The Last Ever After

  Sophie raised her brows. “Date?”

  “Right. Yes. Exactly.” Rafal tugged at his sticky shirt. “I could take you on a tour over the Woods, maybe? You know, after everyone goes to sleep? Lady Lesso won’t get on our case about going too fast and we can stay out as late as we want because—well, obviously. Wait until you see the Netherwood from really high up. With the trees all dead, it looks brilliant, like a devil-made scarecrow, and the stars over the Murmuring Mountains connect into a giant skull,” he rambled, like a nerdy Neverboy. “Could even do it tonight, after supper . . . you know, get some time together without everyone watching us . . .”

  Sophie looked into his milky face, which seemed to be getting younger and younger. For a moment, he sounded so open to love.

  “I’d like that very much,” she breathed.

  Rafal smiled, relieved. The young Master and Queen spent the rest of lunch in bashful silence, like two normal teenagers who’d just arranged their first date.

  That evening, after dinner, as Rafal flew her back to his tower, Sophie nestled into his arms, no longer doubting who her true love was. Tedros’ name was fleshed-over and forgotten, the Storian had written nothing further of him or Agatha, and for the first time, even Rafal wondered whether the two Evers had left the Woods entirely.

  “Perhaps they came to their senses,” he said as they landed in the chamber. He gave the Storian a cursory glance, still paused over a blank page. “Let me change and then we can go on our . . . our, you know . . .” His larynx bobbed. “I’ll go change.”

  Sophie looked out the window. After all this, she’d never see her best friends again, she thought, battling a wave of sadness. . . . She shook it off, remembering this is what she’d wished for: Agatha safe with her true love, and she safe with hers. Bucking up, she looked back at the handsome, loving boy in the corner, doffing his sweaty shirt. The boy about to take her on her first real date.

  “Well, with no Agatha and no Tedros, we’ll finally have time to focus on us, won’t we?” she said. “And what better way to start than a proper date night?” She fixed her hair, gussying up for their evening. “Goodbye troubles! Goodbye ordinary life! I can picture it now: going to school together every morning, gossiping about our students, quiet dinners in the tower, planning the places we want to go and things we want to see, like a princess and prince, in the throes of Ever After—”

  “I’m not your prince. This is not Ever After. And everything you described sounds like ordinary life to me,” said Rafal, his back turned.

  Sophie bristled. “Well, I’m sure a bit of routine will be good for us after everything that’s happened,” she said, straightening books on a shelf to fill the silence. “At the very least, we can send those Ever Killers back to Bloodbrook.”

  “Ever Killers?” Rafal said, sniffing at a pile of dirty shirts, looking for one clean enough to wear.

  Sophie made a mental note to do his laundry in the morning. He was becoming more of a teenage boy by the minute. “You know, the new students you brought in,” she yawned, noticing the new flesh on her ring finger starting to wear thin. She’d have to apply more potion tomorrow. “Edgar and Essa, I think it was. You didn’t think I’d find out, did you?”

  “I’m sorry. Who?”

  “Those cousins, Rafal.” Sophie plopped stomach-down on the bed. “Captain Hook’s family . . . strange pair, really. Clearly obsessive fans of mine but couldn’t bring themselves to ask for an autograph. Spent the whole time sizing up my ring. Don’t blame them, of course. It is rather lovely. Said you’d brought them here to kill Agatha and—”

  But now she saw Rafal staring at her.

  “Hook murdered his whole family,” he said. “By the age of ten.”

  Sophie bolted up, confused. “What? But then . . . then who . . .”

  Slowly Rafal’s gaze moved to the Storian, still frozen inexplicably over the storybook. A light dawned in his pupils, red patches growing on his cheeks and bare chest.

  “You didn’t bring any new students in, did you?” Sophie said quietly.

  The School Master fixed his eyes on her and Sophie saw there would be no date tonight.

  “If anyone—anyone—dares to enter this tower, kill them,” he hissed.

  Then he leapt out the window and was gone.

  “You want us to break into the School Master’s tower?” Tedros shouted through blustering green mist, as he stood on a window ledge high over the bay.

  “Not us. You,” Anadil said, flattening next to his girl body against a black stone wall. “And stop using your boy voice. You’ll be alone with Sophie in a matter of seconds!”

  “Seconds?! The tower’s half a mile away!” Tedros barked in his boy’s voice again, pointing at the School Master’s spire, far into the Blue Forest. “How am I possibly supposed to get from here to there—”

  “Stop waving your hands, you ninny! Someone might see you,” Dot said, peering through binoculars from inside the window. “Ani, the School Master just left, so this is our chance. Sophie’s in there alone until he comes back. Plus, fog’s at its peak.”

  Indeed, Tedros could hardly see the School Master’s tower now, cloaked in green mist blowing off the bay. “First of all, what does fog have to do with getting me into that tower? Second, there’s no such thing as ‘flying’ spells. Third, I can’t mogrify into a bird without reverting to a boy once I land. And fourth, I don’t see either of you carrying fairy dust, so please tell me what I’m doing in a girl’s body ten miles above ground in the middle of the night!”

  Anadil and Dot looked amused. “You didn’t think Merlin was going to leave the details to you, did you?” said Anadil.

  “Fog patterns and mapping Sophie’s movements were my job,” said Dot. “And Ani’s job was . . . well . . . show him, Ani.”

  Ani drew a black rat from her pocket, paws up and whimpering on its back, with a small black helmet fitted over its head. “This is how you’re getting to Sophie,” she said, plunking the rat in Tedros’ palm.

  “This?” Tedros goggled at the rodent. “This is how I’m supposed to fly halfway across the school?”

  “Rat #1 got you through the gates, didn’t it?” said Anadil, stroking the still-pooped pet in her pocket. “Rat #2 gets you to the tower.”

  “And Rat #3 negotiates world peace?” Tedros bellowed, glaring at the shaking, shivering rat in his palm. “Last time I checked, villain talents have limits, Anadil. Maybe you have the talent to make a rat small or white or dance the rhumba, but rats don’t fly, that’s for sure, especially ‘Rat #2,’ who’s acting as if I’m about to chuck it off this tower!”

  “Smart rat,” Anadil grinned.

  “Huh?” said Tedros—

  Dot stabbed out her glowing fingertip and a tuft of green fog floating over his head froze to ice, before turning a dark toast brown. Tedros looked up and a single drop of condensation dripped onto his lips.

  Chocolate.

  Like flames racing up dynamite, the green fog around him started to freeze and spread to cocoa brown, morphing into frozen fractals and swirls—some flat, some loopy, some blade-sharp, some spaghetti-thin—until the entire sky over the bay looked like a chocolate roller coaster, camouflaged by the night.

  Running out of steam, Dot focused harder, her flickering fingerglow chasing a last thin trail of green fog as it surged towards Tedros’ girl body, plastered against the castle wall.

  “Dot, that’s the important one . . . ,” Anadil warned.

  Dot gritted her teeth, trying to keep her glow steady, aiming right at the whip of fog lashing for Tedros’ face . . .

  “Now, Dot!” Anadil cried—

  Dot screeched with effort and shot a blast of light. The fog froze into a knife-sharp icicle, an inch from Tedros’ eye.

  Tedros blinked in shock, eyelashes grazing the chocolate spear. . . . Then slowly he looked down at the shaking, helmeted rat in his hand.

  The rat locked its paws onto the icicle, with Tedros still holding on to the rat?
??s body.

  “Oh no,” Tedros peeped.

  Anadil kicked him off the ledge and Tedros let out a howling scream, clinging to the rat like a handlebar as it zip-lined down the chocolate icicle. At the end of the icicle, the rat flew off, like a sled off a track, before hooking onto another piece of fog-turned-chocolate. The rat zip-lined so fast along the chocolate tracks—corkscrews, dive-drops, sidewinder spins—that Tedros saw nothing but a kaleidoscope of cocoa and stars, as if magically sucked into one of Merlin’s hot toddies. He could hear the chocolate rails splintering as he zoomed past and the rat squealing with terror, knowing it was only a matter of time before the entire ride shattered under their weight. The rat flew into an upside-down loop and blood surged into Tedros’ head, his mind blanking blissfully, his legs kicking through air, detached from gravity. Above him, the rat’s claws shredded even faster along the chocolate tracks, sending creamy brown flakes scattering like snow. Delirious, Tedros closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue, tasting cottony sweetness, wondering if he’d died and gone to Prince Heaven, where he could ravish and pleasure without duty or responsibility forever and ever and ever . . .

  He smelled a sharp, awful stench and the rat jammed to a stop, ejecting him off the chocolate roller coaster, over the rancid Blue Forest, through a wide-open window, and onto a hard stone floor, flat on his bottom.

  Tedros didn’t move, panting on the floor. “I . . . want . . . Agatha’s . . . mission.”

  Then he remembered where he was, the body he was in, and what he was supposed to be doing.

  His eyes jerked open.

  Hobbled and hurting, he lumbered onto his legs, still unused to his girl’s squishy form. He peered around the School Master’s deserted chamber, licking the last chocolate off his lips.

  “Sophie?” he squeaked in his girly snoot, moving deeper into the room. “Sophie, it’s Essa! Essa from Bloodbrook. We met this morning? Sorry to barge in like this, but you’re in terrible danger.” He imagined Agatha at his side, her spirit egging him on. “We have to leave here now, Sophie,” he said, confidence growing. “Before the School Master comes back. So if you’ll just listen to me, girl to girl—”

  A blast of pain exploded through his head, knocking him out, and he crashed face-first to the floor.

  Far across the bay, inside the witch’s room, Anadil and Dot gaped in horror through binoculars at Sophie, who was looming over Essa’s fallen body, wielding a giant storybook like a club.

  Anadil slowly turned to Dot.

  “Never was much of a girl’s girl, was she?” Dot quipped.

  As soon as the fog started turning to chocolate, Agatha saw her chance.

  She’d been hiding at one end of Halfway Bridge, trapped in her boy body, ogling ten hulking, armed shadows atop the School for Old.

  None of them looked human.

  Agatha’s heart seized. She had no hope to get past one of the School Master’s guards, whoever they were, let alone a fleet of them—

  That’s when the fog over the bay started detonating into iced chocolate.

  Flabbergasted, she swiveled and saw Dot’s fingerglow pulsing from a dark window, high in the other school.

  Shouts of shock and panic rang out from the shadowy guards over the Bridge, who flooded off the balconies into the castle, leaving the roof unattended.

  Agatha smiled, hidden at the other end. Whatever Dot was doing in the School for New, it served as the perfect diversion in the School for Old.

  Not a coincidence, Agatha thought.

  Merlin and his spies had done everything they could to help her and Tedros finish their missions.

  The rest was up to them.

  As fast as she could, Agatha darted from her hiding place and sprinted across the dim, frigid Bridge, feeling the wind on her scrawny boy chest, hands held out in front of her, knowing the barrier was coming—

  Bam! She slammed into it a quarter of the way down the span, leaving her palms stinging and her body fully exposed in the moonlight. The guards would spot her the second they returned.

  “Let me through,” she begged, hands flat on the barrier.

  Her crystal-clear reflection magically appeared in the mirror, dressed in Evil’s uniform—only it was her usual girl self, instead of a boy.

  “Old with Old,

  New with New,

  Back to your tower

  Before—”

  Her reflection peered at her. “Wait a second, lad . . . you’re not a student here at all.” Her face darkened. “Intruder.” Her reflection opened her mouth wide. “INTRU—”

  “No! It’s me!” Agatha yelped. “It’s Agatha!”

  “All I see is an underfed, googly-eyed boy,” her reflection said, opening her mouth again to scream—

  “I’ll prove it!” cried Agatha, knowing she had no choice now. She closed her eyes, visualizing the counterspell. . . . Her hair began to thicken, her jaw to round, and all at once her body eased back into her girl’s shape, filling out her uniform. “See. Me,” she smiled, now matching the reflection in the barrier. “So let me pass—”

  “Oh. You,” her reflection growled, not smiling back. “You nearly got me destroyed for confusing the sides the past two years. First you convinced me you were Evil, when you were Good. Then you convinced me you were a Boy, when you were a Girl. No way are you getting past me a third time. So listen clear:

  “Old with Old,

  New with New,

  Back to your tower

  Before I call You-Know-Who.”

  Agatha tightened. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the chocolate patterns in the sky starting to evaporate. The sound of guards storming to the rooftop amplified inside the castle.

  “And how do you know I’m not supposed to be on the Old side instead of the New?” Agatha asked her reflection, trying to stay calm.

  “Easy,” her image huffed. “Because you’re as young as me and I’m as young as you.”

  “So if I’m young, I can’t be old?”

  “Have you ever met an old person who’s young?” her reflection fleered.

  “Well. Would a newborn baby see me as young or old?” said Agatha.

  “Old, but that’s because it doesn’t know any better—”

  “So what about a child?”

  “Depends on how old the child is,” her reflection snapped.

  “So how young or old you are ‘depends’ on things?” Agatha asked.

  “No! It’s obvious to anything that’s full-grown!”

  “What about a full-grown flower? Or a full-grown fish?”

  “Don’t be stupid. A flower or fish can’t see age,” said her reflection.

  “But you said anything full-grown—”

  “A full-grown person!”

  “So you’re a person, if it’s obvious to you,” reasoned Agatha. “Yet you’ve been on this Bridge for thousands of years. So what does that make you? Young or old?”

  “Old, of course,” her reflection puffed.

  “And if you’re me and I’m you, then what does that make me?” Agatha said, lips curling to a smile.

  Her reflection gasped, realizing the answer. “Definitely old.”

  Agatha’s mirror image could only gape in anguish, fading into night, as the real Agatha reached her fingers through the barrier and felt the cold, empty wind.

  Seconds later, the monstrous shadows swarmed to their post and saw nothing on the Bridge but a glint of black and green sliding into the castle, which they thought an errant piece of mist blown from the bay.

  If they’d looked closer, they may have seen a small rain puddle still rippling over stone . . . a single clump print gleaming under the moon . . . or the two specks of light across the Bridge, floating low like fallen stars . . .

  The bold yellow eyes of a bald, wrinkled cat, watching Agatha vanish safely into a den of danger, before the cat pulled into darkness and pit-patted away.

  19

  Old School Reunions

  Do girls have softer he
ads than boys?

  All Tedros could feel was drool dripping off his lip, his scraped-up cheek, and his skull ripping with pain. He couldn’t feel his eyes, let alone open them, and he wondered if this is how mangos felt when they fell off trees and smashed to bits, before he realized mangos don’t have feelings and he was likely suffering from a violent concussion.

  Between pangs of nausea, he tried to touch the back of his head and check for blood, but his hands wouldn’t budge.

  Slowly he slit open his eyes to see he was still in a girl’s body, splayed on a white canopied bed, his mouth gagged and wrists lashed to bedposts with red velvet sheets.

  Stomach sinking, he turned his head to see Sophie perched on a stone altar table in the corner, the Storian paused over a blank page.

  “Well, Essa—if that is indeed your name—you’ve told me so many lies that listening to you, ‘girl to girl’ seems rather pointless, don’t you think? But let me tell you what I do know. You’re not a new student. You’re not a Never assassin. You’re not a Never at all. You and your ‘cousin’ are spies for Good, here to destroy my happy ending. Only you’re too late, Essa dear. Agatha and Tedros are long gone, as this blank page attests, and Rafal and I would be in the throes of a heavenly romantic evening if it wasn’t for you.”

  Tedros garbled urgently into his gag.

  “Still have something to say? Oh dear,” Sophie drawled, standing up. “Well, since the School Master and you are such bosom buddies, why don’t you just tell it to him.” She raised her fingerglow towards the window, about to shoot a flare into the sky—

  Sophie dropped her hand, eyes widening.

  On the bed, Essa’s long hair was lightening from black to gold.

  It shrank into her scalp, as her chin dimpled and her cheeks hardened, amber stubble stippling her jaw. Faster now, her legs and arms sprouted with fuzz, her feet ballooned two sizes and her shoulders and chest broadened, shredding her shirt seams. As the girl stranger writhed in pain, her calves chiseled, her biceps rippled, her forearms swelled, bursting the knots of her binds, until at last she tore away the gag with a virile roar, no longer a girl or stranger at all, but a prince in his body like a lion uncaged.