"You shouldn't be here."
"But where is here?" she says. "Is this the afterlife? I am not spending eternity back at this place."
"This isn't the afterlife," says Death. Holly's trying her hardest not to burst out laughing, to exclaim how fucking ridiculous this is. "You're not there yet. You won't be for a very long time."
"Where am I, then?" she asks.
"Some call it limbo," says Death. "I prefer to look at it as the place deals are made..." Well that's not good. "... And the place past deals are acknowledged."
"I'm not killing anyone," says Holly.
"But you already have."
Holly's blood — if she still has it, in this weird place — goes cold. Instantly her mind jolts back to her mother falling to the floor at her new school, her current school, with blood pouring out from her neck. She looks back at Death.
"You gave me a life," says Death. "And I will return yours."
Her gaze moves back to the Deathly Hallows symbol.
"But when the girl in the Three Brothers was resurrected, she wasn't truly back," says Holly. She remembers how she wished to see Death, so she thinks, Please don't lie to me. "Will I be like that?"
"No," says Death. "Although the same stone will have brought you both back to the mortal world, you are not her. I want you to live. I did not want the same for her."
There is a pause. Holly feels a shiver run down her spine.
"When you return, you will live life as a mortal until you are old, but you will have a connection to this immortal world... It is a consequence of surviving the dark magic that brought you here, similar to the dark magic you've already experienced from this school," says Death. Holly translates this as: I'm always going to be cold, great. "But you will not live like the girl from the tale. You will live freely, however, you may have immortal visitors when they're wished for..." He pauses. Everything becomes colder and colder, quieter and quiet, until he says, "Until we meet again, Holliday Lippincott."
Everything goes bright.
Her hands shield her eyes and she squeezes them shut, white noise shouting in her ears. She thinks she stumbles backwards but then everything feels strange again — and, like that, the noise and the cold and the brightness disappears.
Holly's eyes open and before she can think twice, she moves so she's kneeling on the floor, and she throws up, right onto the old wooden flooring in the room she died in. She jumps to her feet and she wipes her mouth, grabbing the mirror from the side of the room. The room is empty, and the windows reveal the pitch-black sky.
She survived death.
A smile appears across her face until it hits her.
If Bellatrix finds out I'm alive, I'm fucked.
She needs to get out. Forget school, she's got to run away, she's got to grab that bag from her room and her wand and she needs to get the hell out of this place, before anyone realises that she's still alive. Bellatrix will have alerted the other Death Eaters by now, revealing that little Holliday dearest is a traitor to their cause. She has no other option but to leave.
Holly rushes to one of the doors, trying her best to stay quiet. But the door's locked. She checks the other two in the room, and they're all the same. It's fine, it's fine, I can find a way out... It takes two minutes to run upstairs... I can always break out of here, once that clock there says it's, like, midnight, and I'll be gone before they realise what's going on. There's the Floo Network in my room, I can get out that way. I can do this, I can do this—
xv. From Dusk Till Dawn
Start from the beginning
