I flinched back from him, from it. I could have destroyed it. I wanted to destroy it, right now, before it could ever get near me or Mum or any living thing in the world. The only sane thing to do was destroy it, and that was what Liesel had really been trying to tell me to do, when she’d said to leave Orion in the Scholomance, or send him to New York, or just get away from him; she’d been telling me to destroy this thing that shouldn’t exist, that should never have existed, and let it go back into the void where it really belonged. The words were in my mouth. You’re already dead.
“Orion,” I said instead, despairing, wanting to make his name into a different spell, but he just stood there. If it would have done any good, I’d have shoved him through. It was only fair, since he’d shoved me through the Scholomance doors. I’d have gone inside to lure him in after me. But I didn’t even need to ask Mum to know none of that would have worked. We weren’t trying to physically get him into the hut so some magical power could work on him that couldn’t reach outside. The power was already here, all around us. It was his choice that mattered now. He had to choose to go in there, to reach out for the healing. Because this power couldn’t do anything to someone. Even someone who wasn’t well enough to make a choice. If he couldn’t, if there wasn’t enough left of Orion in there, then there was only my choice left, my solitary horrible choice: to let him stay in the world until he did start hunting again, or send him out of it forever.
“You said you’d come to me in Wales,” I said to him. “And you’re not here, not really, so go in there and come to me. Do you hear me, Lake? You promised me. I let you promise me, you wanker! Will you go into the bloody hut?”
I was yelling by the end of it, and in a frenzy I grabbed a stick off the ground and whacked him across the rump. He jumped a little and then looked at me with a flash of something human in his face, of Orion, and before I could react, he looked back into the hut—and he was afraid.
I’d never seen Orion afraid of anything, even when a sane person ought to have been terrified out of their mind; not of monsters or heights or late schoolwork. But he looked into the tiny empty hut, and it was him, it was Orion, and he was terrified of whatever was in there. I whacked him again in my own absolute terror, only magnified by the instant of hope. “It’s a pile of rocks, not the whole school crammed full of mals, stop being such a coward and go in there!” I howled, and maybe he heard me, because he squeezed his eyes shut, the first time he’d closed them at all, and heaved himself over the threshold.
The whole clearing went utterly silent and still. Mum gave a short deep gasp of terror, and then she came to me and took my face in her hands and kissed me on the forehead and said, “My darling, I love you, whatever happens.”
In all of my frenzy to get her to help Orion, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to let Mum go in there with him, alone. I’d only thought about how I could persuade her; I hadn’t thought about what I was asking her to do. But she didn’t give me a chance to say wait, no, which I suppose was better than having to decide whether to say it or not. She let go and went straight inside the hut, and the yew branches lowered back down behind her.
I didn’t sleep at all, by which I mean I sat down on the ground outside the hut to wait, lay down on my side two minutes later, and was asleep almost instantly. I got up again when Precious bit my ear to wake me, leaping to my feet half asleep with my hands moving to cast a shield spell on instinct, pointlessly. The yew was groaning deeply overhead and light was pouring out of the hut, out of the roof between the leaves and branches, out of every crevice between the stones, turning all the moss into glowing green embers: a light that made my eyes water and my mouth feel cool and refreshed, a light I only remembered seeing once before in my entire life. The moment when Mum had chosen to save me from the teeth of prophecy and had carried me to safety in her arms, in her heart, giving her own life over to making herself a shelter to protect me from my own terrible destiny.
There wasn’t anything attacking me; there wasn’t anything for me to do. “Mum!” I called desperately. No one answered. I couldn’t see her or Orion at all. Inside the hut there was only light, and all of a sudden it was fading back down to nothing, so quick my eyes couldn’t keep up and I was left in pitch darkness with the muddled glowing afterimages of the light still imprinted on my vision.
When my eyes finally cleared, there were still a few streaks of light left: the dawn was breaking. All the leaves were coming off the yew, curling up and falling with a faint pattering. The bare branches were wizened and thin, dried up from inside, and then abruptly the lintel of the doorway cracked in two with a sound like a gunshot and came crashing down, smashing the branches across the door into kindling and cracking the threshold straight across. I lunged forward, scrambling over it inside the hut, and Mum was lying in the middle of the floor in a small curled heap.