The Retribution of Mara Dyer (35 page)

I could, but I wouldn’t. I was a lawyer’s daughter, after all. I tilted my head forward, veiling my face with my hair. I was a psychologist’s daughter too. I knew what I needed to do.

“You were all in some kind of, what, treatment center together?”

You could say that. I looked at the table and blinked as if I hadn’t heard her.

“This must be very difficult for you,” she said gently, trying a different tactic.

I bit my lip, hard, so I wouldn’t laugh. She thought I was trying not to cry, and put a comforting hand on my shoulder.

“If it was self-defense, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Little did she know.

“Just a few more questions, and then the doctors will come in to talk to you, okay?”

No response.

“Someone reported a homicide at that abandoned
warehouse. Any idea who that might’ve been?”

I had my suspicions; David Shaw topped the list. He thought I was dead, of course, and someone would have to answer for killing me, wouldn’t they? He was going to blame it on Jude, I bet.

“And the hospital admitted a boy not much older than you, not far from the warehouse, only a half hour before we got there. Any idea who
that
might’ve been?”

Daniel.

My heart seized on the idea, but I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t say anything. I looked out the window instead. We were on the twelfth floor, and New York City stretched out below us. It looked like a doll world from up here, with pieces I could move or play with or break.

The door squeaked on its hinges, and a doctor gestured from the doorway to Detective Howard. “Psych’s on the way,” he said in a low voice. “Someone’s here to see her, though.”

A person stood behind him, but I couldn’t see who it was.

“Are you the mother?” the detective asked.

But the woman who stepped into the room was not my mother. She was young, in her twenties, and wore tortoiseshell glasses on her pale, round, freckled face. She was outfitted in skinny jeans and Chucks, and for the life of me, I had no idea who she was.

She extended her hand to the detective. “I’m Rochelle Hoffman. I’m the lawyer.”

67

S
HE WAS JAMIE’S COUSIN, IT
turned out. He’d called her as soon as he’d dispatched his police escort. Then he’d given the cops her number and told them it belonged to my parents. They believed him, of course. They had no choice.

When I was finally alone with her, I cut the catatonic act and told her I wanted to talk to Jamie. She made it happen, probably with Jamie’s help, and left us alone. He pulled up a chair and sat in it backward.

“So. Here’s the deal.”

He could not talk fast enough to satisfy me.

“Daniel’s in the hospital too.” I opened my mouth to ask
about him, but Jamie said quickly, “He’s okay. We’ll have to Wormtongue our way in after dark or something, stage a hospital break for him and Noah. Maybe during the shift change.”

“What about us?”

“Well, you would be a murder suspect, if I hadn’t managed to painstakingly, painfully, at great cost to my physical and mental well-being, persuade the police otherwise.”

“I’m grateful.”

“You sound it.”

“Does this mean we can just go?”

“Sort of. Rochelle’s taking care of it.”

“What did your cousin say we should do? About everything?”

“Well . . .” He drew out the word slowly. “I sort of described the situation hypothetically.”

“Elaborate.”

“As in, ‘Let’s say this billionaire was funding these messed-up genetic experiments on teenagers . . .”

“Right . . .”

“Let’s say these teens have superpowers . . .”

“Uh-huh . . .”

“Let’s say one of them ended up killing some people with her thoughts sometimes and also with her bare hands. Hypothetically.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“Let’s say there was physical evidence tying her to some of the deaths . . .”

Kells. Wayne. Ernst. “Christ, Jamie.”

“And other evidence had been planted to make it look like she was guilty of murders she didn’t commit.”

Phoebe. Tara.

“Oh, and, just for fun, to make it interesting, let’s say all of these teens have documented histories of mental illness. What do you think our chances would be if we went up against said billionaire in court?”

“I’m guessing you mentioned the stuff we have? The videos? Documents?”

“Yup.”

“I’m guessing her response was not encouraging.”

“Shocking, isn’t it? She said—hypothetically, of course—that the documents couldn’t be authenticated. Chain of custody problems, not admissible, blah, blah. I don’t know, do I look like a lawyer?”

I inhaled slowly, trying to stay calm.

“I even left out the parts where you and Noah died and came back to life, but for some reason she still seems to think I’m fucking with her. She was kind of huffy about it, actually. But she’s trustworthy. And smart. With her brains and my awesome power, we’ll be able to leave whenever we want.”

“Good news.”

“P.S., you were right about Noah. I am willing to acknowledge that now.”

“About what? About him being alive?”

“Yes, but also about him. Like, generally.”

“I’m not following . . .”

“When I met you, I thought he was going to use you.”

“This is a shock to no one, Jamie.”

“Can you shut up for a second so I can admit my wrongness?” He cleared his throat. “As I was saying. He could never use you. You own him. You should’ve seen the way he was looking at you while you were out.”

I smiled a little. “How?”

“Like you’re the ocean and he’s desperate to drown.”

His words wiped the smile off my face. Noah had drowned. With my help.

I shook my head as if to clear it. Jamie must’ve thought I was disagreeing with him because he went on.

“You don’t get what you do for him. You’re like his manic pixie dream girl or something.” Jamie thought for a second. “Actually, more like his psychotic demon nightmare thing, but whatever. You get my point.”

I refused to acknowledge it.

“Speaking of demon nightmare things,” he segued gracefully, “you dying and coming back to life? That was a neat trick. How’d you manage that?”

“Jude said it’s because I manifested finally, or something. That I healed myself.”

“Huh. And Noah?”

I stayed quiet.

“He looked pretty dead when you were sitting there rocking back and forth, holding his seemingly lifeless body, I have to say.”

“Do you? Have to say?”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re not being entirely truthful, Mara?”

“You’re imagining things. You’re under a lot of stress.”

He looked like he was about to hit me, when someone knocked on the door. Rochelle peeked inside and motioned for us to follow her out into the hallway.

“You owe me, Cousin,” she said to Jamie as we passed Detective Howard and some nurses.

“You love me and you know it.”

“You’re lucky I do.”

We passed Noah’s closed door on our way to the elevator. The cops were still there, still guarding him. I recognized one of them; he’d been at the factory. The one distracted by Jamie shouting from the computer.

Jamie stopped walking. “You okay?” Jamie asked the officer. I stopped to listen.

“Yeah,” the cop said slowly. “Why?”

Jamie motioned to his own nose. “You have . . . something.”

The cop’s eyebrows drew together and he sniffed, then rubbed his nose. His fingers came away red. They left a bloody smear above his lip.

He nodded at Jamie. “Thanks.”

We resumed our exit. When we neared the elevator, though, something caught my eye.

A scalpel rested on a little cart outside a patient room. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching me.

No one was.

I slipped it into my back pocket and followed Jamie and Rochelle into the elevator. The officer was dabbing a bloody tissue to his nose when the doors closed.

68

NOAH

M
ARA IS WAITING FOR US
when Jamie springs Daniel and me that night. She stands beneath a streetlight on an empty sidewalk, looking very gorgeous in a very bad way.

“Subway?” Jamie suggests.

Daniel sticks his hand up in the air. “Cab. Definitely.”

A minute later one pulls up to the curb. The cabbie turns around once we’re in. “Where are we going?”

Mara grins at me. “Wherever we want.”

Almost as soon as Jamie unlocks the front door to his aunt’s house, he ducks into the bathroom, and Daniel passes out on the couch in the parlor.

I look around. “Nice place,” I say as Mara leads me farther in.

“Upstairs or downstairs?” she asks.

“Bed,” I answer. Her smile widens as she leads me up the steps. I follow her into a bedroom and we collapse together in each other’s arms.

I wake up the next afternoon. Mara is beside me, dead, her limbs tangled in the sheets.

No. Not dead. Sleeping.

But the panic stays with me. I extract my arm from beneath her as guilt rises in my throat. It’s so thick I could choke.

There’s a bathroom in here, thank God, and I escape into it and bolt the door behind me. I look at my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, at my empty eyes, my blank face. Then they disappear and I see other things. The pale blue veins in Mara’s arm before I stuck the needle in it. Her closed eyelids, unnaturally still.

I want to cut myself into pieces no one can reassemble. Instead I take off my shirt, knowing, fearing what I’ll see.

There are stitches in my chest, as expected, and the wound is almost completely healed, as I’d feared.

I steal scissors from the medicine cabinet and cut the stitches out, wondering without much curiosity at all if I’ll have a scar. Hope so.

“Knock, knock.” Daniel’s voice, muffled, accompanied by tapping on the door. I step out of the bathroom as he says, “Everyone decent?”

Mara opens her eyes blearily, looking up at me from the bed. Her hair is a wild, tangled mess. I want to fill my hands with it.

“Who is it?” she asks.

“Your brother,” I say.

She’s up in an instant and launches herself out of bed, stubbing her toe in the process, swearing creatively as a result. She flings the door open and attacks him with a hug. Daniel staggers back, but his arms wrap around her just as tightly.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice muffled. “So sorry.”

He backs up and holds her shoulders. “It’s not your fault.”

She’ll never believe you,
I almost say. But this is not my moment.

Daniel looks at me anyway, as if he knows what I’m thinking. “Noah. Thank you.”

The words make me sick.

“For saving me and my sister.”

Except I didn’t save him, or his sister. If it weren’t for me, Daniel would never have been in danger. His father never would have moved their family to Florida. Mara never would have been at the asylum. Jude never would have hurt her—she’d never have met him. Everything that happened to them was because my father
made
it happen. I think about the times I promised to keep her and her family safe, when all the while she was in danger because of me. Just thinking about it makes me want to swallow a bullet.

I can’t say any of this to Daniel, obviously, for fear of sounding like a little bitch.

“So this is where the party is,” Jamie says as he sweeps into the room. “Guess what?”

Mara raises an eyebrow.

“We’ve got mail.”

He tosses something at me, and I catch it, wincing slightly. My full name is on the cream-colored envelope, otherwise unmarked. Jamie hands one to Mara, too.

“From?” she asks.

“Lukumi. Lenaurd. Whoever that dude is. There’s one for Stella, too, but . . .” He holds up his hands as if to say,
What can you do?

“How do you know they’re from him?” Daniel asks.

Jamie holds up a larger manila envelope in his other hand. “It was addressed to ‘The Temporary Residents of 313 West End Avenue.’ That’s us,” he adds superfluously.

Mara pouts. “You opened it without me?”

“I thought you might be having sex.”

“You would have heard it.”