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“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.
66
NOAH FLASHED ME A LOOK THAT FROZE MY blood. “Don’t you dare.”
Then Jamie spoke. His voice was like the edge of a diamond, brutally sharp and compelling. “Let me go,” he said to Jude.
And to my enormous shock, Jude did.
I watched Jamie drop to in slow motion, but just before he hit the ground, Jude gripped his neck again, pulling him up.
Then landed a brutal kick to Jamie’s stomach. Jamie curled in the sand.
“Don’t speak again,” Jude said.
I shook with rage and hatred. Jude looked at me with clinical interest. “Here’s how this is going to work,” he said, against the background of Megan’s now-constant sobs. “The longer you make me wait, Mara, the more you will make them suffer.”
“This has nothing to do with them,” I spat.
Jude nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “So are you going to make them pay for what you did? All you have to do is take their place.” He smiled like a reptile and looked at me like I was a rat. “Otherwise you’ll kill them slowly, and I will make you watch.”
Noah placed a hand on my stomach very softly, keeping me back. “You aren’t killing anyone, Mara,” he said to me. Noah looked straight at Jude. “He is.”
That shadow had crept back into Noah’s voice, into his face. I had never, ever seen him lose it, but I had a feeling I was about to.
It was frightening.
Jude trailed his finger along the crown of Megan’s sweat-damp blond head. The sand beneath her darkened with urine. “Who will you choose first?” he asked me.
I was mute. Transfixed. Jude knelt down to Megan slowly.
Then Noah shifted me gently, subtly behind him.
Jude took Megan’s face in his large hand and as he did, Noah moved so silently and fast I almost missed it.
Noah was in the garden. His fist met Jude’s face with a sickening crack.
Megan and Adam let out a double, inharmonious gasp, but I didn’t turn to look. I was riveted, spellbound by what I saw: Jude used his size like a wrecking ball, inflicting carnage with heavy hands and feet. But Noah was incisive and swift, lithe and fierce. He knew instinctively what would hurt most, and that’s what he did. Noah hit Jude again and again and again and I couldn’t look away.
But then I heard my name—in Megan’s voice. Just before she and Adam slumped forward at exactly the same time.
A memory flashed—Jude stabbing himself, dropping to his knees on a wooden dock.
I was assaulted with memories then. The man at the marina who died when he tried to rescue me from torture. John, my bodyguard, who died in his car from a stroke. I remembered dead fish beneath the dock and dead birds that fell from the sky.
Not my fault. But not random, either.
“Noah,” I whispered, looking back and forth between Megan and Adam and Jude. I finally, finally understood.
Jude could heal himself like Noah—by killing things, like me.
He didn’t have to touch anyone to kill them. He didn’t even have to think it. He just had to be hurt himself, and if he was, anything and anyone around him would die.
Like John. Like the off-duty cop. Like the fish.
I was lethal, but Jude was worse. And animals could sense it—our neighbors’ pets disappeared the day I came home from the psych ward—the same day Jude began haunting my house.
Noah had Jude prone and locked to the sand. He pressed his forearm to Jude’s throat and leaned over his face. “I will murder you,” he said calmly. “And before you die you will beg for her forgiveness.”
Jude might have made a noise but I couldn’t hear it because Megan and Adam groaned in anguish.
Insurance, Stella had said.
Jude’s chest heaved and his shoulders shook. He was laughing.
“He’ll kill them,” I said, my voice rough and miserable. “If you hurt him, they’ll die.”
“If you don’t kill me,” Jude said, his voice hoarse, “I’ll slice Mara into pieces so small you won’t—”
Noah released Jude’s throat. And shattered his kneecap in one brutal move.
There was a scream—from Jude, this time. It fractured the air. Jude twisted onto his side, but after a minute, he was laughing again. Still.
His laughter and my heartbeat were the only sounds I could hear. “You want revenge?” Jude asked. His words echoed in the quiet space. He nodded his head at Megan and Adam. “Take it.”
My eyes darted toward them—they were unconscious now, but still breathing. Her hair was mixed in with the sand—almost exactly the same color, too. Bits of it stuck to Adam’s buzzed head.
Jamie and Stella, however, were both awake. They were silent, but their eyes glittered with awareness. Taking it in, just like me.
Just like me.
I was unaffected. They were unaffected. Which meant that if Noah could keep Jude engaged—maybe I could get them free. I looked around frantically for a weapon, a tool, something sharp—
