I react without thinking, pushing him towards the door, but he flings me back easily, against the bed. I clutch my chest and realize with horror that my pendant is out from under my shirt. In plain view.
“Pretty necklace,” he growls, his eyes flashing with recognition.
If he had any doubt about who I am, it is long gone.
Katarina charges forward but he strikes her hard. She crashes against the TV set, smashing the screen with a bare elbow, and falls to the ground.
He pulls something from his waist—a long, thin blade—and raises it so quickly I don’t even have time to stand. I see only the flash of his blade as he swings it down—straight down, like a railroad spike—into my brain.
My head floods instantly with warmth and light.
This is what death feels like, I think.
But no. The pain doesn’t come.
I look up—how can I see? I think. I’m dead. But I do see, and realize that I’m covered, from head to toe, in hot red blood. The Crooked Mustache Man still has his arm outstretched, his mouth is still frozen in victory, but his skull has been split open, as if by a knife, and his blood is spilling out across my knees.
I hear Katarina wail—it’s such a primal noise that I can’t tell if it’s a cry of grief or a scream of relief—as the man, emptied of blood, turns quickly to dust, collapsing in on himself as an ashy heap.
Before I can take a breath, Katarina is up, shedding her robe and throwing on clothes, grabbing our bags.
“He died,” I say. “I didn’t.”
“Yes,” Katarina replies. She puts on a white blouse, which she instantly ruins with the blood from her elbow, shredded from the TV screen. She throws it out, blots the blood from her elbow with a towel, and puts on another shirt.
I feel like a child, speechless, immobile, covered in blood on the floor.
That was it—the moment I’ve been training for my whole life—and all I managed was a feeble, easily deflected shove before getting tossed aside and stabbed.
“He didn’t know,” I say.
“He didn’t know,” she says.
What he didn’t know is that any harm inflicted on me out of order would instead be inflicted upon my attacker. I was safe from direct attack. I knew it, but I also didn’t really know it. When he stabbed me in the head, I thought I was dead. It took seeing it to believe it.
I reach up and touch my scalp. The flesh there is unbroken, it’s not even damp. . . .
There’s the proof. We are protected by the charm. As long as we stay apart from each other, we can only be killed in the order of our number.
I realize his blood has now turned to dust along with his flesh. I am no longer drenched in it.
“We have to go.” Katarina has shoved my Chest into my arms, her face pressed right up to mine. I realize I’ve spaced out, gone to a place inside my own head, reeling from the shock of what just happened. I can tell from the way she says it that this is the third or fourth time she’s repeated it, though I am only just hearing her.
“Now,” she says.
Katarina drags me by the wrist, her bag slung over her shoulder. The hot asphalt of the parking lot burns the soles of my shoeless feet as we rush outside towards the truck. I carry my Chest, which feels heavy in my arms.
I have been preparing for battle my whole life, and now that it’s come all I want is to sleep. My heels drag, my arms are heavy.
“Faster!” says Katarina, pulling me along. The truck’s unlocked. I get into the passenger seat as Katarina tosses our stuff in the bed of the truck and hops into the driver’s seat. No sooner has she closed her door than I see a man racing towards us.