The Evolution of Mara Dyer

65

IT CUT OFF AS SHARPLY AS IT BEGAN.

“That wasn’t Jamie,” Noah said strongly against my temple. He tucked my head beneath his chin, my cheek against his chest.

He was right. The voice had been female.

We listened, fitted against each other in the dark. The silence was thick, shutting out everything but my heartbeat. Or Noah’s. It was impossible to know.

Another scream issued—from the compound’s center. From the garden? I couldn’t tell from here.

“Stay here,” Noah said to me, his voice firm and clear.

He couldn’t not go. But I couldn’t leave him.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re not splitting up.” My voice sharpened. “We’re not splitting up.”

Noah exhaled slowly. He didn’t answer, but he took my hand and lifted me up.

Our footsteps echoed in the silent halls and I gripped his fingers tightly, wishing we could become one thing. Holding on to him, I noticed, my wrists didn’t even hurt.

The early morning sky was still very dark, the black brightening only to a deep purple. Lightning flickered through the windows that wouldn’t release us and made monsters of our shadows against the wall.

Another scream.

We were corralled by it. Drawn to it. That was the point.

We walked into my nightmare together.

Jude stood in the Zen garden, broad and imposing in the sand. He stood between harmoniously arranged stalks of bamboo and sculptured bonsai trees. Jamie and Stella Adam and Megan were kneeling, arranged in the sand. Heads bowed. Hands bound. Positioned among the rocks.

Another girl—I couldn’t see her face—was lying on her side, unmoving. Her white shirt was soaked in blood, coloring it red.

There was a storm outside. It raged through the skylight. But the garden was quiet. No one struggled. No one said a word. Not even Jamie. The tableau was surreal. Deranged. Utterly terrifying.

Then Jude’s voice polluted the air. “Did you try the doors first?” he asked us, and smiled. “The windows?”

No one spoke.

Jude clucked his tongue. “You did. I can tell.” His gaze wandered over each of the bodies in the sand. When he looked up, it was at Noah. “While I’m glad we’re able to finally meet,” he said, “I did want to avoid this.”

Nothing in Noah’s posture or expression showed that he’d even heard him. He was as still and smooth as one of the stones in the sand. The sight of bound and kneeling teenagers didn’t appear to unsettle him at all.

Which appeared to unsettle Jude. He blinked and swallowed, then met my eyes. “I tried to find you, Mara, but you were hiding. So I had no choice. You made me take them.”

“Why?” My voice shattered the quiet. “What do you want?”

“I want Claire back,” he said simply.

“She’s dead,” I said, my voice quivering. “I killed her and I wish I hadn’t but I did and she’s dead. I’m sorry.”

“He thinks you can bring her back,” Stella said, her husky voice barely above a whisper.

Seven pairs of eyes focused on her with eerie precision.

“What?” I asked her.

Jude crouched down in front of Stella, a coiled snake.

She ignored him, didn’t look. She looked, instead, at me. “He thinks you can bring her back.”

Jude smacked Stella across the face.

Jamie flinched.

Megan started to cry.

Adam watched Jude with keen interest—not fear.

Noah took a step forward, brimming with quiet violence.

But when I saw Jude hit Stella, something inside of me rose up from the dark. I held on to Noah still, but I stopped shaking.

“Bring Claire back,” I said slowly.

Stella nodded. “That’s what he thinks.”

“How do you—” I began to ask. Then stopped, because I knew.

Stella was like us. Different. I looked at her, at the expression on her face, and realized how.

She knew what Jude was thinking. She could hear his thoughts.

If Jude believed that I could bring Claire back from the dead, Claire who was mangled and crushed to pieces, who was buried in a closed casket in Rhode Island under six feet of earth, he was absolutely detached from reality. Completely delusional.

The only way out of this would be to act like his delusion was real.

“Jude,” I said, my voice pleading. Practiced. “I want to bring Claire back. Tell me how to bring her back.”

The muscles in his face twitched. “You have to be motivated,” he said mechanically. Then smacked Stella again. Hard.

The muscles in Noah’s arms went rigid, tense beneath my grip.

Jude’s eyes raked over Noah and a smile formed on his lips. “Yes, join us,” he said to him. “You can help.”

Something changed in Noah, then. He relaxed. “And how, precisely, would I do that?” His voice had become more than just blank. It was bored.

Stella coughed. Bowed to the ground, spat blood on the sand. Then looked up at me, her stare direct. “You have to be scared,” she said to me. “If you’re afraid enough, he thinks, you’ll do it.”

So Jude did want me afraid. Everything he did was designed to terrify me. Showing up at the police station so I would know he was alive. Stealing Daniel’s key so he could come and go whenever he wanted, so he could take pictures of me while I slept, so he could move my things around, like the doll, and I would know he had been there, violating the place I should have felt safe.

He killed the cat and told me why with a message in blood.

But that wasn’t enough. He didn’t want me to feel safe anywhere, with anyone. Not with my father—so he nearly ran us off the road. And not at Horizons—so he used Phoebe to scare me. He gave her the picture and had her scratch out my eyes, he wrote that note and had her deliver it. He played me like an instrument and used Phoebe like a tool, to unsettle me, to push me, to make me afraid when he couldn’t be around to do it himself.

I thought it was all for revenge. For Claire. To punish me for what I’d done to her and to him. And no doubt that was part of it. But in his mind, it was also a means to an end.

An end I couldn’t possibly deliver.

I had to be motivated, he said. If I was afraid enough I’d do it, he thought.

But I was afraid. I was terrified. And Claire was still never going to come back.

I didn’t know how to pretend otherwise anymore. “Jude,” I said. “I swear, I would do it if I could. I’m sorry.”

He cocked his head at me. Studied me. “You’re not sorry,” he said plainly. “But you will be.”

Then, in a movement so sudden I almost couldn’t make sense of it, he grabbed a fistful of Stella’s thick curls, lifting her up and bending her back at once.

Megan screamed. Jamie looked away. Adam made a surprised noise.

Noah was on edge again, I could feel it. But he didn’t move from my side.

I was seething. “You think if you torture her, I’ll bring Claire back?” I asked, my voice rising in fury. “If I could do it I’d have done it already—”

Jude let Stella fall back to her knees. He looked down at her.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

A smile crept across Jude’s mouth.

The way she sounded, the way he smiled, set my nerves on fire. “What?”

Jude looked up at me, and his grin grew wider. “Tell them,” he said to Stella. When she didn’t speak, he tugged on her hair. “Tell them.”

“She—” Stella screwed up her face, and her eyes flicked to Jude as he crouched beside her. “She knew,” Stella whispered, looking straight at him. “Jude’s part of it. She knew—oh my God, she knew, about all of us, the whole time—he’s part of it, she promised him you’d bring Claire back if he brought you here, she told him how to make you do it, and she left the rest of us here to see what you would do, oh God—”

“She?” Jamie whispered.

“Kells,” Noah said.

“Jude’s part of it?” I asked, my voice brittle and breaking. “He’s part of what?”

What was he? What were we?

“I can’t hear,” Stella wailed, “there are too many voices!” Then Stella whispered and mumbled; I could only catch one word. It sounded like “insurance.”

“How do we get out?” I asked quickly. That was what I needed to know, before Stella lost it. How to get out.

“You can’t,” Stella moaned.

“I was let in,” Jude said calmly.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest.

Dr. Kells had let Jude in. The adults were all gone. There was no one to help us, no one who would come.

“He killed Phoebe,” Stella said, her shoulders shaking. “But it looks like you did it, Mara—that’s what they’re going to say. They need you—”

Jude slapped her cheek. Stella sucked her full lips into her mouth and looked down at the sand. She wasn’t going to say anything else.

I couldn’t make sense of most of what she had said, but one thing I caught was this: Dr. Kells promised Jude I would bring Claire back if he brought me here tonight. And she was lying.

She wanted me here for some other reason and I couldn’t begin to fathom what it was. I couldn’t play along with Jude’s delusion, but maybe if I could show him that he was just a piece, a pawn in whatever twisted thing was happening here, there might be a chance, however small, that he would let us go.

I didn’t see another way. So I said, “Dr. Kells is lying to you.”

“No,” Jude said to me, “you are.”

Then he grabbed Stella’s wrist and broke it. We all heard it snap.

Megan screamed like an animal. Jamie swore. Adam smirked. I churned with rage.

But Noah. Noah didn’t make a sound. He didn’t step forward. He didn’t even tense. After a minute, he said, “You might want to let her go,” as if he were pointing Jude in the direction of the nearest gas station.

The muscles in Jude’s face twitched. He didn’t understand why Noah wasn’t reacting, why he didn’t seem to care, and until that second, neither did I.

Jude wanted us off balance. He wanted us afraid. He needed those things from me most of all, and I thought he was hurting Stella to try and scare me even more.

But it wasn’t working. I wasn’t scared. I was angry, and Jude saw it. Which is why he wasn’t trying to use Stella to provoke me—he was using her to try and provoke Noah. Thinking he couldn’t resist a damsel in distress.

He wanted Noah to take her place.

But it wasn’t working. Noah didn’t move.

Jude dropped Stella’s wrist, then. She fell back against the bloody sand and I felt a split second of relief—

Until Jude pinched the back of Jamie’s neck.

Everything changed. My stomach curdled with fear.

“I’ll let this one go,” Jude said with a wholesome smile, “if Mara takes his place.”

I let out the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. Jude had me before, at the marina, and didn’t kill me then. He came into my room and ruined my life but I was still here. I was still alive.

Jude couldn’t kill me, Stella had said—he thought he needed me to get his sister back. If I took Jamie’s place it wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t possible; Jude would be busy with me, giving the rest of them a chance to get all of us out.

I let go of Noah’s arm.