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

I tried to bail before the wedding, but Rosa’s great-grandmother slapped the spindle out of my hands and reminded me that her wicked aunt was still out there seeking revenge, so I stayed. And, sure enough, the aunt showed up with a last-second plot twist in her back pocket that might have ruined everything. I locked her in the women’s room and Rosa’s great-grandmother put a ?CUIDADO! sign out front.

It’s after midnight now, but neither the DJ nor the dancers are showing any signs of quitting. Normally I’d have slipped out the back hours ago, but it’s hard to feel existential dread when you’re full of churros and beer. Plus, the groom’s second or third cousin has been shooting me slantwise looks all evening, and everyone in this dimension is so dramatically, excessively hot I’ve spent half my time blinking and whispering, “Sweet Christ.”

So I don’t run away. Instead, I look deliberately back at the groom’s second or third cousin and take a slow sip of beer. He jerks his chin at the dance floor and I shake my head, not breaking eye contact. His smile belongs on daytime TV.

Ten minutes later, the two of us are fumbling with the key card to his hotel room, laughing, and twenty minutes later I have forgotten about every single dimension except this one.

It’s still dark when I wake up. I doubt I’ve slept for more than two or three hours, but I feel sober and tense, the way I get when I linger too long.

I make myself lie there for a while, admiring the amber slant of the street light across Diego’s skin, the gym-sculpted planes of his back. I wonder, briefly, what it would feel like to stay. To wake up every morning in the same world, with the same person. It would be good, I bet. Even great.

But there’s a slight tremble in my limbs already, a weight in my lungs like silt settling at the bottom of a river. I don’t have time to waste wanting or wishing; it’s time to run.

I pick my clothes off the floor and tiptoe to the bathroom, feeling for the handkerchief in my jeans pocket. Wrapped safely inside it is a long, sharp splinter of wood, which I set beside the sink while I dress. I can and have traveled between dimensions with nothing but a bent bobby pin and force of will, but it’s easier with a piece of an actual spindle. I’m sure Charm would explain about the psychic weight of repeated motifs and the narrative resonance between worlds if I asked, but I don’t ask her anything anymore.

I don’t travel as light as I once did, either. These days I carry a shapeless backpack full of basic survival supplies (Clif Bars, bottled water, matches, meds, clean underwear, a cell phone I rarely turn on) and the useful detritus of forty-eight fairy tale worlds (a small sack of gold coins, a compass that points toward wherever I’m trying to go, a tiny mechanical mockingbird that sings shrilly and off-key if I’m in mortal peril).

I sling the pack over my shoulder and glance at the mirror, knowing what I’ll see and not really wanting to: a gaunt girl with greasy hair and a too-sharp chin who should definitely text her mom to say she’s okay, but who probably won’t.

Except, the thing is, it’s not me in the mirror.

It’s a woman with high, hard cheekbones and hair coiled like a black silk snake on her head. Her lips are a startling false red, painted like a wound across her face, and there are deep pink indents on either side of her brow. She’s older than most sleeping beauties—there are cold lines carved at the corners of those red, red lips—and far less pretty. But there’s something compelling about her, a gravitational pull I can’t explain. Maybe it’s the eyes, burning back at me with desperate hunger.

The lips move, silent. Please. One hand lifts to the other side of the glass, as if the mirror is a window between us. Her fingertips are a bloodless white.

I’ve been in the princess-rescuing game long enough that I don’t hesitate. I raise my fingers to the glass, too, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there. I can feel the heat of her hand, the slight give of her skin.

Then her fingers close like claws around my wrist and pull me through.



* * *



YOU MIGHT THINK interdimensional travel is difficult or frightening, but it’s usually not that bad. Picture the multiverse as an endless book with endless pages, where each page is a different reality. If you were to retrace the letters on one of those pages enough times, the paper might grow thin, the ink might bleed through. In this metaphor, I’m the ink, and the ink is totally fine. There’s a brief moment when I’m falling from one page to the next, my hair tangling in a wind that smells like old paperbacks and roses, and then someone says help and I tumble into another version of my own story.

This time, though, the moment between pages is not brief. It’s vast. It’s a timeless, lightless infinity, like the voids between galaxies. There are no voices calling for help, no glimpses of half-familiar realities. There’s nothing at all except the viselike grip of fingers around my wrist and a not-insignificant amount of pain.

I mean, I don’t know if I technically “have” a “body,” so maybe it’s not real pain. Maybe my conviction that my organs are turning themselves inside out is just a really shitty hallucination. Maybe all my neurons are just merely screaming in existential dread. Maybe I’m dying again.

Then there are more pieces of story rushing past me, but I don’t recognize any of them: a drop of blood on fresh snow; a heart in a box, wet and raw; a dead girl lying in the woods, pale as bone.