The Ending #2
“But if I catch any of you writing something insufferably boring, I reserve the right to set the pages on fire.”
“Deal.”
The third door was Virtue’s.
Sasha didn’t open it—wouldn’t have been appropriate, and she doubted he’d want her to see.
But she caught a glimpse of golden light pouring through the gap when he cracked it open, and the sound that escaped was something she couldn’t quite place.
Wind through an open field. Birds. Distant laughter that sounded like a hundred different voices layered on top of one another, as if every hero he’d ever been was laughing at the same time.
He closed it quickly. His expression was unreadable, which was unusual for Virtue. Heroes were usually open books. That was sort of their whole deal.
The fourth door was Vile’s.
He didn’t open it.
He stood in front of it for a long moment, his hand hovering near the handle but not touching it.
The door itself was darker than the others—not black, exactly, but that deep, impossible shade of not-quite-anything that the shadows around Vile always seemed to be.
The wood was old and smelled of leather and something sharper underneath. Roses, maybe. Or the memory of them.
Then he dropped his hand, turned his back to the door, and walked away without a word.
Sasha watched him go.
Interesting.
Sasha found Sidney sitting on the floor of her New York apartment—or rather, the library’s reconstruction of it. Sidney was on the rug by the window, her knees drawn up, staring at the view of a Manhattan skyline that shouldn’t exist inside an infinite library but apparently did now.
Sasha sat down next to her.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The city noise from outside the window was convincing enough to be eerie—distant sirens, the hum of traffic, the faint thrum of a city that never stopped moving. But it was too perfect. Too clean. Like a recording played on a very good speaker.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Sidney asked.
Sasha picked at a thread on the rug. It was the same rug Sidney had in her actual apartment—a cheap thing from Target that she’d bought when she first moved to New York and had kept despite the fact that she could now afford something significantly nicer.
Sentiment over taste. That was Sidney in a nutshell.
“I think so.”
Sidney turned to look at her. The look wasn’t the classic Sidney Lancaster I’m about to lecture you look. It was something softer. Something that came from the part of Sidney that existed underneath all the bravado and the swearing and the charging-headfirst-into-everything-ness.
It was the look of a twin who had been through everything with her other half and was trying to decide if this was the part of the story where they were still on the same side.
“You think so,” Sidney repeated flatly.
“I know what needs to happen. I know what the spell does. Virtue knows where the book is. I know what needs to happen.” She pulled her knees up, mirroring her sister.
“I just don’t know what all of it is going to look like when it happens.
Because this—” She gestured at the room around them.
“This is new. For all of us. Even for them.”
Sidney was quiet for a moment. “Just promise me you’re not going to do something stupid.”
“Define stupid.”
“Sasha.”
“I’m not going to do something stupid.”
Sidney studied her for a long moment. Then she leaned over and rested her head on Sasha’s shoulder. “Liar.”
“Yeah.” Sasha rested her cheek on top of her sister’s head. “Probably.”
They sat like that for a while, in a fake apartment in a real library in a story that hadn’t been written yet, listening to a city that didn’t exist.
Vile was in the main corridor when Sasha left Sidney’s room, leaning against a bookshelf as if he’d been there waiting for her.
Which he probably had. He was good at that—the casual materialization, the studied nonchalance, the I just happened to be here routine that fooled absolutely no one and was never intended to.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“Start the story.” He spread his hands, palms up. “You declared that we would write our own ending. Marvelous speech. Very inspiring. So.” He made an ushering gesture, as if coaxing a reluctant stage performer into the spotlight. “Begin.”
“No.”
He blinked. It was such a small, human gesture that it caught her off guard. Vile didn’t blink. Not like that. Not the confused, what-did-you-just-say blink of a person who had genuinely not expected the answer they received.
“No?”
“No.”
He stared at her. She stared back.
“So, what, then?” A note of genuine bewilderment had crept into his voice, which was satisfying in a way she wasn’t going to examine too closely.
“We’re just meant to stand around here and do nothing?
Wander about and make small talk?” He said the words small talk with the same inflection one might use for sewage treatment.
“This seems like a terrible way to spend a story.”
“It’s a good thing, then, that you’re not in charge of it.”
The silence that followed was loaded with enough tension to power a small city. It was awkward as fuck.
Vile’s jaw worked. The shadows at his edges flickered. For a moment, she thought he was going to argue—to monologue, to threaten, to do any of the dozen things he always did when he wasn’t getting his way.
Instead, he let out a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a scoff, shook his head, and walked away.
She watched him go. His footsteps echoed off the marble until they didn’t, and then he was gone—swallowed by the labyrinth of shelves and shadows that was as much a part of him as his purple eyes and his skull cufflinks.
Good.
Let him stew.
Because Sasha knew something that Vile didn’t. That the most powerful stories weren’t the ones with the biggest plots. They were the ones where people sat in rooms and said the things they were afraid to say.
And right now, everyone in the library were carrying unsaid things that might as well be nuclear bombs.
The story didn’t need her to start it.
It had already started itself.
It took Sasha a lot longer to figure out where Virtue had gone to.
The library had gone and rearranged itself into a new, stranger pattern.
He was at the far end of the corridor where the library’s now-much-less-predictable cathedral ceiling reached its highest point.
He was leaning against a stone column that hadn’t existed twenty minutes ago.
He seemed smaller here. Not physically—Virtue was built like every hero was built, broad and tall and unfairly handsome. But there was something diminished about him. Like a stage actor standing in a room where there was nowhere to perform.
“He didn’t open his door,” Sasha said, because she didn’t know how else to start the conversation.
Virtue didn’t look at her. “No. He wouldn’t.”
“Do you know what’s behind it?”
“I can guess.” His voice was quiet. “The same thing that’s behind every door he refuses to open. The thing he’s most afraid of.”
She waited.
“Nothing.” Virtue finally turned to look at her.
His golden eyes were old. Not old the way a person’s eyes got old—tired and lined and wearing the years.
Old the way a story’s eyes got old. Deep and worn smooth by endless repetition.
“He’s afraid there’s nothing in there at all.
That behind the door, behind the mask, behind all the theater and the cruelty and the performance…
there’s just empty space. Just a thing that was built to be hated and has nothing else underneath it. ”
The words sat between them like stones at the bottom of a well.
“What do you think the ending is?” Sasha asked. She hadn’t planned to ask. It just came out.
Virtue exhaled. It was the heaviest sigh she’d ever heard from him. “I’ve asked him. Just now. While you and Sidney were looking at your rooms.”
“You asked Vile what he wants the ending to be?”
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
Virtue’s smile was thin and tired and so full of something she couldn’t name that it made her chest ache. “Nothing. He deflected. Made a joke about setting me on fire. Adjusted his cufflinks. The usual.”
“But?”
“But I’ve been his brother for a very long time, Sasha.
I know what it looks like when he’s performing, and I know what it looks like when the performance slips.
” Virtue crossed his arms. The golden light from the blank window caught his scar and turned it silver.
“He really doesn’t know. And that bothers him. ”
The two words landed with the weight of a revelation.
“He doesn’t know how this ends,” Virtue continued. “He has never, in his entire existence, not known how a story ends. The villain always knows—he designs the trap, he writes the horror, and then he loses, and it starts over.”
“But this time—”
“This time, nobody designed anything. There is no trap. There is no genre telling him what his role is. And he is terrified.” Virtue’s voice dropped.
“Not of losing. He’s used to losing. He’s terrified because for the first time, there’s a chance—however small—that he might really win.
Not some tragic ending, not some ‘life lesson’ ending, but a real win.
And he has no idea what that looks like. ”
Sasha leaned against the column opposite Virtue. She suddenly felt very tired.
“Do you think he can?” she asked. “Win?”
Virtue held her gaze for a long moment. The hero and the librarian, standing in a library that had become a story that had become a cathedral that had become something none of them had a word for.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that depends entirely on what you mean by winning.”
He pushed off from the column, and walked away. She didn’t know where. Hopefully to find Sidney.
Sasha stood there for a while after he left, staring up at the empty window.
Sasha’s room was exactly right. That was the unsettling part.
It wasn’t a close approximation. It wasn’t an artist’s rendering.
It was her apartment, down to the coffee ring on the nightstand and the three books stacked in the order she’d left them.
Frankenstein on top. Wuthering Heights in the middle.
And on the bottom, dog-eared and spine-cracked from years of use: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
She didn’t look at that one.
Honestly, she didn’t know why she kept it. Maybe she was afraid that if she got rid of it, it’d come back to haunt her.
Dundle hopped off her shoulder and immediately began investigating the nightstand with the focused intensity of an animal who had never seen a lamp before and was deeply suspicious of it.
His glass teeth opened and closed experimentally near the base of it.
Sasha gently redirected him before he could attempt to chew on the cord.
Lundle, by contrast, had flown to the top of the bookshelf and settled there with his wings tucked, surveying the room like a general assessing a battlefield. Which, Sasha supposed, was more or less accurate.
“Dundle.”
The creature’s head swiveled toward her. His mismatched button eyes caught the lamplight.
“I need it back.”
He stared at her.
“The bottle, Dundle. The one I gave you to swallow at the end of the High Fantasy. Before the pyre.” She sat on the edge of the bed and held out her hands, cupped together. “I know it’s still in there. You’re basically a handbag with legs. Nothing gets digested.”
Dundle let out an offended “skritchh” that clearly communicated how dare you reduce me to a storage receptacle.
“I’ll owe you one. Two belly rubs and a whole rat for you next time we’re somewhere that has rats.”
The taxidermy lizard-monster regarded her with the dignity of a creature who was above bribery but not so far above it that he couldn’t be persuaded.
After a long moment, he opened his glass-and-stone-toothed maw, made a sound like an old leather satchel being turned inside out, and hacked something up onto the nightstand.
It landed with a small tink.
The bottle.
It was smaller than she remembered. It had changed.
Continuity error. Whatever. Now, it was about the size of her thumb.
The glass was intact—of course it was; Dundle’s insides were about as corrosive as an empty shoebox—and the liquid inside was still that viscous, faintly luminescent bruise-purple that she’d spent weeks brewing in the bog witch’s cottage.
The spell that could destroy Vile’s book.
The thing that could unmake him.
The key to going home.
She picked it up. It was warm—warmer than it should have been, given its recent lodging. The glass pulsed faintly against her palm, and the liquid inside shifted and swirled as if it were alive.
She stared at it for a long time.
Dundle had given up on the lamp and crawled into her lap, curling into a ball with his bony tail draped over her knee.
Lundle had settled back into his perch and was watching her with an expression that might have been concern, if taxidermy creatures were capable of concern. Which they weren’t. Technically.
I know how this ends.
The thought was clear and sharp and settled in her chest like a stone dropping into still water.
I’ve always known.
She closed her hand around the bottle.
But for the first time, the thought wasn’t about the spell.
It wasn’t about the book, or the plan, or going home, or the Boston Public Library, or bad coffee, or any of the things she’d been telling herself she was fighting for.
It was about purple eyes in a dark room. Stars on a ceiling that didn’t exist. A laugh that sounded like it surprised even the person laughing. The smell of old leather and roses. A hand that had held hers in the dark and hadn’t pulled away.
It was about him.
Sasha Lancaster sat on the bed in a room that was hers and wasn’t, in a story that had no name, holding a weapon that could end everything.
And for the first time since she’d been dragged into this world of monsters and fiction and impossible thing…
She wasn’t sure she wanted to use it.