The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(36)

She had teetered on the edge of the rabbit hole, windmilling her arms for balance, but in the end she had not fallen. She had not. She had stayed in the safe sunlit world of grass and sky, and she would never leave it again. She had been so wrong ever to think about it. It had tried to take her, but she would not be taken.

Plum sank down on the couch. Her knees were two bags of water. She forced herself to think about what it meant. Someone had found out that she was a Chatwin, or something had found out, and they or it was trying to scare her. Or maybe it was one of those things where you automatically saw your greatest fear or something.

But what it felt like was, Fillory itself had reached out and tugged lightly on the invisible thread tied to the fishhook that was lodged firmly in her back, and it had whispered: Don’t forget. You belong to me.

But she had learned her lesson. Or at any rate a lesson: she would never try to enter the wine closet in anything but a straightforward and conventional fashion. The couch was so saggy and brokeback that it almost swallowed her up. She stopped thinking. She looked at her reflection in the long mirror that Darcy and Chelsea had cracked last night.

But she wasn’t in the mirror. There was another girl there instead of her. Or at least it was shaped like a girl. It was blue and naked and its skin gave off a soft unearthly light. Even its teeth were blue.

It smiled at her. Its eyes were the same color as its skin. It hung motionless in midair, a yard above the floor, slightly smaller than life size. The girl’s outlines were strange: sometimes she was slightly blurry, other times crisp and clear.

Plum sat up. She got to her feet, but slowly, and after that she didn’t move at all, because she understood that all moving was over with. She knew who this was.

It was the ghost of Brakebills. It had been the ghost all along. This wasn’t a friendly ghost. It wasn’t a mischievous poltergeist. This was a dead thing that hated the living. Once as a child, after a storm, Plum had seen a downed power line writhing like a lethal snake on a road, arcing over and over again on the wet asphalt, bright as a sun. This blue girl was like that. The insulation had come off the world, and Plum was facing the raw naked current.

The two girls stared at each other: the one who survived and the one who hadn’t. It smiled wider, like they were having a tea party.

“No,” Plum said. “It’s not me. You don’t want me.”

But Plum was lying. She understood. The ghost did want her. It had always wanted her. She was a Chatwin, and Chatwins lived on borrowed time. Plum wondered if it would hurt.

Bump. The sound came from the wall to her left—something had run into it from the other side. A shower of plaster fell. A man’s voice said something like “oof.”

Plum looked; the ghost in the mirror didn’t.

Boom! The wall exploded inward, throwing chunks of wood and plaster and stone in all directions, and Plum ducked, and a man came crashing through it covered with white dust. It was Professor Coldwater. He shook himself like a wet dog to get some of the dust off, though he still looked like he’d been hit with a sack of flour. White witchery sprayed out of both his hands like sparklers, so bright they made purple flares in her vision.

When he saw what was in the mirror he froze.

“Oh,” he said quietly. “Oh my God. It’s you.”

Plum didn’t think he was talking to her. Did he recognize this thing? It was almost like he knew it personally, which would be pretty weird even for him. He took a deep breath and pulled himself together.

“Don’t move till I tell you,” he said.

That was meant for Plum. She didn’t move, but she didn’t dare to believe that he could actually save her. All she’d done was drag him into the catastrophe too.

With an arm protecting his face Professor Coldwater reared back one of his long legs and kicked in the mirror. It took him three kicks—the first two times the glass just starred and sagged, but the third time his foot went right through it. It got a little stuck when he tried to pull it out. It was a measure of how shocked she was that Plum’s first thought was, I must tell Chelsea that she won’t have to pay for the mirror.

That didn’t dispel the ghost, but it was definitely inconvenienced. It was still watching them, suspended in midair, but now it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned his back on it—the ghost threw something at them, Plum couldn’t see what, and he deflected it with one hand without looking. Then he placed his palms together.

“Get down,” he said. “All the way. On the floor.”

She got down. The air shimmered and rippled, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. At the bottom of it was the dull bass pressure-beat of the door exploding outward out of its frame.

“Now get up and run,” Professor Coldwater said. “Run! Go ahead, I’m right behind you.”

Plum ran. She could have stayed and tried to help, but that would have been compounding her stupidity with more stupidity. She did the hard thing and trusted him: she hurdled the couch like a champion and felt a shockwave as Professor Coldwater detonated some final spell. The force of it lifted Plum off her feet for a second and made her stagger, but she found them again and kept on running.

Going back was faster than going forward had been. She was bounding ahead seven-league-boots-style, which at first she thought was adrenaline till she realized, nope, magic. One stride took her through the hell-room, another and she was in colonial Brakebills, then she was in Wharton’s room, on the roof, in the dining room crawl space, the library, hard left turn at the creepy-pear-tree-courtyard, the passage. The sound of doors slamming shut behind her was like a string of firecrackers going off.