Tear You Apart (39 page)

“Three
hours
?”

The troll shrugged. “If you don’t like my terms, I can cut off his head. It’s up to you.”

“No.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll do it.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“IS IT RUMPELSTILTSKIN?”

“That is not my name.”

The troll lounged on his throne, one leg dangling over the armrest, like a joker pretending to be king. He wore his crown—solid gold and topped with spikes—and he’d dressed up for the occasion in an ivory suit dusted with gold, and a reddish-pink shirt the color of a human tongue. At the edges of the room, lined up like parade watchers, were the troll’s guards, the queen, the executioner, and Jasper and his brothers. Ten feet away from Viv, a bound-and-gagged Henley knelt on the floor, with guards on either side of him to ensure that he stayed there.

The second hand of the clock ticked like a finger tapping her skull, reminding her that three hours was nothing.

“Is your name Balthazar? Melchior? Is it Blake? Byron?”

“No, no, no, and no, Princess.”

“Is it James? Jamal? Evan? Edwin? Darwin? Andrew?”

“Those are not my name.”

Viv tried to remind herself that, no matter what, Henley would live. She kept licking her lips, starting to speak and then feeling her tongue move in her mouth, feeling the air slip around it, aware that it would soon be gone. Every part of her trembled in fear of the moment the troll would grasp it by the tip and slice it from her mouth. There would be a hot gush of blood she wouldn’t taste. And then her mouth would be a silent place, a carved-out shell.

But he’ll live
.

Henley would live, and so would she—though what kind of life it would be was something she couldn’t bear to think about.

“Is your name lago?”

The troll’s grin stretched wider till she thought the corners of his mouth might split. “No.”

Every time she looked at Henley she tried to say
I love you
with her eyes.
I love you
and
Believe in me
, but she barely believed in herself. Henley looked as broken as she felt. He’d been the one who’d believed they could fight fate. But they couldn’t fight this.

“Is it Carl? Caleb? Ming? Mason? Alex? Lee? Dante? Dmitri?”

“No, those are not my name.”

The task before her was nearly impossible. Maybe once upon a time, when a person had one culture of names to choose from, and some gibberish like Rumpelstiltskin and Tom Tit Tot, it was easier to guess the right name. But even then, success usually came when the troll screwed up and let the secret slip.

Malcolm was ready with his ax. The queen sat by his side, curled up on a cushion like a cat, clearly thrilled to have three hours with her firstborn son. From time to time she would shout a suggestion, but it was often a name Viv had already guessed. The troll didn’t seem worried about the queen’s “help,” and Viv found his confidence as distracting as the queen’s cries.

The night the troll had caught her in his study, he’d quoted a few books; she guessed the names from those, just in case. “Is your name Ishmael? Melville? Herman? Ahab? Romeo? Shakespeare? William?”

“I love the way your mouth looks when you’re wrong. No, those are not my name.”

The minute hand on the clock slid forward as if it had been greased. One hour, and then two, and nothing she’d said had unsettled the troll. She felt her courage breaking down. She wanted to give up. She wanted to spend the last hour with Henley—holding him for the last time, kissing him for the last time, and just talking to him, just saying his name and saying
I love you
before they cut out her tongue. If this was hopeless, was it better to admit defeat and make the most of that last hour? They’d been in such a rush each time they’d met in the underworld—worried they’d be caught, needing to break a curse, to escape—that there had been no time to just be together.

What would she regret more?

She’d been quiet a few moments and now the troll shifted in his throne, leaning back, relaxed. “Are you out of names, Vivian? Shall we call it a night?”

“No. No, I—” She closed her eyes, feeling almost dizzy.
If she gave up now, she would have an hour to spend with Henley—but she would be handing victory to the troll. This final hour of guessing … it was all she could do to give them a future. And if she squandered that chance, she would never be able to forgive herself.

Her voice, when it emerged again, was weak. It no longer had the strength of hope behind it. Only fear, and desperation, and the knowledge that each word she spoke was one of her last. “Is it Midas?”

“No, it is not Midas.”

“Is your name John?”—
no
—“Juan?”—
no
—“Hans?”—
no
—“Ivan?”

No
.

Fifteen minutes slid by, then twenty, thirty. The pressure on her heart increased.

“Edgar? Edward? Edison? Edwin?”

“You guessed Edwin already—the answer is still no.” That smile—as if he couldn’t be more pleased.

She felt like she was running to a destination she would never reach. Pushing a boulder up a hill, and then, just before she reached the top, watching it roll back down.

“Sisyphus?” she guessed.

The troll laughed. “No,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “That is not my name.”

Viv followed the clock. She could see the block of time that was left to her—ten minutes that the second hand was swiftly carving down.

“
Victor
?” she snapped out. Because he always won.

The troll’s lips curled back to show his teeth. “No. But I like that one.”

Every time Henley had tried to get up, the guards beat him back down. Whenever he’d tried to break free, he ended up with more blood on his face. He made a last, desperate attempt now that her time was running out—lunging at one of the guards, throwing his full weight against him, though Henley could barely stand, bound as he was.

He was doing it so they would kill him—so the deal would be broken. So Viv could keep her voice and guess another day, and still have that chance to be free.

She went to him before he could become a sacrifice, threw her arms around his neck, and held him, as tightly as she could, because he couldn’t hold her. He was on his knees, and she was kissing his tears away faster than they could fall. Tasting salt and misery. She could feel the anger shaking through him—the helplessness.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “It doesn’t matter. We still have everything.”

By which she meant: the past. Memories. They were about to lose everything else.

Henley couldn’t speak with the gag silencing him and she knew there were things he was desperate to say—she was desperate, too.…

But when she started to untie the gag the troll ordered her to stop. Sword blades crossed at the edge of her vision—a second warning, in case she’d missed the first.

She kissed Henley’s mouth through the gag. She held his face in her hands, cheeks and chin wet with tears and blood. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I want to say a million things, but I want to say that most of all. There will never be enough time to say all the things I need to say to you.”

Viv glanced at the clock. Five minutes. She could spend that time kissing him, holding him, whispering words that would never be enough. Or—she could keep guessing while the troll laughed at her attempts.

She got up off her knees and forced herself to walk away from Henley.

“Done with your good-byes?” the troll asked.

“I’m not finished with you,” she said.

“Five more minutes if you want to speak to him. After that, you’ll have to wave.”

Viv took a deep breath—and started to cry. Her mind was blank, a minefield of possibilities, like there were a million answers and also none. How had she let this happen?

“Oh, Vivian, poor Vivian,” the troll crooned. “Will it really be so bad? Living with us? Wait. Don’t answer that. Of course it will.”

She felt like something had been jarred loose in her. Like the bite of poison apple, knocked free from her throat.

She looked at his mouth, the way his lips wormed and puckered as they shaped her name, like he wanted to make out with it. And no wonder. Of course he did. Of course.

“Vivian,” she said.

“Talking to yourself? Is that really the best use of your time?” But she saw him twitch. She saw that ugly smile creep up and down.

“Your name is Vivian,” she said—louder, sure this time.

Because he always said it. Excessively. He threw it in her face like a slap. She’d thought he was taunting her, using her full name, knowing she didn’t like it, because it was one more thing he could do to her, one more thing she couldn’t stop. But
no. He’d loved saying it because it was his dirty secret. A secret he’d revealed himself, like every other troll.

Vivian
. It had been a boy’s name before it was a girl’s. And it had been with her all this time.

He didn’t have to tell her she was right.

His body said it for him.

It started at his hairline—a dribble of blood, a crack that began at his widow’s peak, as if his frustration required a physical release. The crack ran between his eyes, continued down the length of his nose, sliced straight through his lips. His eyes bulged with rage and disbelief … and then his long fingernails scratched wildly at his scalp, as if it were infested with fleas. He grabbed two greasy handfuls of his hair—and pulled, hard.

His scalp split.

His face tore in half—

—not just his skin,
all of it
.

And he howled.

The queen howled along with him. And then she began to laugh and hop up and down. “Malcolm, look!”

There was a sound like paper tearing, like gas bubbling in a swamp, as the troll split down the middle—his body opening like a locket, revealing two gleaming slabs of meat and cracked white bone. His last scream poured into the room like blood … and echoed after he was dead.

The crown dropped from the riven corpse and cracked the marble floor.

They all watched it for a second—this last symbol of the troll’s power—and then Viv picked it up. She placed the crown on her head carefully so it wouldn’t fall.

Jasper had gone white with fear. One of the guards
shrieked with delight, then fell to the floor and began to laugh. Malcolm laid down his ax. The mad queen clapped her hands, giggling like a little girl on her birthday. And Henley … Henley’s eyes conveyed the shock his mouth couldn’t.

“Free him,” Viv told the guards, pointing at Henley. “And bring everyone here. Everyone the troll imprisoned. Tell them their new queen has something to say.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

SHE KEPT THE CROWN.

Two weeks later, it was on her desk at home, in the room that had once been Regina’s office. Viv spent her days there making phone calls, trying to track down the parents who’d traded their children for success. She didn’t want to rule the underworld—Jasper and his family could fight over that job—but she did want to make things right, so she’d taken on the responsibility of reuniting the stolen children with their families.

And since they needed a place to live in the meantime, she’d moved them into her house in Beau Rivage. The first floor went to the boatmen, the second floor to the maids. Some kindly fairies volunteered to foster the younger children. The guards were on their own. Viv would help them find their families, but after the way they’d tormented Regina and beaten Henley, they weren’t welcome in her home.

Her father protested this arrangement; apparently he
wanted to move back in. But it had been so long since he’d really lived there, Viv couldn’t muster the energy to care. She resented that he’d stayed away because he didn’t want to deal with the curse, and now that Regina was dead he expected to return and go on with his life, as if a storm had finally blown over, when Viv was forever changed.

The underworld had turned into a ghost town. The troll was dead, the nightclub deserted. The very-important-Cursed found new places to dance and be seen. Some of the underworld princes set out for the surface; some stayed in the palace, more reclusive than ever. The queen, as far as Viv knew, was hosting tea parties in Malcolm’s honor, drinking from unwashed teacups and eating stale wedding cake.