Chapter 15 #2
"I'm not picking." Sasha held the two creatures a little closer and stared at the checkered marble floor between her feet. “I refuse. I'm done.”
Virtue took a breath as if to speak, then stopped. His expression was pained.
Sidney opened her mouth, shut it, opened it again. “Sash, you can't just…”
A sharp, barking laugh from the far end of the aisle cut through the space like a blade.
Vile turned from the stained-glass window, and the look on his face was something between contempt and exhaustion.
The shadows at his edges rippled and pulled tighter, coiling against his form like hackles.
“Oh, that's rich. That is truly magnificent.” He pushed away from the bookshelf and began stalking toward them, his footsteps loud and deliberate on the marble.
“She refuses. She refuses! As though this were some academic debate she can simply walk away from!”
He stopped some ten feet away, his purple eyes bright with an anger that seemed to be directed at everything and nothing simultaneously.
“That's all very well and good, Sasha darling. Truly. Take all the time you like. Wander the stacks. Sulk in the aisles. Curl up on the floor with your little stowaways and have yourself a lovely cry.” His lip curled.
“But you will pick a story. Eventually. Because the game must continue. That is not a request. It is not a negotiation. It is a fundamental law of this place, as immutable as gravity in yours.”
“Why?” It was a simple question.
“Because I said so.” He leaned forward slightly, lowering his voice.
"You are one death away from losing. One. Your sister has two left. So I would suggest, if whatever remains of that clever mind of yours is still functioning, that you pick wisely. Because if you force my hand by refusing to play, I promise you, what I choose will make Wonderland look like a bloody fucking holiday.”
The library seemed to darken around him as he spoke. Not dramatically—not the full shadow-and-eyes display of his worst rages. Just a dimming. A suggestion. A reminder of what he was.
Of what he was capable of.
Sasha really looked up at him for the first time since she'd reappeared. Really looked at him. And tried to see him for what he really was.
Her eyes were dry. Empty. She'd run out of tears somewhere between the cottage and the library floor, and she didn't know if she'd ever find more.
“Why are you upset?” she asked.
The question seemed to catch him off guard. He blinked. The shadows around him flickered. “What?”
“Why’re you mad at me?” She studied him the way she might study a damaged binding, looking for where the spine had cracked and the pages had started to separate.
Librarian instincts, maybe? Desperation, mostly.
“You were upset before I said anything about not picking.
You were upset when I got here. You haven't spoken to anyone.
You're standing over there by yourself, seething at the Phantom, and you look like you want to set fire to your own library.” She paused. “Why?”
Something shifted behind his eyes. His expression hardened into the mask she knew best—the wolfish smile, the arched brow, the casual cruelty that he wore like his tailored suit.
“You said it best, didn’t you? I don't have feelings.” He scoffed, adjusting one of his cufflinks.
They were different from the skull ones he'd worn as Hook.
These were small and dark and she couldn't quite make out what they depicted.
“I am a construct of narrative. A living metaphor.
Asking me why I'm upset is like asking the ocean why it drowns people. It's simply what I do.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It is the only one you deserve.” The words had teeth.
He held her gaze for one more second. It was just long enough for her to see something raw and unguarded flash behind the mask before it was smothered before he turned on his heel and disappeared into one of the rows of books.
The sound of his footsteps faded quickly, swallowed by the infinite stacks.
Silence settled over them like dust.
Sasha let out a long, unsteady breath. She gently placed Dundle and Lundle into Sidney's waiting hands—her twin took them with such a look of disgust you’d think she’d handed Sidney two piles of actual steaming turds—and then, using the edge of a reading table for leverage, she stood.
Her legs were unsteady. Her body ached in ways that she knew weren't real but felt entirely, completely, undeniably real. Phantom pains. Echoes. The fiction's fingerprints on her human body.
“I made a mistake,” she said.
Virtue looked at her. Sidney looked up at her from the floor, the two little creatures now nestled in the crook of her arm.
“I need a minute.” Her hands were still trembling, but less now. “I need to talk to Vile.”
Virtue's expression didn't change, but something in his posture shifted. A stiffening. A warning. “Sasha.”
“I know.”
“He's dangerous. Especially right now. When he's like this…”
“I know.”
Sidney scrambled to her feet, Dundle and Lundle clutching at her sleeves. “Sasha, don't. Please. We have a job to do. We need to figure out a plan. We need to—”
Sasha turned and pressed a finger to her sister's lips. “Remember. You can’t.”
Sidney's eyes went wide.
Sasha held the gesture there for a beat, letting the silence speak for her. They couldn't talk about it. Couldn’t even think about it. Not here. Not in the open. Vile could read their thoughts when they were in the library—outside the fiction, their minds were open books to him, literally.
But there were things he might not know, if she was careful about how she thought about them. If she didn't think about them here, but rather there, wherever “there” turned out to be. Inside the fiction. Where he was a character. Where he was constrained by whatever form the story gave him.
She couldn't explain this to Sidney. Not out loud. Not even in a whisper.
But Sidney was her twin. And twins, sometimes, didn't need words.
Something passed between them. A look. A shared understanding that went deeper than language. Sidney's jaw tightened. Her eyes glistened. But she nodded.
“Be careful.” Sidney's voice was barely above a breath. “Please.”
“Sshkrrish,” added Lundle in what sounded like emphatic agreement.
Sasha turned away from her sister and Virtue and the two tiny creatures who had somehow smuggled their way out of a High Fantasy and instantly became critters she would murder for, no questions asked.
She walked into the row of books where Vile had disappeared.
The library was its own kind of labyrinth.
She'd learned that early on. The aisles didn't follow any logic she could discern.
Sometimes they were straight and orderly.
Sometimes they curved, or split, or doubled back on themselves.
Sometimes an aisle that had been there a moment ago simply wasn't anymore.
It was alive in a way that had less to do with magic and more to do with the nature of fiction itself—always shifting, always rewriting, never quite the same story twice.
The stained-glass windows at the end of each row cast their strange, colored light across the spines of the books.
She passed Moriarty's window. Passed Dorian Gray's.
Passed a few she didn't recognize, including a woman in a red cloak, standing before an enormous wolf whose eyes were far too human. She didn't linger.
She could feel him before she saw him. Like a drop in temperature. Like the moment in a movie theater when the music goes quiet and you know, you just know, that something terrible is about to happen.
He was standing at the end of a dead-end aisle. His back was to her. His hands were at his sides, not clasped behind him in his usual posture of affected superiority. Just hanging there. Loose. He was staring at a stained-glass window she hadn't seen before.
It depicted two figures. Mirror images of each other. One bathed in golden light, the other in shadow. They were reaching toward each other across a divide that seemed impossibly vast, their fingers almost, but not quite, touching.
She stopped a few feet behind him. Close enough for him to know she was there. Far enough away that she could run, if she needed to. Not that running had ever done her a damn bit of good.
“Leave me be.” His voice was flat. None of the theatrical lilt. None of the charm. Just the words, stripped bare.
“No.”
He didn't turn around. The shadows at his edges weren't leaking anymore. They were still. Held. Like a breath.
The silence between them was heavy with all the things she couldn't say out loud. All the things she knew he'd hear if she thought them too clearly. So she didn't think. She just stood there, in the stained-glass light, and waited.
Because she was a librarian.
Stories were her whole life.
And if there was one thing she knew how to do, it was wait for the right page to turn.