by Shelby Bach
Chase still didn’t like the idea, but he was considering it now. “Can you break the enchantment, Lena?”
She examined the door. You could practically see the wheels turning in her head. “Rory, did you swipe EAS’s extra supply of dragon scales before you left?” I nodded, shrugging off my carryall and passing over the two sacks. “Then I can. It would take some time though.”
“We don’t have time,” Daisy said. “The invasion could begin like, any minute.”
Chase cursed in Fey, and I knew he’d given in.
“Come on, Chase. Even Maerwynne, Rikard, and Madame Benne weren’t together all the time.” I unsheathed my sword and crossed the room, trying to hide my limp as much as possible. “They were united in purpose even when their paths diverged.”
“Rory, I can tell when you’re just repeating something Rapunzel said,” Chase told me.
“Well, it makes me feel better.” I stopped in front of the door. It seemed smaller in person. Under Rapunzel’s light, the tiny frost crystals on the dark wood sparkled just as brightly as the enchantment around the door frame.
“Wait.” Chase came over. His fingertips traced my jaw, tilting my face up again and checking my concussion. Ugh, not again. “All the rest of you, turn around. Lena, you too.”
Well, that was a ridiculous order. I thought some of them would protest, but they did it, smirking.
I didn’t blame him for being worried, but he couldn’t convince me to take the rest of the Water. “I’ll be fine. Just let me do this. We are on a time crunch.”
“Rory,” Chase whispered. “Please stop talking. I’m trying to do this right.”
Then he lowered his head and pressed his lips against mine.
They were a little cold, like they’d been in the tower, and suddenly, they weren’t. All the places where he touched me thawed, and the warmth spread, chasing away the chill. The whole room soared, like we were weightless, on top of the world. It was like flying without being afraid I would fall.
He drew back, so careful not to brush any of my bruises. “That was our first one. The thing in the tower didn’t count.”
I laughed a little. I didn’t realize how close I was to crying until I heard how shaky I sounded. “Of course it counted. It woke you up.”
“We clearly have a different definition of ‘counting.’ ” He had that smile on—the one that I rarely saw, the one that was almost shy. “For me, it can’t count unless both people are conscious.”
I wanted to stand here and tease him until we both laughed. I wanted to savor this. I didn’t want to feel like time was running out. I didn’t want to feel like this might be our last kiss.
“I told you,” Vicky muttered to Tina. I jumped. I’d totally forgotten other people were in the room. “I knew it would happen before the end of her Tale. You pay up.”
“Shhh,” Lena hissed.
So the kids in our grade took bets about me and Chase fighting and kissing. Great. I wondered if they had bets on whether or not we would die, too.
“You’re not going to die, Rory.” And Chase thought I read minds sometimes.
“You don’t know that.” He was afraid too. You don’t make a point of kissing someone who’s about to walk into a trap, unless you think they might not come back. “I have to go.”
He nodded. He stepped away, but he didn’t drop my hand. I reached for the knob with my sword arm. It turned easily. The door creaked open. Cold air spilled out.
“See you in a bit,” I told Chase, and before I could lose my nerve, I pulled my hand out of his and slipped through the doorway.
o giant ice statues. No crushing walls. Not even an enchantment to freeze me where I stood.
It was a plain white chamber, identical to the one I’d just left, except that this room only had one person in it.
She wasn’t the Snow Queen. She was taller and not as slender. Her hair hung in perfect brown waves all the way down her back, streaked with lighter honey strands. Her hazel eyes had a piercing gaze under arched eyebrows. Her dress flowed to the floor in a cascade of dark gray silk. She was beautiful in that chilly, distant way that the Snow Queen was—like her beauty was a prelude to some sort of catastrophe.
She also didn’t look armed. That was the part that really mattered. “So . . . who are you?”
The girl laughed. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said, with my voice.
No. Walking into a one-key safe couldn’t split one person into two. Even the Snow Queen couldn’t manage that, right?
“I got all your best traits,” said the other Rory. “None of the indecision that holds you back, none of your fears, none of your failings.”
Well, if she had all my best traits, she was missing my stubbornness. I had a job to do, and I was going to do it—weird other Rory or no. I circled her once to make sure she hadn’t tucked any weapons under her skirt. Then I turned away. I inspected the walls, looking for some hidden compartment where the Snow Queen might have stored her heart. I even risked sheathing my sword so that I could run both hands over the ice, feeling for cracks too small to see.
Nothing. I should have at least felt the doorway, but that blended in too. No handles or keyholes either. I probably should have left it ajar when I walked in.
Oh well. I would deal with that problem after I got the heart.
The other Rory didn’t try to stop me. She didn’t even move closer. “If I was the one out there, your father wouldn’t need another family. Your mother wouldn’t be in danger.”
I squatted down to inspect the floor, barely listening. I didn’t see anything there either. My head throbbed.
“If I was the one out there, the Snow Queen would have been dead ages ago. Lena would not need Melodie. Chase would never have been ensnared by someone else.” Geez, for someone who was supposed to be me, she sure talked a lot like Mia. Like the Snow Queen, when she was trying to stop me.
I turned back to the other Rory, suddenly interested. “You’re a doll, aren’t you? Solange, are you in there?”
The girl didn’t speak. Maybe the Snow Queen didn’t trust herself to answer. Maybe she regretted trying to use the same trick twice. Maybe she was starting to feel fear.
I drew my sword slowly.
If I had figured out her identity, she should have attacked. Even Mia had poisoned knives for fingers. Solange wouldn’t leave the last guardian of her heart completely defenseless.
Well, unless attacking me would risk the heart she was protecting.
It was stupid of the Snow Queen to make the doll look like me. If it had resembled Chase or Lena, I would have hesitated longer.
I leapt and stabbed. My sword slid into the other Rory’s torso easily, like her skin was made of papier-mâché. No bones got in my blade’s way. No wood like the Mia puppet, no metal screws to hold it together.
The doll’s illusion didn’t even flicker. Something wet—a red so dark it was only a shade away from black—oozed down my sword.
Eww. I might have rethought my strategy if I’d known that was going to happen. I twisted the blade, and its edge scraped something solid and hollow—something big enough to hold a heart. Well, if I had to cut it out of her, I would.
The other Rory glanced down at my weapon. The fake blood had trickled across the metal and covered up all the ancient Fey symbols on the blade.
Her chin tilted up. Her lips curled slowly. Solange’s smile was on my face.
“Very clever, Rory. You’ve figured out how to kill me.” Her voice was her own again. A small relief. “Pity you’ll die here.”
Traps within traps, Rapunzel had said. It had been too easy. The Snow Queen was planning something else.
An explosion blasted me off my feet. Shrapnel—as long as my hand, as sharp as scalpels—thudded into my chest, into my stomach, into my hips and shoulders. I crashed into the wall. My head cracked against the ice.
At least I passed out before I could feel the pain.
“Rory?” Lena’s voice was trembling. A war
m metal fingertip brushed hair away from my forehead. “Rory, please wake up.”
“ ’M okay,” I mumbled. Then I managed to open my eyes. Lena let out an I’m happy but too scared to believe it gasp.
The room was splattered with that awful dark-red ooze. Splashed up against the white walls like that, it made the room look way too similar to the crime scenes in Mom and Dad’s movies, the ones they still said I was too young to watch. The red had left craters wherever it landed.
“Concentrated dragon blood.” Lena’s voice got stronger when it took on that familiar tinny reciting tone. “In this form, it acts like—”
“—an acid. I remember.” I sat up. Beside us, a bean-shaped pool of scarlet had eaten through at least three inches of ice. “It burned me, didn’t it?”
Lena nodded. “And your sword.” She pointed to my other side, at a pile of sharp metal slivers. That couldn’t be my weapon. They looked like misshapen silver spikes, tipped with a much brighter red than what was on the walls. “That was what caused the explosion. The spell was forged into the actual blade, and the acid ate away at the metal. The enchantment unraveled. All the magic spilled out at once, and then—”
“Boom,” I finished. The Snow Queen had expected me to cut into the doll. Maybe she knew about the Itari curse Lady Aspenwind had warned me about. I looked from the shrapnel to Lena. “You pulled those out of me, didn’t you?”
She nodded again. “I was on the other side, and you screamed,” Lena said. I didn’t remember doing that. “I tricked the one-key safe. I used my sorcery to rip all the magic out of the dragon scales and kind of hold it around me, and the door wouldn’t budge, but then it did. I heard the others try to follow me, but they couldn’t, and there you were, lying on the floor . . .” She swallowed hard. “It took the rest of the Water to bring you back.”
All of it? We’d had enough to last us through a few more wounds and enchantments, so I must have been really bad off. Maybe near death.
Well, at least all my banged-up places had stopped aching. “Lena, I’m so sorry.”
She shot me an exasperated look. “It’s not your fault the Snow Queen tried to kill you.”
But it was me who had brought her here, where she had to fish sword shards out of her best friend.
I stood. Doll pieces were strewn around the room, which kind of added to the crime-scene vibe, but since most of the dragon blood acid had leaked out, it was slightly less horrifying than it could have been. I searched for a container big enough to put a heart in.
A small chest had fallen against the wall. It was covered in symbols just like the ones on the bottles we used to hold the Water. With those symbols, the chest could contain magic, or maybe stop a magical acid from eating away at the heart it protected.
I knelt beside it. The dragon blood had gotten into the cracks, tracing all the symbols. It wasn’t safe to touch. My T-shirt was full of holes. It was easy to rip off a section from the hem.
“Be careful!” Lena said, way more worried now that we didn’t have any Water to heal us. “Are you sure that this isn’t just another trap?”
I wasn’t, but we had to risk it. “Lena, she thinks I’m dead. Besides, she would want to have a way inside the chest too.”
“It’s bound to be locked . . . ,” Lena said.
“It is.” I pointed to the faint gleam all around the rim of the lid. “It’s another one-key safe.”
Lena squinted at it. “I didn’t know you could make one so small.” Her expression shifted from concern to interest. I flipped the lid open.
Light spilled out, so bright that I was sure for one terrible second that I’d been wrong, that a second blast was waiting for us. Then my eyes adjusted.
“It’s definitely still connected to her,” Lena said. “Look. It’s still beating.”
A heart. Larger than I expected. It was mostly red, but cobalt streaks curled all around its lumps and chambers. Silver light leaked from its center, shifting as the heart moved—swelling and squeezing, then swelling and squeezing again.
Gross. I hadn’t expected it to look so . . . anatomically correct. “Do you think she’ll feel it if I pick it up?”
I’d asked the Pounce Pot to keep the Snow Queen from finding out about my quest for the heart. The enchantment was probably broken, considering the Snow Queen and I had talked through the doll. The Pounce Pot wouldn’t stop her from discovering that I was alive and that I was bringing the heart to her.
“I don’t know!” Lena said, clearly freaked. “The Snow Queen is the only Character who has ever tried this!”
“Yeah, but you’re probably the only Character alive who could figure out exactly how she did it.” I dropped the rag I’d used to open the chest. It had a few dragon blood spots, and I didn’t want it near whatever enchantments Solange had cast around the heart. The last thing we needed was another explosion. “What’s your opinion?”
Lena thought about it. “Fifty-fifty chance. I mean, she and the heart share some sort of psychic link that transcends temporal space, so she might know. But the nerve endings aren’t attached.”
Much better odds than I was expecting. “Lena, I think everything’s going to be okay. I have this feeling.”
“That doesn’t mean much, considering I just had to dig pieces of your sword out of you, Rory,” Lena said. “I’m not worried about defeating the Snow Queen. You’ll handle it like you always do. I’m worried about you.”
I didn’t tell her not to worry. I knew better. “I’m glad you’re my best friend,” I said, just in case I never got a chance to say it afterward.
Then I reached both hands into the box.
My fingertips tingled as I slid my palms underneath the heart and lifted it out. Vibrations buzzed all the way up my arm, but the only other change in the heart was the light. His color grew warmer, more amber than silver, so bright you could barely make out the heart’s outline. It was like touching pure magic.
“Wow,” Lena whispered. “Do you feel that?”
“Um. I’m holding it.” Of course I felt it.
My pulse thudded in perfect time with the thumping heart in my hands. I wondered whose heartbeat was setting the pace.
“No, I mean the heat.” She pointed down at the floor. A new puddle had formed under my knees. The water reflected my face. My temple was covered with dried blood, but the wound underneath it had healed.
“That puddle has gotten bigger since I’ve been staring at it.” Lena glanced up. The ceiling glistened with a wet sheen, and a few drops plunked into the water below. “Okay, if it’s hot enough to melt the ceiling, then we really need to get out of here.”
“Okay.” It was awkward to get up when I was holding something in both hands. I glanced at what was left of my sword. It felt weird to go into a fight without it, but I forced myself to look away. “Do you remember which way you came in?”
Lena pointed at the wall behind me. “The door vanished when it shut. I’m sorry. I didn’t even think about keeping it open.”
“I did the same thing. Besides, you were distracted by the horror-movie scene.” I stepped close to the door and held the blazing heart up, hoping that the extra bright light would bring out the cracks.
Lena tied a chain to my wrist. Rapunzel’s glass vial dangled from it, no longer glowing now that something else was giving us light. “For luck,” she said. “Look! Well, that solves one problem!”
The heat was melting the wall. Water cascaded down it, and in the place where the ice was thinnest, we could see the outline of a figure. Chase.
He elbowed through the wall’s weak spot, and then he stuck his face through the opening. He spotted the scarlet craters everywhere, the other Rory in pieces. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Oh no. He thought she was me.
“It’s just a doll, Chase,” I said, quickly stepping into his line of sight. “We got the heart.”
Chase’s mouth closed, but he took in the bloodstains on my shirt and Lena’s pinched face. “Good call o
n saving the Water.” He made it sound like a joke, but his face was still too pale. “Hold on. Let me make a bigger hole.”
He hammered at the ice with his sword hilt. Big chunks fell at his feet. Lena squeezed through easily, and then I splashed after her. The heart had already created a puddle of melted ice water around the door.
Chase squinted at what was in my hands. “The battle started fifteen minutes ago. Just so you know. Ben said he’ll call me if any of the Snow Queen’s forces actually reach the human world.”
I wondered how long I’d been unconscious. It had to be a while if the invasion had already started, if people were already dying. It was time to end this.
Something cracked above us. Chase was ready for it. He yanked me and Lena forward a few feet, a second before a huge slab of glistening ice crashed down onto the spot where we’d been standing.
“I was afraid of that,” Lena said.
“The heart’s a portable furnace.” Chase led us to the exit. “Maybe you shouldn’t stand too long in one place while we’re in a building made of ice.” He opened the brown wooden door for me.
The other kids in our grade hung back. Lena’s golden skin flashed as she waved them forward. “Go on. The Snow Queen’s heart doesn’t bite. Just melts.”
I glanced back, wondering if we should wait. Chase took my elbow and hurried me on ahead. “Rory, it’s your Tale. Your Companions are supposed to keep up with you, not the other way around.” We reached the next door. He opened it too. I should keep my hands full more often. It made him as gentlemanly as Ben.
The heat was taking the place out fast. Something crashed behind us. I almost turned back.
“We’re okay!” Lena called. “Keep going!”
“Come on. The heart’s making it worse.”
Chase dragged me through the busted doors. The prisons looked like I remembered them, empty and huge, too pale except for the horrible stains frozen to the floor.
Those stains were starting to look kind of wet now. The melting floor was very slippery.
Chase grabbed my arm just before I face-planted. “Lena, we could use that shoe spike spell.”