Page 42 of House of Hearts

There’s no Disney Princess moment. A flock of magical singing birds doesn’t fly to my rescue in a musical montage.

It’s a quiet progression as the thought hits me, a slow understanding striking after I feel the lockets in my left hand burn.

The two halves gravitate toward one another like magnets, and I watch, stupefied, as they click into place.

There’s an otherworldly sheen between them, an almost hypnotic glow as they merge into one.

They’re a perfect fit, two sides forming to complete a heart.

It’s not just a useless hunk of metal. Could it be…?

Her heart?

The tears that spring from my eyes are from a miserable mess of emotions.

An insatiable urge for revenge mingled with a confusing cloud of empathy.

We’re not that different, the two of us.

It’s funny, really, how similar we are. How grief has skewed us beyond recognition and made us heartless.

If love and loss can turn you into the darker version of yourself, is there any chance of redemption?

Staring up at Anastasia, I can’t help but think there is.

The fall has made her seem briefly human, the hope in her eyes short-lived but enough to tell me that the real her isn’t dead.

Someone is buried in the beast she’s become.

I might not be able to kill the queen, but maybe I was never meant to.

Perhaps I was only ever meant to save her.

My palms cup Calvin’s cheeks, relishing in the feel of his soft skin in my hands.

He stares at me, his eyes unfocused and wavering, but watering the same as mine.

Trapped in the prison of his own body as Anastasia takes the lead.

I have no clue if this will work, but I’m not using my mind.

It’s time to follow my heart after I’ve ignored it for so long.

She thrashes and swipes above me, but I don’t let any of that deter me from what I’m about to do.

Unclasping the locket and stringing it around Calvin’s waiting neck, I clear my throat, and the words ripple out of me one by one.

“Blood for blood, I do impart. I invite you, Ana, to take back your heart.”

I wait for the horrific inevitability. It could all end so horribly and so quickly, Calvin succumbing forever to the madness and killing me with one final blow. I could join Emoree with all the other dead.

There’s a shift in the air like the changing of a tide. Everything softens to an unnatural silence, the world pausing as if with bated breath.

I inhale a breath of my own, and nothing happens.

I exhale, and suddenly we’re surging upward like a geyser has blown beneath us.

Anastasia morphs before my eyes in the air, unmade and remade, a girl who became a monster becoming a girl yet again.

I hit the ground hard, and Percy is at my side in an instant, helping me upward and cradling my head as I gather my bearings.

Anastasia erupts from Calvin’s body like a cicada brood bursting from the earth. The break is abundantly clear; she’s cut the marionette strings and let her puppet collapse onto the earth in a limp heap. He falls, still breathing, but only shallowly.

Anastasia stands by herself, and she’s the very same girl I saw in the portrait.

I recognize the waterfall cascade of her ginger curls and the wide, tear-brimmed gaze of her wide-set eyes.

She’s not the monster I thought she was.

She’s a girl who was betrayed and cast aside, her dying breaths transforming her with hate.

The necklace I gave her no longer hangs over Calvin’s throat, but her own.

The pendant has patched together the chasm of her chest, making her whole again.

She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to. The look she gives us three says it all.

She’d been buried inside herself for so long, her body a vehicle for her hatred to fester and grow and change her.

It’s as if she has woken up from a very long nap and is bleary-eyed as the light shines through her window.

Sleeping Beauty breaking from her dream and finally seeing the waking world for what it really is.

Her spirit blows away with a ripple of wind, and the hedges change in her absence.

They fall inward, graying as they topple to the ground.

This otherworldly limbo we’ve entered is splitting apart at the seams, and reality is seeping through the cracks.

The sky above our heads is shining with twilight, the fleeting progression before the sun descends into murky black.

I’m at Calvin’s side in an instant, lifting him gingerly from the ground and brushing a soothing thumb against his cheek. “Cal,” I whisper, placing a soft kiss on his temple.

He blinks in a daze, his eyes shifting from the sky over to me. Unseeing at first before clearing out. “You need…” he pants, swallowing thickly. “To get away from me. Not…safe…”

“It’s over, Cal,” I tell him, helping him sit up. He gasps at the brush of my hand against the back of his head and slowly registers the world around him. “It’s really over now.”

“Violet?” a voice calls from behind me, and I’d know it anywhere.

I’m up in an instant, and I limp my way toward her. I yearn to finally hug my best friend in the whole world, but as I try to wrap myself around her, my arms slip through the air. There’s nothing left to hold. Emoree smiles her soft, shadowy smile, and it manages to break my heart all over again.

“Em,” I whisper.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this,” she apologizes, her smile frayed at the edges. “It was…‘Selfish’ is really the only word for it.”

How many times have I dreamed of this? One last conversation with Em instead of her lost to the murky realm of the afterworld. And now that she’s here, I can’t find the words at all. I can only cry. A whole year’s worth of bottled grief I’ve stored up inside me dripping messily down my cheeks.

“Please, Em, can’t you stay?” I beg, but I know there’s no changing things. What’s been done cannot be undone, but that doesn’t mean she’s completely lost. How many times have I kept her alive in my thoughts these past months?

“I’ve been with you this whole time,” she answers, like it really is that simple.

“Yeah, yeah.” I snort, wiping the tears away with the back of my hand. “I saw your little stunt in the ballroom and that confusing Ouija-board riddle you left us.”

She shakes her head, and when she points at my heart, I know I must have a concussion.

For once, I don’t feel the urge to tell her how supremely hokey that sounds or how it’s impossible for a human being to reside in the thoracic cavity.

“I’ll always be here,” she says, and that has me sobbing even harder.

You don’t stop loving someone when they die.

Your grief is your love, and they live forever in your hearts.

Besides, she’s in good hands. Percy slowly pushes up from the ground, and every step toward Emoree has him fading further.

For a boy who had been teetering between life and death, caught in the gray in between, it would seem he’s finally made his choice.

“Percy?” Calvin shakes his head and clutches fistfuls of the grass for support. “What are you doing? You shouldn’t be…”

“Dead?” Percy asks, and Calvin gulps hard at the word. “I’ve been gone for a while, Cal.”

Calvin frantically shakes his head and swats at his cheeks. “But not gone for good. You were supposed to come back. I…I can’t lose you! I’ve been doing everything I could to bring you back and now…”

Percy stoops to run a hand over his brother’s hair. It washes over him like a gust of summer air.

“What now? You’re never coming back?” Wet tears blob down Calvin’s cheeks, and in this moment, he looks so heart-achingly young.

A little sibling blubbering up at his older brother.

“Mom wants me to take your place, but, Percy, I just can’t be you.

You need to come back. The shoes you left behind are too big. They don’t fit me and they never will.”

“Then wear your own,” he tells him, standing back up to full height. “You’re Calvin Lockwell, and if that’s not good enough for anyone, then you don’t need them. Make your own fate.” He clasps hands with a smiling Em before turning my way.

I finally get a look at those dimples Emoree used to prattle incessantly about.

“I can’t believe the curse lived there this whole time.

” He chuckles bashfully, patting his throat like he might find a locket swinging there still.

“Right under our noses. I never would have thought that would be her actual heart.”

Calvin leans his weight into my side like a crutch, and I cover his shoulders with my arm. “Why did you have them in the first place?”

Percy scratches his cheek. “It sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but they were family heirlooms I found, and”—he hooks a finger in his collar and shyly casts his eyes to the ground—“I thought they would be romantic . God. I know how that sounds now, but it never had any grand meaning until we found Ana’s spell book.

Even then, I would’ve never guessed they could be used the way you used them. ”

Emoree looks up at me, and her smile is strained at the corners.

“Despite what Percy told me, I knew there was a decent chance one of us wouldn’t make it,” she says, toying with a loose curl around her finger.

“I sent it to you so that if I died and Percy was still alive, you could show it to him and he’d know I sent you.

You’re the smartest girl I know, Violet.

You always have been. I knew if we weren’t successful, then you would be, and I was hoping at the very least, you could get the reward money for your family. ”

I scoff. “I don’t care about the money, Em. I care about you.”

She drops her hands to her sides and presses her palms flat against her legs.

“I know. I know . I’m so sorry again. My whole life has been selfishly expecting you to protect me every step along the way without ever wondering how you felt.

You were always like a big sister to me, and as soon as I came to this school on my own, I felt the loss of you immensely. ”

Another sharp sob racks through my body, and Calvin presses a kiss to my shoulder as he leans his weight against me.

“Be good to each other,” Percy says. He gazes at Em with so much tender love and care, even beyond death. They share a look that melts me to my core. I don’t have to worry about Em anymore, not in this life or the next. She’s at peace.

“I love you, Em,” I whisper as she disappears.

“I love you, too.”

And just like that, they’re gone and the real world is coming back into focus. Illusion lifts from reality like oil separating from water. Calvin and I are back to the present, the moon hanging full above our heads.

I can’t say how long Calvin and I sit there in the clearing.

The world keeps spinning and the clock keeps turning, but the two of us stay rooted where we are.

All we’re doing is holding each other, crying, because what else can you do in a situation like this?

We cling to each other for dear life, and the emotions that follow are jumbled beyond comprehension.

Relief? Despair? Hope? It’s impossible to tell.

Human hearts are such tricky things, and nothing is as simple as it seems.

One thing is, though.

“I think it’s really over now,” I murmur into his hair.

I know he can feel it, too. His forehead finds mine, and his breath ghosts across my skin. “I think so, too, Violet.”

The Queen of Hart’s has finally found her heart. And perhaps she isn’t the only one.