“No, I can feel it beating!” she said. “How is this possible? What sort of magic could restore someone’s heart?”
“I understand completely,” Froggy said with a smile. “It’s called a second chance. After a lifetime of sorrow, the mirror dimension has granted you an opportunity to start over.”
“I don’t deserve a second chance,” Evly said. “After all the pain I’ve caused over the years, I deserve to spend eternity inside a prison cell.”
“Then perhaps it’s a chance for redemption,” he suggested. “You were too late to free Mira, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late for everyone else. There are plenty of people who feel trapped in the mirror and could use all the advice you’ve been storing.”
“But why me?” Evly asked. “Surely there are much more suitable candidates than an evil queen.”
“Well, maybe not,” Froggy said. “Maybe you were meant to go through all that pain and heartbreak so you could save others from their own. Maybe the Evil Queen is just a chapter in your life and not the whole story. Maybe the world has dreamed bigger plans for you than you’ve dreamed for yourself.”
Tears filled Evly’s eyes as she thought it over. It was difficult to accept kindness from a world she thought so cruel.
“I should take my own advice and stop feeling sorry over the things I can’t control,” she said. “Thank you for guiding me through it. As much as I’d like to continue looking for your friends, I suppose I’m quite useless to you from this side of the glass. Good luck to you, whoever you are.”
Evly kissed the mirror near Froggy’s cheek and left the cottage, taking her first steps toward a new beginning. Once she was gone, Froggy left the mirror and wandered into the darkness of the mirror dimension.
“What a nice lady,” he said to himself. “I wonder which friends she was talking about….”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE UNEXPECTED RESCUERS
Conner and his friends could hear the commotion between the witches and the Marines as if it were happening right in front of them. It was terrifying knowing his sister was outside in the line of gunfire, and pure torture knowing there was nothing he could do to help her. Conner fought against the metal bars wrapped around his body until his skin bruised, but the railing never budged.
Just as a thunderous round of gunfire commenced, Morina reappeared in the Rose Main Reading Room. She sauntered through the room to the bridge between worlds without even looking at the captives twisted in the railing above her. Conner and the others called her every foul name they could think of as she passed by, but the metal bars across their mouths muffled their words.
“Save your strength—you’re going to be up there for a very long time,” Morina said with a laugh. “Now that my pawns are in place, it’s time to secure a checkmate. Enjoy these moments while you can—it’ll be the last time the Otherworld belongs to you.”
Morina blew them each a kiss and the metal bars wrapped around their bodies even more tightly. The witch stepped into the fairy-tale world and disappeared in the forest on the other side.
Conner and his friends squirmed in their painful constraints. They were pinned so tightly they could barely breathe and were starting to lose feeling in their limbs. Hero was woken by his mother’s frantic twisting and began to cry—but the infant’s crying was drowned out by Red’s high-pitched weeping.
There hadn’t been many moments in Conner’s life when he’d felt completely out of luck, but this was one of them. With his sister under a terrible curse, his friends imprisoned around him, and no way to contact anyone outside the library, Conner thought the Otherworld might be doomed.
Suddenly, the conflict outside went dead silent and Conner feared the worst. Either the Marines had exterminated the witches and his sister, or the battle had moved. Footsteps entered the Rose Main Reading Room, and Conner worried that the witches were retreating into the library. Since his head was stuck facing forward, he looked out of the corners of his eyes until the muscles in his sockets were strained. He saw the shapes of four familiar young women—and they were the last people on earth he was expecting to find.
“As I live and breathe,” said a familiar voice. “If it isn’t Conner Bailey… and he’s exactly where I’ve always wanted him—vulnerable and in need of a favor!”
Mindy, Cindy, Lindy, and Wendy walked farther into the Rose Main Reading Room and stood where Conner and the others could see them clearly. The Book Huggers stared up at him and his friends with matching smirks, crossed arms, and devious expressions. The teenage girls looked like vultures surrounding a pack of injured animals.
“Hmm hmmhmhm?” Bree mumbled in disbelief.
“Oh, look, girls!” Cindy said. “Bree Campbell and Conner are in a suspicious circumstance together! What a surprise—NOT!”
“Hmmmm hmm hm hmm hmmm!” Conner grunted.
“What’s that, Conner? After all these years you finally have something to say?” Mindy asked. “Wish I could hear you through the all lies and trickery you’ve planted in my head!”
“HMMM HMM HMMM!” Conner grunted angrily.
“Lindy, go back to the abandoned subway tunnel,” Mindy ordered. “I believe there was a handsaw on the platform. That should help Conner loosen his lips.”
Lindy followed the command and promptly left the reading room. Conner wasn’t sure if the Book Huggers’ plan was to free him or torture him with the saw, and judging by their questionable behavior in the past, either was possible. A few minutes later Lindy returned carrying a foot-long handsaw like it was a poisonous snake.
“Great work. Now remove the bar covering his mouth,” Mindy instructed.
Lindy paused nervously. “Maybe Wendy should do this? She was the only one of us who didn’t fail woodshop.”
Wendy nodded confidently and took the tool from her friend. The quietest Book Hugger placed the handsaw between her teeth and climbed a bookshelf toward Conner like a pirate ascending the side of a ship. With two quick strikes on each side, the metal bar across Conner’s face fell to the floor.
“What the HECK are you guys doing here?” he asked.
“We’re on vacation with our families,” Cindy said. “That was, until we saw you in a taxi outside Cheesy Street! Then pleasure quickly turned into business.”
“We’ve been following you ever since,” Lindy said. “We told our parents the pizza bagels gave us diarrhea. They still think we’re in the bathroom.”
“The homeless janitor didn’t want to tell us where you went, but his friends weren’t so loyal,” Mindy said. “They sang like canaries for a couple of granola bars and a box of Tic Tacs.”