Текст книги "The Retribution of Mara Dyer"

Автор книги: Michelle Hodkin

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

60

BEFORE

Laurelton, Rhode Island

Naomi gave birth to a healthy baby boy that day. You have just been born.

When your mother was pregnant with Daniel, I spent countless nights wondering if he would be Afflicted, like me. But within hours of his birth, the professor declared him safe and healthy. The second I saw you, I knew you would not be so blessed.

The professor told me about the Shaw child, what he would become, but not the consequences of it—that you would become something too.

I’ve discovered what actually happened on that night when I believed I seduced the professor.

He had known it would happen. He knew that your mother would be born, that you would someday as well. I’d thought I was his partner, but I was only a tool.

I raged at him for what he had allowed to happen. For what would someday happen to you. He lied, said he couldn’t have changed it. Said, “She cannot become other than what she is.”

He is right about that.

You will make a difference in this world, child, whether you want to or not. Most people are like sand, the impact of their lives washed away by years. They cause no lasting damage, no lasting benefit.

You are not most people.

You are like fire; you will burn wherever you go. If contained, channeled, you can bring light, but you will also always cast a shadow. You can choose to end life or choose to give it, but punishment will follow every reward. And if your fire is unchecked, you will burn through lives and history. The closer anyone gets to you, the more at risk they are of falling under your shadow, or being consumed by your flame. You will have to pretend to be other than what you are. You must wear enough armor so that no one can see or touch you. It isn’t your fault. It’s nothing you did. You cannot change who you are, any more than you can change black eyes to blue. You can only accept it. If you fight yourself, you will lose, and fighting leaves scars. But you will survive them. I have survived many. You will do good things you will regret, and bad things you won’t, but you must keep going, for my daughter’s sake if not your own. She loves you so much already.

I want you to know that I would have wished for a different life for you, and for my beloved daughter, who will never know about any of this if I can prevent it. Sometimes I wonder, if I had chosen a different name for myself, might I have grown into a different person? Might I have become someone else? There were days when I felt that a dragon slept inside me, and exhaled poison with every breath. I flirted with suicide more times than I can count. But I know now why I never did it. I was saving that day for you.

There is a chance, however slim, that if I die before you manifest, the cycle for my bloodline might end with my sacrifice. I don’t know what the odds are, but I’m willing to take them for my daughter; I can’t change the past, but I can choose my future.

I should warn you, though, that the professor will find you someday, as your fate is tied to the boy’s. He might ask you to help him, to join him, to make a difference. He picks at history like a child at a scab, and might offer you the same opportunity. But know this: He has more knowledge than anyone else alive, but it has not brought him happiness. It hasn’t brought me much, either. I’ve known many people over many lifetimes, and the ignorant ones seem more content.

But you must decide for yourself. If you wear this, he will know of your choice.

I don’t know where to leave this for you so that you’ll find it, when you’re ready, without your mother seeing. If I shared the professor’s Affliction, perhaps I’d have some idea. But I will make the best choice I can with the knowledge that I have, and hope.

Letter in one hand, doll in the other, I made my way to the kitchen for a knife. I slit Sister’s doll open from groin to chin, then slipped my letter inside. I stuffed the doll back up, and began to sew before I remembered the necklace. I carried it back to the doll in my closed fist, then pushed it inside with one finger. I sewed it closed.

There. Done. I would wait three days, and then I would leave the world as I’d entered it—alone.

61

NOAH

I HOLD MARA IN MY shaking arms as her pulse fades to nothing. My father doesn’t even wait until she’s dead before he soils the air with words.

“You did the right thing, Noah. I’m proud of you.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had trouble with feelings. Other people get scared, or nervous, or shy, or excited, or happy, or sad. I seem to have only two settings: blank or empty.

I feel neither of those things now.

The pain of losing her is physical. Every breath of oxygen tastes like poison. Every beat of my heart feels like a hammer to my chest. How could she possibly have expected me to bear this?

“I’m going to take care of her brother,” my father says as he types something into his phone. “Her whole family. They’ll never want for anything.” He holds the phone up to his ear, and I hear a ring echo from somewhere inside the building.

Inside the building.

Daniel has been here the whole time.

It’s a double blow, one I can barely process as I stare at her unnaturally still body. I’ve spent too many nights with her to be able to pretend, even to myself, that she’s only sleeping.

“Noah?”

Jamie’s voice cuts through the static in my brain. I look over at the laptop.

His tear-streaked face is anxious, afraid. “Something’s happening. The machines sound weird.”

My father puts his hand on my shoulder. I can’t muster the energy to tell him not to touch me.

“I’ll go find out what’s happening,” he says. “He will be all right, Noah. I promise.”

As if his promises mean anything to me. But if he’s wrong, I will make him suffer every day for the rest of his worthless, pointless life.

He entreats Jude to watch me—so I won’t do anything crazy?—and when Jude agrees, my father leaves me to choke on my grief alone. Or almost. I am aware of Jude’s presence, the way his eyes have been hungrily staring at the knife my idiot father left here. I know Jude will reach for it. I’m not sure what he’ll do next, but I am sure that I don’t care.

“What are you waiting for?” I say.

He turns to make sure my father is gone, and then, as predicted, he reaches for it. Jude looks at me, his eyes filled not with hate but with hope.

Freak. “Go on, then. Do it.”

“Put her down,” he says. “And I will.”

I do. He does.

62

LIGHT STAINED THE BACKS OF my eyelids red. I bolted upright as if someone had plunged a syringe of adrenaline straight into my heart.

I remembered hands that weren’t mine sewing a letter into a doll. I remembered what the letter said. I remembered deaths I hadn’t wished for, families that weren’t mine, trees and beasts, ships and dust, feathers and hearts.

I remembered everything. Every feeling, every scent, touch, sight. I brimmed with echoes of my grandmother’s memories, her knowledge, my inheritance. They rose at the back of my throat, and I was bursting with the urge to tell Noah everything. But it wasn’t Noah’s face I saw when I opened my eyes.

Jude grinned, showing both dimples and looking like a child on Christmas. He held a syringe. “I knew you’d come back once you’d manifested. Doctor guessed you would, when you were finished changing.”

I didn’t care enough to ask him what he was talking about, or to think much about what he was saying and how creepily he was saying it. I had only one question, but my heart knew the answer before my eyes could confirm it.

I turned around to see Noah’s body stretched out behind me. The knife was still in his chest.

63

NOAH

I HEAR THAT VOICE BEFORE I see that face.

“You are not going to die,” Mara says. Her distinctive alto has an edge to it now. Angry. Hopeless. She’s a terrible liar. Always has been, at least compared to me.

I manage to open my eyes. I watch hers travel my body, and revel in the weight of her fingers on my chest. She looks so determined, so furious.

For some reason I think of the first time I saw her, kicking the shit out of the vending machine that refused to release her candy. Before that day, every hour of my life had been exactly like the one before it. Relentlessly boring. Painfully monotonous. But then she walked out of my waking nightmare and into my life, a complete mystery from Second One. Her presence was a problem I needed to solve, a problem that finally interested me. And then, somehow, she made me interested in myself.

Mara began as a question I needed to answer, but the longer I’d known her, the less I felt I actually knew. She was constantly surprising, infinitely complex. Unknowable. Unpredictable. I had never met anyone more fascinating in my life, and all the time in the world wouldn’t be enough to ever know her.

But now I want that time. My mind closes around memories of her, the feel of her hands in my hair, her cheek on my chest, her voice in my ear, her breath in my mouth. It’s so classic. I’ve spent most of my life waiting to die and now that I am, I don’t want to anymore. I manage a small, wry smile. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

64

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE HOLDING the body of the person you love and knowing those heartbeats are numbered.

Noah was still breathing, but shallowly. His eyes didn’t open when I said his name. I cradled him in my arms, and looked up at Jude with hate in my eyes.

“Why?” I barely recognized the sound of my own voice.

“I needed to trigger you. Doctor said. She said if you manifested, you could kill me. And I want that. It’s the only way I can die. I knew if I killed him, you’d be mad enough to do it.”

But I didn’t feel mad. I felt empty.

“Mara?” Jamie’s voice. The laptop was still on the stack of boxes. I craned my neck to look at it. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I thought you died.”

“Is Daniel—my brother—”

“They took him,” Jamie said. “Fuckers took him and left me here.”

“Is he—”

“He was alive, yeah. They put something in his drip. Mara, I’m here—somewhere in the building. Come get me?”

I looked down at Noah’s face. His pulse fluttered in his throat. I glanced at the knife in his chest. Maybe—if I pulled it out . . .

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know.

“Do it before he gets back,” Jude said.

“Who?” Noah’s father? I didn’t care about him. He would get what he deserved. I would make sure of it.

“The one inside me,” Jude said, sending a ripple of revulsion through me. “Doctor was working on something, a cure. I gave myself a shot, but it pushes the other one away for only a little while. You’ve gotta do it, Mara. Please. There’s no one else who can. You couldn’t do it before you manifested, but now, now you’re done. You came back. You healed yourself. You can do it now. Please.”

Jude was asking me to kill him. And I would. He couldn’t live, not after what he’d done. But what he was saying, how he was saying it, peeled the skin off of a memory.

I remembered him standing in the torture garden at Horizons, telling me I had to be afraid, afraid enough to bring Claire back. Which was impossible.

The moment I thought this was the moment Noah stopped breathing.

I watched as the pulse died in his throat, and a breath, his last one, escaped from his lips like a sigh.

“Oh, God,” I whispered. One tear fell, then another. I looked at the knife through blurred vision.

Jamie said, “Mara, do you hear that?”

But I heard nothing. Saw nothing. Felt nothing but Noah. I pulled the knife from his chest, hoping, desperately, that it might not be too late, that somehow he could heal, would heal, despite the things his father had said, despite the fortune-teller’s words.

“You will love him to ruins.”

I thought about all of the choices that had led us here, how each one could have gone a different way. How Noah might never have met me. How he would have been whole and unbroken and alive now if he hadn’t.

“Sirens,” Jamie said with hope in his voice. “Is he—is Noah—”

But it was too late. The life I’d almost had died in my arms.

“He’s gone,” I said, holding his body, and the knife that had killed him.

“Please,” Jude said again. “Please, please.”

I looked at the knife in my hands, the blade wet with Noah’s warm blood. There was so much of it, on his chest, beneath him. Even in his hair.

The knife didn’t kill him. Jude did.

But maybe I could bring him back.

I let Jude’s pleading voice fade into the background with Jamie’s, with the sirens, with everything else. I closed my eyes and pictured it.

Noah, alive, tying my shoelaces in front of my house before he drove me to school.

Noah, alive, looking at the picture I’d drawn of him, folding it and putting it into his pocket to keep.

Noah, alive, looking down at me with his messy hair and sleepy eyes, his arms wrapped around me as we lay in my bed.

I opened my eyes.

Noah was still gone.

I was doing something wrong. I flipped through memories, mine and not mine, searching desperately for a way to fix this. Noah’s father and Dr. Kells had given Jude an ability but hadn’t been able to control him. They’d tried to take mine away, and I’d lost the ability to control myself. Until now.

I wiped Noah’s blood from the knife, looked at the sliver of my reflection in it, hoping it would speak to me, tell me how to fix this. But it was silent.

Jude was begging now, shivering. I got that he wanted me to kill him for his sake, so he wouldn’t have to become the thing he was ever again. But I didn’t care. I wanted him to suffer. He should suffer every day for what he’d done. That was what he deserved.

But I knew I wouldn’t make him.

Noah’s body was warm in my hands. The weight of him filled my lap. I didn’t want to think about Jude. But unless I wished him gone, he wouldn’t go.

So I thought about his corrupted heart stopping, his blunted nerves dying, his pointless lungs drowning in fluid. I thought those things and more, but he was still alive. He was hunched over himself. I thought I saw a drop of blood drip from his nose, but I wasn’t sure.

“Please,” he whispered again. “Please.”

I could kill him without touching him, but I didn’t know when he would actually, finally die. That was always the part I couldn’t seem to predict, couldn’t control. Or if I did, I didn’t know how yet.

So I said to him, “Come here.”

Jude looked at me. Something hateful and sly flashed behind his eyes. How had I missed it, all those months ago? How could I have looked at that blond head and those dimples and missed what an empty, nothing, shell of a thing he was? How had I ever let him get close enough to hurt me?

Whatever. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

It physically hurt to rest Noah’s head on the floor, to empty my arms of him and stand up to face his murderer. Jude was kneeling, but he was straining to do it. He was at war with himself; his muscles were corded and the veins stood out on his forehead and neck.

Maybe I should have taken the opportunity to make him recount his sins before he died, to force some grand confession of regret from his lips, to make him own all of the pain he was responsible for. But that felt like more than he deserved. Jude was no better than an animal really, so in the end, I slaughtered him like one. I slashed the knife across his throat and he fell to his side. I watched as he bled out.

I was vaguely aware of bodies, living ones, rushing into the room, shouting things as red and blue lights flashed through the grime-clouded windows. I glanced briefly at the laptop, watched as police broke into the room where Jamie was being held. Something moved at the corner of my vision.

“Drop the weapon,” a female voice shouted. I hadn’t realized I was still holding the knife. I opened my fist. It clattered to the dusty floor.

“Put your arms above your head and turn around slowly.”

I did. About a dozen NYPD officers stood among the mannequins, holding guns, pointing them at me.

I looked down at Jude’s body, and at Noah’s. Then back up, at the female officer. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me. A grieving girl? A murderer?

I realized I didn’t care. I’d told Noah he wasn’t going to die. The last words I ever spoke to him were lies. I was a liar. He did die, and even though I’d tried, I hadn’t brought him back.

I wasn’t crying anymore. Instead there was just the sob that wouldn’t come, the sting of tears that wouldn’t fall, the ache in my throat that was dying to become a scream. Crying would have been a relief, but I wasn’t filled with sadness. I was filled with rage.

Rage because he’d died, for no reason, for bullshit, while everyone else got to live. If people heard about what had happened, their faces would turn into masks of horror for a moment, but then it would become just a story to them. They would go on living, and laughing, and I would be alone with my grief.

“He tried to kill her,” Jamie shouted from the crappy laptop speakers as an officer on screen untied him. It drew the attention of one of the cops in the room with me, but the other pairs of eyes didn’t waver in their focus.

If they’d known me, what I’d been through, what I’d lost, they might have said they were sorry for me, sorry for my loss. They might even have meant it. But beneath that would have been relief—that death hadn’t happened to them.

All I wanted in the world right then was for Noah to live. That was what he deserved. But thinking something does not make it true. Wanting something does not make it real.

Except that when I want it, it should. That was supposed to be my gift. My affliction.

I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut. Saw writing in my mind, in handwriting that wasn’t mine.

You can choose to end life or choose to give it, but punishment will follow every reward.

Punishment. Reward.

I wanted to give Noah life. To reward him with it. But it wouldn’t be free. Nothing was. If I wanted something, I would have to trade for it.

I wanted Noah. What would I trade for him?

Who would I trade for him, was the question I needed to be asking.

“The people we care about are always worth more to us than the people we don’t. No matter what anyone pretends.”

They’d been Noah’s words once. But they were mine now. Who wouldn’t I trade for him? I would not trade my family. Never them.

But there were other people. The world was full of them. How many would have to be punished so I could reward? What was Noah’s life worth?

His father, David, needed to be punished for what he’d done, no question. But a million of him wouldn’t equal one Noah. He was worthless. Less than.

But not all people were worthless. I looked around me, at the men and women who filled the room, rushing into danger in the hope of saving someone’s life. They were good people. Brave. Selfless. Heroes, really.

Would I trade one of them to have Noah back?

Would I trade all of them to have him back?

I was stripped of all illusions, about this and myself. I knew without thinking that the answer was yes.

65

I KNEW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN next. As the police approached, the woman said, “Are you holding anything that could hurt me?”

Ask the wrong questions, get the wrong answers. I shook my head as she reached for my hands and cuffed me.

“What happened here?”

I didn’t respond. How could I?

Besides, I had the right to remain silent, so that was what I did.

The paramedics had arrived, and they were setting up gurneys, checking the bodies, as if there were any point.

The female officer tilted her head and asked. “Are you all right?”

The question was almost funny. I shook my head.

“I think she’s in shock,” she said to an EMT. “Do a quick check, and we’ll take her to the hospital.”

“We’ve got another one here,” a voice said. I followed the source of it and saw Jamie, flanked by two cops.

“I told them,” he said loudly, too loudly, as he passed. “About your crazy ex.”

Clever boy.

“Your ex-boyfriend?” the female officer asked me. “Which one?”

I looked at Jude.

“This your boyfriend?” She tipped her head at Noah, at his body, as he was being lifted onto a gurney without urgency. I nodded numbly, dumbly. They were going to take him away. I didn’t know how I would bear it.

“I think I know what happened here,” the female officer said in a low voice to another, who had joined her. “We’ll track down the parents once we get to the hospital.” She put her hand on my elbow as they began to wheel Noah’s body away. My limbs felt like lead. I couldn’t move. I could barely see. My vision blurred with tears. I blinked furiously, but they just kept coming.

The female officer tugged me in the direction of the exit just as one of the paramedics lifted a sheet to cover Noah’s face. I saw him blink.

Face covered, wheels squeaking. Noah was almost gone when I finally managed to say, “Wait.”

No one heard me the first time, so the second time I screamed it.

The action stopped. The paramedic who had done the face covering must have seen something in my expression, though, because he looked at me and then back down at Noah, and then lifted the sheet.

“Holy shit,” he murmured. “He’s breathing.”

A second ago, the air had been dead, practically silent, but now it buzzed with frenzy. Paramedics swarmed around Noah, blocking him from view. I caught a glimpse of an oxygen mask being placed over his face as I was pulled away from him by more than one pair of hands. I watched his eyes open, and beneath the clear mask I thought I caught a hint of that half smile that I loved and missed so much.

I’d seen a lot of things since all of this had started though. And not all of them had been real.

But as Noah passed me, he slipped his hand off the gurney. His skin brushed mine. Electrified it.

He was alive. He was real.