Chapter Twenty-Two
She didn’t know what she was looking at, when she opened her eyes. It seemed like the night sky, like stars, but they were
filmy. Blurry. As if someone had streaked something over them. A swipe of red paint, she thought, because there was a definite crimson hue to it.
Then she registered the pain and realized.
It was blood. There was blood in her eyelashes. If she swiped it away, she would be able to see the North Star clearly, as
it gleamed away up there. But the problem was, she couldn’t seem to lift either of her hands. They laid there limp at her
sides, unwilling to listen to her commands.
As did every other part of her.
Her legs were lead, her head heavier than the center of some terrible black hole. Even her chest didn’t seem to want to rise
and fall.
And that was bad.
That was really bad. That meant she wasn’t breathing enough to keep her body alive, quite possibly. More than quite possibly, because there was something else stopping it, too. Something in her throat, it felt like. A thickness,
a wetness, a thing that rattled whenever she tried to take a breath.
Not a thing at all, she realized, after a moment.
The absence of a thing. The absence of some vital part of her throat.
I lost it on the way to wherever this is, she thought wildly. Because she could tell now that she wasn’t in the forest anymore. Or at least, not the forest as it
was in her time. It looked similar—it looked almost the same—but the trees were definitely smaller. Things seemed greener,
not barren like they should have been in winter.
And Harker was different, too.
She could really see it now, when it was this close up. All the subtle changes he had made—to his hair, from soft and falling
too far over his forehead to that smoother look he sported now. Sideburns in her time, but none there, little no doubt magical
touches to his nose, his eyes. He made himself uglier, she understood, with a start.
Though it was more than that.
In this past he’d plunged her into, he looked almost boyish.
Younger, even though he couldn’t have been. He had to have stopped aging the second he hit full grown, and yet there were
so many things that made him seem fresh-faced here. Openhearted, easy to shock. This version of him hadn’t been ruined yet, she thought. Then somehow got to watch, as that ruin happened in real time. His dazed confusion melted away and was slowly
replaced, piece by piece, with other things. Realization, shock, horror. Then finally, oh, finally: the most harrowing agony
she had ever had the misfortune to see on another person’s face.
It was like watching a void open up where a man had once been.
He seemed to try to scream, and no sound came out.
And she knew why, too.
His mouth was as bloody as her throat was. It formed a beard beneath his bottom lip. It made a thick stripe down his neck. The collar of his T-shirt—absurdly colorful, striped with the name of some Gauntlet team she didn’t know—was soaked. Like he’d spilled a lot of his food as he had eaten.
And of course Lilibet had been the meal.
She had been the meal. She is me and I am her, she thought, and wanted to laugh hysterically. But when she did, blood rushed more quickly into all the places it shouldn’t
have been. She choked on it, coughed it up, choked some more.
Then watched her murderer reach for her.
He put her hand over that ruined place.
Like maybe he could cover up what he had done, if he really tried. He could put back what he’d taken, or hold all the blood
in, or something, anything to make this not be what it was. She wore the dress made of blood because he tore her throat out, she thought, the idea so obvious and so clear she wondered why she hadn’t grasped it before. All those flashes of memory,
all those whispers from the past, from the girl she had been. And she hadn’t realized.
She had almost trusted him.
Almost liked him.
How could that have been? Why did you not tell me the most important part, Lilibet, she asked in her head. Desperately, as she looked up into that agonized face. As she heard him sobbing these great wrenching
sobs, magic pouring out of him and into her. Screaming for someone to come, someone to help.
And in the middle of all that, Lilibet answered.
I did, she said. I did, I did—I tried a thousand times.
You didn’t hear me. You still can’t hear me.
Let yourself hear me.
Then somehow, Mina found herself sinking down, down. Into this other body, this other version of her. She saw not through those eyes but with them. She didn’t watch as the girl she was touched his upper lip, kissed him under the moon on some rickety chairs, let him
bring her more pleasure than she could stand.
She felt all those things.
She felt whatever she had before.
She became that girl, lying on the forest floor, slowly dying. And the moment she did, there was only one emotion she knew.
A frantic one, a desperate one, she could feel herself trying to speak and failing so completely it was like being cursed.
It wasn’t you, she tried to tell him. It wasn’t you; you didn’t do this.
She even managed to lift a hand. She tried to grab him, to make him see.
But the most terrible part of that was: He seemed to think she was pushing him away. Her, the girl he loved and thought he
had killed—he felt her touch him in one last attempt to stop all these events being set in motion, and saw it as fear, horror,
revulsion. She watched him jerk back, utterly broken.
And there was nothing she could do.
She died in that place, in the sweet summer of ’89.