The last time I saw that Mara, she stood held against Jude’s body, his blade at her na**d throat. Or no, no, that wasn’t the last time. A split-second frame flickers in my mind, a quick and blurred picture of her pressing Jude against a wall, almost into it, with her hands at his throat, digging into his bare skin. And I remembered what preceded it. Mara began as his victim, and then she made him hers.

But it wasn’t just us f**ked up teens that last night in Horizons. A scentless something invaded the air, made it shimmer and wave. I remembered my voice as I called out to her, the way it competed with the sound of blood rushing beneath my skin, with the sound of my ragged breath roaring in my ears, before my world went black.

God knew how many minutes, hours, days I’d spent in darkness after that, waking up to be forced to eat by a person, or people, with blurred, blank faces and gloved hands, only to be swallowed back into unconsciousness as a dark, wet tongue pushed me to the back of its throat. I remembered practically nothing until today, when my father’s face appeared at the door.

“You’re safe now,” he said, and miracle of miracles, led me out into the world. I felt bliss for a moment when I saw the sky, until I realized it was the color of spoiled milk. My father seemed to be talking to me, reassuring me or something, but I had trouble translating the words. I did try to find some sliver of gratitude for him, some rejoicing at my freedom, but I felt absolutely nothing at all.

Until he mentioned her name.

My father had found her the way he’d found me, he said. She needed help that only I could give her, and would I go with him?

I would go anywhere, with anyone, to see the girl I loved again. Obviously.

The girl before me now doesn’t quite look like her. She is different in a way I can’t name, in a way that goes beyond her thinness, her new shape. If she were na**d beneath the faded black T-shirt she wears (one of mine—the hem is half-torn), her ribs would show, her spine would protrude, her collarbones would cut glass. But she doesn’t look ill, not the way she had begun to before Horizons. Color blooms in her cheeks, and her eyes are lit with an emotion I can’t name. And there’s something more, more than the change in her features and in her body. Looking at her is like walking into a home you once lived in to find it changed by new, alien owners. She is bound, prone, and Jude, that absolute horror of a human being, looms over her, but she looks nothing like a damsel in distress. She looks like a dragon instead. I am struck dumb and thoughtless with the sense that I don’t know a thing about this person until she speaks my name.

The sound of her voice thaws my mind and my blood; it pulses hotly through my veins. I ignore Jude’s presence—she and I can butcher him together later. My feet carry me to my girl and I kneel and reach for her. Something stops me—not Jude. Not my father. My hand curls into a fist and falls by my side, and a strange, unfamiliar voice inside me whispers, Don’t.

I look to Mara for an answer to the question I haven’t asked. She says instead, “You’re here.” But what I hear in her tone is, Where were you?

My heart would break if it weren’t filled with happiness. Her voice is the same. It’s home.

My father pollutes the air with his, however. “Mara was told that Horizons collapsed.”

I look up in confusion. “Why?”

“To keep you safe,” he says to me.

“From what exactly?”

“From her.”

Mara is silent for a moment, and blinks her dark lashes that frame her too-wide eyes. They would look innocent on anyone else. “I would never hurt him.”

My father looks at her with no expression. “You already have.”

52

BUT NOAH WASN’T HURT. HE was alive. Whole.

Here.

I nearly choked on my own breath when I saw him, and when I heard him speak, I thought I would dissolve. If I had been standing, I would have fallen to my knees.

He wore unfaded jeans and a T-shirt, too new-looking to be his, and they hung loosely on his already lean frame. He knelt beside the table and examined my hands.

“Do you have something I can cut these with?” he asked his father. I blinked, confused, as his father withdrew something from a nylon briefcase beside him. My neck hurt trying to see what it was.

A knife.

“Yes,” Jude mumbled. “Yes.”

Whatever warmth I’d felt at Noah’s timely reappearance vanished. Something was happening here, but I didn’t understand what.

Noah didn’t either, clearly. He cut the zip-ties on my wrists, on my ankles, with no protests from David or Jude. What were they playing at? What was this?

My limbs were shaky and weak, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stand or run. But I could sit up. Noah helped me.

“What happened to you?” he asked as his hands gripped my shoulders, propping me up against the wall.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it; it just bubbled up from my throat. How could I even begin to answer that question?

Noah looked away from me, his jaw tense now. “Who did this to her?” He focused on Jude. His voice was flat when he asked his father, “Why is he here?”

David plucked a manila folder from his bag. “I told you today that I needed you to help her,” he said, and I wanted to spit in his face. “This is why.”

He laid out several sheets of paper. Or no, not paper. Pictures. Photographs. Full color. Graphic.

“Wayne Flowers, age forty-seven. Mara cut his throat and took his eye as a souvenir.”

Noah’s face was impassive, his eyes flat.

“Deborah Susan Kells, age forty-two, died of several dozen stab wounds, inflicted by Mara with nothing but a scalpel. Robert Ernst, age fifty-three, father of two. Mara stabbed him with a scalpel as well. His body could barely be identified by the police when they found it, rotting in a rest stop in the Keys.”

Noah didn’t look at me for confirmation, but he lifted the picture of Dr. Kells from the table. Then looked at his father.

“Did you know her?” he asked. “Do you know what she’s done to Mara? To me?”

It hit me then, how little Noah knew. It scared me.

“I do,” David answered.

Because he hired her, I wanted to say. I wished I could stand up, grab his shirt, make Noah listen, make him understand. But the drugs, David’s drugs, made sure I couldn’t.

“Do you know about—me?” Noah asked coldly.

“Your mother hid it as long as she could, but I found out when she died. It’s why she and I were chosen.”

“For?”

“To be your parents.”

David closed his eyes, and when he opened them, a quiet fury had settled in his face. “The man you call Lukumi, whom I knew as Lenaurd, manipulated your mother, recruited her, then introduced her and me so we could breed. You were planned, Noah. Engineered.”

Noah practically radiated frustration. “For what?”

“To be the hero,” David said, looking at Noah like he was his greatest disappointment. “To slay the dragon. But you fell in love with it instead.”

53

NOAH

HAD MY FATHER BEEN DRIVEN mad by the loss of my mother? By perpetual disappointment in his son, perhaps? I may never know.

“I hear electroshock therapy has come a long way in the last century,” I say to him. My wit falls on deaf ears.

“All I ever wanted for you, Noah—all most parents ever want for their children—was for you to be healthy, to be normal. But I’m part of the reason that never happened for you,” he says. “Your mother and I, we are both carriers, both unmanifested, of the original gene, the one that makes you abnormal.”

I nearly laugh out loud at the word. “All right. Fine. How long have you known?”

“Your mother left papers, letters,” he says flatly. “I didn’t believe them until you were eight years old.”

I search my memory for a hint and find none.

“You managed to climb up onto your dresser while your nanny was in the bathroom, and dove off it. You cracked your head open. I was terrified.” A brief, flickering smile appears on his lined face, and in that moment an image of my old bedroom materializes in my mind, high-ceilinged with dark wood trim. The floor had an inlaid pattern to it. I climbed my tall dresser to get a better look, and when I did, the floor seemed to take on dimension, to recede, as if I could jump into it. So I tried.

“I rushed you to the hospital, but by the time we arrived, your wound was nearly closed. I ordered a private doctor to attend to you, to take you for CAT scans, MRIs, blood work—nothing turned up. You were perfectly healthy,” my father says with a bitter smile. “Except for the fact that you kept getting hurt. No, not getting hurt—you were hurting yourself,” he adds nastily.

I want to hit him so badly.

“There was the fractured leg at nine.”

When I jumped off the roof at our country house, hoping I would fly.

“The adder bite on the Australia trip when you were ten.”

When I uncovered a snake beneath a pile of leaves, and decided I had to hold it.

“The broken hand at twelve.”

After a fight with my father, when I punched the wall.

“The burns at thirteen.”

When I set fire to the garden my mother had planted years earlier, which my father loved more than he loved me.

“And the first time you cut yourself, when you were fifteen.”

When I had had enough.

“And in between, there was the smoking, the drinking, the drugs—exercises in contempt for the life your mother and I had given you.”

A refrain I have heard so many, many times before. Boring.

“Psychologists and psychiatrists insisted you were traumatized by your mother’s murder. At five you were too old to forget it—”

True.

“But too young to talk about it.”

False. No one tried.

“So you lashed out at the world, at me, at yourself. Your mother gave up her own life to have you, and you kept spitting on her memory.” My father’s eyes are thankfully missing that telltale maniacal glint, but still. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so furious. It’s oddly riveting.

This might be the longest conversation we’ve ever had.

He pauses to regain his composure and withdraws a kerchief from his pocket. Good God. He dabs it at the corner of his mouth. “I couldn’t look at her things after she died. I could barely look at you, you looked so much like her. But in time, I managed to force myself. She wrote about what she had done, what you were, what you would become. No wonder the psychiatrists and doctors were useless.” He shakes his head in disgust. “They couldn’t begin to comprehend your affliction. So I hired Deborah Kells.”

I realize, as my father confesses his involvement in the plot that has ruined the life of the girl I love, and my life by proxy, that I should feel a profound sense of betrayal. Righteous anger, perhaps. Shock, disgust, wrath—any of these would be perfectly normal.

That he hired Kells to experiment on the others and Mara, that he let Jude torment Mara, torture her—that much I could actually believe, monstrous and psychopathic though it was. If there were any profit to be had in it, my father would make it. That is a thing that makes sense. And the Lukumi bit is an interesting touch, I admit.

But the dragon business, this hero shit? Complete madness. My father is unhinged.

And yet he looks so normal. Particularly next to Jude, who is twitching, possibly drooling a bit, I can’t quite tell.

My father confirms my assessment with every word he speaks. “Deborah had theories about how to find others like you, and theories about how to cure them. I had her record her monthly progress and send the videos to me so I could keep up, but nothing in them promised to help you. Not until she found your Mara.”

I am repulsed by the sound of her name in his mouth.

“Deborah wasn’t sure Mara was the one. In Providence, Deborah thought it might be the older brother, actually. But after some birthday party, her foster daughter convinced her it was Mara. The asylum was chosen as a staging area, in the hope that the fear of spending the night there would trigger the beginning of Mara’s manifestation. And it did.”

It sinks in slowly, what he is saying. He is talking about Claire, Jude’s sister. He is talking about the asylum, the place where Jude nearly raped her. He is telling me how it was staged, planned, and my bemusement morphs into loathing. I don’t know how I’m still standing.

“Mara ended up teaching me as much about you as you taught me about her. More perhaps. I had no idea how your ability worked. How you heard things, what you saw. But it was hubris,” my father says. “If there is a way to arrest the anomaly, we haven’t found it. You might be the key to it, Noah, but we’ll never know as long as she’s alive. And you can’t stay away from her, and she can’t help what she is.”

I almost can’t wait to hear his answer. “And what is that?”

“Every generation someone along the affected bloodline develops an ability that parallels an archetype—”

Fucking hell. Time to go.

My father smiles, as if he can hear my thoughts. “My son, the skeptic. I was once too. But tell me, haven’t you ever wondered why she can’t wish for anything good?”

His words erase the snide comments that were on the tip of my tongue, and replace them with a memory. I wondered exactly that. And I wrote about it in the journal I kept for Mara.

My theory: that Mara can manipulate events the way I can manipulate cells. I have no idea how either of us can do either thing, but nevertheless.

I try to get her to envision something benign, but she stares and concentrates while her sound never changes. Is her ability linked to desire? Does she not want anything good?