32

Two words, and the whole world tumbled. Two words, and everything inside me floundered and scrambled, my entire body inwrought with a grim sense of doom.

His heart.

"Isa, what—" Apollo started, but the words died inside his throat as Isa held up my necklace. The butterfly pendant glowed with a translucent, flame-like quality, the silver cracking, breaking. Something wild and very much alive shifted beneath.

It throbbed. It pulsed.

I felt like a sleepwalker interrupted mid-dream, dazed and immobile. My muscles locked in place and my brain stuttered, every part of me on pause to let the realization sink in.

His heart. His heart. His heart.

Isa careened forward, and Apollo sprinted across the room, reaching me in a heart-rending instant of disbelief.

"The concealment spell really was my best work. I mean, it hid the necklace's true magic even from me. I didn't feel its presence in my house at all." She laughed a dark, bitter laugh, the sound snapping me into alertness. Apollo stepped in front of me, trying to shield me from her, but her sharp eyes followed me. They pierced through me like arrows. "And you had it with you when you came to the manor, didn't you? You've had it all along."

From this vantage point, I couldn't see Apollo's face, but I heard the rage and hurt in his voice in that single, broken, "Isa—"

"Shut up!" she screeched, and the whole room shook before her fury. The blinds of every window snapped shut, ensuing a flurry of ear-splitting bangs. The candles burned higher. The floor shuddered and roared. The vines on the wallpaper seemed to crawl to life, one black thorn at a time.

This room was my mother's, you know. It still bears her magic. It's embedded in the walls. I can do almost anything in here.

Just like that, all the blazing panic and my thousand questions clarified into deep, guttural fear. It pounced through me. It left me breathless.

"Isa, Isa, Isa," she mocked. "I'm so tired of listening to the sound of your fucking voice." She clutched the pendant in her fist, and the last piece of metal melted away like iron under fire. A tender, throbbing organ cocooned in opalescent flames remained between her long fingers. And then, she clutched it.

Apollo let out a tremendous gasp, stumbling backward as though a spear had gone through him.

I grabbed him around the waist from behind, but he was too heavy, and we both staggered further back and collided with the wall.

"It was you," Apollo snarled, struggling to form the words as Isa tightened her grip on his heart.

"Of course it was me," Isa scorned, stepping into the circle of light the candles cast on the floor. The flames wavered, the shadows trembled, and I wondered with no small amount of horror if even the darkness in this room was hers to command.

We needed to get out of here. Right now. I shut out the buzz of my thoughts and scanned the room for something—anything to use against her.

"You think an ordinary witch could do what I did?" she continued. "My father was a Zayra and my mother an Andria, one of the greatest witch lines the North has ever seen." The room shuddered as if to applaud her declaration. Apollo pressed his back on my chest, making his body my shield. "You really thought I was going to spend my life making potions and let a magicless half-breed nothing rule in my kingdom?"

"It is not your kingdom," Apollo thundered.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he slunk to the side, inching towards the vanity table to our left.

The letter opener, I realized as I noticed the sharp object glinting in the purple semidarkness.

"I'm next in line for the throne, aren't I?" Isa wryly mused, toying with the flaming heart in her palm.

"You did this for the crown?" Apollo kept her talking, not averting his eyes from her as he edged closer and closer to the table.

Isa pinned him with the weight of her hatred and disdain, her lips curling back into a sneer. "The way you say it like it's nothing only proves how unfit you are for it. Of course, you're unfit. You're your father's son. A nobody's son," she spat, his heart a tender, trembling thing in her palm that she could crush at any moment on a whim.

Apollo's eyes darted to me, and then even more discreetly to the nightstand, to the large silver vase that looked heavy enough to do some serious damage.

I slipped to the side, pretending to cower away from her as she approached.

"I thought about killing you," she said nonchalantly, as if murder was nothing too hard for her. "But killing the Crowned Prince of Thaloria means years upon years of investigations and memorials and faking tears every time someone mentions your fucking name. You would have become a hero, and I would have become the Queen who had some big shoes to fill. No, it was far more gratifying to turn you into a joke." She glanced in admiration at the alabaster flames around his heart, the very spell that kept it beating while it was ripped away from its owner's body. "Murder is such a man thing to do. But patience…patience is a womanly art."

Apollo seized the opportunity of her wavered focus and snatched the letter opener from the vanity. But before he could even raise it fully, she jabbed her fingers deep into his heart, and Apollo crumbled.

He screamed—he screamed, and the horrible, heart-shattering sound pounced through me and punctured every bone, every joint, every muscle in my body. I could hardly feel my limps ignite into motion as I changed directions at once.

He collapsed on the floor, heaving, spasming, grasping at his chest. "No!" I pleaded, tearing across the room. "Stop! Please!"

And just as I was about to reach him, my fingertips almost at his shaking shoulders, something pulled me back. Something handless but tremendous picked me up and shoved me across the room. I landed hard on the wall with a ragged cry, my head spinning, my ears ringing, and the air leaving my lungs so violently that black spots fell upon my vision and the candlelight burned dark through my eyelids.

Then, the wall came to life.

The vines uncurled and poked out of the wallpaper. They slithered over my body and wrapped around my throat, my wrists, my ankles, pulling me back into the baseboard until I was fully and inescapably trapped inside a black cocoon of thorns.

"Nepheli!" Apollo howled, trying to stand through the pain with a white-knuckled fist around his only weapon. Isa dug her fingers into his heart again, and he fell on his back, every muscle on his body convulsing all at once. He looked up at Isa, his jaw so clenched that the words barely made it out, "I swear to the gods, I'm going to tear you to pieces if you harm her."

Isa stepped with her heel on his wrist, forcing the little object out of his hand. He growled in pain, and I thrashed underneath the vines, twisting around and pushing against them until my dress tore on the thorns and my skin was just as raw as my fear.

She's going to kill him, was the only thought left in my head. And a prayer to the stars, the stars who hadn't taken me, who'd forgiven my childish mortal mistake and had made me a part of them instead, to tell me now what to do.

What should I do? What should I do? Gods, what can I do?

"You really are pathetic," Isa tutted, sharp-edged and cruel, strolling around Apollo's shuddering body like a vulture with carrion. "You made it so easy for me after Verena. You practically told me what to do. Your glorious, miserable heartbreak gave me the idea. And you didn't even notice me, ruining you one potion at a time. Of course, you didn't notice. Why would you? I'm just your second best." Isa squeezed his heart, and he arched in agony, grunting on the floor. "But I was always there with your disgusting, imbecile friends, slipping my potions into your drinks. Magic is an emotional practice, you know. For a potion to take full effect, it needs to be fed by its host. The potions intensified your pain and desperation to a breaking point because you fed them pain and desperation."

"Isa," Apollo choked out, trying to sound reasonable. "If I ever hurt you—"

"I told you to shut your fucking mouth," she snarled, and this time she rammed her fingers so forcefully into his heart that even the flames quivered in pain.

"Please," I sobbed hysterically. "Please, don't hurt him."

Isa whirled around, alight with fury. "He hurt himself. By consuming each and every potion I slipped into his drinks. By being so unable to see past the illusion of the old witch. By begging me to stop the pain. What better way to make an heir unfit to rule than by stealing his very ability to feel, understand, empathize with his people? Everything worked out perfectly. I couldn't steal or alter his memories, my magic has its limits, so I had to be thorough. It had to look real, so the Queen and King had someone to blame, something else to investigate. I bought merchandise and staged an entire Witch Shop that was always closed during the day because the witch was too old and only worked whenever she felt like it. I guided him to it. I'm no illusionist, so I cast the most basic illusion spell over myself that if he had a speck of magic inside him, he would have been able to see right through it, even stinking drunk. But he made it so easy. I told him about the spell. He consented. I put his heart on a necklace. A random, worthless necklace. I cast a concealment spell so no one would ever be able to know it for what it was, even if they held it in the palm of their hand. I faked the old witch's death. And, of course, I didn't want to keep the evidence with me. I was only a young witch back then, and the North has too many magical beings that can work through a concealment spell. I had to get it out of here. So I sold everything, including the box with the necklace, to Curiosity Shops in the South—the other side of the world. And then," she curled back her lips, eyes shining, "you found it."

The room around me became a spinning blur of distant remembrances—the day I found and bought the necklace, the first night I slept with it on my neck and never took it off me again, the day Apollo walked into the Shop, and after seven years, he found his heart at last.

I was in agony; every nerve ending, every organ, every emotion bruised and crushed. My mind wanted to shut down, but doubt crept in, cutting and stark. It wasn't real. None of it was real. His heart had drawn him to me from the start.

His heart, which I'd had all along. I'd wished on it, prayed on it. I'd dreamt with it at night. I'd took it in my hand whenever I needed courage. And then Apollo came into my Shop and couldn't leave without it.

"What is it, darling?" Isa laughed at the burning-hot tears that rolled down my cheeks. "You thought it was real love? You thought the stars brought you together? You were literally wearing his heart around your pretty neck, Little Butterfly. Of course, he couldn't stay away from you."

"Don't listen to her!" Apollo groaned, struggling to push himself up on his palms.

"By all means, don't listen to me," Isa derided. "Delude yourself all you want. It doesn't make it any less true. There was an invisible string connecting you with him all along. And that string wasn't fate or destiny, and it certainly wasn't love. It was just bad fucking luck," she seethed as she clenched her fist, dragging another gut-wrenching groan of pain out of him. "He was never supposed to find the necklace because there weren't supposed to be any Curiosity Shops left in the South, much less a girl so infatuated with magic that she would be compelled to wear a thing like that around her neck."

Her words fell through me like a rock, the realization hitting hard and fast. "You," I choked. "You're the Dreadful Mundane."

Isa's too-white grin was the stuff of nightmares, wide and hypnotic—the whole room shrank to it. "I thought he would eventually stop, but he never did. He kept looking for his heart, traveling closer and closer to the South. He wouldn't recognize the necklace even if he found it, of course, but I didn't want to risk it. Magic is too unpredictable. It betrays you so easily. I mean, how many times have you heard about curses being broken by something as ridiculous as love? I'd worked too hard to leave it all to chance. I had to take action one last time. If Curiosity Shops closed down, he'd have no choice but to abandon his search and return to Thaloria to finally forfeit his crown. It only took me a month in Elora to spread some rumors about magic potions gone wrong, mystery boxes with vengeful ghosts inside, evil oracle cards that conspired for the reader's destruction. A handful of people started fearing magic. And the wonderful thing about fear is that it is the most infectious disease in the world. It spreads and festers and rots. It leaves nothing behind." She sighed dramatically. "It was a perfect plan, really. The only plan that could never be tracked back to me. And then he brings you here, and he starts fucking feeling again because his heart is literally beating five breaths away from him. I knew you were trouble the moment I laid my eyes on you. I tried to scare you away, but you're like an enamored pest, aren't you? Because even after everything, here you show up to the Palace, with my spell dangling around your neck, and the entire court starts talking about the way he looks at you and how the Prince of Broken Hearts is finally cured, and I can't have that now, can I?" She snapped her eyes at mine. Her face was all burning embers and sharp edges. Her rage was a dagger she was about to wield. "All this hard work, so Little Miss Curiosity from Elora to turn me into a murderer."

With a raucous upsurge of magic, the vanity mirror cracked into countless intricate cobweb patterns. Uneven knife-sharp fragments flew off the purple frame, their silvery glare falling into stillness as they paused in midair to point straight at me.

In a sick panic, I pushed against the vines, and the thorns poked into the balls of my shoulders, my clavicle, the base of my throat. I gritted my teeth, trying not to make a sound even as I felt the warm, viscid blood trickle down my arms. I tried to keep quiet because I didn't want him to break. I didn't want him to utter the exact words that escaped him just then, "Please," Apollo choked, writhing in pain at her feet. "Isa, please. You want to kill me? Kill me. Torture me. You want the throne? Take it. Take everything. But please, I beg of you, please don't—" His words died with a wring of her hand.

"Don't… what?" she mocked, putting a finger behind her ear. "Come on, dear cousin, don't slur your words."

Apollo grunted incoherently, thick beads of sweat gliding off his face like tears.

"Oh, you mean kill her?" Isa cooed. "You want to save the girl, princeling, is that it?"

The glass fragments fluttered impatiently in the air, the rustle so alarming that I began shaking uncontrollably. Although at a great distance, I knew that it would only take a surge of her magic and a few seconds for them to pierce my chest. I sucked in a breath, readying myself for pain, for death, and for seeing Apollo's face for the very last time—his beautiful face that was twisted in a mask of agony now as he managed a nod to her question, choking on a desperate, "I'll do anything."

Isa bent over him, grabbed the collar of his shirt, and forced him up to his feet. "You'll have to write a letter," she said, relaxing the grip on his heart just enough to keep him upright.

"If I do what you ask, will you let her go?" he grunted, biting down on the pain.

"No! Apollo, don't do it!" I pleaded with him. "She'll kill us both!"

Apollo met my eyes, ravaged by guilt and despair. He tried to tell me something through the struggle, but failed. Isa tightened her hold on his heart again, and he collapsed forward on the vanity's little seat. "Nepheli, I'm sorry," he gasped, his whole body trembling. "I don't know what else to do."

"Enough with the melodrama," Isa sneered as she shoved a piece of paper on the table in front of him and forced a pen into his hand. "You ran away with our darling Nepheli," she dictated, and Apollo wrote with a shaky hand. "You can't come back to Thaloria because everybody knows that a heartless man cannot become the just and benevolent ruler the North deserves. You will try your best to start a new life somewhere else. You'll miss them, but they'll have to accept your decision because it is the best for everyone. You don't want them to look for you. You want everyone to heal and move on."

Apollo scribbled down the words, stealing glances between me and the glass fragments as though looking away was what would cause my demise in the end.

"Sign it with your blood," Isa demanded.

Apollo clenched his jaw, stabbed the fountain pen into his pointer finger, and signed the letter in his blood.

"I did as you asked," he breathed out. "Do as you want with me now. But you will let her go, Isadora. You will release her because we both know you are a lot of things, but not a murderer."

"You don't know what I am!" she snarled, her teeth bared and hungry.

Apollo didn't retreat. "I understand you feel cheated. You've lost so much, and now it's your time to take. I haven't lost my own parents, so I won't insult you by saying that I understand what that feels like, but I do relate to your pain, Isa. I don't expect you to forgive me for not being there for you when you needed me the most. So take the crown and spare her life. Listen to me, Isadora. Do it for you. For your conscience. Don't spend the rest of your life haunted by the things you've done."

The air deadened. The flames lay flat on the cables, like we were trapped inside a dream, objects looking almost normal but too motionless and exaggerated to belong to reality.

Isa stared at him blankly, her nails on his heart. "You know, when I first devised this plan, I was just a young girl, barely eighteen years old. I didn't want to get my hands too dirty. But now, I really want to see you bleed."

A low chant left her mouth, and a booming outburst of magic shook the room. His whole body bent over a devastating crack. A crack so bright it was almost as if a theater's spotlight had snapped over him. His chest split open like unwatered soil, and a wild stream of light poured out and stretched towards the pulsing organ in Isa's hand. Her voice rose, the words dark and powerful, and with a jolt of her arm, she rammed Apollo's heart back into his chest.

He screamed as a violent spasm went through him and he fell to his knees. I struggled to see past all the light. To call out to him over the clangor of magic. To beg him to look up and see that one of the glass pieces had flown back to Isa, and was now nestled inside her fist.

He was still screaming in agony at the tremendous pressure on his chest when the sharp fragment began descending to his throat.

"No!" I howled, wailing and thrashing against the vines until there was not a part of me that was not bleeding. "Don't! Please! Don't do this, please!"

Her head turned to me slowly. She looked almost inhuman in her magic. "You're right," she crooned. "He should see you die first. To remember one last time what it means to bear a broken heart."

The fragments tore through the air—fast, so fast—but not as fast as he was. With his heart restored and his body finally his own, Apollo sprung across the room in a blur of desperate lunges and catapulted his body to mine. I was saved by a microsecond. The shards lanced right through him instead.

I could not believe it. I could not reconcile with it. The first moment he had a body that could die, he made it my armor.

A second of dreadful silence. A second of horrible stillness. Then he opened his lips—"Nepheli"—and blood poured out.

No.

No, no, no, no.

He held on to me, his hands bracketing the sides of my immobile chest, and tried to say something, but he was crumbling, choking on the inflow of blood. "You're glowing," he managed before he collapsed at my feet.

Ragged, inconsolable sobs racked my chest. My very soul quaked in brutal pangs of rage and agony and despair—that broken voice inside my head wailing that the man I loved was lost to me forever.

Then, in a white flash of memories, his words settled in. He was trying to tell me something. He was trying to remind me of what stars did best.

They blazed.

Power, deep, internal, and blood-curdling, surged through me. With a raw, visceral scream, I blazed out of my thorny shackles and rocketed through the room, burning, shining, a fallen star spellbound to destroy everything at its passage. Things broke and splintered, my light booming, shaking the room to pieces. A rain of glass hailed over us as the windows cracked and shattered from the outside, the stars in the sky shoving into the room to see me shine.

Isa shrieked and snarled with eyes shut to the starlight and chanted things to no avail, spells bouncing off the star's opalescence like arrows on an iron shield.

And then, I was on her, shoving her to the floor with my hands wrapped around her throat. "How could you!" I screamed, shaking her violently. She writhed beneath me, clawing at my arms, but the sharp shoots of pain only gave me a horrid, ugly thrill that made my light burn brighter. "Answer me! What did he ever do to you?"

"He took what's mine," she hissed.

"You took what's mine," I howled back, my tears falling incandescent, searing and sizzling upon her skin. "You should have known that when stars fall, they burn the ground with them."

She screamed in agony, thrashing against the silver, blazing droplets. I kept her down by the shoulders and burned her with my tears. The room tried to help her as the vines surged out of the walls and rushed right toward me, only to turn to ash upon contact with my light.

Finally, the magic of the room crumbled completely, and the doors gave out, banging into the walls. Guards, who had either heard the raucous of the windows breaking or Isa's manic screams, barged inside, and the room stumbled into a flurry of heavy boots, flashing swords, and horrified sighs.

I heaved in relief as I staggered up to my feet, allowing my light to dwindle so they could approach. "He's hurt. Apollo is hurt—"

But instead of rushing to his aid or seizing Isa, the men came straight at me. I felt like fainting, watching them race toward me. The tilt of the room had an inescapable, nightmarish wrongness. On one side was Apollo, immobile and red. On the other was Isa, in a sick hysteria. She sobbed, huddled in a banged-up corner, and coughed out her accusations: "She tried to kill us! She did this to him!"

In my shock, I didn't resist as two guards grabbed my arms and forced them behind my back while another prepared a pair of obsidian shackles for me, the only stone in the world that could subdue someone's magic.

I squirmed and cried out to warn them. I didn't want to hurt them, but I had no other choice. I would not be imprisoned. I would not let him die and her win. With only instinct and heartbreak to guide me, I summoned the light—the fiery, starlit sensation rising through my bloodstream like a violent tide.

But then—

"Don't touch her."

It was barely more than a grunt, a harsh, pained whisper. But it was his. It was his. It was his, and my heart beat again, and my lungs pumped air and the light from my bones hushed into a tender, harmless glow.

"Apollo," I gasped.

"It was Isa… She did it," Apollo panted and tried to prop on his elbows, only to slump on the floor again, coughing out chunks of blood.

I wrenched out of the guards' hold and ran to him, yelling hysterically, "What are you all waiting for? Move! Someone get a physician! Now!"

I did not care about Isa's howls and curses as the guards forced the obsidian shackles on her. I did not care about her protests and promises of revenge as she was dragged out of the room. I did not listen to the barrage of questions the men hurled at me.

I only fell on my knees next to Apollo and did my best not to look at the back of his shirt, sticky and scarlet, each wound bleeding as avidly and hopelessly as the heart inside my chest.

He groaned as the side of his head dropped on my lap. "I'm so, so sorry, Nepheli."

"Shhh. It's okay. Everything's going to be okay. You'll be fine," I soothed in a hoarse, cracked voice I barely recognized as my own. I brushed with trembling fingers the wet locks from his eyes. His forehead was pale and beaded with a cold sweat. He was like a handful of stardust, beautiful and half-dead, slipping through my fingers into a moment away from reality.

"I'm so proud of you," he murmured, his eyes glassy and damp. "My star. You shined."

Don't leave me, I wanted to beg. "Don't speak," I only said. "Don't strain yourself. The physician is coming."

My eyes drifted to the gaping double doors, then to the shattered windows, their frames dangling, bared, and crooked, like broken bones. The stars outside twinkled, watching down on us with bated breath.

Please, I prayed. Please, please, please, save him. Please don't take him from me so soon.

"Nepheli," he muttered.

I looked down. He was grasping at his chest. Tears, his first tears in seven years, fell from his eyes and rolled over the sides of his face. "Nepheli, my heart beats so fast," he said.

And closed his eyes.