She heard him jump up from his seat, but she didn’t turn around. The sooner she did this, the better off they’d both be.
She ran to the hall.
“Wait—” Jacks grabbed her hand and spun her away from the clock. His face was pale, and his eyes were glassy with red.
She hated that she’d hurt him, but she shuttered her expression. In a minute, they’d both feel differently. Jacks wanted the stones more than anything else, and she wanted to save Apollo. She wanted a happily ever after—and she wanted it to be real and true and not because of magic.
“Whatever it is, Jacks, you won’t feel the same in a minute.”
He swallowed hard and clenched his jaw. “You have no idea what I’m feeling now.”
He looked at her lips, and the most tortured expression she’d ever seen crossed his face.
When Jacks wanted something, it was with an intensity that could break worlds and build kingdoms. That was the energy pouring off him now, as if he wanted to destroy her and make her his queen all at once.
And it was oh so tempting to let him. Magic crackled in the sliver of space between them. Golden and electric and alive. It felt like the end of a fairytale, when one kiss had more power than a thousand wars or a hundred spells.
Evangeline imagined drawing closer, pressing her lips to Jacks’s and spending eternity lost in one neverending kiss.
“This isn’t real, Jacks.” Each word hurt to say, but Evangeline knew that although the words were painful, at least they were true. “This place, it’s the enchantment of a fairytale without any of the curses or the monsters. But there are still curses and monsters out there. Apollo is still out there—”
“Apollo is fine,” Jacks cut in, angry as he said the prince’s name. “Chaos found him—and I saw him when I was away. Apollo is comfortably locked away in Chaos’s castle, where no one else can hurt him and he can’t hurt you.”
“But he also can’t live like that. And we can’t live like this.” Evangeline pulled her hand from Jacks’s, and before he could stop her, she turned toward the clock. She opened the door to the pendulums, snatched the mirth stone and shoved it into the iron jar.
PART III
A Murder of Monsters
41
As soon as the mirth stone was removed from the clock, its ticking ceased. The Hollow turned silent, and the air in the entry went cold as tombs at night.
Evangeline knew places weren’t truly alive, and yet she felt as if the Hollow were dying. Candles blew out. Cracks wounded the floors. Dust appeared on the stairs where before there had been gleam and shine.
The Hollow might have been enchanted to keep out curses, but it seemed the rest of its magic had come from the mirth stone.
Even the little dragon changed. He started pawing at the entry’s doorknob as if he couldn’t wait to leave.
Evangeline would have loved to have kept him, but she opened the door and let him fly out into the cold. On the other side of the entrance, the snow no longer sparkled. Instead, it was wet and icy, and it bit at her cheeks before she shut the door.
A pit formed in her stomach.
She didn’t even want to look at Jacks. If the Hollow was this cold, she feared what she’d see when she turned back to him. Although a tiny part of her hoped that nothing had changed, that although the Hollow had been altered, Jacks had stayed the same.
“You can turn around, Little Fox.” His tone was brisk, and at the sound of it, her spark of hope burned out. “You don’t have to worry about any more unwanted declarations from me.”
And he was right; when she turned, the red was gone from his eyes. His jaw was still tight, but it looked annoyed instead of pained.
“I told you that you’d feel differently,” she said. The words hurt, and she tried to push the ache aside. Chaos had told her that she’d feel the power of the stones stronger than anyone else. It seemed she hadn’t stopped feeling the mirth stone’s influence yet, but hopefully, the lingering feelings would be gone very soon. They’d clearly already departed from Jacks.
“You were right,” he answered. “I feel like leaving now. I’ll fetch the other two stones. You should find a cloak.”
* * *
Evangeline discovered a gold cloak lined with thick white fur in the same wardrobe where she’d come across Aurora Valor’s journal. She took the cloak and changed into a matching white dress with embroidered gold flowers and a bodice laced up in sunset-pink ribbons. She decided to pack up the diary as well. She wasn’t really sure why—after the last entry she’d read, almost all the pages were blank. And it wasn’t as if she needed the book to find any more stones. She and Jacks now had the mirth stone, the truth stone, and the youth stone, and Chaos already had the luck stone.