She felt all those things.
She felt whatever she had before.
She became that girl, lying on the forest floor, slowly dying. And the moment she did, there was only one emotion she knew. A frantic one, a desperate one, she could feel herself trying to speak and failing so completely it was like being cursed.It wasn’t you, she tried to tell him.It wasn’t you; you didn’t do this.
She even managed to lift a hand. She tried to grab him, to make him see.
But the most terrible part of that was: He seemed to think she was pushing him away. Her, the girl he loved and thought he had killed—he felt her touch him in one last attempt to stop all these events being set in motion, and saw it as fear, horror, revulsion. She watched him jerk back, utterly broken.
And there was nothing she could do.
She died in that place, in the sweet summer of ’89.
Chapter Twenty-Three
She came back to life in a great rush, in her own bed. As if it had all been just a nightmare, and now she was waking up from it. All she had to do was take several calming breaths, and it would be a distant nothing. A vague imprint of something terrifying, of a sort that gradually faded into even less than this.
Though of course she couldn’t believe anything of the kind.
He had dipped her directly into the past. And the past hung on. That other girl was in her now—not just outside, whispering. Not just one hand on her shoulder. She could feel her, beneath her own skin. A second heart beating with her own. A flood of memories that now belonged to her.
And they all said the same thing:
He loved you. He thinks he killed you.
He thinks he accidentally tore your throat out, in a frenzy.
But he didn’t. He did not. More than that: You know he could never have.
Even if he doesn’t.
So now she had to do something extremely difficult. Almost impossible, in fact. She had no idea how she was even going to manage, considering it involved undoing almost forty years of extreme trauma and self-loathing. But she knew she had to try. She had to do it, for the man who had felt affection from someonehe loved for the first time in decades, who had seen a ghost of his beloved come back to him, and responded by trying to impress on her that he couldn’t be trusted.
“I’m coming, Bram,” she said. And only realized after she had that she had called him by his real name. That part of her now knew him only in that way, and not just when it came to horrors like this. She could see him laughing with abandon, in her mind’s eye. She could feel him actually being joyful. Running from her spells across an empty Gauntlet square, in darkness. Arms around her waist, as she flew him across the lake on her broomstick.
Because he had been terrible at flying, she remembered now.
And thebooks. Dear god, the love of books.
She stopped dead in the middle of pulling her boots back on, struck to her core by this sudden understanding. It all just fell into place, like an incredibly simple jigsaw that had somehow still eluded her.
He had mocked her for her love of reading,because reading was how it had all began.
He saw me devouring a book he loved instead of listening to a lecture, she found herself recalling.Secretly, under the table, frantic to turn the pages. The real version of Dracula, before the magical authorities made sure only the sanitized and more ordinary version was released. And he knew exactly the sort of person I was.
One in love with the dream, over the dull reality.
One he could talk to. He could share with.
And then, she remembered, he had sent her a book.From a fellow bookworm, he had written on the inside. Right beneath the title, of another book that had started off as magic, trying to break through to ordinary people. Before finally ending up as something she knew very well:The Velveteen Rabbit.
God,The Velveteen Rabbit.
She had to finish putting on her boots with tears streaming over her cheeks. She couldn’t even make them stop once she stepped outside her room. People stared; someone she barely knew actually asked her if she was all right. If she ran into Anaya, there were going to be a lot of questions she didn’t know how to answer.
But she kept going.
She even knew where to go to.
