Iâll be fine,â Sophie said. âThe witch wonât come back, Aggie. Not as long as weâre friends.â
Her voice was more naked than Agatha had ever heard it. Agatha looked up, surprised.
âYou make me happy, Agatha,â said Sophie. âIt just took me too long to see it.â
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.
âYouâll see. Weâll come up with a plan, like always,â Sophie said, reapplying pink lipstick between yawns. âBut maybe a little beauty nap first . . .â
As she curled up on the pew like a cat, pillow to her stomach, Agatha saw it was her friendâs favorite, stitched with a blond princess and her prince, embraced beneath the words âEver After.â 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 louderââSend her back! Send her back!ââAgatha stared at Sophieâs 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 Sophieâs hand, growing stronger, stronger, until her finger had glowed with a secret. A secret so terrible, so unforgivable, that sheâd ruined a fairy tale.
For in that single moment, watching the wedding sheâd 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.
Thatâs when the arrows came for Sophie.
The arrows that wouldnât stop, no matter how much she tried to take her wish back.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOFâNOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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3
Breadcrumbs
T hat night they flattened Radleyâs 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. Donât give them Sophie, and her whole town would die. Shame burnt her throat. Somehow sheâd reopened the gates between the worlds. But to who? Who wanted Sophie dead?
There had to be a way to fix this. If sheâd reopened the gates, surely she could close them!
First she tried to make her finger glow again, focusing on her anger until her cheeks puffedâanger 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 Sophieâs pink lipstick from her fist and scratched âTAKE ME INSTEADâ on the dawnlit window. To her surprise, she got an answer.
âNO,â flames spelled across the forest fringe.
For a moment, through trees, Agatha glimpsed a glint of red. Then it was gone.
âWHO ARE YOU?â she wrote.
ââGIVE US SOPHIE,â the flames answered.
âSHOW YOURSELF,â she