Chapter 21 #2
“Answering a question with a deflection is not an answer.”
“Is it not?” The theatrical lilt crept back in.
He couldn’t help himself. “Very well. Think about it for more than half a second, brother. What does a reset to one-and-one accomplish? Hm?” He waited, the way a professor waits for a slow student to catch up.
“It takes a death off Sasha’s ledger, yes.
But it also buys your precious ‘good guys’ more time. ”
He let the word hang in the air.
Virtue said nothing.
Vile sighed dramatically, and continued.
“More time to strategize. More time to scheme. More time to come up with whatever pitiful little plan you’re all inevitably going to cook up while you think I’m not paying attention.
” He smiled. “I’m giving you a fighting chance.
You should be grateful.” He paused. “You’re welcome. ” He waved his arms in a dramatic bow.
Virtue’s eyes narrowed. Sasha had watched the two brothers go back and forth enough times to know when Virtue was trying to read beneath the surface of Vile’s words. It was like watching someone try to see the bottom of a pond that was made entirely of ink.
“What’re you scheming?” Virtue’s voice was quiet now. Measured. “You don’t give time. You don’t extend the game out of generosity. You’re up to something.”
“Perhaps.” Vile’s gaze drifted—almost casually, almost lazily—from Virtue to Sasha. And stayed there. “Or perhaps I am simply enjoying my time with this pair. They are…more entertaining than most. Certainly more than the last several dozen.”
Sasha felt the weight of his gaze like a physical thing. Like a hand on her shoulder. Like shadows settling against her skin.
“Perhaps,” he continued, and his voice did something complicated that she couldn’t quite parse, “I am even growing fond of one of them.”
The library was very quiet.
Sidney was staring at Sasha. Sasha was staring at the floor. Dundle had gone very still against her neck, as if he could sense the shift in the atmosphere the way animals sensed earthquakes.
Virtue broke the silence with a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. “That is impossible.”
Three words. Said with the absolute, ironclad certainty of a being who had spent his entire existence on the opposite side of every story from his brother. Said the way someone might say the sun rises in the east or water is wet or villains don’t love.
Vile smiled at Sasha.
Not at Virtue. Not at the room. At her. And it wasn’t the theatrical grin or the predatory flash of teeth or the cruel curl of lip that she’d catalogued in the mental filing cabinet she’d built for all of his expressions.
It was the smile from the ceiling of stars.
The one from after. The one that had never existed on his face before her.
“You see?” he said softly.
And the worst part—the absolute, soul-crushing, worst part—was that she did.
She saw it perfectly.
He wasn’t saying look how I’ve fooled them. No, it was far worse than that.
He was saying look how they’ve already decided what I can and cannot feel. He was saying this is what it means to be the villain. They won’t even allow me the possibility.
And she wanted, more than anything, to not understand.
But she was a librarian. And she’d read too many books to pretend that she didn’t.
Stop it. Focus. Sidney. The spell. The plan. Stop looking at him like that.
She tore her gaze away from Vile and fixed it on a point somewhere between the stained-glass window of Dracula and the one of Dorian Gray. Neutral territory. Literary no-man’s-land.
Lundle shifted on her shoulder. His wire-tongue flicked out and tickled her ear, which was either an attempt at comfort or an attempt to eat her earring. With Lundle, it was hard to tell.
The silence stretched. Virtue was staring at Vile with an expression she couldn’t name. Sidney was staring at Sasha with an expression she absolutely could—it was the we are going to have a conversation about this later and you are not going to enjoy it look. A classic Sidney Lancaster special.
And then Sasha heard it.
Her own voice.
Speaking before her brain had finished forming the thought.
“Winner take all.”
The words fell out of her mouth like coins dropping into a well. Once they were gone, there was no getting them back.
Every set of eyes in the library—human, demigod, and taxidermy—turned to her.
The silence that followed was so complete she could hear the faint creak of the bookshelves shifting in whatever imperceptible breeze moved through the library. She could hear the tiny rasp of Dundle’s dried-leather body against her collar. She could hear her own heartbeat, too fast and too loud.
“What?” Sidney said.
“What.” Virtue said.
Vile said nothing. He was watching her with an expression she’d never seen on him before. It wasn’t amusement. It wasn’t anger. It was…attention. Raw, undivided, stripped of every layer of performance. Like she’d said something in a language he didn’t know he understood.
“I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice was shaking, but the words weren’t. “I can’t watch my sister die again. I can’t be killed again. I can’t keep jumping from story to story, death to death, waiting to see which one of us runs out of lives first. I’m done.”
She looked at Vile. Then at Virtue. Then back at Vile.
“The next death is the last death. Winner take all. No more best of three. No more resets. No more clearing the board. Whatever happens next—that’s the end. For all of us.”
“Sasha.” Virtue’s voice carried a warning. “You’re raising the stakes to—”
“To what they already are?” She turned on him.
Lundle flapped his wings to keep his balance on her shoulder, letting out an indignant “skrrtch.” “We’re already dying, Virtue.
We’ve been dying since the moment we got here.
At least this way it ends. One more story. One more death. And then it’s over.”
Taking a deep breath, it was time to make her bigger, scarier move.
Sasha braced herself. “And I have the story,” she continued, the plan crystallizing in her head even as she spoke.
She hadn’t dared to plan ahead. He could read the page, after all.
“Actually, no. I don’t have a story. That’s the point.
We’re not going into anyone else’s world this time.
No more Peter Pan. No more Sherlock Holmes.
No more Wonderland or High Fantasy or whatever other literary playgrounds you two have been bouncing us through like pinballs. ”
She took a breath.
“We’re going to write our own ending. Here. Right here. As ourselves.”
The library absorbed the words the way it absorbed everything—quietly, completely, as if the shelves themselves were committing them to memory.
“Sasha, it’s not your turn to decide where we go.
” Virtue’s voice had taken on the patient, measured tone of a man trying very hard to be reasonable in a room full of people who had abandoned reason several stories ago.
“The choice of genre—and story—belongs to Sidney. Those are the rules. We alternate. It’s her—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Virtue blinked.
Sidney stepped forward. She didn’t look at Virtue—not with malice, not with dismissal, just with the singular focus of a woman who had finally reached the end of every rope she’d ever been given. She walked to Sasha’s side and took her hand.
Held it.
Squeezed.
“I’m sorry, Virtue. But she’s right,” Sidney said.
Her voice was steady in a way that it shouldn’t have been, given that she’d been dead less than an hour ago.
But that was Sidney—the one who could be falling apart on the inside and still walk into a room like she owned the building.
“Winner take all. One more round. Our story. Our rules.”
She turned to Virtue. The look she gave him was complicated—apologetic and fierce and tender and absolutely immovable, all at once.
“I love you. I think. As much as it’s possible to love something that might not be real.
But I am done following rules written by someone else.
It’s my turn? Fine. This is my choice. I’m choosing her. ”
Virtue looked at Sidney for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes that was older and sadder than any hero in any story had any right to be. Then he exhaled, and his shoulders dropped.
He said nothing.
But he didn’t argue.
Sasha held her sister’s hand tighter. Her palm was sweating. Her heart was hammering. Dundle had his face entirely buried in her collar and Lundle had gone rigid on her shoulder, his glass-and-stone teeth bared in the direction of the only person in the room who hadn’t spoken.
Vile.
He was still standing under the stained-glass lamp.
The purple light caught the edges of his form and turned them into something that was almost—but not quite—beautiful.
The shadows at his borders had begun to move again.
Slowly. Like the first wisps of smoke from a fire that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to burn or go out.
He laughed.
But it was the wrong kind.
Sasha knew all of his laughs by now. She’d catalogued them the way she catalogued everything—compulsively, obsessively, the way a person who worked in a library filed things into systems because the alternative was chaos.
The theatrical cackle for show. The dark chuckle for intimidation. The genuine laugh, rare and startling.
This one was none of those.
This one was the sound of something cracking down the middle. Like the laugh itself was a wall, and behind it was something he was trying very hard to keep hidden.
“Oh, this is just simply perfect.”
His gaze moved from Sasha to Sidney, then to Virtue, then back to Sasha. It lingered there. On her. On the hand she was holding that wasn’t his.
Something flickered in his purple eyes. It was brief—half a second, maybe less—but she caught it because she was looking for it. Because, God help her, she was always looking.
Hurt.
Not rage. Not contempt. Not the theatrical indignation of a villain who’d been outmaneuvered. Hurt.
It was there and then it was gone, sealed away behind the mask so quickly she might have imagined it. Except she didn’t imagine things. She was a librarian. She dealt in facts and filing systems, not hallucinations.
“Very well.” Vile straightened his lapels. He adjusted his cufflinks—the little skull ones—first the left, then the right. Taking his time. Because Vile always took his time.
“Winner take all.” He repeated the words back to her like a mirror, stripping them of her desperation and returning them coated in something that sounded like ceremony. Like a contract being signed in blood. “One story. One death. Finis.”
The stained-glass lamps flickered. Every one of them, simultaneously, as if the library itself had shuddered.
The shadows between the bookshelves deepened and stretched, reaching toward the center of the aisle like fingers.
The temperature dropped—not dramatically, but enough that Sasha felt it settle into her bones.
And then everything was still again.
Sasha stood in the center of the library, holding her sister’s hand, two taxidermy monsters on her shoulders, a hero at her back, and a villain in front of her who looked at her like she was the only story he’d ever wanted to read.
She didn’t look away from Vile.
And for the first time since she’d been dragged into this impossible, beautiful, horrifying world of fiction and monsters and stories that could kill you—she wasn’t afraid.
She was ready.
He smiled. Slowly. “Then…let the ending begin.”