A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1)(25)

I wanted to save us all from our stories, but I should have known better than anybody: there are worse endings than sleeping for a hundred years.

Pain pops in my kneecaps, sharp and sudden. My teeth clack together. It’s only when I hear Charm swearing that I realize I’ve fallen to the floor. I feel her arm bracing my shoulders, Primrose kneeling at my other side. I want to tell them I’m sorry, that I tried my best, but the tightness in my chest is suffocating me. My pulse has lost its steady tick-tocking rhythm, thundering like hooves in my ears. Darkness nibbles at the edges of my vision.

The floor tilts toward me, or maybe I tilt toward the floor, and then my cheek is plastered against cold stone. I blink once, staring hazily at the boots and slippers and bare feet of the beauties around me. I guess I get a theatrical death after all, sprawled at the top of the tallest tower, pale and fragile as any Rackham princess, but a lot less lonely.

I see it in the half second before my eyes hinge shut: a slender shard lying on the floor. A single splinter of dark wood that might once have belonged to a spindle. It wasn’t a spinning wheel in the original version.



I feel my lips peeling back over my teeth in a bloodless smile. I’ve read enough fantasy novels to recognize a last chance when I see one. This is the part where I rally my final strength, calling on reserves of fortitude I didn’t know I had to reach my numb fingers for that splinter. With my dying breath I will prick my finger and pull us all into the space between stories, and all the beauties will weep with gratitude and admiration as they escape into whatever new narratives they choose, and I will fall into my final sleep knowing I’ve done something worthwhile—

Except I don’t have any secret reserves of strength. There’s no amount of conviction or hope or love that can keep my overstuffed heart from stopping or my oxygen-starved brain from going gray.

My hand barely brushes the splinter when my vision turns the final, empty black of a theater screen just before the credits roll. I feel myself falling down, down into the kind of sleep that has no dreams and never ends.

The last thing I hear is my own name, spoken in a voice that sounds like a heart breaking. The last thing I think is how ironic it is, how fucking hilarious, that Charm should spend her life trying to save me, and I should die trying to save her, and both of us would fail.





10


I FIGURE I’M dead. Again.

True, there’s a grayish light glowing through my eyelids and stiff sheets beneath my skin, but I chalk that up to the random sensory misfirings of a dying brain. Ditto for the soft squeaking of orthopedic tennis shoes on waxed floors and the distant beeps of machines. It’s the smell I can’t seem to ignore: hand sanitizer and human suffering. Surely no version of heaven has hospital rooms.

I open my eyes. There’s a paneled ceiling above me. A whiteboard with the name of my nurse and a smiley face written in blue marker. The intrusive chill of oxygen tubing beneath my nose and the prickle of an IV in the crook of my arm. The window is one of those unopenable, industrial affairs, nothing at all like the arrow slit of a castle tower.

I know my regional hospital rooms: I’m in the ICU of Riverside Methodist Hospital on the north side of Columbus.

It occurs to me that one explanation for the seven days I spent trapped in a fairy tale is that I collapsed on the night of my twenty-first birthday and have spent the past week hooked up to an IV, furiously hallucinating about hot princesses and un-wicked fairies. That maybe I’m actually in one of those bullshit Wizard of Oz stories where the girl wakes up in the final chapter and everyone assures her it was all a dream.

But then—why is there a slender splinter of wood held tight in my fist? I press my thumb against my own fingertips, feeling for blood or bruises; there are none.

“Hey, hon.” The words are rough with exhaustion, cracked with relief.

How many times have I woken in a hospital bed to the sound of my father’s voice? How many times have I turned my stiff neck to see my parents perched at my bedside with new worry lines carved into their faces, cardboard cups of watery coffee clutched in their hands?

“Hey.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from inside a rusted pipe organ, a flaky wheeze. “Where’s my Prince Charming?” It’s the same joke I always make when I wake up from my surgeries and procedures. Usually Dad pulls a wounded, “Am I not charming?” face and Mom rolls her eyes and tousles his hair in a way that tells me she, at least, is thoroughly charmed.

This time they both burst into tears. Dad is the established crier of the family—he was asked to “get a grip or leave the theater” during the last twenty minutes of Coco—but this time Mom is crying just as hard, her shoulders heaving, her knuckles pressed to her eyes.

“Hey,” I offer rustily. “Hey.” And then somehow they’re both on the bed next to me and our foreheads are mashed together and I’m crying too. I spent the last week (or maybe the last five years) trying not to let the weight of their love suffocate me. It doesn’t feel very suffocating right now.

I clutch them a little closer, tucking my head into the hollow place right beneath Dad’s collarbone the way I did when I was little, when my death was far away and neither of us were very afraid of it. We stay like that for a while, shuddering and snuffling at one another, Mom smoothing the hair from my forehead.

Questions intrude, scrolling gently across my brain like the banners behind planes at the beach. How did I get here? How am I not dead? Am I still dying?