She shouldn’t have touched the bottles; they were clearly a gift. But one look at their brilliant colors and she couldn’t help herself from picking up a cerulean-blue bottle of curiosity.
Her throat went suddenly dry as she tried to remember the last time she’d had something to drink. She’d never tried Fortuna’s Fantastically Flavored Water, but she’d seen it on several occasions, and like the bottle’s label, she was curious.
The liquid bubbled on her tongue, and it tasted like cotton and—safety pins? It was far from a fantastic flavor, and yet she finished the entire drink.
She meant to put the bottle back and return to her task, but she was still thirsty. She grabbed a shiny bottle of luck, wondering if it might taste better. The liquid inside was a sensational shade of green, but it tasted of grass and old celery.
How were these drinks so popular?
Unless it was not the flavors that actually drew people to these waters? Evangeline studied the gleaming green bottle in her hands. Maybe the drinks inspired some sort of thirst compulsion? Despite her best efforts to put the drink down, Evangeline couldn’t help but continue to guzzle the bottle of luck.
When she finished, she was tempted to grab yet another. And she might have done it if she hadn’t noticed the pile of missives sitting next to the lovely bottles.
Evangeline didn’t make it a habit of reading other people’s correspondence. But she was giddy with physical fatigue and the strange rush provided by the drinks, and she noticed something familiar about the folded letter on the top of the pile.
The note was in her handwriting, and it was addressed to Lord Jacks. It was the letter she’d written him last week.
She picked through a few more notes. All of them were written to Jacks. No wonder the bell had been ringing so wildly—this place belonged to him.
47
Evangeline knew Jacks would be unhappy with her going through his mail, but he was asleep and she couldn’t stop. It was like drinking from the bottles of flavored water, except the only magic at play was her curiosity about Jacks.
The letters, sadly, did not give her any indication as to what Jacks wanted from the Valory Arch, but they did confirm that this was Jacks’s place of business. Most of the correspondents asked him for favors or meetings. So many people were far too eager to become indebted to him, just as she had once been.
She’d never really thought of Jacks as someone who worked, exactly. His office appeared that way as well, with its disorganized bookshelves and mismatched chairs. But after spending time with him, Evangeline knew Jacks was not as reckless or careless as he led people to believe. He was a calculated collector. She’d seen him cash in favors from two different Fates—Chaos and Poison—and the letters on this desk held promises of even more. It would have been easy to get derailed from her search for a book containing a love potion cure to see what sorts of things Jacks took from people. And she may have briefly paused to rifle through his desk a little more—he would have undoubtedly had no compunction about looking through her things. But all she found were some ugly coins, a blue silk ribbon, some recent scandal sheets about her wedding, and, of course, apples. Then she was back to the bookshelves, hunting for a tome with a love spell antidote.
Most of Jacks’s books were crookedly stacked and next to volumes without any apparent reason, except for a small collection of the last book she’d have expected to find here: The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox.
Something warmed inside of her at the sight of so many copies of her favorite storybook.
Jacks owned seven volumes, ranging from old to very old. Positioned more precisely than anything else in his den, they sat side by side, on the tip-top of the shelf, the sort of place where a person stored books they didn’t want anyone else touching.
What was all this about?
She wished Jacks were awake so that she could ask him, but he hadn’t moved from his position on the sofa, where his limbs were recklessly sprawled, making him look unmanageable even in his sleep.
Evangeline reached for the first volume—she knew she was being distracted. But all she wanted was to look at the last page and see what sort of ending the story had. She wanted to know if it had a happy ending—if the Archer kissed his Fox girl or if he killed her. And maybe seeing all these books felt like a sign. She was starting to think that sometimes she imagined things were signs when they weren’t. But that didn’t mean there were not actual signs.
She opened the first book, but the pages in the back were all ripped out. And unfortunately, she did not have better luck with any of the other volumes. Every copy fought her. One book kept falling from her hands every time she tried to open it. Another book only had blank pages at the end.