“The words that dragged you from Hell. It was a story, wasn’t it.”
“Yeah, of course it was. But I don’t see how that helps us.”
“Because I think… I think it was the one about the prince who doesn’t believe he is. The one that had all my heart in it, all my despair, all my hope, when hope was still in me. I spent thelast of it looking up at the stars, scribbling you without knowing your name.”
“Right, and then it happened. The spell was cast.”
“To drag you from Hell, yes. But I didn’t have enough hope to write the rest. I believed that you would come. I couldn’t let myself dream that you would stay. That me and you would be okay. In real life, nothing ever is that way.”
“So the terms and conditions went—”
“You were right. I didn’t write them. All I left at the end was blank space. Something unfinished. Something that someone else could step into and twist to their own ends. I was too afraid to go for it all, and so it was taken away,” she said, so fierce now that he stepped back. He stared at her, like he could hardly let it sink in.
“Nance,” he said, in this eerily calm sort of way. “You don’t happen to still have that story, do you?”
But he knew by her expression what the answer was.
It was the reason he grabbed her hand, and told her they had to run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She knew the truck wasn’t going at a normal speed. Mostly because she had been plastered to her seat from the moment Jack put his foot down. She couldn’t even lift her hands to hang on to something. Though she didn’t really need to. The truck had secured her with about twelve extra seat belts. A kind of safety helmet had sprouted around most of her head.
It even voiced some disapproval at first.
“She’s My Baby,” it bleated. As if it couldn’t bear to see her hurt.
But after Jack reasoned that mild bruising from going at a nightmare speed was probably preferable to being obliterated by all the armies under Satan’s command, it changed the tune. Now they were barreling down Highway 72 with “Bat Out of Hell” blasting from the speakers.
It was surprisingly exhilarating.
She found herself laughing hysterically. Then Jack was laughing hysterically, too. “I think we might be delirious with terror,” he yelled, over the music and the insane sound of a truck going seven million miles an hour, and then behind them—something horrifying. Something really bad. Something that made her think of that movie where nothingness catches up to reality, and starts to eat it.
She didn’t even want to look back in case that was a good guess.
But then Jack checked the rearview, and said, “Come on, come on, come on,” to the truck, and the truck strained and screeched and tried to go faster, and she had to. She glanced back, somehow, even though it felt like fighting gravity, and made her hair form a weird tunnel around her face.
And there it was out the back window.
The black teeth of nothing at all.
A great mass of it, a great maze of it, it made her eyes go funny to see it.Because it’s not really what it looks like, she told herself. But it didn’t help to think of it that way. She wanted something concrete, something she could fight. Her hands were already buzzing with spells to do it.
So she asked.
“Tell me what to do to it,” she said, thinking of undoing, unmaking.
Heck, for a moment she wondered if she could simply blip them away from all this. Like the Dorothy hurricane she’d done before. Only when she tried, she got the honk. And Jack seemed to know it was coming before she did.
He grimly shook his head.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna work. Truthfully it’s a miracle we’re even outrunning something that should exist in eight dimensions. There isn’t really any such thing as moving only in a straight line for my dad. Or for me, if I’m being honest. We don’t even really obey space and time and gravity. A thousand years and five minutes exist simultaneously in Hell. It’s how I was gone for a few hours for you, but it felt like a thousand years to me.”
“So how are we doing this?”
“I think it’s mostly you.”
“But I haven’t cast a spell.”
