Tear You Apart (34 page)

THE TROLL WASN’T DOING A DEAL tonight. He was in his chambers somewhere, asleep or awake, dreaming of ruining lives, or counting his treasures, or planning a wedding.

Viv had never snuck into the troll’s chambers while he was there—hadn’t even set foot in the corridor—but tonight she had no other choice. If she didn’t try, Henley would be executed. If she was caught … well, she supposed she’d know exactly how far she could push the troll.

A few of the doors were open and lamplight filtered out into the corridor. The library was lit, and so was a room Viv had taken to thinking of as the troll’s treasure room. It was full of glass cabinets that held the mementos he’d taken from his victims. The nursery door was closed, but Viv could smell baby powder, could hear a baby fussing and the creak of the floor as someone paced. The bedroom door was shut. The study door was open, but the room was dark.

Viv quickly slipped inside the study, closed the door behind her, and turned on the light.

She left it on just long enough to switch on the smaller, weaker, and hopefully less noticeable desk lamp, then started her search for the diamond tree, or a tree with diamond leaves, or whatever it was.

She’d never searched the study. It contained some bookshelves, and also a desk, and cabinets—but all the drawers and cabinet doors were locked. Viv had always planned to go back once she’d gotten her hands on the keys, or stumbled across a book on lock-picking. Wherever the diamond tree was, it wasn’t out in the open. So where to break in first?

Viv went to the desk. She felt around for a key—taped underneath, maybe?—and finally ended up unfolding a paper clip and trying to pick the lock on the top drawer. She felt completely inept—she was sure Jack Tran or Luxe would be able to do this with ease. Jack had stolen from giants. Luxe mainly broke things. But still. How would they get these locks open? Would they bother with a paper clip?

While Viv was kneeling in front of the desk, a speck of sparkle caught her eye, lying on the floor below one of the cabinets. She abandoned the lock to examine it, and saw that it was a tiny diamond leaf, about the size of a fingernail clipping.

The diamond tree had to be in the cabinet. The maid must have dropped the leaf in her hurry to summon a doctor for Viv. Slowly, Viv stood up. She tried the cabinet door.

It was open.

The tree sat on a shelf inside, growing out of a small porcelain tray. It looked like a bonsai tree, but its warped trunk and branches were made of shining, angular diamond.
Diamond-sliver leaves stuck out from the branches like tiny fangs. Glittering dust sprinkled the soil where some of the leaves had been snapped off.

Viv felt around for a weak point on the longest branch. All the trees in the underworld had points where they were meant to be broken, and the diamond tree was no exception. The branch sounded like a candy cane cracking as Viv snapped it off. She closed the cabinet—then heard the click of toenails on the floor in the hall, like a large dog was moving slowly toward her.

She switched off the desk lamp and dropped to a crouch.

The door opened. Viv cringed, eyes squeezing shut in anticipation of the light, but the room stayed dark. She heard breathing and the soft scuff of large feet on the carpet.

“Vivian,” the troll said, “you make things so interesting. It’s been a long time since a young girl searched the palace for my name. You’re like a pretty little rat, sinking its teeth in everywhere. So what have you found out?”

She didn’t answer.

“Do you want to hazard a few guesses? Should I dance around a fire and sing it to you? Wouldn’t that be nice. The way it is in storybooks.” She could almost see the dry curve of his mouth.

“ ‘Call me Ishmael,’ ” he said—and her heart jumped, thinking he was revealing the answer, until he said, “ ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ ”
Moby-Dick. Romeo and Juliet
. He went on reciting name quotes, some she recognized and some she didn’t, until her hands were clenching from nerves and her heart felt like it was about to stop. The three branches were
just a hope, a long shot, but if this plan was taken from her she had nothing to replace it.

“You know, dear … if you’re going to guess my name, you might as well get something for it. We could make a wager. I give you something you desperately need and, in exchange, you give me something you can’t bear to lose. And then, if you can guess my name within three days, you get to keep everything. What do you say, Vivian?”

Quick breaths rushed in and out of her chest.
You could save Henley … you could save him and still guess the name
.

No. He wouldn’t want that for her.

“Maybe some other time,” the troll said. She heard his footsteps moving away, and she trembled with relief. “Now go get your beauty sleep. You want to be the fairest on your wedding day, don’t you?”

She heard the click of his long toenails on the wooden floor of the corridor … heard them fade as he walked away. She waited a few more minutes, her body still curled into a crouch, her fingers frozen around the diamond branch, before she unfolded her shaky limbs and ran to her room.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

VIV STOOD IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR, eyes locked with the evil queen who stared back at her. White as frost, black as kohl, red as poison.

Tonight’s theme at the nightclub was
Fairy Tale
. It came up every few months, a more loaded, self-aware costume party, where Cursed discarded their roles and dressed their fantasies to the hilt. It was fun for princesses to slum it as the Little Match Girl, for older, experienced ladies to take on the innocence of Cinderella at her first ball, for Beauties to pretend to be Beasts.

Viv wasn’t in the mood to wear glass slippers, or to tiptoe around yawning, showing off the spindle prick on her finger and giving everyone bedroom eyes. And dressing up in a donkey’s skin or a coat made from the furs of a thousand animals was just disgusting. She didn’t want to be any kind of princess or prey. When the underworld seamstress had asked her what kind of costume she wanted, she’d told her to make her an evil queen.

Her dress was long and black with a high, stiff collar, the skirt slashed at the bottom to reveal ribbons of red silk that tangled around her legs when she walked. The wide sleeves extended past her knuckles, in jagged edges that resembled the webbed feet of a frog.

Last night, on her way back from the troll’s study, she’d broken a twig off one of the gold trees in the main hall. Now, while everyone else was getting ready, she slipped the diamond branch and the gold twig into a velvet pouch and bound it to the underside of her forearm—easy to conceal beneath her long, wide sleeves, and easy to release.

Jasper escorted her to the club. He was still angry with her, but they had to appear together as a triumphant couple now that he’d saved her from a public poisoning attempt. They danced mechanically for a few songs before Viv excused herself to go to the ladies’ room—the safest rendezvous spot. Jasper wasn’t likely to follow her.

She felt sick. She was afraid for so many reasons. Henley could be dead already. If he’d been at the club last night and had seen her bite into the poison apple, and he’d tried to get to her—tried to save her—and the guards had found him …

She waded through a sea of interpretations, passing a fairy-kei Gretel with tiny plastic cupcakes glued to her fingernails; a prince dressed as a wolf, delicately waltzing with a white cat in a Red Riding Hood costume; and an old man holding a blue satin pillow with a glass slipper on top of it, who kept exclaiming, “Still haven’t found her!” as if he’d planned it to be his catchphrase for the night.

Viv lingered near the Twelve Dancing Princesses to give
Henley a chance to notice her. Already she was sweating through her dress, but she was cold, too. She hugged her arms to her chest, feeling the crush of the velvet pouch and the sharp edges of the branches. Either way, this was the end. The end of Henley would be the end of her. And if he lived, and broke the curse, their relationship would be over. Henley claimed he couldn’t be happy without her, and once she would have hated the idea of him being with someone else. But standing there, feeling the cold sweat of fear roll down her sides, all she wanted was for him to live, and be happy like he deserved.

She went into the empty bathroom, witch heels loud on the tile floor, wondering if the door had stayed open a few extra seconds before it swung shut—and got her answer when Henley shed the invisibility cloak. He appeared all at once, one eye-blink
not there
and then suddenly towering over her in the same tux he’d worn the first night. She barely had time to look before he was pulling her to him, and she felt his hands in her hair, tilting her head back, and then his mouth was on hers, like it all needed to happen now, because they wouldn’t be together very long.

He didn’t have a solution. He didn’t know how to break the curse, and he thought—

Viv wanted to tell him, but she was too busy kissing him. She threw her arms around his neck, and when she did he lifted her up; he grabbed her hips and pressed her back against the wall and one of her legs scissored up out of the slit in her dress. They went on kissing, his body pressing against hers. It would be so easy to lose herself, to forget everything else … but her kiss wouldn’t keep him safe.

Viv turned her head, the only way she knew to stop
herself. His breath was heavy in her ear. “I thought you might be dead,” Henley said.

“I thought the same thing about you.”

“Jesus, Viv. Stay the hell away from poison apples.”

“I didn’t think Regina could get to me down here.”

“Your future in-laws don’t think I can get to you down here. But there are work-arounds.”

“Speaking of that …”

“This is our last night together.”

“I know,” she said. “But I think—I have an idea. Get invisible, and come with me.”

He looked unsure, but set her down and pulled the cloak across his shoulders. “Lead the way,” he said as he vanished.

She heard him laugh as she fixed her dress—straightened the skirt where it had twisted around her hips. “Some of us aren’t invisible,” she said.

She held the door open so Henley had a chance to slip through, then picked a path across the crowded dance floor, trusting him to follow. Tonight, more than ever, walking through the club was like passing through a dreamscape: pastel princesses, James Bond–style princes, a girl covered in honey and feathers, a gothic Sleeping Beauty holding a baby doll in each arm, a man whose upper body bristled with bloody hedgehog spines, and more than one Snow White blithely admiring an apple, her red lipstick gleaming under the lights, her face powdered as white as a slice of Wonder Bread.

By the time Viv got out of the club she felt like she’d run a fairy-tale gauntlet. The train of her evil queen dress swept over dark stone now, instead of a floor sprinkled with gold glitter and rose petals. She reached behind her and felt Henley’s
fingers close around hers. Secure that he was with her, she started down the path that cleaved the rocky hillside.

A few latecomers straggled by, passing on Viv’s left while Henley kept to her right; she saw a couple small stones get dislodged by his footsteps and go skittering down the hill. The latecomers didn’t notice. They were busy talking, praising one another’s costumes and fishing for compliments about their own.

At the lakeshore, Viv turned and headed into the silver forest, walking until the shadows and bladelike trunks were thick enough to shield them from view. She reached up and snapped a silver twig from one of the trees.

“Hold this,” she said.

Henley took the twig, and the silver was swallowed up by the magic of the cloak.

“I wish I could see you,” she said. “But don’t!—don’t take that off.”

Viv freed the velvet pouch from her forearm. “I was thinking about how you could break the curse,” she said, opening the pouch and taking out the twigs, “and I was thinking about the fairy tale, the three twigs the soldier brings back to the princesses’ father. You have a silver one. There’s a diamond and gold one here. I don’t know what we can do with them, but I thought … maybe they’re involved in breaking the curse somehow.”

“I can’t see anything I’m holding with this on,” Henley muttered. He reappeared as he pulled the cloak from his shoulders and draped it over the crook of his arm. “Can I see those?”

“Here, take them.”

He held all three in his hand, spread out on his palm like they might reveal their secrets to him. “I’d like to think there’s something to this. I don’t have any other leads. The princesses seem like they want the curse to be over, but they don’t know anything about breaking it. And the princes, they don’t know anything, either?”

“They’ve never said. Once you were here, I was afraid to ask. I didn’t want them to start looking for someone. I know what they’d do if they found you. Put your cloak back on.”

“Wait a minute. No one can see us back here.”

She glanced in the direction of the club. “You’d better hope not.”

Henley closed his hand around the branches and sighed. “I don’t know, Viv. I don’t know what to do with these. I think I might just—”