Of Enemies and Endings by Shelby Bach

Author:Shelby Bach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

ry again,” I said, furious at her for giving up so quickly.

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I tried three times.”

“Maybe you aren’t kissing him right,” I said frantically. “Maybe you need to kiss him for longer.”

“I can’t do it,” Adelaide said through gritted teeth. “I can’t save him.”

Death isn’t the only way you can lose someone. The Director had slept for a century.

A hundred years. A hundred Chaseless years. Even if I did survive the summer, even if I joined the Canon and lived long enough to see him wake up, it would never be the same. I would have lived a whole lifetime without him, and we would be strangers to each other.

I could have survived him being with Adelaide. I might have endured us growing apart, but I couldn’t imagine him never teasing me again, never bossing me around, never telling me that I was better than I thought I was.

It wasn’t like after losing Hansel. I didn’t scream or sob, but tears cascaded down my face. I felt them drip off my chin, and when I tried to blink them back, they just fell faster.

Lena gave me a tiny, kind smile. “Rory, we’ll get him back. You’re just going to have to kiss him, that’s all.”

I snorted—always a messy, snotty mistake when you’re in the middle of crying. “And are you going to give it a try if that doesn’t work?” We could create a portal in this room and march every single girl Character in here to attempt a kiss. It still wouldn’t matter. I knew how this Tale worked—the girl who could wake up Chase might not have even been born yet.

“Are you serious?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Adelaide balk. I guess she’d seen my face. Ugh. The only thing worse than having a breakdown was doing it in front of her.

“Rory, sometimes, a kiss is just a kiss,” Lena said. “Adelaide’s kiss didn’t mean anything. They’ve probably kissed tons of times.”

I stared at her. That wasn’t making me feel any better.

“It wasn’t that many times,” Adelaide mumbled, which actually did cheer me up a little.

Lena spoke slowly and calmly, like she always does when she doesn’t want me to freak out. “It would be different if you kissed him.” Her voice became tinny. She was reciting something. “ ‘A first kiss has its own magic. It is as powerful a change as the transformation into a sorcerer. Before a first kiss, a relationship was one thing. Afterward, it is irrevocably changed.’ ”

“Don’t you want to kiss him?” Adelaide asked bitterly.

That was a good question. It was easy to want to see my family and friends safely through the summer. It was easy to want to defeat the Snow Queen. It was only a tiny bit harder to want to live long enough to go to high school.

But with Chase . . .

I wanted to rewind our lives to the way things used to be between us, like I had pretended all summer.

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