Page 113 of Death and Do-Overs

Could she bodysnatch a kitsune? I didn’t think so.

“Pathetic bluff,” the cat said in an unsettling human-like voice.

I stared, not believing my ears. This really was Noodles.

“Why did you take my head?” I asked.

“To help, obviously.You’re welcome,”Noodles said.

“How did taking Nie’s head help?” Imogen asked. “Is this some kind of reverse psychology nonsense? Pretty sure taunting people with their own head in a box is not nice.”

The cat huffed, and its tail twitched faster. “Wouldn’t it have been crueler to leave it?”

It sounded almost pleading, like the cat wanted to be reassured that she was doing me a kindness.

“No,” Imogen said. “It was pretty much the meanest thing possible.”

I wasn’t so sure.

Yes, opening that box had been devastating. But the cat hadn’t killed Nie. If it had left her head here in Nevermore, Mar wouldn’t have come here to find her. I wouldn’t have known about the threat to my life, what had happened to the other me, and I never would have met Levi.

That last part may have been for the better.

And all of this assumed that Noodles wasn’t colluding with Otis and Levi.

“Meanest thing possible?” The cat rolled upright and tucked her paws under her, tail smacking hard back and forth at her sides. “It’s impossible to win with your kind.”

“What are we winning and losing?” Imogen asked.

“Nothing,” the cat huffed. “Everything.”

Noodles definitely thought she was doing me a favor.

I asked, “Why did you think delivering Nie’s head would help?”

“Because then you’d know your Nie had been eliminated from the competition,” the cat said. “And as a part of the same being, they’d be coming for you next.”

No one until the alchemist had attacked me, and that was only after I came to Nevermore. Still, despite my neutral facade, my heart raced with a quiet optimism. Every word she spoke inched me closer to the truth I desperately sought.

I asked, “What competition?”

At the same time Imogen said, “Who is coming for Marnie?”

“You truly know nothing.” Noodles sighed again, this time more exaggerated than the last. “Your clone entered you intoThe Competition.Kill or be killed. Everyone who is left is coming for you, Marnie.”

Some sort of last man standing competition? Like…in the movieHighlander?

Each remaining threat had the same binding curse that stopped him from leaving the island. If they were all after me, they never would have been had I not come to Nevermore.

“Why would Nie do that?” Imogen asked. “Why join?”

Instead of answering, Noodles insisted, “I did thegoodthing by warning you, just like I did a good thing when I warned the other on the train.”

The other had to be Nie.

There was no Noodles on the train manifest from Piccadilly to Nevermore, and I didn’t remember seeing a cat or fox getting on the train either.

The pieces finally clicked.

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