The Wicked We Have Done (11 page)

“And even your instincts. It’s like you didn’t think of the fact that your neck could have been broken when you stabbed—when you stabbed my dad.”

I focus on my shirt, untwisting it so I can put it on.

“Same with Jace when she was hurt. Hell, even Salem. That is your instinct. To help people no matter what risk it is to you. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since the lake, when you wanted to find food for me and Jace because you were so sure that you were going to die here. So tell me, Evalyn, how does someone with that kind of instinct premeditate a mass murder?”

My hands stall, fingers tightening around cotton fabric.

“Because I’m a diagnosed psychopath, Casey, and that’s what psychopaths
do
.”

“Wrong,” he says brazenly, making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “If you’ve proven one thing to me it’s that you aren’t egocentric. That is what makes a psychopath so damn predictable.”

A chuckle bubbles from my mouth. “So what? You think I didn’t do it—that I didn’t commit my crime?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re wasting your time, trying to figure me out. I know what you want to do. We’re lonely. I don’t want to die alone and you don’t want to die alone, but the only difference is that you need to paint the best picture of me in your head to be close to me.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. I like you the way you are. The way you
really
are.” I twist my neck until I can see his face. He’s close enough that I can distinguish the exact colors within his fractured irises. A mosaic of moss green and gold and hazelnut. “If you want someone to snuggle up to for the end of the world, I don’t have to be anything less than an evil human being.”

“Won’t it feel better for me if you aren’t, though?”

I drop my shirt and pivot toward him. Grasping his shoulders, I slide onto his lap.

I attempt to keep a straight face, even with my soaring adrenaline and our lack of clothes. Even though he’s damn near expressionless and I haven’t shocked him as much as I was aiming for.

“You tell me,” I challenge. A handful of inches from him and I can count the freckles on his nose. They make him seem so much younger than I know he is.

His warm, callused hands grab my hips and pull me to him, eyes fevered, and I’m reminded that it’s been almost a year since I’ve been touched—really touched—not the manhandling I received from the prison guards or the abrasive hugs given to me by Mom. There was a time in prison where I thought I’d die, like the infants in orphanages that are never held. My heart would collapse because it knew that the arms around me were only my own.

He is electric, recharging me after months of solitude.

There’s nothing separating us other than our soaked underwear. One of his hands trails up by back, pinning me so my breasts are pressed to his chest. He groans as I grind my hips into his. My fingers lace through his dark hair. “Is this what you want?” I whisper into his ear.

He doesn’t respond right away. One of his hands remains at my back. The other cups my thigh as he tries to bring me even closer to him, like it’s even possible. “How long has it been for you?”

To my own surprise, I laugh. “Since I’ve had sex, or since I’ve been touched in a way that doesn’t remind me I’m the scum of the earth?”

It isn’t funny. He knows it isn’t funny.

I want to kiss him. I need to.

Suddenly he pushes me back onto the grass until I’m beneath him. “Both.”

“The same amount of time. Ten months.”

“Since doomsday.”

“Since doomsday,” I repeat.

He bites his lip. He’s thinking.

I reach up, tracing from the bottom of his rib cage to his navel, where the color has stained his skin.

“How does it feel?” he asks.

“What?”

“You said you haven’t been touched in almost a year, so how does this feel?”

“I—” What do I say? I could say that it reminds me there’s more in life to feel than the hard mattress of a prison bunk at my back all day. Who wants to hear that melodramatic bullshit, though, really?

So instead, I say, “Like our kiss.”

His lips twitch, and his hand slides up the inside of my thigh. “You’re so cold.” He lowers his open mouth to my neck and exhales slowly.

I curse.

“What?” His hand slips higher, thumb tracing the hem of my underwear.

“Don’t stop.”

His teeth graze my jaw. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m— I—” His lips hover over mine. So close. “I want someone for the end of the world.”

The moment I say this, the sky flashes green, like it’s signaling the impending apocalypse. He nudges my chin up with the bridge of his nose.

His tongue glides across my collarbone for one bright moment. Pressure builds in my abdomen and I bite on my lip so hard I taste blood.

I see blood.

Trickling from the eyes of a little girl.

I choke on my scream. Casey notices the girl, scrambling to his knees and pulling me to him.

“I can’t find my mom.” She squeezes her eyes shut, blood trailing down her cheeks and dripping off her chin, catching on the ends of her black hair.

Mine and Casey’s breathing rattles in sync. I hold on to him for dear life.

“
I can’t find my mom!”
she shrieks and takes off with a limp, her jeans torn to shreds, blood seeping from the wounds beneath.

“She’s running toward camp,” Casey says.

I tug on my clothes. “We need to hurry.”

A scream rips through the air.
Jace.
Once I’m dressed, we race back to camp.

The girl stands between the tent and the newly smoking fire. Tanner’s on his feet, fists balled. His eyes dart between us and the girl. Stella hugs her knees and rocks back and forth in the dirt.

Jace presses herself to a tree, Valerie her shield. “I told you I was sorry.” She clings to Valerie’s shirt. “I’ll give you anything.”

The girl stands so close to the fire that her bloody tears hiss when they splatter inside the ring.

“My life back.”

Her moans build on top of one another until she’s screaming, blood oozing—her cheeks a curtain of sticky crimson.

“Leave,” Valerie commands.

The girl shudders. “I want my mom.” She can’t be older than twelve. Young. Vulnerable. “I want to find my mom.”

“Look for her somewhere else.”

“But—”

“
LEAVE,
” Valerie growls.

The girl hangs her head, her cross necklace dangling below her chin. “But I’m so alone now.” Dragging her bare, bony feet across the dirt, she turns from our camp, disappearing into the shadow of the forest.

“I’m so alone.”

So alone.

So alone
.

Stella cranes her neck toward Jace, flashing a wicked smile “She must be yours, then? She is lovely.”

***

The girl was the last one to die from the wreck that Jace caused. She was in a coma for three days before her body gave out. Jace had been the one to drag her from the car before the police came. She was drunk off vodka but sobered by the accident.

The girl had cuts beneath her eyes from the shattered glass. They made her look like she was crying blood.

“Why?” Casey prods some of the hot coals in the fire ring with a stick. “Why did she come into camp now?”

Valerie and Jace exchange glances. Jace wrings her hands in front of her. “We were talking about . . . the accident.”

She means her own accident. Her crime.

“I think that scared the shit out of me more than anything else.” Valerie’s hand is still planted on Jace’s back, unmoving, like a ward of protection. “How she suddenly showed up right when . . .”

Jace starts to cry, and Valerie frowns and bows her head.

“I don’t mean to pry or be insensitive,” Tanner says, “but I want to know. Were you talking about the girl?”

Jace nods. Valerie drags her hand in circles over Jace’s back. Touch is the last luxury of comfort that we have here.

“So you were
thinking
about the girl and she walked into camp?” Tanner attempts to clarify with Jace.

“No,” I interrupt. Casey’s eyes are glazed. I wonder if he’s replaying the moment when the bleeding girl stumbled upon us, like I am. “Casey and I were by the creek and saw her first.”

“Was there anything strange about the way she appeared?”

Other than the fact that she was watching as he lay on top of me half-naked? “No . . . well . . .” I remember the light. “There was a strange flash of green before she appeared. Was that a part of your crime?” I ask Jace.

She sniffs and shakes her head.

“I don’t know.” Tanner rubs his chin in thought. “It’s so unlike the other tests.”

If it was a test at all. I think of Todd, and of Valerie’s sister. But they were images of comfort, not of terror.

Valerie stands, pacing back and forth in front of the campfire. “I’ll take the first watch tonight.”

“Me too,” says Jace.

“You need to rest. Especially—especially after that.”

“But I want to be with you.”

A silent argument rages between them. Finally, Valerie says, “You’ll be with Evalyn.”

Jace rests her head on her knees, tangling her fingers in her hair.

I walk over to her. “Let’s go in the tent, Jace.”

“It isn’t even that dark yet,” she says into her knees. “It isn’t even dark.”

“Come on.” When I help her up, she complies. Inside the tent, we lie down next to each other.

She gazes past the bug netting, to the sky deepening as minutes pass. “Yes. I deserve this.”

Maybe she’s right; maybe we all do. But still, I say, “Don’t think that.”

“It’s okay.” She takes my hand. “I’m ready to die again.”

“You shouldn’t be ready to die until you’re faced with it.” Maybe I should eat my words and not be such a hypocrite. “What about falling in love?”

Immediately her eyes shift to the open tent flap, to Valerie, who sharpens a knife with a stone by the fire.

“You’re into her.”

She scowls at me. “Am not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No one should be
into
anyone here. Why wrap yourself in someone just to lose them?”

The tent shakes. Casey shuffles to the far corner. I swallow the lump forming in my throat. “Because it might be the last time you’re able to do it.”

She blinks, her head falling back.

“You okay?”

“I’m not sure. Nothing feels real anymore.”

“I think that’s all right.”

“Does it feel real to you?”

As my gaze connects with Casey’s, my pulse speeds. “No, but I’m letting that be my drug. I’m letting that drive me for as long as I have left.”

Sadness flickers across his face.

“Don’t leave me tonight,” says Jace. “Neither of you.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” I reach over her and take Casey’s hand. Tanner will stay on guard with Valerie tonight, and even if we invited Stella inside the tent, she’d refuse, so we don’t bother.

“What do you think death will be like?” Jace murmurs.

Casey squeezes my hand. It’s like he knows that my mind reverts to the moment when we were kneeling around the faux corpse of Casey’s father and waiting for death. I was so sure that every breath I took was going to be my last. It was the first time in a while that I thought about what would happen after my heart stopped beating.

Casey is the first to speak. “When the lodge lit on fire, I thought we had already died.”

“I don’t think hell will care about testing us,” Jace says.

“You believe in hell?” he asks her.

She thinks for a long, hard moment. “No. I believe in finding redemption, even after death. Somehow.”

That word again.
Redemption.

“Evalyn?” Jace asks.

I don’t have the heart to tell her that my jaded mind can’t wrap around anything other than death being an infinite nothing—suffocating blackness. But I try to imagine for her. I try to play make-believe, like I used to when I thought of joining Meghan. “Death will be like floating on your back in the cleanest water you can think of beneath a hot sun. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to have a broken heart over. No one to lose.”

“Alone?” Jace asks.

“Yes. Alone.”

Casey squeezes my hand even tighter. Jace is right. Cycling through love is like wash, rinse, repeat. Falling for anyone now is as pointless as believing I would have Liam forever.

Nothing is forever except the loneliness.

***

The soft walls of the tent shake as someone fights to get out.

Everyone’s yelling.

I’m up.

“Valerie!” Jace screams, racing out of the tent.

Casey and I exchange bleary, startled glances before throwing our blankets off. He groans as he stretches his muscles for the first time in hours and I plow past him, crawling out of the exit and onto my feet.

Jace disappears into the woods, sprinting.

“What happened?” I cry at Tanner, whose fingers are clenched in his hair.

“Valerie said she had to pee. She . . . she . . .”

“Spit it out!”

“Was dragged into the woods. Something dragged her into the woods.”

Something?

I take off, Casey right on my heels. His breathing is labored—pained, and I know every step is work for him, but he doesn’t slow. He even speeds up when we catch a glimpse of Jace fighting the brush at her ankles up ahead. Down a hill all of us go, and I nearly stumble over my feet before the ground levels out. Valerie lies on her back in the middle of the clearing, clawing at something around her neck. Jace runs to her, dropping to her knees.

When I’m closer, I make out the object around Valerie. A noose. With Jace’s help, she’s able to untangle herself from it, gasping for air.

I drop to the ground on the other side of her. “What the hell
happened
?”

Valerie coughs, tears springing to her eyes as she rubs her neck. She chokes out, “It slithered around me, like a snake. Didn’t know what was happening until it was too late.”

Casey runs into the clearing, followed by Tanner. The noose slinks across the ground on its own, like it’s controlled.

“They see everything,” Stella sings from the edge of the clearing. She twirls a piece of hair around her finger. “They take their robot claws and rip apart your skin. I bet you they like it.”