Finale (Caraval 3)

A hand clamped over her lips. Cold and sweet, like apples and Fated magic.

“Quiet, my love,” Jacks whispered. “There’s nothing you can do for her now except keep yourself alive.”

His cool fingers stayed in place until after Gavriel finally died from the wound her mother had inflicted. His massive body fell to the ground. The cavern should have filled with silence, but Tella could hear the pieces of her heart as it shattered.

12

Donatella

Tella wished that time would stop. For years she’d divided her life into two periods: When Her Mother Had Been There and After Her Mother Had Left. Now her mother was dead. But Tella didn’t want to use this moment as a measure of time. She didn’t want time to move forward at all. She wanted time to freeze, like her unmoving limbs, but even they were regaining echoes of feeling.

She couldn’t walk, but she managed to crawl across the cavern’s granite floor to her mother’s body. But that’s all it was, a body. When Paloma had been in her enchanted sleep, her face had still possessed color, her chest had moved up and down. Tella had once thought she was still as a corpse, but she wasn’t—until now.

“At least he stabbed her instead of burning her to death with his powers,” Jacks said. “Fire’s the most painful way to die.”

“That’s not helping,” Tella muttered.

“Well, I’m not really the comforting sort.” Jacks’s cool arms slipped beneath Tella’s back as he picked her up from the ground.

“Put me down,” Tella said. Jacks was a Fate, and the last thing she wanted was help from someone like him.

Jacks huffed a sigh. “If I leave you here, you’ll die like your mother when Gavriel comes back to life. Or another Fate will just find you.”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t.” Jacks flashed his dimples, narrow lips parting into a sharp smile that turned him into the beautifully cunning Prince of Hearts that she’d been fascinated with as a child. “I just prefer torturing you myself.”

“Too late,” Tella m

umbled, and she probably should have tried to fight him more.

Jacks hadn’t bothered her for the last sixty-odd days, and supposedly she was his true love—the one person immune to his fatal kiss—but he was still a Fate. A murderous one. He’d been heir to the throne before Legend, and according to rumors he’d killed seventeen people to take that place. He’d even threatened to kill Tella. He was viperous and fatal. Yet Tella couldn’t muster the appropriate fear. She couldn’t feel anything other than numb.

Her mother’s death didn’t even make sense. Gavriel hadn’t hurt her until after she’d wounded him. He might not have killed her if she hadn’t stabbed him. Why would she risk it, when he would only come back to life?

“Who is Gavriel?” Tella choked out. “Which Fate is he?”

Jacks’s cold fingers tensed against her back. “I’m only telling you this because I like him even less than I like you. Gavriel is the Fallen Star.”

The same Fate who, according to Legend’s witch, had created all the Fates. A venomous surge of rage briefly broke through Tella’s shock. If Legend really did want to kill the Fallen Star to defeat the other Fates, he’d have to get in line.

“I’ll find a way to destroy him,” Tella vowed.

“Not in this condition,” Jacks muttered as he carried her up a set of steps.

She didn’t want to see the sky as she and Jacks finally emerged outside. It should have been black. But it was still impossibly blue, rippling with threads of indigo. Tella usually loved it when the sun stayed out so late, when it was night and the world remained light, but now it just felt wrong. The day should have ended. The sun should have fled and turned the world dark the moment her mother had died.

Tella’s throat went tight. She closed her eyes, attempting to shut out the light, but that only made it worse. Every time her eyes closed, all she could see was the Fallen Star as he drove a knife into her mother.

A sob began to build inside her. She was only dimly aware of her surroundings as Jacks carried her down a brick street. She didn’t know where he lived now that he was no longer heir to the Meridian Empire and had been kicked out of Idyllwild Castle. She’d assumed he resided in the Spice Quarter, inside a crooked building with a coven of thieves, or in an underground tomb with a den of gangsters.

But it didn’t smell as if he was taking her to the Spice Quarter. There were no pungent cigars. No streams of spilled liquor or urine stained the ground. Jacks had brought her to the clean pathways of University Circle, a world of leather-bound books, pressed robes, and pristine hedges, where ambitious scholars grew like weeds.

His pace turned leisurely as he approached a four-story house made of clay-red bricks and onyx columns. Tella might have asked what they were doing here, or if this was where he lived. But all she could do was let her tears fall.

It couldn’t even be called crying. Crying gave the impression of participation, action. But Tella was done acting. She could barely keep breathing.

“I’d try to say something comforting, but last time you didn’t appreciate it,” Jacks murmured. But despite his words, he held her closer to his cool chest as he reached a pair of polished doors.