Page 135 of The Nightmare Before Kissmas
This is new.
Pointed.
And that’s where my confidence bucks. Where I can’t hide the cyclone gaining ground in my lungs, ripping the breath out of my body, and I know Dad sees that little flutter of a gasp.
“Leave him out of this,” I say.
He takes a step forward, and I go perfectly still, a deer in a hunter’s sight. Kris, he comes closer, beside me, and I flash back to one of the first times after Mom left, one of the first times I’d actively gotten in trouble, and Kris had stood by my side and we’d both watched Dad lose his mind at me, and it hadn’t felt real. This couldn’t have been our father, this screaming, terrifying man.
He’s real now.
Dad studies me, his rage held at bay by what he’s reading on me. “Their prince has been manipulating you. I had thought inviting him here would serve to remind Halloween of the benefit in staying out of Christmas’s path. What would their allies think, I wonder, if they found out that Halloween’s heir was plotting tooverthrowme? How does something like that fit into the autumn collective’s ideals of fairness?”
Cold horror spiderwebs out across my body.
I stammer. “That’snotwhat—”
“You were not manipulated?”
“No,I—this was me, this was just me—”
“Then this is your mistake only. And you will write to those leaders you summoned.” He tosses the letters at me; they rebound off my chest, scatter to the trashed floor around us. “You will write and tell them that they are not to set foot in Christmas unlessI,personally, invite them.”
My lips part, I have no idea what I’ll say, but Dad cuts me off.
“You have proven to be only what I most feared you would become, Nicholas: unworthy of this role. You are still nothing more than the careless, selfish person who endangered our entire Holiday with the New Koah fiasco. You are a disappointment to this family, and—”
I blink, and Kris is in front of me.
“How dare you,” Kris hisses. “Howdare youspeak to Coal that way.”
Dad whips his glare on Kris. “Do not think you are exempt from this, Kristopher. Nicholas has long been the negative influence holding you back, and I—”
“He’snota negative influence, and if you keep talking about him like that—”
“Do not interrupt me! For too long, I have allowed him to slanderour name—”
Kris’s shoulders hunch.“Shut the fuck up!”
Years overlap in this moment. Years of breaths held because everytime I asked how much worse he could get, he’d stun me speechless, until we arrive here, the birth of all my worst fears.
Dad’s arm moves. It moves and Kris screamed at him and they’refighting,all outfighting,overme.
I grab Kris in an agitated scramble and yank him back and hurl myself in front of him, hands up, body all fragile, breakable eggshells.
My eyes slam shut. And I hold. And go, “Please, please,” because that’s what I’ve been saying for years.
Eternity passes. Remakes itself in the air around my lifted arms, in the gasps of Kris who fell to the ground behind me, and I wait.
I reached too far. I forgot who I am, I forgot everything and tried to become someone too different, and this is my punishment, an extricating reminder thatthis is what happens when I try.
I did this. I caused this, again, and I’m falling apart.
“I’ll do what you want,” I say from far, far away. “I’ll write to the other Holidays. I’ll stop it. I’ll stop everything, I swear.”
I cut my eyes open.
To see Dad, his hand only stretched out into the distance, raised to make a point.
