A Mirror Mended (Fractured Fables #2)(26)
It’s at this point that Eva begins unlacing the front of her dress. My brain splits into two competing factions, one of which is cheering and sounds a lot like Charm on girls’ night at the gay bar, and the other of which is thinking how sad it is that Eva has endured so much, only to lose her mind now. “Eva, babe, what are you doing?”
She doesn’t answer, drawing the ribbon slowly out of her shift. Except it’s not a ribbon, is it? It’s a bodice lace.
A syrupy weight settles over my limbs. I notice small things: the minute tilt of Eva’s body away from mine. The taut cord of muscle in her neck, the divot in her cheek as she clenches her jaw, bracing herself to do something terrible and brave and stupid. I reach for her. Too late. Eva has already launched herself across the courtyard, knifing through the air like a falcon with dirty white feathers. She collides with Snow White, and then there’s a splintering, shattering sound, like a dropped wineglass. Something sharp slices across my cheek.
The courtyard falls into a numbed silence as every eye looks at the ground, at the place where the magic mirror lies in broken shards. I see our faces reflected in the shards, split and doubled, frozen in shock.
There’s a large sliver of glass right beside me, close enough to touch. The face reflected in this piece does not belong to the huntsmen, or either of the queens, or even myself. It’s a face framed by a long wing of bleached blond hair, with a septum piercing and an expression suggesting homicidal intent, or at least serious bodily harm. The lips of the face are moving, repeating the same name over and over, interspersed with swears: Zinnia, Zinnia, goddammit Zinnia.
“Charm, holy shit—” I reach for the shard and my fingers fall through the glass, into the cold rush of the great nothing between worlds. I feel myself tilting into it, falling forward, but I dig my toes into the stones. “Eva, it’s Charm! Come on!”
Eva is crouching before the queen with blood oozing from one nostril. She looks back at me and understanding flashes across her face. But she doesn’t run to me. She could have. I want that on the record. She could have taken my hand and run, and left this world under the thumb of its wicked queen for another century or two. She could have chosen to survive, like she always had.
Instead, she draws the bodice lace tight between her hands. It gleams sickly green in the firelight.
Eva nods once to me, with a fey, rueful smile, as if to say, Well, someone has to, before she surges to her feet and wraps the ribbon around Snow White’s throat.
Warm fingers grab my wrist, pulling hard. The last thing I see before I go is Eva—my not-so-wicked queen, my heroic villain—falling beneath the weight of her enemies.
9
I LAND HARD, flat on my back, feeling like a lump of Play-Doh forced through a cheese grater. The sky above me is no longer low and purple, but a bright, suburban blue crisscrossed by jet trails. A few oak leaves slap peacefully against one another. Damp earth soaks through the back of my T-shirt.
I’m in Charm and Prim’s backyard in Madison, a place I wasn’t totally sure I’d ever see again and from which I now desperately and ironically want to leave.
“Well, if it isn’t Little Miss SOS.”
I sit up—a considerable, even noble effort, which Charm does not appear to appreciate in the least. She’s kneeling beside me, her nose running badly, her cheeks blotched with ash. Prim is on my other side, her enormous eyes crimped with worry. She brushes dirt from my shoulder, plucks something from the greasy nest of my hair.
Behind them is the tiny metal fire ring they bought for their microscopic yard. There’s a pair of flip-flops inside the ring, still smoldering gently, sending up chemical curls of bluish smoke.
I give Charm a quick, woozy smile. “Knew you’d figure it out eventually.”
A look of relief crosses her face, there and gone again. She throws a sullen glance at the fire ring. “I liked those shoes.”
“Uh.” The flip-flops are hot-pink plastic. I can see the dollar store sticker still stuck to the underside of the left shoe. “I owe you a pair?”
Charm shrugs. “It’s fine.” It’s clearly not.
“Okay, whatever. I actually need to go back to where I was, like right now, so if you have another pair to burn that would be great. And maybe a mirror?”
Charm doesn’t move. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Her tone is cordial, but her eyes are thin and hard.
“Thank you?”
“Maybe try, ‘I’m sorry, Charm.’”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” It comes out bratty, audibly insincere. “But I really have to—”
“Shut the fuck up and listen for a second?” Charm’s civility vanishes; she was never a good bullshitter. Prim winces as Charm leans in. “I agree. Let’s recap our situation, shall we? So, first, I tell you I’ve got something important to talk about, and you say, ‘Sure thing, babe!’ But then you Spider-Verse into another dimension and leave me hanging.” I have the sinking suspicion that this speech has been rehearsed, more than once, with and without slides. Prim is creeping for the back door now, leaving me to my fate. “Second, you don’t talk to me for six months. Which is very mature and chill. Then, third, you send me a damn Aarne-Thompson-Uther index number—even though you specifically told me that system was, quote, ‘a Eurocentric mess’ that ‘should be retired from anthropology syllabi’—and failed to respond to any of my requests for clarification. Leaving me to spend the last seven hours frantically acting out the goddamn plot of goddamn Snow White, ever more certain that you’d already bitten into a poison apple or been assaulted by a wandering prince or some—”