Checkmate. Her stomach swoops, a tremor sprints across her skin, and her cheeks stain.
He knows that she was down here, tampering with things that don’t belong to her.
Had he been awake? Had he felt her take liberties? Had he endured her petting his hair?
What else does he know? Does he know how much he resembles someone else? Someone important to her? Someone she has lost?
Does he know what loss is?
“I…,” she falters.
“You,” he echoes between his teeth. “Yeah, you. I’ve got so many ideas about you. How I can pay you back. How I can leap out of this chair right now and demonstrate what I think of you touching what isn’t yours. How you don’t even see that one of your arrows is tipped toward me, ready for stealing, and how I’m thinking of the best place to use it on you.”
Wonder resists reaching for the arrow, to nudge it out of range. If he indeed gets up and tries something hostile, she’ll block his effort.
But that would be too simple for either of them. Because when Malice rages with words, it’s got a sharper edge than physical retribution.
His voice takes small bites out of her. “On the other hand, I’d rather prolong the inevitable and then take something that matters to you. Something precious. Then I can see what you look like tempted, with your bright—” he swats the pomegranate bowl off the tray, “—spellbound—” then the lemonade, “—eyes—” then the tea, “—full of doubts instead of daydreams.”
Ceramic and glass clatter across the floor, and drink spills across the boards. Malice gives Wonder a terrible look, one that promises he’ll deliver, and that he’ll make her deliver, too.
He was once her target. Now she’s his.
And now she knows what that feels like.
2
Once upon a myth, she loved a boy. That boy had blond curls and a charming smile, a benevolent smile, a mortal smile. He was different, and different had attracted Wonder.
That had been her first mistake.
The second mistake had been falling in love.
It had been unconventional, seeing as she’d never had a single physical or verbal interaction with him. Rather, she had cherished him from afar, pining until the distance became intolerable.
And that’s when she made her third mistake. And that grave error had earned her scars, a pulp of starbursts carved into her hands.
But those had healed. The boy hadn’t. Not after what she did to him, giving in to temptation and causing him pain in the process. For a goddess who’d once steered the destinies of humans, she had sealed the worst kind of fate for a boy who hadn’t known she existed, yet who’d suffered because of her.
Once upon a myth, she had overstepped her boundaries. She cannot do that again.
Hopefully, she won’t have to. Because Malice isn’t that boy. He cannot be that mortal boy from another century, from another era, from another life.
They’re identical. They’re mirror images.
Having returned to the library’s main hall, Wonder stops in her tracks, because this thought always forces her to stop in her tracks. She stalls in between the stacks, under curtains of ivy as the same ceaseless questions orbit her mind.
How is this possible? Can destiny produce such a sequel, such an accurate rendering of the past? Why would fate do that?
Everything about him is the same, yet nothing about him is the same. On the outside, he’s a replica. On the inside, he’s the opposite.
Are Malice’s features a coincidence? Or are they a resurrection?
How to explain his residence in a library? How to explain the items in his vault? The saddlebag, the rocking chair, and the 1800s telescope?
How to explain the envelopes stained with age?
How to explain all these details and objects associated with the past, with that other boy?
None of this makes sense, no matter how many texts she’s consulted, no matter how many pages she’s rifled through, no matter how many times she’s begged the stars for an explanation. And while this mortal library is beautiful, it’s also inadequate to provide answers.
Only a forbidden place filled with forbidden texts will yield such information. Only there, in the heart of the Peaks, can one untangle these quandaries.
The problem is, she’s banished. Thus, that great landmark of knowledge is off limits unless she finds a way back.
Wonder glances at her surroundings. Throughout the building, human patrons either mill about or sit in cubicles where they type on their laptops. Someone discreetly pries open a plastic bag, the crinkle skittering into the air. Another soul unzips a pencil pouch. Another soul turns a page.
She wants to take a few conciliatory laps around the hall. She wants to stroll and watch them muse and ruminate. She wants to distract herself.
He knows about last night. He’d felt my fingers in his hair.
Five minutes ago, she’d left him in the vault. She’d refused to apologize, instead rising to her feet and marching away as if his revelation had been inconsequential.
Free from the underworld, Wonder takes refuge in sunlight streaming through the windows and ropes of plants swaying overhead. All the same, she projects an image of him sleeping, of him resting in peace, safe from nightmares because she’d been there to stop them.
Picturing his taloned fingers curled around that dainty envelope, she slumps against the nearest bookcase and allows herself the luxury of trembling.
A hand pops into her line of vision. She blinks at the set of masculine digits that presents a hefty book bound in leather, gold embossing the surface. It’s a tome about the history of meditation.
Wonder’s gaze roams from the title to a pair of broad shoulders, then to a countenance inset with pewter irises and crowned in a froth of messy white hair. The male props himself against the shelf and regards her with a lopsided grin. “This looks like a pile of boring,” Andrew says. “But desperate times call for desperate measures.”
Wonder laughs. Andrew is good at this, making her peers chortle in spite of themselves. He’s also good at finding her, his thirst for narrative matching her own, except he leans toward the fictional. Back when he was a human, he used to work at a small-town bookshop, fancying tales about dragons and time travel.
In contrast, Wonder frequents the factual. They harmonize with each other this way, and they’ve had plenty of invigorating discussions about it, since they both spend a lot of time here, ever since Andrew became immortal.
It happened five years ago, when he and her peer, Love, met.
Love had been an invisible goddess, and Andrew had been an unsuspecting human, and their friendship had been precarious at best. Yes, mortals don’t have the power to see or hear deities—with one exception. Only the purest soul can breach that rule. Hence, Andrew. His ability to see past the myth had rendered him universally dangerous to their kind, therefore essential to vanquish, for the sake of the Fates’ preservation.
But when Andrew and Love fell for each other—a forbidden relationship—that bond had rescued them from annihilation. It’s a long story, but ultimately, it took another series of events in order for Andrew to become immortal like Love.
Wonder accepts the meditation book. “I’ll trade you, dearest,” she says, giving him a chastising look as she extends the volume on Hades and Persephone, because again, it’s doubtful that Malice had weaseled a specific title from Andrew without an agenda.