Dangerous Women. Part II. Джордж Р. Р. Мартин

then: bump. The sound came from the wall to her left—it sounded like something had run into it from the other side. A little plaster fell. The bump was followed by a man’s voice saying something like “Oof.” Plum looked.

      The ghost in the mirror didn’t.

      “I know,” it whispered. “I saw.”

      The wall exploded, throwing plaster in all directions, and a man crashed through it covered with white dust. It was Professor Coldwater. He shook himself like a wet dog to get some of the dust off. White witchery sparked around both his hands like Roman candles, so bright it made purple flares in her vision.

      Always keeping one hand pointed at the blue ghost, he walked toward Plum till he stood between her and the mirror.

      “Careful,” he said over his shoulder, relatively calmly given the circumstances.

      He 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 reaction was: I must tell Chelsea that she doesn’t have to worry about paying for it.

      Breaking the mirror didn’t dispel the ghost—it was still watching them, though it had to peer around the edge of the hole. Professor Coldwater turned around to face the wall behind Plum and joined his hands together.

      “Get down,” he said.

      The air shimmered and rippled around them. Then she had to throw her forearm over her eyes, and her hair crackled with so much static electricity, it made her scalp hurt. The entire world was shot through with light. She didn’t see but she heard and felt the door behind her explode out of its frame.

      “Run,” Professor Coldwater said. “Go on, I’m right behind you.”

      She did. She hurdled the couch like a champion and felt a shock wave as Professor Coldwater threw some final spell at the ghost. It lifted Plum off her feet and made her stagger, but she kept on running.

      Going back was faster than going forward had been. She seemed to be bounding ahead seven-league-boots-style, which at first she thought was adrenaline till she realized, no, it was just 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 crawl space, the library, the creepy-pear-tree courtyard, the passage. The sound of doors slamming behind her was like a string of firecrackers going off.

      They stopped just short of the Senior Common Room, breathing hard. He was right behind her, just as he’d said. She wondered if he’d just saved her life; at any rate, she definitely felt bad about having made fun of him behind his back. He resealed the passageway behind him. She watched him work, dazed but fascinated: moving in fast-motion, his arms flying crazily, like a time-lapse movie, he assembled an entire intricately patterned brick wall in about five seconds.

      She couldn’t help but notice that this time he caught the resonance pattern, the one she’d used to break the last seal, and corrected it.

      Then they were alone in the Senior Common Room. It could all have been a dream except for the plaster dust on the shoulders of Professor Coldwater’s blazer.

      “What did she say to you?” he said.

      “She?” Plum said. “Oh, the ghost. Nothing. She said ‘You,’ and then she didn’t say anything else.

      “‘You,’” he repeated. He was staring over her shoulder—he’d already gone absentminded again. One of his fingers was still crackling with a bit of white fire; he shook it and it went out. “Hm. Do you still want to go to the wine closet? That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it?”

      Plum laughed in spite of herself. The wine closet. She’d completely forgotten about it. She still had Wharton’s stupid pencil case in her stupid pocket. It seemed too pointless to go through with it. Everything was too sad and too strange now.

      But somehow, she thought, it would be even sadder not to go through with it.

      “Sure,” she said, aiming for jaunty and almost getting there. “Why not. So there really is a secret passage?”

      “Of course. I steal bottles all the time.”

      He drew the rune word on the next panel over from the one she’d used.

      “You don’t count the half panel,” he said.

      Aha. The door opened. It was just what she thought: a doddle, not even one hundred yards, more like seventy-five.

      She squared her shoulders and checked her look in a pier glass. The hair was a little wild, but she supposed that would be part of the effect. She was surprised, and almost a tiny bit disappointed, to see her own face looking back at her. She wondered whose ghost the ghost was, and how she died, and why she was still here. Probably she wasn’t here for the fun of it. Probably she wasn’t a nostalgic alumna haunting Brakebills out of school spirit. Probably she needed something. Hopefully, that thing wasn’t, you know, to kill Plum.

      But if it was, she would have done it—wouldn’t she?—and she hadn’t. Plum wasn’t a ghost. It was actually worth telling herself that: Having seen a real one—and she hadn’t even thought they were real, but live and learn—she knew the difference now, really knew it. I didn’t die just then, she thought, and I didn’t die in that room. It felt like I did, I wanted to die, but I didn’t, because if I had died then, I would have died