His breathing grew harsher.
She heard him yell and smack something, hard enough that it ended on a wet note. Before she forced herself to focus only on the search. Only on the mounds and mounds of papers she didn’t even remember keeping. She unearthed old stories, old slips of spells.Turn this carrot into candy. Keep my glasses on my nose.
One of them was even an attempt at not needing glasses at all.
In fact, she remembered it. It had made her eyes turn purple. Her mom had thought she’d been drinking too much grape juice, and banned it from the house. And there was more, there was more, there was every memory here, packed away, pretending not to exist.
I’m surprised they didn’t burn them all, she thought despairingly.
And suddenly there it was. Curled like a rose petal in the middle of a circle of papers. Just a scrap of some notepad torn out, barely a page filled. Hardly a story at all, but oh so familiar it made her ache.Once upon a time there was a prince who thought he wasn’t, it started. But she didn’t stop to read on.
She just raced to the end.
The sentence that wasn’t finished.
She even remembered why it wasn’t now. It wasn’t just that her hope had fallen short of what was possible, for no reason at all. Her dad had yanked her hand away before she could. She could see the line her pen had made, diagonally down the page.You need to stop all this childish nonsense, he’d said, and for the first time in her life, she’d listened. She’d believed him, and not herself.
But not anymore.
Not now.
Now she went still, in the middle of this maelstrom. Dust from the ceiling swirling around her, Jack yelling “Anytime now, Nance,” snarls and the screeches of metal puncturing the air. Then she put her pen to the paper. Just a ballpoint, this time, but it being one didn’t seem to matter.
The power was in her.
It had always been in her.
And they lived happily ever after, she wrote.
Then listened to the low, sweet sound of all her dreams coming true.
EPILOGUE
It was his idea to go to Cassie’s New Year’s Eve party. She wanted to stay in, for their now-defunct deadline. But he did a good job of talking her into it.We’ve stayed in every night for the last week. If we stay in anymore, my dick will fall off, he said. And the words had made Popcorn look up, with hopeful eyes.
Then he slumped back down, grumbling about disturbed sleep as he did so.
They left him watching reruns ofFrasier, her in a gauzy black dress and a pointy hat and stripey stockings. Him in all his ordinary clothes, with a jaunty set of devil horns peeking up from his thick thatch of hair.
He looked so gorgeous she could have cried.
And Cassie seemed to agree. She welcomed them warmly, and when he offered his hand, nervously, she drew him into a hug. Then once he’d walked past her into the house, Cass turned her head and mouthed,oh my GOD. With a fan of her hand over her face, for good measure.
It made her wonder what Seth would think, but when she saw him handing a drink to Marley from theGazette—who Nancy now knew for sure knew—he was somehow fanning himself, too. He gave her a thumbs-up as she followed Jack to the living room. A little worried about losing him amidst people he was nervousto be lost amidst—sometimes the fountain incident and theloserstuff still loomed a little large in his mind—but a lot less so, once she saw who he was with.
A Minotaur.
He was shaking the hand of a Minotaur.
Like none of that mattered, anyway. He had more now than just wanting to be completely human. He had the reassurance of everything around him that he didn’t need to be. He didn’t need to fit in. He didn’t need to worry about not being good enough. She and everyone here thought he was.
And honestly, she knew he did, too.
It was in the way he had said to her, that morning, as they laid in bed:I think I’d like to try it the other way.Almost absentmindedly, like it wasn’t a big deal. But it had been, because she’d known what he meant. He wanted to be the demon with her. He wanted her to call out that name—the one she could still hardly say, but said anyway. She whispered it in his hear, as the party glittered and sparkled around them.
People danced on the ceiling.
Fairies fluttered everywhere.
