The queen staggers, her eyes wide. “What are you?”
That’s the question of the annus. I tilt my head. “Annoyed. Do you accept your new fate?”
She slices her hand through the air. “Never.”
“Then what follows is on you.”
She screams. Red light explodes from her body. Not blood. Not fire. Rose petals. Thousands of them bursting outward in a violent, beautiful storm. They lash across my face and hair, hot and perfumed.
Then she’s gone. No corpse. No crown. No dramatic final speech. Just a spinning column of red petals that lifts into the air and rains down over the ruined field.
For a tempo, no one moves. One petal lands on my nose, another on my tongue. I spit it out. “Well, that’s concerning.”
The world rushes back in. Nash is there first, hands gripping my arms hard enough to bruise. Hart at my right. Malachi to my left. Theo behind me a second later, his palm flattening betweenmy shoulders like he’s checking if I’m solid and real and not about to blow away into decorative flora.
“What did you do?” Nash demands.
“I don’t know.”
“That isn’t a real answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.” My hands are shaking. No, not shaking. Jittering. Power races under my skin in wild little sparks. My teeth buzz. My heart pounds too fast, too hard, like it’s trying to outrun my body. If I reached out right now, I think I could knock down the sky, turn the castle inside out, or convince the roses to sing flirty songs.
I swallow.
“Daphne?” Theo’s voice is lower. Closer. Worried.
“I feel weird.”
“That isn’t reassuring,” Hart says.
“It isn’t reassuring to be me either right now.”
Malachi brushes petals out of my hair, his face pale. “You rewrote her.”
“Or unraveled her,” Genie says faintly. He hovers upside down for some reason, spectacles crooked, like he’s forgotten how gravity works. “Hard to tell. It was spectacular either way.”
Around us, the last of the petals settle over the field. The card guards are gone. The hedgehogs are gone. Even the tiled madness of the croquet pitch fades, grass pushing back through the illusion until it looks like an ordinary stretch of lawn with entirely too many roses.
Hart turns slowly, scanning the walls, the gates, the shadows. “Tell me she’s dead.”
Genie winces. “That would be neat. This was not neat.”
Of course, it wasn’t. Nothing with me ever is.
Nash’s thumb presses to the inside of my wrist, checking my pulse. “Too fast.”
“I noticed.”
Theo bends to murmur in my ear, “Can you sit on the horse?”
I laugh. It comes out too sharp, too bright. “I could probably sit on the moon.”
No one laughs. Tough crowd. Also concerning.
I press a hand to my chest. Instead of dissipating, the power ricochets inside me, too big for my bones. The field. The queen. The rules. I changed them. I changed her. A thrill skates through me, wild and wrong and magnificent.
Oh, I understand now why people go power-mad. It hums like a second pulse.
