Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sasha had made a terrible mistake.
She realized that now.
Which one? She didn’t know.
But a mistake was made.
Somewhere along the line.
She once more became aware of herself, sitting on the marble floor of the library.
Not standing. Not sitting in a chair by the fire with a blanket around her shoulders. Not even sprawled on her back staring at a ceiling, which had happened more times now than she cared to count.
No.
She was on the floor. Sitting. Knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins, forehead pressed to her kneecaps.
She was shaking.
It wasn't the violent, adrenaline-fueled trembling she'd had after seeing the crocodile.
It wasn't the gasping, hyperventilating mess she'd been after watching the Lost Boys die.
It wasn't even the numb, hollowed-out vacancy she'd felt after Vile had taken a meat cleaver to her wrists in the kitchen of Regency romance Manor.
This was different.
This was quiet.
This was the kind of shaking that came from somewhere so deep inside a person that it didn't have a name. The kind that lived underneath the muscles and the bones and the blood, somewhere in whatever it was that made a person themselves. Her soul, maybe. If she had one.
The jury was apparently still out on that.
She just sat there and breathed, and tried to remember how to do that without thinking about it, because every time she thought about breathing, she thought about other things, and every time she thought about other things—
Don't.
The marble was cold. It seeped through the fabric of the clothes she was still wearing from her day at work. Her clothes. Not whatever character she'd been playing—the witch, or the King of Hearts, or the housekeeper before that. Or when she was Irene Adler. Or Mr. Smee.
She was herself. She couldn’t smell anything of the cottage. None of the herbs. None of it was real.
But it had felt so real.
Did any of it—
Did any of it matter, really, in the end?
She squeezed her eyes shut tighter.
Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about—
“Sasha.” Virtue's voice. Gentle. Close, but not too close. He knew better than to crowd her. He was learning. They were all learning, she supposed. “Sasha, you're back. You're safe.”
Safe. What an absurd word that had become. What did safe even mean anymore? Safe from what? From whom? She was trapped in a dimension of fiction with two demigods—one who wanted to protect her and couldn't, and one who could do anything he wanted to her and did.
Safe was a children's word. A word that belonged in stories that didn't have Vile in them.
She didn't answer Virtue. She didn't lift her head.
“Hey, Sash.” That was Sidney. Closer than Virtue. Her twin's voice was raw and hoarse. Clearly, she'd been crying recently, or screaming, or both. Sidney crouched down next to her, and Sasha felt her sister's hand settle lightly on her back. “Hey. I'm right here. I'm right here, okay?”
Sasha didn’t respond.
“Hey um…I think there’s someone here who wants to see you.”
Something moved against her stomach underneath the dress.
Two somethings.
For one horrible, lurching second, she thought it was the tendrils again—those drawn-on, inky black things that Vile used to restrain her, to hold her down, to—
But it wasn't. The movement was small and frantic. Not warm and slippery like those things. Whatever was under her dress was alive, and squirming, and desperate to get out.
Well. Alive to a certain degree, anyway.
A tiny head poked out from the neckline of her shirt, right under her chin. If she hadn’t known what they were, it would have been the most horrifying thing she’d ever seen. As it was, she felt so much relief it was almost ludicrous.
A taxidermy alligator head with big black buttons for eyes that were, now that she really looked at them, mismatched. And a little too big for its face.
Dundle. He let out a quiet “ssckktch?” The poor little thing was actually concerned about her. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.
“Hey…” She she sniffled. “C’mon, get out from there, you silly thing.” Reaching into her shirt, she did her best to try to scoop him out, but he simply ducked his head back down into her shirt and rustled around to try to hide from her. “Oh, you little shit—”
Something equally sized, and with equally pointy claws, clambered up her back and perched up on her shoulder. Lundle. She shot him a look. “Can you reason with your brother?”
Lundle just looked at her blankly for a moment before diving down the front of her shirt. She winced in pain as what followed was a flurry of tiny claws and whip-like tails, before the two taxidermy lizard monsters wound up in a heap in her lap.
She stared down at them, uncomprehending, her mind still trying to catch up with what she was seeing.
Sidney let out a rush of air. “Oh thank fuck. I’m so glad they made it.
They came running up to me, in all the chaos, and I shoved them up under my dress, and I was hoping they’d make it, but I didn’t know, and—when you were---when we were—” She couldn't finish the sentence.
“I didn't know if they'd survive the transition.”
The two tiny creatures were now climbing up Sasha's arms with a feverish urgency that had nothing to do with escape and everything to do with getting closer to her. They were shaking.
They were scared.
Something cracked inside her. Not in the way things had been cracking inside her for—however long they'd been trapped here. Not the breaking kind of crack. The other kind.
The kind where light got in.
She uncurled her arms from around her knees and gathered them both against her chest.
“It’s okay…it’s all okay. I’m here. Hi,” she whispered. Her voice cracked and sounded like it belonged to someone much older and much more exhausted. “Hi, little guys.”
She held them closer. They settled against her, their trembling beginning to slow as they huddled in the warmth of her arms. Something about the simplicity of holding two small, frightened creatures who needed her—who were looking to her for comfort—cut through the noise in her head in a way that nothing else had.
It didn't fix anything. It didn't erase what had happened. But it gave her something to do with her hands besides grip her own hair and something to think about besides the sound of a cleaver hitting a butcher's block.
Or the crackle of her own flesh as it burned.
Sidney sat down on the floor next to her, hip to hip, and rested her head against Sasha's shoulder. They stayed like that for a while. How long, she couldn't say. Time in the library was a suggestion at best.
Virtue stood a respectful distance away, his arms folded loosely, watching them with the kind of quiet empathy that was his entire reason for existing. He looked tired. Could he get tired? She supposed even the concept of heroism had to get worn down eventually.
It was the absence that she noticed next.
Or rather…the absence of commentary.
Vile was there.
But he wasn’t speaking. He was always there.
It was his library, after all. But he was wrong. Or rather, more wrong than usual.
He was at the far end of the aisle, leaning against the end-cap of a bookshelf with his back partially turned to all of them.
His arms were folded tight across his chest, and his jaw was set in a way that made the muscles in his cheek twitch.
He wasn't looking at any of them. He was glaring at a stained-glass window depicting the Phantom of the Opera as though the Phantom had personally insulted his mother.
If he had a mother. Which he didn't. Because he was a fictional construct who existed to make people suffer.
The darkness at the edges of his form was doing that thing it did when he was angry—leaking, seeping into the shadows around him like oil on water.
But it was restrained. Pulled tight. He was keeping it in check, but barely.
Like a man gripping a dog's leash while the animal strained and snarled at the end of it.
He hadn't said a word.
And that…wasn’t like him at all.
That was the part that unnerved her the most. Vile always had something to say. He was pathologically incapable of not having the last word, the snide remark, the theatrical monologue. His silence was louder than any of his tantrums.
“Sash.” Sidney lifted her head from her sister's shoulder. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. The anger was back—the thing Sidney used to coat over her fear like armor. "I know you just went through hell. I know. And I'm not going to push you. But we have to talk about what comes next."
Right. The game. The stories. The deaths.
And the other thing.
The thing they couldn’t—
"The score," Sasha said flatly. It wasn't really a question.
"The score." Sidney's mouth pressed into a thin line. "You're at two deaths. I'm still at one.” She swallowed.
The words landed like stones dropped into still water.
Two. She was at two.
Peter Pan was declared a wash because only Hook had died.
Sherlock was struck from the board because it was a tie and Vile had declared it a waste of time.
She'd died in the regency when Vile had taken her apart in the kitchen because the “stakes had to be different in the second book than the first one.”
One for Sidney at the end of Wonderland. And now two for Sasha at the end of High Fantasy.
Three deaths, and you were gone forever.
Sasha was one death away from losing.
The two small creatures in her arms seemed to sense the shift in the air. Dundle—or Lundle—let out a tiny, anxious “schrsrh” and pressed closer to her.
“We need to figure out the next story,” Sidney said carefully, watching Sasha's face. “Something safe. Something where we can control what happens and make sure nobody—”
“I’m not picking a story.”
The words came out of her before she'd really decided to say them. Flat. Quiet. Final.
Sidney blinked. “What?”