Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sasha slammed back into awareness on the marble floor of the library.
Not gently. Not gradually. This was the equivalent of being yanked out of a dream by someone dumping a bucket of ice water on your face.
The library. His library. The endless rows of bookshelves stretching off into the dark, the smell of old leather and dust, the coffered wooden ceiling three stories above her head.
And there he was.
Vile was standing ten feet away from her, leaning against a reading table with his ankles crossed and his arms folded, looking at her the way a cat looks at a mouse that just ran into a wall. Amused. Patient. Slightly disappointed in the entertainment value.
“Welcome back, darling.”
Her legs were unsteady. Her hands were shaking. The white coat was gone—she was back in her own clothes, her black turtleneck and jeans and the glasses that were, once again, slightly crooked on her face.
The morphine was still in her hands. The weight of the syringe. The resistance of the plunger. The way Sidney’s grip had loosened one finger at a time.
She stared at Vile.
He smiled.
And something inside her that had been held together with spit and denial and the emotional equivalent of duct tape finally, irrevocably, snapped. Throwing the bottle and the syringe onto the table, she had just…had enough.
“You fucking son of a bitch!”
She stormed toward him. Not with the careful, calculated anger she’d learned to deploy around him. This was the raw, ugly, graceless fury of a woman who had just euthanized her own twin sister and was looking at the person responsible.
“You sent us back to the end of Wonderland!” She shoved him in the chest with both hands. He didn’t move. Of course he didn’t move. Shoving Vile was like shoving a load-bearing wall. “That wasn’t Dracula! It was never Dracula! You trapped Sidney in that asylum for—for months, and you made me—”
Her voice cracked. She hit him again. Open-palmed, square in the sternum. It accomplished nothing except making her hand sting.
“You made me kill her.”
Vile looked down at her with an expression that was infuriatingly, maddeningly calm. One eyebrow was slightly raised, as if she’d said something mildly interesting at a dinner party.
And then he laughed.
Not the theatrical cackle. Not the dark chuckle. The real one—warm and rich and genuine and so entirely wrong for the moment that it made her want to claw his eyes out.
“What did you expect?” He spread his hands wide, his smile broad and unrepentant. “I’m a villain, Sasha. Capital V. It’s in the name. It’s the name. You ‘literally’ just made that observation yourself, didn’t you?”
“You—” She tasted bile in the back of her throat. “Don’t you dare.”
“Besides.” He pushed off from the table and circled her with that slow, predatory stride that she’d come to associate with the moments right before he did something terrible.
Or something charming. With Vile, the two were the same.
“We barely tapped into the potential of Wonderland the first time around.” He waved a hand dismissively.
“We never got to have any real fun with it! I didn’t want to waste the world. There was so much more to explore.”
“Explore?” She could hear her own voice climbing toward a register that was going to give her a sore throat tomorrow. “You know how much I hate that place. You turned Wonderland into an asylum. You…you made Sidney endure…you ruined—”
“Ruined?” He stopped circling. Tilted his head. “Or recontextualized? There’s a difference. One is lazy. The other is art.”
“Don’t you dare pretend what you did to her is art.”
The smile that spread across his face was slow and delighted and so deeply, fundamentally wrong that it made her stomach flip in a way she was going to aggressively attribute to rage and absolutely nothing else. “There she is. There’s my precious little protegé.”
“I am not your—”
“Sasha!”
The voice came from behind her. She whirled.
Sidney was running toward her down the main aisle of the library, her boots pounding against the marble. Behind her, Virtue followed at a more measured pace, once more in his white and yellow suit, ever the inversion of his brother.
Sidney crashed into her like a freight train of sisterly panic. Arms locked around her neck, face buried in her shoulder, the kind of hug that threatened to crack ribs and didn’t particularly care if it did.
“You’re okay.” Sidney’s voice was muffled against her sweater. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re—”
“I’m okay.” Sasha held her sister tight. Sidney was solid. Whole. Not thin and wasted and strapped to a bed. The transition back to the library had restored her, the way it always did—healed the body, if not the mind. “Are you? Sid, are you all right?”
“No.” The word was flat and honest and very Sidney. “But I’m alive, which is more than I was ten minutes ago, so. Relative scale.”
Something small and dry and pointy scrabbled up Sasha’s leg.
She looked down. Dundle was attempting to scale her jeans with the frantic, uncoordinated energy of a creature who had precisely zero upper body strength and was compensating with sheer determination and very sharp claws.
His mismatched button eyes were wide—well, they were always wide, they were buttons—but there was an urgency to the way his glass-toothed jaw was opening and closing that she’d come to recognize as I was worried about you and I will express this by climbing you like a very small, very ugly hairless dead cat.
“Hey, lil buddy.” She reached down and scooped him up, settling him on her left shoulder. He immediately burrowed into the space between her neck and her collar, making a sound like a leather wallet being stepped on. “I missed you too.”
A second weight landed on her right shoulder with considerably more grace.
Lundle had dropped from somewhere above—a rafter, a bookshelf, the existential void—and perched there with his magpie wings folded neatly against his patchwork body.
His wire-and-thread tongue flicked out and retracted.
He let out a single, dignified “skritchh” that managed to convey both hello and I am above this emotional display but I’m here.
Sidney took a step back from the hug and eyed the two creatures on Sasha’s shoulders with an expression that was fifty percent disgust and fifty percent grudging acceptance. “Your children survived.”
“They’re not my children.”
“They literally live on your body, Sash.”
Dundle chose that moment to peek out from Sasha’s collar and hiss at Sidney. Sidney flinched. It was barely perceptible—just a twitch of the shoulders—but it was there.
“I’m telling you, he likes you,” Sasha said.
“It has the social skills of a hand grenade.”
“Runs in the family, then,” Vile offered from behind them.
Sasha and Sidney both turned to glare at him in unison. It was the kind of synchronized twin reaction that would have been funny under literally any other circumstance.
Vile clasped his hands behind his back and took several long, deliberate strides toward the center of the main aisle, positioning himself under the largest of the stained-glass lamps.
The amber and purple light fell across him like a spotlight, which was absolutely intentional.
Everything about this man was choreographed.
“Now, then.” His voice carried through the library with the practiced projection of someone who had been delivering villainous monologues for the better part of eternity. “Shall we address the state of play?”
Virtue, who had been standing silently behind Sidney with his arms folded across his broad chest, said nothing. His jaw was tight.
“The board,” Vile continued, undeterred by the collective hostility radiating from everyone else in the room, “has been reset. We are back to one-and-one. Tied. Even. Square.” He held up one finger on each hand, as if they needed a visual aid.
“Sasha died in the regency.” He wiggled his left finger.
“Sidney died in Wonderland.” He wiggled his right.
“Everything else has been cleared from the board.”
He dropped his hands and smiled as if he’d just delivered excellent news.
The silence that followed was the kind that preceded either violence or a very pointed question.
Virtue provided the latter.
“You’re cheating.”
Vile’s expression didn’t shift. “You’ll have to be more specific, brother. I cheat at many things.”
“The High Fantasy.” Virtue took a step forward.
There was nothing overtly threatening about the movement—heroes didn’t threaten, they confronted—but the air in the library shifted the way it always did when the two of them were squaring off.
Like the books on the shelves were holding their collective breath.
“Sasha died at the end of that story. Burned at the stake. That was her second death. You cannot simply erase it.”
“I can. I am. I did.” Vile inspected his fingernails with performative boredom.
“By resetting us to the end of Wonderland and running the asylum variation, the High Fantasy never happened. It doesn’t exist on the board.
Sasha’s death at the pyre? Gone. Sidney’s survival through the quest?
Also gone. We are, as the saying goes, back to square one. ”
“That takes one of Sasha’s deaths off the board.
” Virtue’s voice had dropped into a register that Sasha had only heard from him a handful of times.
The one that said the golden retriever had stopped playing and was showing its teeth.
“She was at two. One more and she’d have lost. And you’re just… giving that back?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Vile lowered his hand from his inspection of his own cuticles and regarded his brother with a look that was, for once, devoid of any theatrical flair.
Just flat. Just honest. The shadows at his edges were still for the first time since they’d arrived back in the library.
Not leaking. Not coiling. Just…present. “You should be thanking me.”