The Retribution of Mara Dyer

The last time I saw that Mara, she stood held against Jude’s body, his blade at her naked 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 fucked 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 thi

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 i

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 pla