Chapter 35

Chapter 35

Evie

“What are you doing here?” Evie asked incredulously.

She hadn’t seen or heard from her cousin in years. She remembered so well how she used to wait by the mailbox for Helena’s letters every day, just in case a new reply to her missives arrived, but after two years, she’d had to give up hoping.

Helena glided toward the bars, dressed in a lovely sapphire gown that floated behind her as she took a seat in the room’s only rickety old chair. She tapped her finger against her chin thoughtfully. “I work here.” Her cousin’s eyes flitted to her and then her boss, keen interest playing in them. “And what are you doing here?” The finger stopped tapping her chin and now pointed around the cell.

Suddenly, Evie felt angry—so angry. She’d had no idea Helena ended up in the Heart Village, had no idea she worked in a playhouse, had no idea of anything her cousin was doing. Because she’d simply disappeared, like everyone else in her life.

“You didn’t hear?” she asked with an eye roll. “I had too much to drink and tried to strip naked on your stage.”

Her boss choked behind her, slamming a fist against his chest. He’d been doing that a lot—perhaps she should have Tatianna make him something for heartburn.

Helena laughed—a lovely, lilting sound that matched her countenance. Evie wondered if her boss noticed that loveliness. The thought sent a pounding ache through her skull. “You are still most amusing, cousin.”

“Incarceration really tickles my funny bone,” Evie said pointedly, looking at the bars and then the keys hanging on a hook by the door.

Helena followed her gaze, nodding, unhooking them from the wall. Both Evie and The Villain stood on edge in preparation for the cell door opening. “Before I do you any favors, though, perhaps you can tell me what you’re doing in the Heart Village”—she smirked—“wicked woman?”

The Villain grimaced, but Evie jumped and gave a little clap. “Oh, the wanted flyers of me are spreading, sir! How exciting.”

“We have different definitions of that word,” he grumbled, rubbing at his temples.

Evie shrugged, deciding directness was the best way to address the situation at hand. “We’re looking for my mother, Helena, and I’m guessing you’ve seen her recently, judging by the ghastly look on your face.”

Helena flinched. Got her. “Yes,” she said, not trying to hide it. “Aunt Nura was here for a time.”

But not anymore, were the words Helena wouldn’t say. The silence wore through the last of Evie’s patient kindness. “Helena, as much as I have missed our correspondence, I am through with niceties. Tell me.”

“She spent a few months here. Maybe two or three years ago.” Helena looked haunted. “I had just moved to the village when she arrived, after my father remarried.”

Evie hadn’t even known that Uncle Vale had remarried. “And his new spouse?”

“Oh, my stepmother is lovely, if not a little boring. I think that’s what my father needed. I just didn’t want to be in the way while they started their new life, and I was told the Heart Village was a bustling hub of enterprise and opportunity.” Helena scoffed at the words like they were a joke.

The Villain, who had until now allowed Evie to take charge of the conversation, chimed in, quiet but steady. “I take it you do not feel that way any longer.”

Helena’s eyes flashed. “I work with method kidnappers. What do you think?”

He clicked his tongue as if to say point taken and moved back, allowing Evie to continue.

“Did my mother say where she was going? Or why she came to you in the first place?” Evie asked, growing desperate.

Helena shook her head, almost looking sympathetic beneath the guise of her apathy. “I think she thought it safer to come to me than my father. He loves his sister, but you know as well as I he would’ve sent her right back to Uncle Griffin.” Her warm gaze went far away, and her brows knitted together, as if she was trying to remember. “She wanted to know more about the stars, I think? Of what my father taught me. It was the only time she’d speak. Mostly she was truly a ghost, Evie. It wasn’t pleasant. And when she did talk, it was nonsensical muttering about wanting to be gone. To be no one. She wanted to be swallowed by midnight. I thought she’d gone mad.”

There had been a certain level of detachment that Evie had held on to during this endeavor to find her mother. But she could see it, remember it—the lost look in Nura’s eyes. It had been ingrained into Evie since she was too little to understand what it meant. She had watched her mother fade from the vibrant, beautiful woman who ruled her childhood to a husk of a person, and then to nothing.

Evie had been given many things by her mother—the length of her fingers, the curl in her hair, the bow of her lips—but she could never have anticipated being handed down her mother’s ability to bury anguish beneath the surface. And like her mother, Evie feared one day…she, too, would break. A tragic inheritance, seeing your mother’s flaws crop up within yourself and having the awareness to know it but no idea how to stop it.

“I imagine the guilt drove her to it, about killing Gideon,” Helena said, snapping Evie from her spiral.

Her eyes burned. “He isn’t dead.”

This surprised her cousin but didn’t seem to shock her. “Oh, how wonderful! He owes me money.”

“Take heart,” The Villain said to Helena, but his eyes were on Evie; she could feel them.

Helena laughed and swung the keychain about her finger. “I wonder whether the rumors of The Villain’s brutal, destructive magic were exaggerated, if simple rusty metal bars can keep you contained.”

The Villain didn’t reply, just glared, stepping subtly closer to Evie. “Let us out and I’ll be happy to demonstrate for you.”

Helena quirked a grin before tossing the keys to the other side of the room, where they landed soundly on the small table near the door. “Unfortunately, I cannot do that.”

Evie gripped the bars, furious. “Helena, we’re family. You’re not actually going to allow your boss to sell us out to the king, are you?”

Helena tsked, the train of her dress floating behind her as she glided to the door. “Oh, goose. You think any of those buffoons upstairs could run anything? Other than their hopeless careers into the ground.” Helena finished with a flourish and put a nail in Evie’s and The Villain’s proverbial coffins.

“The Deadlands Theater is my playhouse, and I am the boss.”