Chapter Twenty-Three
She came back to life in a great rush, in her own bed. As if it had all been just a nightmare, and now she was waking up from
it. All she had to do was take several calming breaths, and it would be a distant nothing. A vague imprint of something terrifying,
of a sort that gradually faded into even less than this.
Though of course she couldn’t believe anything of the kind.
He had dipped her directly into the past. And the past hung on. That other girl was in her now—not just outside, whispering.
Not just one hand on her shoulder. She could feel her, beneath her own skin. A second heart beating with her own. A flood
of memories that now belonged to her.
And they all said the same thing:
He loved you. He thinks he killed you.
He thinks he accidentally tore your throat out, in a frenzy.
But he didn’t. He did not. More than that: You know he could never have.
Even if he doesn’t.
So now she had to do something extremely difficult.
Almost impossible, in fact. She had no idea how she was even going to manage, considering it involved undoing almost forty years of extreme trauma and self-loathing.
But she knew she had to try. She had to do it, for the man who had felt affection from someone he loved for the first time in decades, who had seen a ghost of his beloved come back to him, and responded by trying to impress on her that he couldn’t be trusted.
“I’m coming, Bram,” she said. And only realized after she had that she had called him by his real name. That part of her now
knew him only in that way, and not just when it came to horrors like this. She could see him laughing with abandon, in her
mind’s eye. She could feel him actually being joyful. Running from her spells across an empty Gauntlet square, in darkness.
Arms around her waist, as she flew him across the lake on her broomstick.
Because he had been terrible at flying, she remembered now.
And the books. Dear god, the love of books.
She stopped dead in the middle of pulling her boots back on, struck to her core by this sudden understanding. It all just
fell into place, like an incredibly simple jigsaw that had somehow still eluded her.
He had mocked her for her love of reading, because reading was how it had all began.
He saw me devouring a book he loved instead of listening to a lecture, she found herself recalling. Secretly, under the table, frantic to turn the pages. The real version of Dracula, before the magical authorities made sure
only the sanitized and more ordinary version was released. And he knew exactly the sort of person I was.
One in love with the dream, over the dull reality.
One he could talk to. He could share with.
And then, she remembered, he had sent her a book. From a fellow bookworm, he had written on the inside. Right beneath the title, of another book that had started off as magic, trying to break through
to ordinary people. Before finally ending up as something she knew very well: The Velveteen Rabbit.
God, The Velveteen Rabbit.
She had to finish putting on her boots with tears streaming over her cheeks. She couldn’t even make them stop once she stepped
outside her room. People stared; someone she barely knew actually asked her if she was all right. If she ran into Anaya, there
were going to be a lot of questions she didn’t know how to answer.
But she kept going.
She even knew where to go to.
He couldn’t fool her, anymore. She remembered all his hiding places.
The bench beneath the willow tree, the couch at the bottom of the library, the hollow under the stairs. That portrait on the
fourth floor that slid back when you touched it with magic, to reveal a little cubby. They had hidden there once, when Professor
Hargreaves had been furious over a book they had stolen from her collection. Though she didn’t remember reading it.
She remembered kissing.
She remembered his sighs of pleasure.
The memory of them made her heart flutter. It made her whole body flush hot, even in the middle of all of this. And it was
in such a state—weak, thrown, half in love and half still her old self—that she found him. In that copse of trees by the lake,
that you could only get to by seeing your way with magic.
Like putting a particular key in a certain lock.
Hard for her before. So easy now it was breathtaking.
She formed a shape with her hands like a heart, and the path opened up, and there he was. Sitting an only slightly safe distance
from the water, with his arms around his knees.
Hoping something will eat you, she thought and wanted to roll her eyes.
But instead she found herself wondering how many times he’d tried to do something similar.
Let himself fall off a roof, wandered into the library after dark, attempted to make some weapon that could be used against himself.
God, it was no wonder he’d wanted her to do it for him.
Constantly, all he had cared about was her doing it for him.
Make a knife, he had said. And now she was even more in her feelings than before. She almost buckled when he looked up, emotion so suddenly
clear all over a face she was still used to being steely. He looked haunted, horrified. Before she could even say anything,
he tried to stand up and back away.
She made him stay down with a spell.
Invisible wall—two hands flat and face down, together in the middle, then drawing outward just above his head as he rose.
He clocked into it pretty hard, and thumped back to the ground with a sound of surprise and protest. Then after a second,
he let out a weary sigh.
“Oh god, now you’re remembering how to do everything,” he said, with a shake of his head. “And you’re not even going to use
it to get revenge, clearly. You’re just going to do stuff like make me stay here and listen to you probably being insufferably
sympathetic toward the man who murdered you.”
“So that’s why you dumped me in my bed and ran away.”
“I didn’t run, all right? I just walked very fast. Then hid.”
She looked back at the path she had easily found.
Then back to him. “You didn’t pick a very good spot.”
“Only because I had no idea that one memory would give you loads more.”
“I think it’s a little like poking a hole in a dam. Once you do it . . . ”
“The deluge. Yes, I can see that. God, you even look more like her.”
“Because I am her,” she said, more insistently than she intended to. She didn’t even know she believed it like that, until it came out
of her with all the passion in the world. She put her hand to her chest but somehow ended up clutching it instead.
It made her feel silly.
Until she saw the way he reacted.
He jerked as if shot through the heart; the breath he let out seemed to break, in the middle. And the way his eyes searched
her face, that hand on her chest, the curve of her shoulders, the dark tumbling waves of her hair. She knew he was letting
it all sink in. That she wasn’t just almost, but lacking the memories to be more.
She was actually.
And the acceptance made his expression sink.
It disappeared beneath waves of emotion she wouldn’t have said he even knew how to feel, before now. Before it broke down
entirely. She saw his face almost crumble, in so traumatic a way she took a step forward. She put out a hand, caught between
what Mina would do if it was Harker, and what Lilibet would do for Bram.
But he held up his own hand before she could decide.
While the other covered his face as best it could.
To hide what it looked like to see him sob, she thought. Though she didn’t know why. The sound he made broke through just fine. It made her think of something being
wrenched out of a person. A hoarse and brutal thing, that hit her so hard she felt her eyes sting.
She almost swiped at them, before he could see.
Then she remembered. She didn’t have to do things like that anymore.
He wouldn’t mock her for it. He’d never even meant the mocking he’d done. It had all just been an act, a show, and now it
was over. And he was simply this. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out, from around that hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean
to do this. I didn’t mean to drag you back to this hell. I thought it was just a myth, an old ordinary human tale, something
to scare their children with. If you do this, a witch will return from the grave and come knocking at your door. But I should
have known.”
“You should have known what?”
“That the soul of a witch never dies. And so, if you call out her name enough times . . .” he said, trailing away into something
he obviously found endlessly dark and awful. Even though she knew the end. She remembered it from her childhood, and her one
much loved book full of fairy tales.
The picture in the middle, of the girl falling from the tower.
The bell of her dress, billowing up. Her prince with his hand reaching for her.
Then the last page, with her in his arms, once more.
“She will come back to you,” she whispered.
And now he looked at her. Begging for understanding.
“Yes. Yes. But I swear I never intended it.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“It was an accident.”
“I can see that.”
“But how can you?”
She thought of her version of the story.
The one she’d drawn in her notebook, as a kid, of the prince being the one to fall.
“Because if you were gone, I would cry out for you all the time, too,” she said, voice so thick with longing and unshed tears that every word came out strained. They split down the middle. She wasn’t even sure he would understand her.
But as soon as he abruptly stood, she knew he had.
“For god’s sake, Mina, you should want me away from you. Can you not at least see that now? Surely even you, who endured every misery I could throw at you and came
back for seconds, can grasp that actually killing you is enough to want me gone? Or to be gone from me? You should loathe me,” he said, so furious suddenly it should have been scary.
But of course she knew why that fury was there.
“How can I, when I know why you did all of it now? Like trying to force me to leave, repeatedly. Oh, that was horrible indeed.