She’d come. After all this time, she never gave up.
Angelique stopped and gaped at the mirror every few minutes—practically oblivious to the fighting around her.
He stared at her, a weird, starving sensation twisting in his gut as he noticed her unevenly cut hair and unusual clothes.
Can she tell I’m here? I think she knows I’m in a mirror, but I don’t know that she can sense it’s this one.
Evariste paced back and forth, as close to the mirror’s surface as possible.
She’s not using magic—why is she not using magic? Isn’t Clovicus or Sybilla with her? Why is she alone? What’s been happening that she appears to be alone? The mirror is too dangerous to face alone—I, of all people should know!
Evariste’s cloak tangled around his legs as he impatiently paced—hope and fear blooming in his chest.
He might be able to get out—he could almost taste freedom!
But if the mirror can overpower Angelique…if it captures her and engulfs her the way it has engulfed me…
Evariste pushed against the mirror’s surface and tried one last mad scramble for his magic.
No! I can’t let her be taken!
Neither yielded, but he didn’t give up. He wasn’t going to stop fighting until he was out.
Angelique’s magic surged through her—cold and knifelike—as she finally let herself sprint across the throne room.
She pounded past Snow White and barely noticed when frost clung to the tips of her messy hair and her magic cut through the swampy fog that had begun to gather. She skidded to a stop in front of the mirror and slammed her fists on its surface. “Evariste!”
He appeared in the mirror, wearing the blue and black cloak he’d been in the day the Chosen kidnapped him—the cloak she’d seen in her dream.
Evariste pressed his palms into the other side of the glass. “Angelique!”
Angelique slapped her hands over his. Despite the freezing temperatures the mirror was radiating, she could have sworn she felt the heat of his hands through the glass.
The wind howled as the mirror gathered more magic to it.
Angelique grimly planted her legs as it tried to push her away.
“Angel—you have to leave,” Evariste shouted.
“Not when I’ve just found you!” Angelique shook her head, trying to dislodge some of the frost that covered her eyelashes so she could see better.
“It’s too dangerous!” Evariste said. “Please—I just want you safe!”
“I’ve looked for you for six years, Master Evariste,” Angel growled. “I’m not giving you up now.”
Choices…the mirror whispered. The murky voice was gone, but a cold, ancient voice had taken its place.
Rage…Power…
Angel ignored it as she slammed her fists on the mirror. “I’m getting you out!”
“But you can’t! Not with your current abilities—”
Angelique shut her eyes and gathered her core magic to her. She’d loosened it before approaching the mirror, now she harnessed it—but not to twist it into a different kind of magic or spell. No, she needed her magic to be as deadly as possible.
When she flicked her eyes open, her magic engulfed the room. It brushed against every sharp object in the room (which glittered in the back of Angelique’s mind) and was so potent, it broke the skylights and poured out of the open door. It covered the oblivious soldiers fighting outside the throne room, gushed down hallways, and spilled out of the castle, rapidly spreading across all of the Glitzern Palace grounds.
Angelique’s mind was cluttered with the knowledge of broken pieces of glass, cracks in windows, stored arrows, jagged rocks, the guard armories and more. It filled her with an intoxicating sensation of power.
But, as she suspected, even with all of that power, Angelique’s hand couldn’t push through the mirror’s surface.
Perhaps all those curses weren’t so stupid after all. Maybe—hopefully—love is the strongest force in life after all.
“Give him back.” Angelique’s magic put extra force behind her words as she felt her powers gush from the well of her magic.
Her core magic surged around the mirror, trying to crush it. It beat back the mirror’s black magic, but when it touched the mirror’s frame, it brushed against the ancient, foreign magic that had nearly killed Angelique when she used the tracking spell and stole her breath from her so her lungs felt like they’d crumpled in her chest.
That’s not the mirror’s magic, she dimly realized. That’s the mirror itself.
“Never,” the mirror whispered. “Evariste is mine.”
“That wasn’t a request!” Angelique grabbed the mirror on either side.
How do I do this? It’s very grand to say I need to use love—but how?
The mirror rattled in her grasp, but Angelique doggedly hung on, even when the mirror’s sheer presence overwhelmed her, its bottomless power so effortlessly wrapped around her, she couldn’t move. The pain was immense. It wracked her body, making it feel as if it was crushing her. If she didn’t soon let go, it would kill her!
“Angel!”
That’s right—I need to think of Evariste. I need to think of what he means to me.
Angelique’s mouth opened in a scream that wouldn’t come, and it was only the power of her magic that kept her standing as she clung to the mirror despite the pain.
Shaking, she forced herself to look at Evariste.
He hammered on the other side of the mirror, his blue and green eyes gleaming with desperation as he shouted things she couldn’t hear. A thatch of his blonde hair hung over his forehead, and even though he’d been locked in an immeasurably evil thing, his concern was for her.
That’s what I love about him. His generous spirit and kindness so deep it’s immeasurably strong. I missed it. And his laugh—the way he’d tease Roland, even his ridiculous insistence that we buy matching clothes and that Stil was our child.
She gritted her teeth as pain clogged her throat, and pushed past it.
Angelique had been in agony for six years, missing Evariste.
What the mirror was inflicting upon her? It was middling in comparison.
Angelique held Evariste’s gaze. His handsome face was lined with worry, and he shook his head.
Angelique tried to smile, and then she peeled her right hand off the mirror’s frame and once again pushed it against the mirror’s surface.
It resisted for a moment, and Angelique thought of the late, warm nights they spent drinking tea as they laughed about a nearly botched assignment, of the wintery afternoons they’d spent in the workshop tinkering with magic in companionable silence, of all the shared joys and sorrows and amusement—each precious moment that, in her silly suspicion, she hadn’t valued enough at the time.
But now she knew better. Now, Angelique knew she loved Evariste.
The mirror changed from a hardened surface to a jelly-like texture, and Angelique pressed her fingers through it.
The mirror shook, and the numb sensation of its ancient presence grew that much stronger as she pushed her hand inside. The surface rippled, pooling at her wrist until she pushed her arm in all the way up to her forearm.
Evariste watched—afraid to breathe—as Angelique’s hand passed through the mirror.