The wound stung, then throbbed, as if Jacks had sunk his teeth into it again.Įvangeline clutched her lantern like a sword. The tingling of her shoulder blades slid over her arms, an unsettling caress that went down to her one remaining broken heart scar. He moved as if the night should have been afraid of him. She tried not to think his name, but it was impossible not to as she watched him saunter out of the dim, indolent yet confident and handsome as ever. But Evangeline knew that even if they sparkled now, even if these eyes lit up the dark and tempted her to lower her light, she couldn’t trust them. She imagined they shone just to taunt her. Silver blue and brilliant and broken-star bright. The uncanny sensation was so subtle, at first she let herself think it was merely paranoia.Įvangeline peered into the library’s dark, and a pair of inhuman eyes stared back. It had been with her since the moment she’d stepped out of her royal suite on a mission to unlock this door, in the hopes it would lead her to a cure that would save her husband, Apollo. It was the spider-thin prickle crawling across her shoulder blades.
And Evangeline had never been frightened.īut it wasn’t actually the dark or the night that she feared. Before losing her parents, she had constellation-watched with her father and listened to her mother tell stories by candlelight. Dark was for stars and dreams and the magic that took place in between days. Evangeline had never been afraid of the dark before.
She fidgeted nervously, and the lantern flickered.
Her lantern’s ocher glow chased the nearby shadows away, but the bulk of Wolf Hall’s royal library stacks were nebulous with night. With one drop of her willing blood, she could undo any lock.įirst, she needed to be sure she wasn’t being watched or followed or stalked by that deceitful, apple-eating scoundrel whose name she wouldn’t even think.Įvangeline checked behind her shoulder. She was also rather good at opening doors. She had pulled and tugged and twisted the iron knob, but the door would not budge. There is a wolf’s head wearing a crown emblazoned on the door’s wooden center, and people have sworn the wolf smirks at their failed attempts, or bares its sharp teeth if a person even comes close to opening this unopenable door.Įvangeline Fox had once tried. But no one has so much as left a scratch on this stubborn door. People have tried to set it on fire, break it with axes, and pick its lock with magic keys.
There is a door deep inside the royal library of Wolf Hall that no one has opened for centuries.
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