“You think that will hold it?” I ask, huffing a laugh. A real laugh, and he shrugs.

“If this doesn’t, I don’t know what will.”

Silence falls between us, and perhaps it’s because I’ve never been good with silence, never at peace with it, that I ask for something terribly cruel.

“Tell me about tomorrow,” I say.

Nox looks at me then, and when he does, the weight that lifts from his brow threatens to crush me. “Tomorrow,” he says, then lets out a startled huff. “Tomorrow I take home the most breathtaking girl in the world, and I introduce her to my mother. Tomorrow I live again, Blaise. We live again.”

His eyes shutter again, and I know what he’s thinking. Still in the dark. Still a creature of the night. And I wish I could take his hand, but the symbols stand between us now, guarding the path like dutiful soldiers.

I realize then that I have to tell him. Not about my death, but about how I feel about the tomorrow he imagines. “Tomorrow sounds great,” I say, “but even if it never came, I’d be pretty content with today.”

Nox smiles, but as he turns the words over in his head, a shadow slinks on the corners of his lips.

He opens his mouth, but I don’t get to hear what he says.

A cool shiver runs down my spine, and I am no more.

CHAPTER 39

NOX

Blaise is still smiling when she changes.

When the innocent, sun-soaked grin fades from her face and bleeds into an inky smirk.

There’s a cracking sound, and for a single horrifying moment, I think it’s her neck as she snaps her head back, lifts her chin to the sky and the stone ceiling that obscures it.

But it’s not Blaise’s neck that cracks.

It’s her hip.

She lets out a single garbled moan, the pulse in her neck exposed with her posture.

Blaise changes.

Her thin legs, which she’s only recently managed to put a few pounds on with all the rolls I’ve been sneaking her from the kitchen, bulge in the previously loose-fitting pants I scrounged for her from the servants’ laundry room.

I trace that wretched cracking sound to its origins, and I watch as her hips expand, as her bones rip apart and sew themselves back together.

Her breasts swell next, and her sunken cheeks, deprived of sunlight, fill out.

Blaise’s raven hair is bleached before my very eyes—the bridge of her nose compressed, her wild brows tamed, her lips plumped.

“NO.” The word escapes my mouth too late, because the woman who is not Blaise shoots a seductive grin in my direction and stands, tugging at her skin-tight pants to readjust them to fit her form better.

She takes a moment and traces the shape of Blaise’s body—no, not Blaise’s body—with her hungry gaze. And then she turns her attention to me.

“Well, hello there, Nox. Have you missed me?”

My muscles twitch in my calves, ready to pounce, aching to rip to shreds this woman—this being—who ruined Blaise’s life, but I can’t. Not when this is Blaise’s body—changed, warped, defiled, sure—but still Blaise’s.

Her voice is sultry, her smile feline as she glances me over, her gaze lingering in places that have me wishing I hadn’t shed my robes earlier, leaving me in just my thin shirt and pants.

“Who are you?” I find myself asking. Not because I don’t already know, but because I have no idea what went wrong with the extraction, and I need time to think, time to figure out how to reverse what has happened.

The spell should have extracted the parasite.

This shouldn’t be happening.

Cinderella traces a long, slender finger up the side of her body, caressing its shape. “You don’t remember me then?” She pouts, but I can tell it’s feigned, meant to send my mind whirring in all sorts of lewd places it is certainly not at the moment. “But we had such fun together.” She traces her full lips with her fingers, as if remembering a specific taste, and I shudder.

“What are you talking about?” I’m sure it’s nonsense, but my mind is busy elsewhere, calculating and recalculating the concentration of Blaise’s blood in the potion, the ratio of Rivrean flax to foxglove…

Cinderella flits her hand, like she’s imitating a female courtier’s offense, but it comes across more like she’s tossing the line of a lure, dangling an apple in front of my face. “I’m speaking of the time you kissed me, Nox, upon this very dais,” she says, stepping casually over the runes as she traces the dais’s surface with her fingers.

I stiffen, and my immediate reaction is to deny it, to remind this parasite that she’s delusional, but there’s something about the lilt of her tone that tugs at a memory. Not even a memory so much as a dream. A dream—one of many—that I’d been kissing Blaise. A dream in which she’d asked me to partake of her blood and…

My throat tightens; my stomach clenches; and I feel the blood drain from my pallor.

“It was you.” The words are empty, carved hollow by the dread that infects my gut, rotting my insides.

“You knew that at the time, yet you still kissed me,” Cinderella says absentmindedly. “Tell me, was it because you wanted me or because you wanted her, and feared you’d never have her if the decision was left in her hands?”

The moment doesn’t get the chance to pass before I’m upon her, before I’ve wrapped my fingers—knuckles bulging—around the neck of this wretched creature. The thought of someone else using Blaise’s body like that, of using me when I believed myself asleep, fans a slumbering rage within me.

Cinderella only tsks and presses herself up to me, and I back away.

“You can’t hurt me, you know. Not without hurting her,” she says, and I can tell by the triumph on her haughty expression that she feels she’s won.

Something went wrong: a measurement, a calculation, a—

“You’ve been a naughty male, Nox,” Cinderella drawls—and Fates—even her voice has me fantasizing about ripping her larynx from her neck with my teeth. “Though I suppose it’s my own fault. I suppose I should have told you not to feel for the girl, not to fall captive to her allurements.” She says the word like she’s trying to banish a bitter aftertaste. “Though I never suspected a girl as plain as that one would have such an influence over you. The queen really has kept you locked up too long if you think Blaise is the sort a male like you ought to be bedding.”

Cinderella reaches out to me, and before I can flinch away from her touch, she whispers, “Don’t move.”

So I don’t.

Not an inch, not a quaver, as she runs her long fingers through my hair, tangling her grip at the nape of my neck. The touch has me wanting to gag, to grab her by the hair and crack her head against the corner of the dais.

It has every muscle in my body demanding I put as much distance as possible between myself and this monster, but I don’t.

I can’t.

My feet are stuck in place, my hands by my side.

“It was a mistake to tell you to forget,” she says, her voice a bedtime whisper, “to make you believe it was simply a dream. What I should have done was tell you to love me, to be so devoted to me you’d be happy to do all I asked. You’d have been counting down the days until I returned to you. How does that sound, Nox? Would you like me to free you of your feelings toward the girl? Make you love someone who could please you infinitely more?”