A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(11)

Then she’s glaring and panting, reaching for her knife while her cheeks turn patchy pink. I shouldn’t care, because I should be disappearing right now.

Except I’m not.

Nothing is happening. The world is not thinning around me, the infinite pages of the universe are not rustling past. It didn’t work, and both of us are extremely screwed.

Something draws the queen’s eyes away from me. She looks more closely at the mirror in her hand, and her eyes go wide.

She drops my collar and catches my hand instead. Before I can pull away—before I can even begin to form the word hey!—she presses our hands to the glass surface of her mirror.

Except there is no glass. Just our hands, falling into nothing at all.





4


IT’S COLD, BETWEEN worlds. There’s no air, but it whips past me, smelling of frost and first snows. The only warm thing is the queen’s hand locked tight around mine, dragging us into a story that doesn’t belong to either of us.

My knees hit earth, moss-pillowed and green, and the queen falls beside me with a squashy thud. She makes a sound like air leaking out of a tire, and I’d make fun of her if I didn’t feel the same way. My cells are frazzled, as if my entire body was recently microwaved, and it takes me longer than it should to stand and look around.

Trees. Soft, springtime air. Extremely melodic birdsong. The whole scene has a strange haziness to it, like a pre-Raphaelite painting or an old VHS tape.

The queen staggers to her feet in front of me and spreads her hands wide in triumph. “I didn’t need you after all, Zinnia Gray. I saved myself, as I always have and always will.”

I roll my eyes so hard it hurts a little. “Oh yeah? Then who’s that?”

The queen’s victorious smile sags a little at the edges. She follows my gaze over her left shoulder, where a glass coffin lies between the trees. A girl with a cute black bob is lying beneath the glass, her face lit by a single, perfect sunbeam, her hands folded limply around a bouquet of flowers.

The queen stares. She opens her mouth, closes it, and opens it again. “I don’t know,” she answers.

“Are you serious? Did you hit your head?”

“No, I know who it is, but—” The queen swallows, her eyes fixed on the unsettling white of the girl’s face. “That’s not my Snow White.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” I tuck both hands in my pockets, squinting around at the scenery. “Your world was a little more Gothic, but this place has a ‘now-in-Technicolor’ vibe.” I can tell she doesn’t understand, so I say meanly, “Congratulations, you made it to a different world! But you’re still in the same story.”

The queen looks dazed, staring down at Snow White with the beginnings of revulsion creeping into her eyes. “Why is the light like this?” She reaches her hand tentatively into the sunbeam. Something violet drifts into her palm. “Are there flower petals falling over her?”

I don’t answer because I’m busy sidling behind her. I snatch the mirror out of the queen’s hand and fling it sideways at the trunk of a tree. I’m hoping for a dramatic shatter of glass, but the frame just thwumps disappointingly against the bark and falls to the ground, perfectly whole. There’s a half second’s held breath before both of us dive for the mirror.

The queen shoves past me and I tackle her around the waist. It devolves quickly into a wrestling match, our clothes streaked with moss and dirt, our breath coming fast.

The queen is stronger and meaner than me. “No,” she pants. “I am—not”—she pins me between her knees and lunges for the mirror—“staying here!”

I try to slap the mirror out of her grip but she turns the glass to meet my hand, and it flies through it, passing back into that cold nowhere.

The last thing I hear is the queen laughing.



* * *



THIS TIME WE land somewhere dim and damp, like one of those basements that never quite dries out. Opening my eyes takes more effort than it should, and I can’t tell whether it’s the GRM or the unwilling trips through nowheresville.

The first thing I see is a stranger’s face smiling down at me. It’s a cute face: freckled and gap-toothed, framed by tangled hair the color of coal. Her lips aren’t red as blood and her skin has seen too much sun to be compared to snow, but I know a protagonist when I see one. “Hi,” I rasp.

“Good morning!” God save me from princesses and their exclamation points.

“Morning. Where’s—” I sit up abruptly, blinking the room into focus. But it’s not a room. It’s a cave, with a sandy floor and tidy fire pit.

The girl—woman, really, she’s got at least a decade on the cherubic kid in the coffin—settles cross-legged beside me. “Your angry woman?” She has a burbling, throaty sort of accent.

“She’s not my—yeah, her.”

She gestures with her chin toward the entrance of the cave, where more than a dozen men are struggling against a tall, dark-haired figure. There seems to be a lot of swearing from all parties.

“Who are those guys?”

The stranger smiles fondly at them. “Mine. They took me in when my mother tried to murder me, and I’ve been here ever since.” She confides this without much concern, as if attempted filicide is one of life’s little misfortunes.