandon me too.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
I hurled myself into the mist before she could convince me to stay.
My skin prickled as my antlers began to form, then stopped, incomplete. Pain seared through me, brutal and merciless. The poison of my own curse crawled higher than my hands, violet veins streaking up my arm to my neck.
My magic, once an extension of my will, rebelled against me.
I fell.
The void opened to swallow me. My wings refused to spread. My antlers shattered against the trees. My claws found no hold. I fell. Broken. Unrecognizable.
And for the first time, my magic did not answer.
27
Magic listens to the heart, not the mind. But when the heart wavers—when emotions stray from the spell’s source—it fractures.
LEMPICKA
Astorm had crashed over the manor in the mist, drowning everything beneath sheets of pounding rain.
The giant leaf I was using as an umbrella slipped from my hands, flying off on the wind like a rebellious bird. In hindsight, going out to gather golden apples in the middle of a thunderstorm had been an objectively terrible idea.
“No, no, no, this isn’t happening! What is?—”
Dozens of papers shot straight toward me like a swarm of wasps, merging into a swollen, furious mass pouring out of the forest. My hair bristled, and I bolted for the manor, my apron of apples bouncing against my hips with every stride.
“THE DOOR! OPEN THE DOOR, OR I’M ABOUT TO END UP AS PAPER-MASHED-PIE!” I screamed at my companions,who had had the good sense to stay warm and cozy by the fire crackling beside the cauldrons.
The kitchen door swung open just in time. I hurled myself inside, spun on my heel, and slammed it shut. It caught on one torn corner of the paper-creature, which shrieked in a piercing wail. A gust of sheets slipped in under the frame, tickling my ankles. One sliced clean across my calf.
I lost my footing, one shoe sliding on a loose sheet, and the rest of me went with it. My backside hit the floor. I probably looked like some soaked, abandoned pastry left out in monsoon season—painful to look at, even worse to move.
The papers hovered above me, ready to turn me into a library dessert, until one of them settled neatly in my palm.
“Sugar…” muttered Éclair, dressed in a flour-streaked apron, kneading a dough so packed with charcoal pigment it had turned black.
Chouquette plunged one tail into her throat—or rather, her apparently bottomless void—and pulled out a towel, which she handed me. She’d finally figured out what those were for.
