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“Oh, sweetie,” Annie said. “I’m so glad you did. Reach up and let me give your hand a squeeze.”

As Annie lowered her hand toward him, he raised his up and their fingers touched.

Charlie placed something in Annie’s palm.

He did it, she thought.He got the message. And he might never have figured it out had Nabler not revealed himself to Charlie, however briefly.

She moved the object about in her hand, confirming that it was what she hoped it would be. The small sculpture she had made from plasticine. The rat-wolf figure that stood on its two hind legs that had come to her as a vision when she had sketched it out on a sheet of paper, and then created in three dimensions.

Why am I making this?she had wondered at the time. Now she knew.

“Thank you, Charlie,” she said, and then, with the last scintilla of free will in her possession, she swiftly brought the figure to her mouth and bit off its head.

Sixty

She wasn’t able to bite through the wire armature, of course. But her teeth sank right into it, and then she pulled away, tearing the molded head off the way one might rip the meat off a barbecued rib.

And then she spat it out.

Annie and Nabler dropped to the floor, their elevated embrace having come to an abrupt end.

She hit the floor on her side and rolled, while Nabler landed on his feet—or, more accurately, ratty paws—with his hands clutching his throat, a bluish-green liquid spilling out between his fingers. He let rip with a scream that drowned out the trains still stampeding about the layout.

A few tendrils of viscera, a brain stem, were all that linked his head to his body as he staggered about the room. Those tendrils gave way, and the head landed on the floor with a plop. But what amazed and horrified Annie was that he continued moving, the proverbial chicken with its head cut off.

Nabler wasn’t done.

Even without eyes, his body sensed where Annie was and came for her. She was still reeling from the fruity potion and Nabler’s embrace and was unsteady as she scrambled to her feet.

The timing, she believed—and hoped—was just about right. Charlie had shown up when she’d needed him most. She’d acquired enough power so that when she bit off that head, the so-called “mirroring” effect kicked in. But, judging by Nabler’s headless lunging in her direction, it hadn’t quite been enough.

She looked to her hand, to see what else she could do to the figure, but it was not there. In her fall, she had lost her grip on it.

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Annie jumped back as Nabler came at her, swinging his arms like Frankenstein’s monster in some old black-and-white horror movie. He might be missing a head, but if he managed to get hold of her, she had no doubt he could crush the life out of her.

Where the fuck was the—

“I have it!” Charlie cried.

He waved it in the air, briefly, his eyes wild. The figure, headless. But he didn’t take more than a millisecond to figure out what he had to do. He ran for one of the closest tracks that was at a level he could reach. A mighty steam engine was furiously approaching.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

Charlie placed the figure across the rails, straddling them, one hand on the feet, the other on the upper torso, holding it down firmly so that it wouldn’t simply be tossed aside when the train reached it.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

The real dismembered head, on the floor in a puddle of blue-green blood, shouted, its eyes still open: “Nooooooo.”

The train hit the figure square on, its wheels slicing through it at the knees and stomach, striking with enough force to sever the inner armature.

The headless Nabler, lunging forward to grab Annie by thethroat, suddenly fell apart, as if someone with a great sword in each hand had slashed him across the body in two places.

The three remaining chunks of him fell to the floor and moved no more. The eyes on the head drifted shut.

Chuff... chuff... chuff...