You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Sixty-Two

It was impossible. It hadn't even taken any time at all. She had yelled his name, and then...

The bolt was gone. He was standing, and the bolt was gone, and his neck was as pure and brown as it had been at his birth.

"You're... you're dead!" spluttered Nimrod.

August stared in disbelief. Jen peeked through her hands, face still completely white. Christine sat on the floor beneath him, looking like the ceiling had fallen on her, drenched in sweat, but smiling, like an idiot, grinning through her teary eyes and swelling face.

She didn't need to say anything more. She had called his name, and that was enough.

Rob touched his chest, expecting to find something wet and raw there, but there was nothing, not even the hint of a wound.

Just his birthmark, the same as it had always been, the curse that had been his since childhood.

"No," he said. "I don't think I'm dead. As a matter of fact, I think it's the other way around."

Nimrod laughed, but there was something new in his flabby titter, something that hadn't been there before.

Not fear, but caution. Like he had found himself very suddenly in a dark glade, the water cold and clammy between his toes, pooling in his suede shoes and wetting the edges of his corduroy pants.

"I don't know how you did that, Princess, but you can't get me with tricks. I prepared far too well for this. This is an illusion, isn't it? A glamor. Cast by your fairy brat."

"I'm not her fairy brat, thank you," said August from the door, now twisted into his best approximation of a one-armed bouncer. "I'm my own fairy brat."

"There's no trick, asshole," sniffed Christine. It was a very triumphant sniff. "This is Princess Power!"

Nimrod threw the knife. It was such a sudden movement that Christine didn't even blink, but Rob knew it was going to happen before it did, because the beasts told him.

Catch the knife, they said as one, hisses and growls melded into a single unified cacophony, as if they had spoken before, and not for the first time just now.

There was something like a cage inside of him, made of bars that he had spent his whole life building up. In that one moment, when the knife flashed like a red star, slick with his own blood, he took the bars in his mind and broke them with both hands.

And then he caught the knife.

Or stopped it with his hand, at least, in the same way a tiger might spirit a bullet away, like how Buldeo had shot at Shere Khan and missed. Pain opened his arm up in a single searing burst, a bright clawing spurt of jarring agony, but he laughed. Not because it didn't hurt, but because it just made him feel more alive.

Nimrod snarled and charged. It was like an entire sofa had grown legs and decided to shamble at top speed, but he supposed even a sofa might do some damage, even with bulk alone.

Let us out, said the beasts.

No, said Rob just as clearly, even though the voice was only in his own head. This is for me to do.

"Go to hell," he said out loud.

He took Nimrod's incoming arm with his left hand, yanked him off his feet like he was made of cotton wool, and whipped him head-first into the wall.