Tear You Apart (2 page)

“I’ll take my own car,” Viv said.

“Oh, please. What do you think—I’m going to run us off the road? I wouldn’t crash my car for a chance to break your arm. I’ll wait for your boyfriend to do that. Now let’s go. We’re late.”

You’re such a bitch
, Viv thought. She could have said it—had said it, plenty of times—but saying it would mean dragging out the conversation, and she didn’t want to hear anything else about Henley potentially breaking her arm, cheating on her, or killing her. Regina’s favorite topics.

So Viv popped her earbuds in and turned up the volume on her iPod until she could see Regina’s mouth moving but couldn’t hear her voice. She buckled her seat belt in case
Regina
did
run the car off the road, and let Curses & Kisses’ fiercest songs shield her from her stepmother’s commentary.

Viv’s friend Jewel, Curses’ lead singer, was singing one of her revenge songs. Viv tried to let the bass, the drumming, the screaming push all awareness of Regina from her mind. Tonight, elsewhere in Beau Rivage—in the city, not the green, suburban fringes where Viv lived—Jewel was probably getting ready to go to Stroke of Midnight, the city’s evil-fairy-owned nightclub. Wicked stepsisters were forcing their feet into shoes that didn’t fit. Villains were angsting; spurned princes plotted revenge. Princesses shook sand out of their bikinis; Match Girls starved in alleys. Wolves spied on girls in red hoodies, and hunters sharpened their knives.

That was Beau Rivage: grime and glitter, magic tucked into shadows and hidden in plain sight. Normal people went about their own dysfunctional lives while the Cursed ran the city, and the strangeness went largely unnoticed. People believed what they wanted to believe.

Once, cursed lives had been turned into fairy tales, repeated, recorded, and passed down. Now, most people thought of the curses as stories—just stories—and even the Cursed of Beau Rivage grew up reading about their destinies in books. There were no new curses anymore, just variations on the same classic roles. Sleeping Beauty’s spindle might be swapped out for an earring, Cinderella might ride to the ball in a limo instead of a carriage, but the heart of the curses never changed.

Somewhere, a frog was being kissed, a Rapunzel was detangling her floor-length hair, a thief was sniffing an enchanted rose. At the shore, a mermaid might be crawling out of the sea, her glistening body colored neon by the lights from
the casinos. Somewhere, someone’s dream was coming true. And someone’s was ending.…

Viv laid her hand on her arm, feeling how thin the bone got toward the wrist and how easy it would be to snap it. Even with the music filling her ears, the crack Regina had made about Henley breaking her arm was still bothering her. Henley had never physically hurt her … but Regina made her feel like it was imminent. Like she knew something Viv didn’t.

Viv was full of doubts. Regina was the one who was always sure.

Dark trees bordered the road leading to Seven Oaks. The whole stretch was woodsy and undeveloped, as if to distract from the highly tamed nature of the golf course, and all the poison the country club put into the earth to keep the grounds looking like an emerald paradise. Viv and her dad had argued about it when she was younger, when she first found out from Henley what kind of chemicals Henley’s dad’s landscaping company used. Back when her dad had been around to listen to her opinions.

“Don’t be mad at your dad,” Regina had told her. “You should be mad at Henley’s father—he’s the one putting that stuff in the ground.”

“It’s not his fault,” Viv had insisted, unwilling to be angry at Mr. Silva. That would have been like being angry at Henley, and back then her loyalties were with Henley, always. “It’s his job—Dad tells him to do it, so he has to.”

Regina had sucked the cherry out of her drink and said, “Interesting argument.”

Henley hadn’t been cursed then. He’d just been her best friend, her other half. But the conversation must have stayed
with Regina, because she brought it up from time to time to get at Viv. She’d say things like,
You shouldn’t fight with Henley. Even if he is going to kill you, it’s not his fault. It’s his job
.

Viv hated that Regina thought that was funny.

She hated most things about Regina.

Jewel’s revenge song ground to a halt, then blasted into an angry love song—and Viv heard a muffled explosion, a burst of noise that had never been part of the music. The car started swerving and Viv’s head jerked toward her stepmother, whose fingers were locked around the steering wheel. Her red mouth was open; her arms were rigid and the car was shuddering and thumping like they were driving over rocky ground. Viv braced herself, unsure whether Regina had done this on purpose, until the car came to a stop.

Viv ripped her headphones off. Her heart was pounding the way it did when she woke from a nightmare—still alive, two seconds from having her heart cut from her chest.

They got out of the car. Tire scraps littered the road behind them. Regina walked around back to survey the damage and Viv scanned the trees, nervous that she was being set up. There were no other cars on the road. The woods were a black tangle, perfect for hiding someone. Everything was dark, except for the car lights and the moon. Even though she couldn’t see anyone, she could imagine someone watching her. Someone who’d been waiting for just this moment.

While Regina lamented the state of her car, Viv dug through her purse for her phone and called Henley.

Henley, who still came to her aid.

Henley, the person she’d be most afraid to see walk out of the woods.

CHAPTER TWO

HENLEY
.

She’d known him forever.

He’d found her one day when she was lying in her glass-coffin pose in the woods—a decade ago, when they were both seven—and he’d seemed fascinated by her, as captivated as the animals were. She’d liked him because he liked her so much—it was hard not to like that—and because he knew the forest as well as she did, and never got tired of being there.

They’d spent their days running through the woods, battling imaginary monsters and hanging out in an abandoned cottage they’d found. It had been a hunting cabin once, and they’d cleaned it up, filled the cupboards with books and treasures, and turned it into their secret hideout. It was there that Viv had showed him her dead mother’s fairy-tale book, the pages of “Snow White” spotted with bloody fingerprints from the day her mother had cut her finger and wished for a daughter as black as ink, as white as paper, as red as blood.

And it was there that Viv had shared the rest of her secret.
There really is a monster after me, you know. The Huntsman. He’s supposed to cut my heart out
.

She’d showed him the märchen mark on her lower back: the pink, apple-shaped mark a fairy had put there as a sign of her Snow White curse. He’d recognized it instantly—she’d known he would; his bloodline had curses in it, too. Henley had made fists and sworn:
If anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll kill them. I don’t care who it is
.

He was so fierce about it that she’d believed him—messy hair, skinned knees, and all. He’d instantly shot up in her estimation, secure in his spot as her favorite person in the world.

Years had gone by. They’d moved from pretend games in the forest to kissing in that same abandoned cottage, letting the sun slide lower in the sky until at last it was time to go home. She’d fallen in love with him a little on the day he’d vowed to protect her, and as they grew older, that love had become more real. Now it lived in her mind like a story she’d read. The kind of fairy tale that kids saw on a movie screen, filled with hope and happy endings.

The kind of story she didn’t believe in anymore.

In Beau Rivage, fairy-tale curses were punishments, rites of passage bestowed by fairies who’d long ago decided that mixed blood was reason enough for a curse. Somewhere in Viv’s past, in Henley’s past, in Regina’s past, was an ancestor who’d been born from a human-fairy union. Once there was magic in your blood, it never left. And it left you wide open to fairy retaliation—or blessings. Gifts from kind fairies. Hardship from cruel ones.

Curses were often terrible, rarely wonderful. The Cursed were marked to be heroes or villains, to triumph or to lose … 
and while every person had choices to make, fate usually prevailed.

The day Henley turned sixteen, a fairy cursed him to be Snow White’s Huntsman. And everything had changed.

It wasn’t that he started acting differently. He cried when he told Viv, but aside from that he was the same. And yet the curse divided them. Because there was something inside him—there had to be—that had led a fairy to give him that curse.

Curses weren’t random. A girl who was cursed to be Beauty in a Beauty and the Beast curse was almost always compassionate, capable of looking past ugliness to find the good beneath. A boy who was cursed to be Red Riding Hood’s Wolf was usually predatory by nature.

A fairy must have noticed that Henley’s love for Viv was strong enough to turn into hate. That he had put her on a pedestal—and she could never live up to that ideal. He was destined to lose her to a prince but, as the Huntsman, he wouldn’t have to let her go. He could take her heart—physically take it—so that she could never leave.

That was the Huntsman’s role: One day Regina would order Henley to kill Viv. And he could do it—kill her, carve the heart from her chest, and bring it to Regina as proof—or he could spare her life, and lose her forever.

Viv didn’t know what Henley would choose. She didn’t know which loss he’d rather live with.

I would never hurt you
, he’d said,
never
—but was it true? Every promise became something she had to doubt, or she’d be that same naïve girl who’d fallen for Regina all those years ago. The one who’d loved wholeheartedly, trusted implicitly—and been betrayed.

CHAPTER THREE

VIV KEPT HER EYES on the woods while the phone trilled in her ear and she waited for Henley to pick up. Four rings, and then a girl answered.

“
Viv
,” the girl said—because of course her name had shown up on the screen. “I’ve heard of you.” She said it like it was a dirty secret, and Viv gritted her teeth and walked a few feet up the road for privacy. She had never answered Henley’s phone in all the years she’d known him, and she’d been his girlfriend.

“Where’s Henley?”

“He’s on the court. He’s busy.
Sorry
. Can I take a
message
?” The girl’s voice dripped with condescension.

Crowd sounds buzzed in the background. Music. Shouts. A basketball game. Probably at Fitcher Park. Viv closed her eyes and pictured the girl getting hit in the face by a basketball. Or maybe a brick.

“
No
,” Viv said with equal snottiness. “You can give him his phone. It’s an emergency.”

“Oh, okay,
Viv
. If it’s that
serious
.”

There was a sound like the girl was holding her hand over the mouthpiece, and then the phone shifted and Viv heard “No, they definitely broke up” before the girl started calling for Henley, in a voice that was significantly nicer than the one she’d just been using.

“Henley! Hey! Your friend Viv is on the phone. She says it’s an emergency.”

Viv could hear Henley’s friends making rude comments, and Henley telling them to shut up. They hated her because they thought she was a stuck-up Royal bitch. Well, she thought they were lowlifes, so the loathing was mutual.

When Henley picked up he sounded out of breath. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Just, we were on the way to my dad’s party and Regina’s tire blew out. Can you come here? Can you change the tire?”

“Viv … just call a tow truck. Or call your dad.”

“Please don’t leave me here with her.” She knew she sounded desperate. Her voice was taking on that whine she didn’t like. In the background, she heard a guy yelling, “Hang up!” And then some scuffling and laughter like someone was trying to wrestle the phone away.

Finally, Henley said, “Where are you? On the road to Seven Oaks?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”