Chapter 33
Robin flew to her feet, banged her hip against one of the tables, didn’t seem to notice, and reached an embrasure. She put
her hands on the stone sill and gaped out.
“Oh, my God,” she said, in a small voice.
Donna was prepared to yell at Gwen if she tried to set aside her crossword. But Gwen had hardly looked up, and then only with
muddy, feverish eyes. Her gaze swiftly turned back to the newspaper open before her. Donna had a momentary look at it, in
time to see letters scrawling themselves on the page, rising out of nowhere, much in the way lemon juice would reveal invisible
ink. TEARS was just coming into being.
“Tears,” Gwen muttered, pronouncing it as if it were the verb that meant to rip. Only Donna knew it wasn’t “tears,” to rip, but “tears,” what is wept. She thought there would be plenty of those before the night was done.
Donna pushed herself to her feet and stepped into the embrasure to Robin’s left, the one that had blown in as King Sorrow
swept past the tower. Donna stared into the star-strewn night. For a moment, the campus was as still and peaceful as buildings
in an undisturbed snow globe. A raft of silver cloud idled in the north.
Then the dragon swept across the moon, wings spread, vast enough to blot it out for an instant. King Sorrow banked like a
stealth bomber and fell toward the library, growing in size, instant by instant, and Donna thought this was what it must’ve
been like to stand at the top of one of the World Trade Center towers just as the plane was about to strike.
“Get the fuck down,” Donna cried, shoving herself away from the open embrasure and throwing herself at Robin, who seemed stuck in place.
They crashed to the floor as flame gouted through the embrasures, great jets of it, billowing right above them. The whole
row of narrow north-facing windows erupted in a spray of glass. Fire poured through. Donna felt the heat of it on her back,
as if she were lying beneath a kiln. Tana grabbed Allie and squashed her to the floor. Both of them disappeared under the
spreading pool of the martyr’s robe.
Gwen remained on her knees, her forehead almost touching the floor, like a woman of Islam called to prayer. The crossword
was under her nose. Her face was almost serene, and the last answers were filling themselves in, although her eyes were so
unfocused, who knew if she could even see them. Flame licked past her, inches behind her head. She didn’t seem to notice.
When Donna lifted her gaze, the first thing she saw was the video projected upon the glass wall. It was glitching, playing
the same second and a half of film, over and over. Arthur spun toward camera with the lacrosse stick, then snapped back. And
again. And again. He was a shimmer and blur more than a person now, a smudge of light.
The jets of flame stopped as if someone had thrown a switch. The books on the far side of the room were afire. Smoke boiled
through the chain-link grating. Robin struggled to wriggle out from under Donna.
“Get offa me,” she cried.
Donna rose to one knee. Robin launched herself up and toward the door, and Donna thought, Running, the fucking bitch is running, that fucking coward. But Robin stopped before she reached the door to pry a slim fire extinguisher off the wall. She yanked it loose and turned
to face the burning wall of books and began to blast away, the extinguisher propelling a sticky white foam into the smoke.
From beneath the folds of the robe, Donna heard Allie’s voice rising in prayer—not to God, but to Arthur and Van.
“Please Arthur please Van please Arthur please Van,” Allie chanted.
But there was no Arthur, there was no Van, no magic sword out of a comic book and no help from the dead. There was only them, and they needed more time.
Donna stumbled up. She grasped for her purse and reeled to the embrasure in time to see King Sorrow blast past, thirty feet
from the tower, in a rippling mass of black armored scales. The wind buffeted her. She could smell the lizardy reek of him.
The force of his passing set off car alarms in the parking lot behind the building. Donna pushed one hand into the purse for
the cold steel cylinder that had been there for weeks.
“King Sorrow!” she screamed. “King fucking Sorrow! More like King Chickenshit! Do you hear me? Do you fucking hear me? Donna McBride has a riddle for you!
Come on over! Don’t make me shout! Let’s riddle for our lives, what do you say, big man?”
The dragon circled the tower—then tilted in, toward the library, and struck.
Gwen felt King Sorrow hit the tower, felt the stones lurch, the floor shudder beneath her. It seemed to be happening a long
way off. There was a grinding of old rock. Books fell off shelves behind the chain-link grating. The room was hazy with smoke
and drifting spatter from the fire extinguisher. Gwen looked up, saw Donna’s hand rising out of her purse, wondered if the
woman had brought a gun. Never bring a gun to a dragon fight, she thought, and almost laughed, and looked back to the crossword. It was filled in, except for one last word in one last
corner. Bait for a shark but also your Arthur.
“Chum,” she whispered, and whether it was a drop of sweat or a tear that hit the newspaper, she didn’t know. “I love you,
old chum. It doesn’t matter if I say it now. I wanted to say it a thousand times but King Sorrow wouldn’t let me. I had to
say it to you in my heart, instead, where I said it every day. Every time I thought of you. Come back to me if you can—and
if you can’t, I guess I’ll come to you, soon enough, and that’ll be all right too.”
Letters began to write themselves in the last boxes.
C
H
U
And Gwen began to smile.
Tana lifted one corner of the robe to see what was happening and found that the Russian mirror had spun across the floor and
wound up next to her elbow. Her gaze fell to the reflective surface . . . and she saw Arthur’s hand pressed against the inside
of the glass, his palm almost pink. It was as if he was right there, on the other side of a window. Tana reached out with
her own hand, hardly knew what she was doing, to put her palm against his. Their fingertips met, separated by a quarter inch
of glass. Tana felt a stab of pain travel up her hand into her funny bone—it was much as if she had brushed an electric fence.
A loud, glassy pop caught her attention, and when Tana snapped her head up, she saw that a Y-shaped crack had appeared in
the glass wall, at the back of the treasure room, a crack that mapped perfectly to the crack in the mirror, although it was
six feet high instead of six inches long.
She glanced once more, wildly, into the mirror. Arthur’s hand was gone, and the glass had healed itself, not so much as a
scratch in its surface.
“Come on!” Donna screamed out the window. “Show me your face and I’ll give you a riddle. I’ve got a real fucking good one for you! I’ve got a real fucking stumper!”
“Donna?” Allie asked in a frightened whisper. She had stuck her head out from under the robe as well, was staring across the
room at the woman who had ruled her imagination for more than two decades. “Donna. What are you doing?”
Donna didn’t look back at her.
“Guys,” Robin whispered.
She pointed through the smoke at the glass wall.
She stared with the stunned, blank eyes of someone who has been struck a ringing blow.
Tana looked again and saw that the video was flicking back and forth over the same half second now, as Arthur Oakes wheeled about in a blur, slinging that lacrosse stick.
Arthur’s right arm was extended toward that new Y-shaped fissure running through the wall.
By some trick of optical refraction, the handle of the lacrosse stick seemed to be pressing right through the crack, at the very point where the Y split in three directions, at the very spot where two lines joined to become one.
Gwen put the crossword down, rose from her knees, and began to walk, like one in a trance, toward the wall of glass.
King Sorrow gripped the outside of the tower, claws sunk into the stone, belly pressed against the rock, like a salamander
clinging to a stucco wall. His tail lifted to curl around the lower part of the tower. As he raised his face to peer through
the embrasure, Donna unscrewed the top of the battered thermos, tipped her head back, and drank. It was, she thought, like
drinking the brine in which they packed olives, so salty her throat wanted to seize up. She forced down the first swallow
of dragon tears, and then the second . . . and abruptly the strength trickled out of her left hand. Her fingers tingled and
numbed. The thermos fell and struck the floor with a bang and her right hand clutched the edge of the windowsill, in case
her legs suddenly gave way.
King Sorrow’s dark crown—that web of membrane, with its sharp ridges of cartilage—opened around his vast and terrible face.
He turned his head to peer in at Donna with one eye, then swiveled around to stare in with the other. Those eyes were as big
as the lenses of a lighthouse’s beacon. Donna was reminded of a cat peering through a hole in the wall at mice.
“Why would I riddle with you, Donna McBride?” King Sorrow asked. His voice was so deep and powerful, it caused the chain-link
grating over the shelved books to tremble and resonate. “You have nothing to offer me.”
She felt it then: the moment the edge of her soul ignited. It was a thrill, a kind of shock—pleasurable and painful at once—that
raced from the top of her skull to her toes. It was like being dizzy-drunk and freshly laid at the same time . . . a sensation
of delight so powerful it threatened to stop the heart.
The tears were going to stop her heart. She could feel each new thud in her chest—sore but lovely—and count the long seconds in between. She coughed without opening her mouth . . . and tasted smoke.
“Solve my riddle,” she said. “And you can have my life. I’ll give it freely.”