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She jolted at the sound of her name, her alarm taking a new direction as she moved closer and peered through the door’s spy-hole.
Legend’s response was too low for her to hear, but she could see his expression. His dark brows slashed down and the look in his eyes shuttered.
“I know you don’t love her,” Julian said.
Tella staggered back a step. She already knew Legend didn’t love her, but the way Julian said the words made it sound so much worse. It didn’t matter that his voice was soft. The words were like a period at the end of a sentence, small but absolute in their power.
“If you care about her at all, then you should let her go rather than try to change her.”
Silence.
Tella dared to look through the spy-hole once more. The sun was almost set. Night was taking over the sky as Legend looked down on his brother with something like an accusation. “That’s her choice to make, not yours. Although you didn’t object when I told you that a blood oath could make you ageless.”
“And I hate myself for it sometimes.” Julian’s voice turned harsh. “I hate not just watching you lose yourself piece by piece, but benefitting from it. Then I saw you with Tella. I thought, maybe after you saved her from the deck, you would change.”
Tella held her breath, but nothing about Legend changed.
He looked like the Legend who’d left her on those steps in front of the Temple of the Stars—closed off and cold and utterly unreachable. “If I’d changed, I’d be dead.”
“You don’t know that,” Julian argued. “Maybe you would have just done things differently. You’re careless with your life. You take chances because you know you can’t die. That’s fine if that’s how you want to live, but don’t be careless with her life.” He looked up at his brother, brown hair sheltering eyes that appeared to be waging a battle between abandon and hope. “Do you remember what the game was like when it first began?”
“I try not to.”
“You should, it was fun.”
“It was barely a traveling carnival,” Legend mumbled.
Julian smiled, as if hope had just won. “It was. But it still inspired people to dream and believe in magic. It made me believe in magic.”
Legend eyed his brother as if he’d lost his mind. “You know magic is real.”
“Just because something is real doesn’t mean you believe in it. The Fates are real, b
ut I don’t put my faith in them. I used to put my faith in you, and I want to do it again. I know you can be better than this.”
Legend laughed, but it sounded so far from humorous that it made Tella sad, not just for Legend but for all of them. “When did you become such an idealist?”
“When I met a girl who loved her sister so much she was able to wish her back to life. You might possess magic, but love like that is real power.”
“And yet all the love in the world wouldn’t have brought Tella back without my magic.”
“She never would have died without your magic, either.” Julian’s smile disappeared. “Tella would have found another way. She didn’t and doesn’t need you to save her. She needs to save you.”
42
Scarlett
Scarlett stared in the mirror that rested above her marble-pink vanity and tried not to cry at what she saw. Tella wouldn’t have cried. Tella would have willed her pain into power and used it to find a way to fix everything—no matter the cost.
Scarlett could do that, too. She could do it for her sister, for Julian, for everyone in the empire, and for herself. Even if it felt impossible at the moment.
At least her sister and Julian couldn’t see her right now.
Scarlett continued to stare at her new reflection in the mirror, as her thoughts took her back to the night before, after she’d delivered her last note to Tella and Julian, when everything had gone so awry.
Once a day, since Scarlett had first arrived in the Menagerie, the Lady Prisoner’s purple eyes turned milky-white, letting Scarlett know she was glimpsing a fragment of the future as she told Scarlett, The only way to defeat the Fallen Star is to become what he wants most. But all the Fallen Star wanted from Scarlett was for her to conquer her powers, and control the emotions of others. And her original plan had been to do just that—to cultivate her powers to change his feelings and make him love her, so that he would become mortal.
But over the last couple of days the Fallen Star had made it clear that if Scarlett mastered her abilities, it would be the catalyst that would turn her into an immortal Fate.
