He tossed it toward me without looking up. It landed on the floor a few inches from my foot. I scraped at it with my shoe and tried to grab the handle.
“This is why I joined the library to begin with. I have to keep my eye on my true mission. It’s supposed to be all that matters. But it’s not anymore. She matters more to me than any promise. She matters more than anyone else ever could,” Fernando read.
I hooked the bag on my shoe.Yes.
I lifted it slowly up between my shoe and the wall. I needed to reach it with my hand. I tried to stretch, but the unicorn’s horn held me tightly in place. Every tiny movement was agonizing. The unicorn’s putrid breath made my stomach churn. It’s black eyes glared at me with hatred.
“Bum-bum-bum-bmmm-bummmm,”Kurnbottom sang.
“I’ve waited too long to tell her what I really am,” Fernando said.
I looked at the black eyes of the unicorn, and I knew exactly what Silas’s journal was talking about. I couldn’t see him in there now, but I had in the field before.
Silas was the unicorn.
I could save him.
I reached inside my purse and wrapped my fingers around the cursed carrot. I shoved it in the unicorn’s mouth.
He chomped, he gagged. He stumbled backward. My wound went from searing hot to icy cold. I collapsed to the floor. Blackness pressed against my vision, the pain overwhelming.
The unicorn shrank, shriveled, and fell to the floor, too.
I crawled toward him.
“A unicorn,” Fernando said.
The carrot would knock him unconscious for hours. I had to reach him, to touch him, to see his face and feel him breathing to convince myself that everything would be all right.
Fernando dropped the book and popped over to Silas. He looked down at his unconscious face and frowned.
“No Chocolate Man.”
“The unicorn was a man the whole time?” Imogen said, apparently still here with us. “Are you all right, Lily? What a stupid question. Of course you’re not all right. We need to bandage your arm. Here, let me help you.”
I pushed her away and crawled up to see for myself.
His hair was the same straw color, but cut shorter, and speckled with more gray than Silas’s. The wrinkles on his face were deeper. His mouth was all wrong.
Fernando was right. This man wasn’t Silas.
My heart sank. My throat constricted.
If this wasn’t Silas,where was he?He wasn’t Kurnbottom, either. So who in the heck was he?
“Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bummmm,”Kurnbottom sang even louder and faster than before.
Adrenaline flooded my veins. Horrible images flooded my brain, of Silas on a table like the one in the building, of Silas’s body pale and still. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to even my erratic breaths, tried to think.
Where was Silas?
Beyond my pounding pulse, the world turned eerily quiet. Kurnbottom was no longer humming.
CHAPTER 29
“Is he dead?” Imogen asked. “Was it the carrot that killed him? Did it go rancid? It did look awfully green and black and wrinkly.How old was that carrot?”
“Shh.” I waved my arms at her, grabbed her phone, and clicked off the light. I whispered,“Listen.”