The School for Good and Evil #2: A World without Princes Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ll be fine,” Sophie said. “The witch won’t come back, Aggie. Not as long as we’re friends.”
    Her voice was more naked than Agatha had ever heard it. Agatha looked up, surprised.
    â€œYou make me happy, Agatha,” said Sophie. “It just took me too long to see it.”
    Agatha tried to hold her gaze, but all she could see was the saint above the altar, hand lunging towards her, like a prince reaching for his princess.
    â€œYou’ll see. We’ll come up with a plan, like always,” Sophie said, reapplying pink lipstick between yawns. “But maybe a little beauty nap first . . .”
    As she curled up on the pew like a cat, pillow to her stomach, Agatha saw it was her friend’s favorite, stitched with a blond princess and her prince, embraced beneath the words “Ever After.” But Sophie had revised the prince with her sewing kit. Now he had boxy dark hair, goonish bug eyes . . .
    And a black dress.
    Agatha watched her best friend fall into sleep a few breaths later, free from nightmares for the first time in weeks.
    As the chants outside the church grew louder—“Send her back! Send her back!”—Agatha stared at Sophie’s pillow, and her stomach wrenched with that sick feeling.
    The same feeling she felt looking at the storybook prince in her kitchen. The same feeling she felt watching a man and wife exchange vows. The same feeling she felt as she held Sophie’s hand, growing stronger, stronger, until her finger had glowed with a secret. A secret so terrible, so unforgivable, that she’d ruined a fairy tale.
    For in that single moment, watching the wedding she’d never have, Agatha had wished for something she never thought possible.
    She wished for a different ending to her story.
    An ending with someone else.
    That’s when the arrows came for Sophie.
    The arrows that wouldn’t stop, no matter how much she tried to take her wish back.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
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Breadcrumbs
    T hat night they flattened Radley’s house first with a boulder lobbed over the trees, then the crooked clock tower, which tolled broken moans as screaming villagers fled through the square. Soon whole lanes went up in splinters as parents clung to their children in wells and ditches, watching rocks fly across the moon like meteors. When the blitz ended at four in the morning, only half the town remained. The trembling villagers looked out at the theater, illuminated in the distance, the lights on its red curtain rearranged:
    S OPHIE OR D IE .

    While Sophie slept calmly through all this, Agatha sat trapped in the church, listening to the screams and thumps. Give them Sophie, and her best friend would die. Don’t give them Sophie, and her whole town would die. Shame burnt her throat. Somehow she’d reopened the gates between the worlds. But to who? Who wanted Sophie dead?
    There had to be a way to fix this. If she’d reopened the gates, surely she could close them!
    First she tried to make her finger glow again, focusing on her anger until her cheeks puffed—anger at the assassins, anger at herself, anger at her stupid, unlit finger that looked even paler than before. Then she tried doing spells anyway to repel the raiders, which went about as well as expected. She tried praying to stained glass saints, wishing on a star, rubbing every lamp in the church for a genie, and when it all failed miserably, she pried Sophie’s pink lipstick from her fist and scratched “TAKE ME INSTEAD” on the dawnlit window. To her surprise, she got an answer.
    â€œNO,” flames spelled across the forest fringe.
    For a moment, through trees, Agatha glimpsed a glint of red. Then it was gone.
    â€œWHO ARE YOU?” she wrote.
    â€œâ€œGIVE US SOPHIE,” the flames answered.
    â€œSHOW YOURSELF,” she