Wearing a dreamy smile, I nodded and plopped onto the edge of the bed. “Mmm, yes. Gods, he was handsome. And stubborn. And arrogant. And I wanted to smack him and kiss him all at the same time.”
She laughed harder. “Aye, well, that do sssound like him, don’t it.”
“Arrogant. And stubborn. And all the rest of it too.” I shook my head and sighed, gripping the bedframe and staring at the wall where I’d cornered him. My heart began to race as I remembered just how close I’d come to finally being able to kiss him again.
The kiss on the night of the ball had haunted me for years. And I rather thought I’d made far more of it than what it actually was. I just knew I would be let down, and yet, when he’d tipped my chin up and caressed the length of my neck last night, he’d stirred a fire in my soul and awakened a beast inside of me I’d never even known I’d possessed. “I have to see him again.”
Dalia’s lips twitched. “Then perhaps we should go with the bronze gown today, eh?”
I nodded back enthusiastically. “Yes. And flowers in my hair.”
“Roses?” she asked.
“Yes.” I nodded. “Lots of roses.”
I WASN’T ACCUSTOMED to libraries. They’d always smelled musty and dank to me, even slightly rotten. I wasn’t a reader and didn’t particularly enjoy spending an afternoon strolling through rows of books.
But I had to admit that Rumpel’s library was impressive, indeed. It was multi-level, with spiraling staircases of thick, hammered gold and iron vines. The carpets beneath my feet were so plush it almost felt like walking on fluffy clouds. The bookshelves themselves, a deep shade of rich, polished cherrywood, were stacked one against the other. Thick tomes with leather bindings faced spine out and overflowed from the shelves. I looked at a couple of the titles. Some were on history. Others were cookbooks. Some appeared to be novels. And there were even a few spellbooks in the mix.
None of the books called to me, though the paintings and frescoes certainly did. I admired the works of art, which had been painted by the hands of a master, no doubt.
The scenes were all different but themed. Each of them depicted different parts of Kingdom. I stared in a daze at one in particular, of a gorgeous woman with hair of green that almost seemed to sway behind her like banners blowing in the breeze. She walked upon water. Her eyes were clear as glass. Fangs poked out from beneath her full blood-red lips, and she was unashamedly nude. Her body was a thing of perfection, broad of hips, but long of legs, with an impossibly tiny waist and large, perfectly formed breasts.
Whoever had painted her had done so with obvious love in every swish and curl of his or her wrist. I wondered who she was, but more than that, I couldn’t help but wonder who the artist had been.
Was it Rumpel himself? My heart fluttered at the thought that he and I quite possibly shared similar passions. Hers wasn’t the only painting. There were more. All the canvases easily weighed hundreds of pounds in their thick, sturdy frames and stretched as high as the twenty-foot vaulted ceilings.
There was one of a man, a dark, lordly type of character who wore black armor and sat upon a throne built of human bones. He had blazing blue eyes that looked as though he were real and studying me, rather than the other way around. I shivered at that thought and didn’t linger before his painting long.
I particularly enjoyed the painting of the fairy gardens, with all the dragonfly lights zipping here and there. There was breath and life in that painting. The sugar fire trees, with their cotton-candy-colored leaves, swayed in a gentle breeze, and the moonflower gardens—translucent, ball-shaped flowers that only bloomed under the light of a full moon—created a harmonious song in the backdrop. Frogs croaked, and crickets chirped, and I had to quickly walk away from that painting the moment I realized I’d begun to sway. I’d been so lulled by the tranquility of the watercolor scene that I was halfway back to being asleep.
Yawning and stretching my arms high above my head, I looked around. There were still hundreds of more paintings to inspect, and I doubted I could even see them all in the week’s time I had remaining. The dimensions of the library were vast and dizzying. It almost felt as though it stretched on into infinity, which was very likely possible, considering the master sorcerer that called the castle home.
I was growing slightly impatient and unable to focus on the paintings any longer.
I wondered who planned to meet me there. Already I’d been walking aimlessly through this stunning room for what surely must have been an hour at least, probably more.
Maybe Rumpel had lied to me. I frowned. Maybe there wasn’t anyone planning to meet me here. Honestly, who would I even know in this place? I’d only just arrived, and my interaction with the outside world had been limited to begin with. I thought back through the whole of my history and couldn’t think of a single person I could possibly know from here.
No sooner had I thought it then I heard faint scratching, like the sound of claws scraping upon tiled floors. Twirling on my heel, I turned toward the sound and squinted.
Gas lamps lit up the entire place, but the light wasn’t strong and there were long shadows between the bookshelves, making it difficult for me to tell whether there was anyone there at all.
“Hello?” I called out. “Is someone there?”
Just as I was about to call myself a scatterbrained, silly goose, that same scratching sound caught my ear.
“Who’s there?” I asked. “Show yourself.”
That time, the shadow moved, and that’s when I finally noticed the burning red eyes and the massive, shaggy head of a beast staring unflinchingly at me.
For a second, a punch of fear hit me like a sledgehammer between my breasts, but instantly my brain noted there was something different about the heavy-breathing dog.
An image wormed through my brain, a memory, one very nearly forgotten until just then. Me as a child, and a black dog I’d once called my very best friend. I squinted. It can’t be. Is it Prince? “Prince,” I whispered. He whined and tipped his large head just slightly.
I gasped, covering my mouth with my trembling and cold fingertips. “P-P-Prince?” I breathed his name again like a benediction and reached out for him. How is he here? How is this happening? He’d left me years ago. I thought he’d died. Or simply stopped loving me back and abandoned me for good.
I’d last seen Prince the day I’d turned into a siren. He’d never returned, and though the little girl had felt discarded and betrayed, the woman only wanted a hug from her once-dearest friend.
The large dog whimpered and took several steps toward me.
My heart trembled and my eyes filled with heat because I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I shook my head. “Is this true? Is it really you? Are you really here?” I studied my childhood friend through the lens of a mature woman and noted the similarities, the shaggy pelt, the one floppy ear, and large, furry tail. But I saw what I’d not seen before.
He wore a collar, I’d always noticed the collar, but I’d never noticed the pendant attached to it. Much like my stone of Veritas, it too was a stone, but in the shape of a diamond. It gleamed like polished ebony and I cocked my head.
Prince whimpered, his long tail slapping at the floor over and over.
I smiled softly and held my fingers to him. “It’s okay, Prince. I’m here. You can come to me. You can—” The words died on my tongue when a mirage of heat wavered over his large form, and where once there’d been a beast there appeared a child, but one on the verge of manhood.
I snatched my hand back, hugging it tightly to my chest, and shook. Prince was a... boy? My mind could not make sense of what I saw standing before me.
He was young. Possibly a little younger than me, though not by much—five or six years, maybe. He was kneeling, hands and feet on the ground, and staring at me with eyes that glowed the darkest-red of flame. His hair was shaggy, falling around his shoulders much like it would as a dog. His features were exotic and different. His skin was the color of Demone flesh, all shad
ow and darkness and purest ebony. There was a touch of adolescent plumpness left in his cheeks, but I could see the man just beneath the surface.
How is it possible that he should look younger than I, when he’d been the older of us before? I sucked in a sharp breath, trembling from head to toe. “Who are... Who are you?”
The boy cocked his head. His mannerisms were wolfish, and my heart rattled in my chest. This wasn’t my friend. This was magic. Dark magic. Something wicked. Something cruel. And yet when he blinked, I could almost swear I saw the ghost of the dog staring at me.
“They call me Euralis,” he said in a soft, yet regal and refined voice that had my stomach flopping down around the vicinity of my knees.
I’d heard that voice and that soft, lilting accent before, but only in dreams. Always in dreams, laughing and teasing me. He was forever out of reach and begged, “Come find me, mama.”
I gasped and began panting as I violently shoved that memory, delusion, or whatever it’d been away from my consciousness.
“You called me your Prince once,” he said slowly, cocking his head and looking at me as though he wished to come closer but not sure that he should.
I didn’t realize I’d begun crying until his image became blurred. But no matter how hard I tried to shove that memory away from my mind, I continued to be haunted by the sound of the little boy.
He twitched.
“Stay where you are,” I hissed without thought, taking a step back, not sure I could trust myself or my instincts in that moment. My head was filling with images of that same child, the ghosts that’d haunted my dreams for years surging to the fore. I saw the man-child before me, but my mind was full of images of a young boy, no older than nine. His laughter echoed in my head over and over again.
Come find me...
Euralis froze in his tracks, eyeing me warily. “I would not harm you.”
A terrible burst of laughter issued from my numb lips. “You’re a boy. A boy.”
He shook his head, no doubt noting my obvious shock. “Don’t cry, Shayera. Please don’t cry.”
I rubbed at my nose, feeling strange and unsure exactly what that emotion was that I felt. It was a strange sensation to find that which had been lost years after losing it. I didn’t know if what I’d lost, whether it was my long, lost pet, or whether the ghost child still eerily laughing inside my head was who had been missing.
I’d come to this castle to remember my past and to find myself. Is this it? Was this boy part of that? Had I once known him as a boy and a dog? I felt cold all over, and all I wanted to do was sit, but I was afraid to move, afraid that if I so much as blinked right now he’d vanish.
Come find me, mama...
I swiped angrily at the constant stream of tears cascading down my face. I wanted to leave. And yet, just as I felt confounded by my conflicting desires with Rumpel, I found myself feeling the same way with Euralis.
I knew him.
I didn’t know how I knew him.
But I knew him.
I’d known him.
Come find me, mama... The echo had grown softer, Just a whisper. I couldn’t stop shaking. “I know you, don’t I? The other me? From before? Is that why you found me?”
He squeezed his eyes shut, and I noted the fine stitching of his clothing. Whoever he really was, he was not one of the servants of the keep. I wracked my brain for any answers or clues, but nothing came. My eyes kept returning to his handsome face, and I felt as though I’d once known him well. “Who are you, really?”
He blinked. “I did not believe him,” he said softly, “when he first told me of you. But his stories of you were so vivid, so real that I found myself falling in love with them.” His voice was steady but still soft, as though he wasn’t used to speaking often. He winced, and a muscle in his cheek twitched.
He loved me. Come find me, mama...
I looked at him with new eyes and the echo of the ghost rattling inside my skull. Had I once been this boy’s mother? My hands shook so violently that I had to clutch my fingers together to make them stop. He glanced down, noticing it immediately but saying nothing about it.
“I... I knew I had to see you for myself,” he said, the words seeming like he had to force them past unwilling lips. “And so I went, at first only to watch you. But as time progressed, I fell in love with you same as I had with the you of his stories. You were kind and beautiful and silly and funny and...” He cast his blood-red eyes toward the ground at his feet. “And nice. You were very nice to me.”
My heart hurt, and yet it was full at the same time. I’d stopped fighting the tears, because it seemed pointless. They came whether I wanted them to or not. “Then why did you leave me? Why did you abandon me that way?”
His nostrils flared and his upper lip curled up just a little. Even as a boy, there was a feral quality to him.
“Because I failed you. Because I wasn’t there to stop the siren from cursing you. I was ashamed, and you deserved a better protector than me.”
The lump in my throat didn’t want to go down. “It was fated to be. I’ve seen myself in the other time, I was a siren then, and I am a siren now. I don’t think it could have been changed, no matter what you’d done.”
He flicked his glance toward the side.
“Who are you to me, really? Who were you?” I asked softly, hoping he’d answer with the truth. “Please, Euralis, tell me.” His shoulders heaved when I said his name. I bit my lower lip. I was almost positive I knew, but I had to hear him say it. The ghostly echo had faded to little more than a breath of noise.
“I cannot fault you for failing to remember when I did not remember you either. But I remember what happened to Father—”
Father? I frowned.
“—the way he raved, the way he tore through the castle, fighting day and night to reclaim you, telling me over and over that he would bring my mother home. And now here you are, and I’m not sure I know how to handle this.” He shrugged, and I could hear the echo of my heart in my ears.
His father was Rumpelstiltskin, which made me his mother. I expelled a long breath from my body, and with it went the ghost of the boy. No more laughter echoed inside of me. I stared at his ruby-red eyes, then at his softly rounded cheeks, his square jaw, and his long nose.
“Mother?” I said in a low voice, but the word trembled and I fought to cling to my sanity. “Mother?” I said it again, this time little more than mouthing the word itself.
He blinked and I couldn’t rip my eyes off his face. I swept my curious gaze over his sharp features again and again, trying to recall not the stories told to me by Danika or others, but trying to find the real memories of him that had belonged to the other me. Those corridors were eerily dark and silent. “I am... Your mother?” I hadn’t meant for it to come out a question, and yet it had.
He trembled, and long black lashes tipped in silver frost trembled against the rich, dark hue of his skin. A ghost of a smile feathered over his full lips. It was gone in an instant, but I’d seen it, and heat spread all the way through me.
“You are my mother, the only one I have ever known,” he whispered, and where mine had sounded strained, his sounded full of heat and completely broken. “I saw you grow up. I saw your best days and I saw your worst. I grew to love you again, and you could not be more my mother to me now than you ever were then. I do not understand the depth of this dark curse that took you from me, but I have you back now. I see why father worked so hard for you. You are worthy, heart of my heart. Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood. My life for yours. Always.”
I gasped, covering my mouth with my hands. None of this made sense to me, and yet I could no more deny my love for him than he could for me. But I knew nothing of the boy. The only thing I had was the surety that what he said was truth. I felt love burning, flowing through me and growing stronger by the minute. I’d come for answers, but this was not at all what I’d expected to find. A child. My child. I wanted to hug him, but I wasn’t sure how to even
start to ask him for one. Would he think me strange? Odd?
He took a miniscule step forward and though I tensed up, I did not ask him to stop this time. I watched him breathe, watched his birdlike chest rise and fall in rapid succession. It was clear he was as nervous as I was.
I’d been taken from him and he from me. The twin flame between Rumpel and I caused us to feel this same level of need. Had Euralis and I ever bonded in such a manner? Is there magic involved in what I feel for this boy, too? “Is this magic, Prince? What we feel for each other?” I pressed a fist to my furiously beating heart.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. All I do know,” he said as he fingered the jeweled pendant lying upon his chest, “was that I was once cursed too and it was you who brought me back then. Maybe this time, it was my turn to do the same for you.”
His words sounded sad to my ears and my fingers twitched. What he said was so beautiful, but also tragic, and it made me feel heavy inside. I wanted to know what his curse had been and what I’d done to break it, but the words wouldn’t leave my tongue. Instead, I asked, “Will I remember you someday? Will my memories of our time together ever be restored? Were yours?”
Again, he shook his head. “No. I only know what we were because of father, but my feelings for you now are very real because I grew up with you. I saw you.”
“Why did you never show me your true self?”
His thick brows furrowed tight. “I... I didn’t want to frighten you, and maybe I should have shown you sooner, but I was terrified of you.”
“Of me?” I patted my chest. “I’m not nearly menacing enough to matter.”
His eyes were huge and desolate looking in his dark face. “Once I loved you again, the thought of you ever turning me away if you knew who I really was... It scared me badly. So I hid my secret from you, but only so that I could keep you with me longer.”
“And yet you left me in the end.” I flicked my wrist, hearing my hurt linger in the words. I’d thought myself long over Prince’s rejection of me, but remembering that time brought up the pain afresh. “I never knew what became of my Prince. You simply vanished.”