Bookish and the Beast

I am Vance Reigns.

Black SUVs and news vans have pulled up in front of the house, people piling out of them with cameras with long lenses and camcorders on their shoulders and microphones in their hands. News anchors and paparazzi and journalists and people streaming video on their phones. There aren’t very many—at least not as many as I would usually attract if I was in my natural habitat of LA, but enough for me to remember who I am.

I jerk away from the peephole and press my back against the door to bar it from the vampires outside. Elias stands just behind me, the color slowly draining from his face. His phone begins to ring. “It’s your stepfather,” he says numbly, before it goes to voice mail.

Mine follows a moment after, and I read the caller ID. GREGORY.

My stepfather.

So, here we are.

Elias gets another call—my mother this time—and sends it to voice mail, too. He stares at his screen for a long moment. The doorbell rings again.

I tighten my grip on the doorknob. “How do they know about Rosie?” I ask, my voice shaking.

“Well…because of this,” he replies, and shows me an article on TMZ. An article with a video attached. It plays automatically, a shaky phone video of a dark house, but as soon as it turns the corner into a dark room, I recognize the bare bones of the library. Rosie’s hand slowly reaching for The Starless Throne, not yet water damaged. The rest I don’t have to see. I know what happens.

She goes onto the back patio. I ask, “What are you doing here?”

And she screams and falls backward into the pool.

I close my eyes, gritting my teeth so hard my jaw begins to ache—

“Vance, you can’t honestly think that she’d do this,” Elias says patiently.

“Didn’t she?” I force out, because the truth is right there on the internet. And then, quieter, “I guess I deserve this.”

For a moment I didn’t hate being Vance, being me, because for once I was a person to someone, and not Vance Reigns. He isn’t a person. He’s a character. He’s a vehicle other people can live vicariously through. For other people to pretend to be close to. To pretend to know. Pretend to love.

I should have known better.

The paparazzi on the front lawn remind me. That even in this house, far away from the life that I knew, I’m still Vance Reigns, and I’m still fodder for everyone else’s lives. A moment, and then discarded. It’s either use or be used, and I was used so bloody badly.

I was a fool.

“Vance, what are you doing?” Elias asks.

What I should’ve done at the beginning. I wrap my fingers around the doorknob and wrench it open, and the bright flashes of camera lights are blinding. They remind me of the flash of paparazzi the night outside the wrap party for Starfield: Resonance. Of the night that my mask slipped for a moment, and I actually decided to care about any of this. If only I’d never agreed to take Elle home, then none of this would’ve happened.

I always knew how to disappoint people.

Why would disappointing myself be any different?

When people assumed that my actions broke Darien and Elle up, I didn’t bat an eye. If the world needed a villain, I’d play it. I was already good at it. I would get even more attention, more press.

I wonder how much TMZ paid her. I wonder how much other tabloids are clamoring for our text messages, our call histories, our stories. I told her so much—too much. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

I should’ve played my part.

The moment I open the front door, the vultures rush toward me like hungry vampires, waiting for me to welcome them inside.

“Vance! Is it true that—”

“Did you really coerce—”

“Is it true that you made a girl—”

“Is this Rosie Thorne working for you?”

And then another voice cuts through the cacophony of questions. “Vance!”

I raise my gaze toward the crowd, the flashing cameras and bulbous lenses, to the girl pushing her way through the crowd. She gets elbowed by a paparazzo and shoves them back with equal vigor.

“Vance!”

She catches my gaze, and her face breaks open with relief. But only for a moment—a breath—before it fills with dread. Because she must see it now, the mask. The one I’ve worn for so long it’s become the face everyone sees.

I’m no one I recognize, and for a few weeks, that was nice.

Her lips move in a question. “Vance?” I can’t hear her anymore over the other questions, the people vying for my attention, and when I blink she’s just another face in the crowd.

That’s all she should’ve been to begin with.

I take one look at them, the briefest glance, before I say, “Piss off,” and slam the door in their faces.

PART FOUR

HERO

Her name is Amara Avanrose, and she is the princess of the Noxian Empire. She has lived through the Starless Wars, the coups to overthrow her father from his throne, the brief tète-à-tètes with Prince Carmindor. She has survived ship scrimmages, assassination plots, imploding stars.

But she isn’t sure she is going to survive this.

He wraps his arms around her legs and presses his face into her middle. “I must not lose you. I cannot. It will tear me asunder, ah’blena.”

“It will not,” she replies, cupping Ambrose’s face in her hands. He turns his gaze up to her, and she memorizes the cut of his cheekbones, the glow of his white-blond hair, the way he looks at her with those eyes, so sky-blue they make her want to fly.

“I have made so many mistakes,” he whispers, closing his eyes. “Oh, Sol curse me, conscript me, make me forget.”

“Then you’ll forget me, too.” She runs her thumb across his cheek. “Sometimes the universe deals us fates that make us happy, but sometimes it simply deals us fates that make us. I love you, Ambrose, but you need to love yourself first.”

Then she lets go of his face and steps out of his embrace, and even though she knows he wants to hold on, he lets her slide out of his arms, and then she turns away from him, and leaves him kneeling in the empty room of the Starless Throne.

I DIDN’T DO IT.

I keep mouthing those words as I stare up at the poster of General Sond on my bedroom ceiling. I didn’t do it. I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter, because he thinks I did leak the video. He thinks I’m that kind of person—the nerve of him! It’s almost enough for me to hate him. Him, and this stupid sleepy town, and Homecoming—I hate all of it. I don’t see why it even matters. Why any of it matters.

I don’t know what I’m hoping for—that Vance appears at my door? That he smiles at me with that kind of smile he keeps tucked away so no one can see, and tells me what the hell happened? That yesterday was just a terrible fever dream and that he knows I didn’t do it, that we’ll figure it out? Or did he close the door because it was the other way around—that now that someone shined a light on his little vacation here in nowhere, he wants nothing to do with me?

Was that all I was—just a vacation? That’s depressing. And sad. And it makes me feel so terribly small.

I roll over in bed when I hear my phone buzz, and I check it even though I know who it’s going to be. Today is the day of the Homecoming Dance, after all.

  ANNIE (2:13 PM)

—hey, talk to us?

QUINN (2:15 PM)

—Please?

I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to admit that I was a fool, and that I screwed up. That when he looked at me in the sea of paparazzi, the Vance I had come to know—the one who kissed me in the library, who drove me home and let me read to him all my favorite passages and called me weird with that secret sort of smile—that Vance disappeared in the blink of an eye, and the one I had met at the beginning comes back, his lips set into a thin line, his blue eyes distant, his face impassive—like a curse returning.

He looked at me like he didn’t even know me.

And that hurt the most.

I know I’m fooling myself, but for a moment it felt like I was living some unimaginable story, some impossible fairy tale. It was kind of impossible, wasn’t it? A girl from the middle of nowhere meeting the guy she fell in love with at a comic-con, only to find out that he was a jerk of an actor, and yet…

And yet.

Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Though even as I tell myself that, it feels like a part of me has broken.

I can never sit on the barstool in the kitchen again as Elias cooks dinner. I can never walk into the library again. I can never run my fingers along the aged spines of hundreds of books. I can never look up the expanse of stairs to the second floor. I can never see Vance at the top of them again. I can never pet Sansa again. I can never read The Starless Throne while lounging on a pool chair in the backyard, or read it to him, or have him read Sond’s lines in that distinctly silky voice.

I can never, never, never again.

One moment it was all there, at the tip of my fingertips, part of my life in a way nothing has ever been before, and the next—gone.

All of it, gone.

I hug my pillow to my chest and try to keep the well of sadness inside me, but I can’t. This doesn’t hurt as much as losing Mom. Nothing will ever hurt that much, but it hurts all the same. Tears spill down my cheeks, and I bury my head into my pillow.