I pushed off from the table—and dive-tackled Wes. He slammed to the floor under me while chants of “Fight!” chorused from the crowd gathering around us.

“People really do that?” Wes grunted, his hand shoving my face back.

“Apparently,” I growled, elbowing him in the nose.

“Kind of sad, really,” he snarled, flipping me scary-easily onto my back before delivering a second punch—one that caused my lip to split. “Like getting your ass kicked twice in as many days.”

I latched on to his shirt, and gritting my teeth, I rolled us. Getting him under me, I slammed him down amid rising cries and screams—causing his head to bang the linoleum.

“Ouch,” grunted Wes through a cringe. “That tickles.”

Inserting a knee between us, he kicked me off, and I went pedaling backward before sprawling flat.

We both hopped to our feet, blood running from his nose and my lip. But then Patrick appeared over Wes’s shoulder, both hands catching Wes’s coiled arm. Wes didn’t pull or lower the punch though. Not until, with a blur of blonde, Charlotte came flying between us.

Immediately, Wes lowered his fists, no longer bothering to try to fend off Patrick, whose pull he began to follow instead.

“What’s wrong with you?” she screeched at Wes, almost making me feel bad for the guy. And maybe I would have. If our fight had turned out to be as fake as he’d said it was going to be.

Charlotte had enough time to turn around and gape at me before Mr. Corey, the lunchroom monitor, grabbed me, yanking me back from Wes.

Charlotte’s expression, tortured as it was, made me hope Wes would turn out to be right about one thing at least.

That our fight, fake or not, really would buy Charlotte’s silence.

For at least one more day.

SIXTY-NINE

Stephanie

I didn’t see him the rest of the night or, so far, this morning either. He’d not been back since the rain had started.

After last night, after the fading of the strange phenomenon and the dissipation of the snow, I hadn’t encountered a single one of his masks. Just like him . . . they’d all vanished.

While I couldn’t say where the masks had gone, I sensed that he—Erik—had gone to the other Moldavia. And that he’d done so because he wanted to be away from me.

After I had implanted that heart inside of him, an odd change had taken place inside of me, too. I didn’t just think he’d gone to the other Moldavia—I knew it. Because now, I carried within me an internal signature of him, a strange buzzing awareness of his presence and, more loosely, his whereabouts.

Something had happened between us—to us—in the conservatory.

But the rose couldn’t have brought about the change. Not on its own.

Something else had occurred. Something I couldn’t make sense of. But then, the clarity that I was missing would only come to me when he did.