Tedros froze, taken aback.
Slowly Agatha felt the air return to her lungs, as if a boulder had lifted off her chest.
Her prince traced his finger between bricks in the floor. “We only see the finished storybooks, Agatha. How do we know every Ever After doesn’t take a few tries? Think about it. Each time you left the Woods, you tried to come back to your old life. But this time is different, isn’t it? When we get to our true ending, you’ll have a new life with me. We’ll have my kingdom to protect, until we’re old ourselves and it’s time to pass it on. Just like my father did and his father and all who came before.”
Looking at him, Agatha realized how selfish and small-hearted she’d been by keeping her prince here.
“I promise,” he said, squeezing her hand. “This time, we will be happy.”
“All right, say we do get back to the School for Good and Evil,” Agatha allowed. “What’s our plan?”
“Make things right, of course,” Tedros puffed. “Rescue Sophie, kill the School Master, take back Excalibur, free the other students, and you and I go to Camelot in time for my sixteenth birthday, and coronation as king. The End.” He paused. “The real End.”
Agatha made a sound halfway between a cough and a sneeze.
“All right, Sophie can come too, if you’re going to be difficult about it,” he sighed.
“Tedros, my love,” said Agatha cuttingly. “You think we can just waltz through the school gates and kill the School Master like we’re buying bonbons from the bakery?”
“I think buying anything from the bakery would pose far more obstacles at the moment,” said Tedros, eyeing the triple-locked door.
Agatha let go of him and braced for a fight. “First off, the School Master is an all-powerful sorcerer who last we saw came back from death, turned young again, and stabbed you with your own sword. Second, for all we know, he’s killed the Evers and has everyone on his side. And third, you don’t think he’ll have guards and traps and—”
“Merlin had a saying: ‘Worrying doesn’t solve problems. Just gives you gas,’” Tedros yawned.
“I take back the smarter than you look thing,” Agatha groaned. Her cat stirred and staggered out of her arms, but not before spitting in Tedros’ lap. The prince backhanded it and Reaper fled, throwing Agatha a horrible scowl at her choice of mate.
“He used to love me,” Agatha said, watching her cat gnaw the head off a dead canary.
“Agatha, look at me.”
“Tedros, you don’t even have your sword, let alone a plan. We’re going to die.”
“Agatha, please look at me.”
She did, with folded arms.
“You can’t plan your story any more than you can plan who you’re going to fall in love with. That’s the point of a story,” said Tedros. “And even if you could, what’s the fun of living through it if you know what’s going to happen? All we know is that Good always wins, right? So if Good hasn’t beaten Evil yet, our fairy tale can’t be over. As soon as we make our wish, we’ll be back where we belong, chasing our happy ending. Trust our story, Agatha. We’ll know what to do when the time comes.”
“And what about Sophie?” Agatha asked. “What if she hasn’t forgiven us?”
Tedros thought for a moment. “Everything Sophie did, she did to get closer to you or me. We’ve all made mistakes, that’s for sure. But Good or Evil, Boy or Girl, the three of us are in this tale together.” He leveled eyes with her. “So how can Sophie be happy until we are?”
Agatha fell quiet, aware of the dark room hemming her in with her prince and yet keeping them apart.
Long before she ever met her best friend, she’d secretly read storybooks from Mr. Deauville’s, buying them right after the shop opened, when no one else was inside, and paying for them with the coins her mother had given her for sweets. She drank in the lesson of those fairy-tale books more than any hot cream or fudge, that same lesson told and retold: you didn’t need a hundred true loves to find Ever After . . . you just needed one. It didn’t matter if an entire town called her a freak or a witch or a vampire. If she could just find that one person who loved her—one measly soul—then she’d have everything a princess did, minus the horrific pink dress, obnoxious blond hair, and moony-eyed face.
From the moment she met Sophie, Sophie was that soul: the friend who made her feel normal, who made her feel needed, who so clearly cared about her, despite all her efforts to disguise it. Back then, Agatha had done everything she could to ensure they’d end up together forever, rather than let her best friend be stolen away by a boy . . . until Agatha somehow fell in love with that boy herself. And so the story had turned on its head, this time Sophie doing everything she could to keep a boy and her best friend apart. It was a wicked love triangle, with Sophie the point that had to be removed, until finally Agatha and Tedros had rid themselves of her, turning that triangle into a straight line between them—prince and princess united at last, just like in the storybooks buried under her bed. But now, as Agatha sat in darkness, feeling more and more like the graveyard girl of old, she wondered if the reason she missed her best friend was the simplest of all. What if Sophie wasn’t the force that kept her and Tedros apart? What if Sophie was the force that brought them together?
Without Sophie, she never could have opened up her heart.