“What is it?” I asked wildly. My stomach rioted with fear, with regret, with treacherous, treasonous resolve. I did not let go. “What’ve you done?”

“I thought your blood would just subdue her—” Beau’s frantic voice echoed my own. He watched in horror as Lou’s back bowed, as she finally slumped in our arms.

Coco stepped back, eyes blazing with satisfaction. “The blood of an enemy poisons.”

The blood of an enemy poisons.

Nonsensical words. Ludicrous ones. And yet . . .

Realization began to take shape in my gut, even as my mind still protested.

Beau shook Lou with rising hysteria, his breath labored. His face red. “What the fuck does that mean?” He shook her harder. “Is she—have we just—?” But Coco only grasped Lou’s chin in answer, forcing open one fluttering eyelid. She isn’t dead. I repeated the words, trying to calm the thunderous beat of my heart. To ignore my mounting apprehension. She isn’t dead. She isn’t dead. She isn’t dead. She’s just—

“You said something was clearly wrong with her.” Coco retrieved her locket from where it’d fallen to the ground. Lou twitched in response. “You said it went beyond grief.”

“That doesn’t mean we poison her,” Beau said incredulously. “She’s still Lou. She’s still my sister.”

“No.” Coco shook her head with vehemence. “She isn’t.”

Lifting the mirror in the locket to Lou, she revealed the stark truth at last: I held long black hair in my hand, not white. The waist I clasped wasn’t right either. Though I couldn’t feel her bones beneath my fingers, I could see each rib in her reflection. Her skin appeared sickly. Alabaster pale. Not the smooth and freckled gold I loved. And scarred—so very scarred.

My pulse slowed to a dull, steady rhythm as I took in the truth. A poison all its own. I felt its cold touch in my chest, felt it crystallize around my heart. When it crept down my spine, my legs—debilitating me—my knees gave out, and I crumpled, dragging Lou’s body down with me. I stared at her slack face in my lap. Those dark circles beneath her eyes had deepened since yesterday. Her cheeks had grown sharper. She’d been fighting an altogether different poison. A disease.

Nicholina le Clair.

Fire burst through the ice like lava, melting everything in its path. My hands shook. My chest heaved. “Get her out,” I snarled.

No Rose Without a Thorn

Reid

Coco crossed to the door swiftly in answer, throwing it open, allowing sun to stream into the dilapidated room. But the sun—it did little to banish the shadows now. Instead, it refracted rainbows of light across broken mirrors, and those broken mirrors . . . they didn’t work right either. They reflected Lou back to me.

This wasn’t Lou.