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“It might.”
“It won’t. And I’m perfectly all right.”
“Bushwa, you are! You’re still shaking,” Sam said. “Excuse my language.”
“Whatever Marlowe’s putting into Jericho made him do that,” Evie said.
“Yeah? Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe that serum is just meeting up with what’s already inside Jericho to begin with. You ever think about that?” Sam folded the rag over, finding a cool spot and applying it to Evie’s forehead.
She winced as it hit a raw spot. “Ow!”
“Sorry.”
Evie took the washrag from him and held it to her face. “Really, Sam. I’m okay.”
Sam leaned back against the giant tub carved with rosettes. “This place gives me the creeps. It feels all wrong.” Sam gave Evie a long, searching look. “On the level—you jake?”
Evie could feel tears wanting to come, but she was determined not to let them. Jericho had attacked her. He wasn’t a stranger. He was her friend. But this morning, it felt as if she’d never really known him at all. “No. But going to bed seems like my best plan tonight,” she said.
“You want me to stay?”
“I doubt there’ll be trouble tonight. All those tranquilizers in his blood.”
“I don’t know. The giant’s pretty strong. I heard Marlowe say he’d be back to normal by morning. Whatever that means.”
“I’ll be okay.” She struggled to her feet, reached into the bathtub, and pulled up a baseball bat. “Found this in a closet. I’m keeping it close.”
Sam rinsed out Evie’s washrag and laid it on the side of the sink.
“Lock your door?” he said on the way out.
“Oh, yes. And a chair under the doorknob.”
On the walk back to his room, Sam detoured through the moonlight-dappled ballroom. He felt that strong presence again. It seemed to be coming up from the earth itself. He thought he heard his name being called very faintly.
“Mama?” he said to the still room once more, but there was no answer.
After Evie had locked her door and shoved a chair under the knob, she crawled into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Many times Evie had fantasized about petting with Jericho. In her fantasy, she imagined surrendering to a dominating Jericho. She’d liked it as a fantasy. There was something wild and hedonistic about the idea of allowing herself to be taken over by a big, strong, handsome man, as if she had no say in the matter and so no responsibility for making love with him: Why, it just happened! What could I do? I was helpless! But in reality, it hadn’t been that way. It had been confusing and utterly frightening to have no say and no control, like a rag doll wielded by a careless child. It was like not being a person at all.
Now that she thought about it, what Jericho had done to her, well, wasn’t that what Marlowe was doing to Jericho? Taking away his control? Making him an experiment, an object that Marlowe didn’t even take the time to read? Did Marlowe even see Jericho as a person anymore? Had he ever?
What if Sam was right, though, and there was some part of Jericho that really was that brute in the woods? What if it couldn’t be blamed completely on the serum? That thought made Evie’s stomach hurt. Tomorrow was their last day at Hopeful Harbor. Marlowe said Jericho would be back to normal in the morning. What if he didn’t remember what he’d done and he was sitting there at breakfast tomorrow morning as if nothing had happened? What would she say?
She wouldn’t go to breakfast.
No, that was a terrible plan. If there was anything Evie was unsuccessful at, it was avoiding breakfast. Most likely, Jericho would still be asleep tomorrow morning, she told herself. But just in case, she’d take the baseball bat with her.
She punched her pillow and waited impatiently for sleep. When it came, it was violent. Evie dreamed of the soldiers. Their faces, pale and ghostly, were carved in shadow, their eyes as prominent as a dying fish’s. There was a sound like a howling wind full of bees, and under that, a galloping, clanging heartbeat keeping time. The men shouted to her across a great distance, their voices sailing past in a fast whine like bullets:
Help usEye Stop stopHelpStop O
Godhim stopfree usss
HELP. US.
The soldiers’ screaming mouths opened unnaturally wide, as if the screaming had distorted their very bones. As if they were coming apart and there were no words for the agony. Conor Flynn appeared. His eyes were haunted. “Can you hear it? The Eye is close. You gotta find it. You gotta stop him. I can’t keep hiding from him forever,” he said.
When Evie woke the next morning, a note had been shoved under her door.
