The Girl Who Would Be King(103)

She pulls me close to her and then just launches me. For a second I think I’m flying, like her, until I realize that she’s just thrown me. I realize this because I start falling. Fast. Like a star headed back to Earth. I brace myself for a fall that’s likely to break my neck, but I hit water. Hitting the water at that speed doesn’t feel unlike hitting solid ground though and my broken arm cries out a thousand times harder than before. But I’m conscious; I’m alive. I get my bearings and swim one-armed in the direction I deem the surface is. I break through breathless, the rain pelting the water powerfully, and see I’m in the Hudson River – the George Washington Bridge down from me maybe half a mile. My mind boggles at the strength it must take to throw someone that high and far, and I nearly have a breakdown when I try to examine why she can do so many things I cannot. Things that haven’t even occurred to me. Like flying. Well, they’re going to have to start occurring to me now.

Something like Lola can’t exist. Not without something like me. There has to be someone to stop her. I have to stop her. And as frightening as the concept of her is, it’s almost a relief. It’s like finally having a big, blinding light illuminating my path. I finally have a purpose. Something I’m designed for. I’m almost smiling as I pull myself out of the river, grabbing onto slick rocks, wet sand, trees and grass – whatever solid thing I can touch.

I’m strangely optimistic, maybe just because I’m not dead already, until Lola kicks me in the face, breaking my nose for a second time, and sending me back forty feet into the Hudson.



•

I kick her in the face, more out of frustration than anger. But when she goes flying back into the river I suddenly know how to kill her. When I see her float to the surface face-down I fly across the river and kick her in the back of the neck. She chokes and gags and starts sinking again. Before she goes too deep, I reach into the water and grab her shirt. I fly back toward the shore, dragging her in the water behind me. When I feel her feet catching on the riverbed I stop and stand in the water, straddling her, anchoring my feet into the sand and rocks below. She’s coming around, her eyes blinking slowly and her mouth gasping. As I put my hands around her neck and push her head under the water, the rain pelting us both, thunder rumbling all around us, strikes of lightning illuminating the sky angrily – I talk into her head.

<Lemme know how it looks on the other side, yeah?>

Her eyes get big as she goes under, locked on mine and I wonder if she’s been as nervous about the idea of drowning as I have been. We’re so resilient, it seems like it would be kind of horrible. Like you might die and come back a couple times before your body gives out.

And that’s pretty much how it goes.

She kicks and fights me, and breaks at least one of my ribs as she struggles, but then, almost suddenly, she dies. I feel it. The life goes out of her, a limpness that cannot be faked. But I hold on just the same and a minute or two later I feel her fighting me again. I take little trips inside her head, reading her mind, bathing in her fear. But I pop out every time I think she’s gonna die. I’m not sure that’s something I want to know about so intimately. Not yet at least.

It takes more than half an hour and at least five cycles to drown her.

But eventually she stays down for more than ten minutes and I know it’s over. I feel her mind go dark, like someone simply flipping a switch in a once bright room.

I let her go.

And the storm stops.

As quickly as it started, it’s over – the sky clearing as if it never happened.

She floats to the surface. Her eyes open, her face blue, her tongue lolling out of her mouth grotesquely. I turn around and wade through the waist deep water. Once on the shore I watch her body drift downstream toward a giant bridge. I wring the water out of my hair and flinch at the pain in my ribs.

I have a slight twinge of something. Similar to what I felt in the trailer, regretting killing Delia before I knew what was really going on. I didn’t really know Bonnie’s deal either, but after the fight she put up, there’s just no way I could have let her live. I barely beat her today and she couldn’t even fly, or read my mind, or heal at will, and she didn’t have the stone. Who knows how strong she might have become in time? Despite the twinge, I know I did the right thing.

I sit down on the rocks and watch the river for a good half hour before I feel my strength return enough to fly a long distance. For a moment, I think I see an old woman on the opposing riverbank washing bloody clothes against the rocks, the river impossibly red with blood. When I blink, she’s gone, as is the blood from the river. I reach up almost unconsciously to touch the stone and realize it’s gone too, along with Liz’s chain. I pull at my cat suit and look on the ground around me to see if it’s simply fallen off.