Page 78 of Devoured

But I feel that golden essence, and I know I need to do something to it. I need to change it somehow.

Rewrite her past. Change her history.

The instructions are simple. So simple. I just need to pluck another string, play another note.

“Vanessa—don’t hurt her.” Someone touches me. Someone tries to shake me. “Vanessa, let her go.” Claws pierce flesh, but I don’t feel pain. There is too much gold. It winds around my fingers, through my hair, between my ribs.

“Change something small, remember?” the voice whispers. “Pick something inconsequential. Don’t hurt her.”

Something small.

Heat surges through the gold. All that love shouldn’t be erased or replaced. Those memories are too pure. Too valuable. I need something else.

“I hate my curls.”

The golden touch of a brother as he runs his fingers through her natural curls. As he weaves flowers through them, carefully and lovingly, for hours. The gold of laughter as they share jokes in the quiet. As he tells her that one day, her hair will be even longer than his. But she had to cut hers before she came to the castle, had to cut it for combat, and she will always remember how his looked. In that final moment, when he collapsed on the blood-soaked field, even then his curls were beautiful. Long and glorious and everything. He meant everything to her.

She had to cut hers.

“Please. Please.” That voice cracks, but it doesn’t matter anymore. “Don’t hurt her.”

Sunlight ribbons dance over my palm, and I know exactly which one to pluck. I know exactly what truth to undo to heal her. It’s obvious, burning brighter and brighter in my grasp, and so I take it between my fingers. I pull until that one golden thread unravels from the rest.

I can’t bring him back. I can’t heal her brother or cure him. But I can give her this. I can make her happy, and hopefully—it will be enough.

“Vanessa!” A booming voice like thunder. A painful crack across my cheek. “Wake. Up!”

My eyelids flutter. I blink—and Portia sits in front of me.

Portia.

She is Portia, and I am Vanessa, and I just… I just changed her. Oh god. Nausea curls in my stomach, rising in slow, treacherous waves as pain ruptures through my skull. The world threatens to shatter with my vision. Oh god oh god oh god. What did I do? What have I done? I scramble onto my knees, ignoring the sting in my ankles, and reach for her. But Portia doesn’t vanish.

She doesn’t disappear.

Instead, before my eyes, her curls begin to grow. The same color as her brother’s. The same texture. Only now, they lengthen all the way to her waist. She glances at me without seeming to realize, then at Evie beside us, whose claws drip with my blood. I distantly realize she scraped my arm. I realize she slapped me too. But I don’t care, because Portia is alive. I didn’t hurt her.

Portia smiles with that same sunshine warmth that I just held in my hands, and I’m so relieved I could vomit.

“What happened?” She bounces on her knees, excited. “Did anything change?”

Unfortunately, I can’t answer her. Because at that moment, I do vomit, and the pain in my skull—it implodes.

There is a Before and an After with my powers, and it seems I am doomed to remember them both.

When I look at Portia now, I see both the current version of her that exists—long hair to her waist, a beautifully bright smile—and the version of her that existed before she lied. No one else, however, remembers that past version. It’s as if she’s always been this way.

Evie has returned to the vanity—after she and Portia forced me to swallow an elixir to ease my pain—only now, she doesn’t sit still at all. She tears at a handful of flowers, and her legs jog anxiously under the table. “So what are the rules? I mean, there has to be rules, right? You erased the bishop’s birth, but you didn’t outright murder him. You didn’t bring Portia’s brother back from the dead. Do you think you could, though? Could you just… reverse what happened during the massacre?”

“No one has ever been able to bring anyone back from the dead,” Portia says. “Or make someone fall in love with them. Those are the hard rules of magic. Everyone knows that.”

“Vanessa just changed the length of your hair,” Evie snaps, “and neither of us remembers it.”

“Those gifted powers by the Chamaeleon constellation can alter their appearance too. It’s impressive, sure, but it’s not new. No offense, Vanessa. I’m certain you did a lovely job on my hair.”

“None taken.”

“She erased the bishop from existence.” Evie glances at me, and a violent sort of hope burns in her gaze. “Can you erase the massacre too?”