Of Enemies and Endings (33 page)

“He's fine,” Dad said. “Well, the giant broke his arm. I got distracted for a second. He went that way with some others.” He pointed toward the library.

Chase must have heard Lena too.

I didn't even feel my legs, sprinting down a side street, slipping on the snow, ducking through a skirmish between ten seventh graders and a leftover ice griffin. I could hear someone crying—big, wrenching wails. It sounded like Jenny.

Around the next corner, ax heads were buried in the library door. A clump of people had gathered beside it. Chase was with the triplets, his back to me. Mrs. LaMarelle was sitting on the ground, her head bent. I couldn't see Lena.

My feet crunched over the snow. Chase turned. His broken arm must have been hurting him, but that wasn't the kind of misery on his face. Something terrible must have happened, something we couldn't fix. He threw out his good hand. “Wait. Let them put a cloth down first. You don't need to see the damage.”

I slowed to a walk. I shouldered through the others.

A yellow sheet covered Lena from chest to knees. Her face twisted with pain, her skin shining with sweat. Red bloomed on the fabric, soaking through in two places. She was losing too much blood.

Jenny knelt at her sister's side, crying. She held a short bit of rope out, but Lena squirmed away from it.

Their grandmother stroked Lena's forehead, brushing away the too-long braids so gently, but her voice was firm. “You have to let Jenny apply the tourniquet.”

“I don't want it,” Lena said, her voice shaking.

I didn't see what they needed a tourniquet for, and then, all of a sudden, I did. There, peeking out of the cloth near Lena's foot, was my friend's small palm and slender fingers, too far from her arm.

General Searcaster's voice. Her laugh. Lena's scream. The axes had been so sharp.

“I can be your hands.” I hadn't noticed Melodie, held by the metal Fey dummy chauffeur. Golden tears slid down her nose. “I can be your hands, like the statue is my legs.”

“Lena . . . ,” I breathed.

Jenny looked up. She spotted me. “We need the Water of Life.
Now
.”

But I'd given it up. I'd let Likon carry it off to the Arctic Circle. Rapunzel had told me to.

“No,
please
,” Lena murmured. I wasn't sure she'd noticed how many people had gathered around us. “I should have guessed Searcaster would come. I threw the self-destruct switch, but it was too late. It was my fault—”

Mrs. LaMarelle turned away. She pressed a hand over her mouth.

Lena's lips were bleached and cracked, her eyes sunken, scared. She was dying. We couldn't save her.

“Rory, snap out of it,” Jenny said. “The
Water
.”

I shook my head.

Chase guessed the truth first. “It's gone. The Snow Queen got it.”

No one spoke for a moment, and the silence stretched out. Even the sounds of the final skirmishes seemed to grow quieter.

Then Jenny said, not sounding very sure, “Then we tie the tourniquet. We get her to the hospital.”

Mrs. LaMarelle shook her head. “Too much blood. Not enough time.”

“We have to try
something
,” Jenny told her grandmother. “We can't just let this happen.”

A dozen metallic clatters disturbed the silence behind us. Rapunzel soared over the house where the Tree of Hope had fallen, riding her purple magic carpet through the smoke. It had a new rip down its middle. Trailing them were a dozen evil Fey dummies, looking like one of the giants had stepped on them. They lurched along with crushed feet, twisted knees, flattened heads, bent wings, and missing shoulders. Behind them, jogging to catch up, were the human Itari warriors.

“George!” Chase said. “Get over here!”

“Can't! The Director's orders!” George called back, irritated. He had no idea.

“It's Lena!” Chase said. Then George's jog turned into a sprint.

Rapunzel's carpet pulled up beside me. She stepped onto the ground. “I could not find Gretel. Someone needs to tell her to search under her bed for that which was lost.”

I couldn't believe she thought any of us would leave Lena now. “I'll go later.” My voice gave out on the last word. I didn't mean
later
. I meant
after
.

“Not you, and not later.” Rapunzel turned to the triplets and pointed at Kevin and Conner. “You. Tell her those with the most dire wounds are beside the doors to Baltimore, the kitchen, and Atlantis.”

Kevin and Conner looked at Chase, who nodded. They took off.

For once, I wasn't the one who understood her first. Hope blazed across Jenny's face. “The Water?”

“I only had time for one,” Rapunzel said again. “I hope I made the right choice.”

“You switched them,” I said, understanding. “You let Solange think she had the Water.”

Rapunzel nodded. “She would not leave unless she had what she sought.”

Mrs. LaMarelle wasn't comforted. “Jenny, it won't come in time.”

The blood had soaked through most of the sheet, and still, it spread, creeping out in a circle around Lena, dying the snow crimson.

Lena saw it. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I've read about this. You
do
get cold.”

The crowd parted. George barreled through, so fast he would have fallen on his sister if Chase and Kyle hadn't steadied him. “Lena,” he whispered. “God, no.
Lena
.”

“Come and say good-bye.” Mrs. LaMarelle's voice seemed to come from a different person, someone not losing her granddaughter. Her face was so serene. “Saying good-bye is a gift. Not many people get it.”

But I didn't
want
to say good-bye. Neither did George and Jenny. We wanted something in this big, complicated magical world to turn up and save her.

Rapunzel dropped her hand over my head. She waited until my eyes met hers.

“Rory, this was always my ending, and I have always known it. You did not fail to save us. This is my choice.” I was taller than she was, but on her tiptoes, she still managed to kiss my forehead.

I was barely listening. Lena filled the corners of my mind, and nothing else processed. “I have to say good-bye.”

“No. You need her more than you need me, and I can give her back to you.” Rapunzel turned to the LaMarelles. They'd gathered around her so tightly they crowded everyone else out. “Excuse me. I must speak with Lena.”

Jenny and George glared up at Rapunzel. Mrs. LaMarelle didn't bother to lift her head.

George started to push Rapunzel back, but Kyle dragged him away. Rapunzel knelt in the space he'd left behind, blood staining her skirt. She held something hidden in her hands.

“Lena's the new Rapunzel,” Kyle told George, and then I understood.

The Canon's golden apple had saved Rapunzel's life once. Two hundred years later, she was passing on the favor.

“Lena, I can pin this token upon your person, but the spell will only transfer if we make a verbal agreement,” Rapunzel said. “Do you take this gift and this burden?”

Lena struggled to swallow. “You're making me part of the Canon?”

“I am asking,” Rapunzel said.

“Yes,” Lena croaked.

As calm as you please, Rapunzel reached under the sodden cloth. Her fingers moved, sliding the golden apple onto Lena's clothes. But what she was giving away had kept her alive for hundreds of years, longer than her natural life span. When she let go, she would be gone. Forever gone, and her prophecies would go with her, and her advice, and her kindness.

“But—” I had to say something. At this point, words were all I had left. “I need you both.”

Rapunzel looked up, and the smile she gave me was real and warm. “No. I needed you. We cannot choose our family in this life, but if I could have chosen myself a sister, it would have been you.”

And before I could answer, she let go. In a heartbeat, she turned translucent—a soft pretty gray pearly dust, exactly the same shade her hair had been. For an instant, it still held Rapunzel's shape.

A dry sob ripped out of my throat.

Then the dust began to blow away, swirling across the courtyard in a stream of silver, mixing with the falling snow.

Lena kicked the sheet away, not even looking at the blood. Her lips were pink again, her eyes bright. She sat up. She looked at her hands. Gold covered the left one up to the wrist and the right one halfway to the elbow, like a pair of mismatched metallic gloves.

“Just like Madame Benne,” whispered Melodie, awed.

Mrs. LaMarelle grabbed one of the new hands, and Lena promptly burst into tears.

y eyes burned, but I didn't cry.

A second grief doesn't cancel out the first. It just scoops a bigger chunk from your insides. Losing Hansel had hallowed out a vast cavern, echoing and empty. Losing Rapunzel cut even farther, piercing the heart of my world, a hole so deep and so dark I couldn't imagine that it had an end.

But Lena was okay. I clung to that thought. It was the only thing keeping me from falling apart completely.

Rumpelstiltskin ran toward us, his plaid blazer singed. He carried an enormous book over his shoulder, and it knocked into people as he shoved through the crowd.

He didn't stop until he saw Lena and her golden hands. Then his whole body sagged with relief. His favorite student was safe. “So it's true, then. You have one of the double Tales.” He opened the blue book and read, straining to hold it up without a table supporting its weight. “ ‘The Rapunzel Without Hands.' ”

Wow, I thought leadenly. The magic around me was working overtime today.

“That's creepy,” said George. Jenny smacked his arm.

Lena stared at her golden palms. “And the apple still let me into the Canon? Even though my Tale is contaminated?”

“Not
contaminated
, just combined,” Rumpelstiltskin said. “ ‘The Maiden Without Hands' is another Grimm Tale. Two other Tales fused this spring—‘The Pied Piper' and ‘The Snow Queen.' You can see it here in the book.”

At first I thought the library had just automatically started a new volume of tales when the other one was stolen. But this book was bound in blue leather, the edges of its paper gilded, almost identical to the one I'd seen the goblin carrying through the portal. My voice was hoarse, like I'd actually been screaming instead of just wishing that I could. “You switched the current volume for one of the older ones.”

Melodie nodded. “Lena and I held them off while Rumpel hid it.”

“I didn't even think about the maps.” Lena wiped her tear-streaked face on her shoulder, like she was trying not to use her new hands.

“She got the
maps
?” Chase said.

“The maps and the volume of Tales from Summer 1990 are gone forever, I fear,” Rumpelstiltskin said mournfully.

But keeping the current volume was good news. It should have made me glad, like Lena being alive should have, but that got smothered by the unfathomable emptiness. Rapunzel was gone.

“Where is Rapunzel?” cried a voice so cold that I was sure for a second that Solange had come back, but it was the Director. Sarah Thumb flew up behind her. Mr. Swallow was missing a few tail feathers. His clumsy flight was zigzaggy, but he still managed to land on the Director's shoulder. “Where is the traitor?”

I couldn't even muster up the energy to argue. I'd said it all before. The Director never listened to me anyway.

But this time, it wasn't me who piped up.

“She's dead,” said Jenny.

Rapunzel would have loved to see the Director's face then. Shocked, then baffled, then hastily stern as she backtracked. “It does not clear her. Someone gave the Snow Queen the means to enter this place. Our fortress held for the entirety of the last war. Someone must have aided the invasion. What Rapunzel did—”

“Was save my grandbaby,” interrupted Mrs. LaMarelle, like her word was final.