Tempt the Stars

Helping him.”
    Unsurprisingly, it didn’t look like he bought it, although the Valkyrie did lower her wand thing. I still didn’t get a good look at it; it disappeared inside her coat faster than a cell phone in the hand of a teenager. Which didn’t make me feel better, since she could obviously take it out again just as quick.
    Caleb, on the other hand, looked visibly relieved.
    At least until the little witch came back over, looking like she was spoiling for a fight. But despite the wall incident, he wasn’t the target. “Jonas Marsden! Just the man.”
    “Beatrice,” he said, sighing.
    “I want to know what you think you’re doing, letting this girl go untrained!”
    “We
are
training her,” Jonas said patiently. “But there are priorities—”
    “Priorities? Like allowing her to go about completely defenseless?”
    “She is hardly that. She has guards, as you can see. And wards. And normally a trusted member of my force is assigned to her, as well—”
    “None of which kept us from breaking in here—”
    “Yes, well, your skill set is somewhat greater than the norm—”
    “—or taking the lobby apart! Where the girl was messing about, completely alone, and completely defenseless—”
    “She isn’t as defenseless as she appears, as I believe you discovered. And in any case, what would you have me do? Lock her up?”
    “I would have you show some sense! You should have called us in, long before this. Old rivalries are well
    and good, but when lives are on the line—”
    “You think I would deliberately endanger—”
    “I think you
have
endangered—”
    I stopped listening. I wasn’t interested in hearing a bunch of people debate my education or lack thereof. Again. I wasn’t interested in hearing them talk at all.
    I was interested in Jules.
    “Can you remove the hex or not?” I demanded.
    The little witch had been glaring at Jonas. Now she turned the glare on me. For a second, before her eyes softened. “Yes, yes. Well, probably,” she hedged. “But it’s hardly worth the effort—”
    “Not worth the effort?” I stared at her.
    The room grew suddenly quiet.
    “She didn’t mean it like that,” Jasmine said, looking at me with pity in her beautiful eyes.
    “Then how exactly did she mean it?”
    “You must understand, the spell has already done most of the damage that it was designed to do. Removing it now will prevent more, yes, but . . ”
    “But
what
?”
    “But it cannot reverse that which has already been done,” she told me softly. “I am sorry, lady. I do not know of anything that can.”

Chapter Twenty-five
    I don’t know what happened then. I wasn’t hearing them anymore. I was hearing Jules.
I took care of you. Take care of me.
    I knelt on the floor beside him.
    The face was bad, but the body wasn’t any better. He had been wearing a nice blue cotton button-down, starched and preppy like the man himself. Now it was almost like it was wearing him, with the fabric all tangled up in the too-smooth skin of his chest. It was as if his body had folded over on itself, like dough in a mixer, and taken pieces of the cotton with it. The area on his shoulders was still mostly intact, mostly normal. But the hands . . 
    His beautiful hands were all but gone, just two lumps poking up from what had been his stomach, with a few ridges where knuckles had once been. I covered them with my own anyway. Somehow I didn’t mind anymore, didn’t find them alien or horrifying or gross. They were just part of him, part of Jules. That was enough.
    I closed my eyes, mainly to shut out the ring of staring faces. And as soon as I did, that feeling of connection strengthened. Maybe it was just my imagination working overtime, but I could swear I felt it: his anger, his confusion, his almost desperate desire to move, to gasp for air he didn’t need, to
see
—
    But mostly, I felt his fear.
    It was cold, overwhelming, debilitating, almost as much as what was happening to his body. The spell was cruel; it didn’t bother to trap the mind. Maybe Augustine hadn’t thought it necessary. After all, a human or fey would be dead by now.
    But Jules was neither of those things.
    And so he was left to drive himself mad on an endless loop of speculation: what if there was no way to reverse this? What if he was trapped like this forever? Hope gone, looks gone, just this piteous and pitied thing, unable to move, to speak, to do anything but scream into a darkness that would never end,