The Retribution of Mara Dyer (26 page)

My thoughts hung like loose threads, frayed and tangled. It didn’t help that I was exhausted. I leaned my head in my hands, staring at the documents in front of me. The words on the page arranged themselves into an incomprehensible shape as I fought to stay awake, and lost.

43

BEFORE

Cambridge, England

I
T HAD BEEN OVER A
century since I fled London with the professor, and yet he still treated me like a child.

Tonight he was in a particularly sulky mood. The weather was customarily dreary, and his office was cold and damp and in ruins. He warmed himself with a bottle of whiskey, his preferred poison, and scribbled furiously in one of his books. Torn paper and worn books littered the scarred wooden floor. I watched him in silence.

Something had caught his attention recently, focused him in a way I had never before seen. A coming shift, he called it. He thought he might have discovered a way to trigger it. But he refused to share his thoughts with me.

He had cared for me during the fevers as my Gift blossomed inside of me, as my body changed to accommodate it. He forced me to eat when food lost all its taste. He comforted me during my night terrors and caught me, stopped me, the first time I tried to do myself harm.

But I didn’t need him for those things now—I hadn’t in many, many years. I had shed the girl who had fled London in darkness, the one who cried over her husband of one night. I was strong, bold, and I could control myself perfectly. If I wanted to.

I did not want to anymore.

I’d grown tired of pretending to be someone else just so I could be safe for others. I wanted to be who I was. The professor knew me the way no one else did, which was why I wanted to be with him. But no matter how I broached the subject, he dismissed it. Dismissed
me
. He still wouldn’t even tell me his name.

The sound of shattering glass snapped me to attention. The professor sat stick straight at his desk, staring at nothing.

No. Not nothing. I followed his gaze to a painting of himself that hung on the opposite wall. It had been given to him by a student, he’d said, and though he would not tell me which, I had my suspicions—the style was familiar and distinctive. But the picture glistened with the remains of his drink, making his skin and hair look wet. The fiery scent of spilled whiskey mingled with that of his old books.

“What is it?” I asked gently.

He didn’t answer, so I stepped between his desk and the portrait. He looked right through me, as if I were invisible.

But I would be seen tonight. I would be felt.

I skirted the edge of his desk, until I came to his chair. “What is your name?” I asked him, not gently at all. “Tell me.”

He smiled a little. I’d been asking that question for a very long time. Each time I asked, he would give me a different answer.

But this time, tonight, he reached for a scrap of paper, a torn-out map. My heartbeat quickened. He wrote something on it in a language I’d never learned to read, and showed it to me.

I smoothed my finger over the words. “I am in love with you,” I said.

“I raised you,” he replied, and did not meet my eyes.

“You did not raise me. Sarah Shaw raised me—”

“Until you were eighteen. Then I took you, I taught you—”

I moved over to him, pressed my hand to his cheek. He flinched. I didn’t move. “I know you watched me when I was young. I know you feel responsible for me. But you are not my parent and I am no longer young.”

“This is wrong.” His voice was blank and empty.

I climbed onto his lap. “It doesn’t feel wrong,” I said. There was no sound except for our breath, and the slither of a belt being pulled through its loop. I kissed him below his jaw. He shuddered a breath, and I kissed his lips, just once.

It was enough.

The professor was gone when I woke the following morning. I bore a daughter nine months later. I did not see the professor again for twenty-one years.

Laurelton, Rhode Island

Twenty-one years later

The Professor knocked on the door of my cottage on the morning of Indira’s graduation from Brown. I did not want to open the door for him, but I knew I had no choice. He didn’t look a day older than he had when I’d last seen him. Then again, neither did I.

“I found him,” he said to me, his eyes lit with a childish excitement that was incongruous with the dark, serious suit he wore. He looked like an undertaker.

“What are you doing here?”

“I found the one.”

“Please leave,” I said flatly.

“Mara—”

“Don’t you dare say my name. You have no right to say anything to me.”

He closed his eyes. “May I come in?”

“No.”

“Please.”

I wanted to close the door in his face, but I knew him well
enough to know he wouldn’t leave even if I did. He would stand there, sleep there, turn up everywhere I went, until he gave me the message he wanted me to hear.

“You left me,” I said, as I let him in. I didn’t have to make it easy.

The professor’s gaze fell to his feet. “I saw what would happen to her if I’d been there. It was for your, and her, protection.”

“That’s so convenient, isn’t it? You can excuse anything that way, can’t you? By saying it couldn’t be otherwise, that you had no choice. So why are you here now? What do you want from me? I want you gone before Indi finds you here.”

“There’s a girl. I need you to befriend her. She’s passionate, hyperintelligent, but skeptical.” His words were rushed—I’d never seen him so excited. “She won’t listen to me. You’re the only one who will be able to persuade her to do what’s necessary to have the child.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because your daughter is pregnant.”

I blinked, stunned. “What?”

“She didn’t want to tell you until after she’d graduated. She’s going to marry her boyfriend. She thought you’d disapprove.”

I sat down, rested my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands.

“It’s recessive, Mara—Her child might be a—”

My head snapped up. “Have you seen anything?”

“The child’s fate is too tightly wound with mine, so I can’t distinguish the threads. But I know that we need the boy Naomi will have. We need a Hero. Just in case Indira’s turns out to be a—”

Shadow. Like me. He didn’t need to say it.

“Your ability will fade as Indira’s child begins to manifest. But if the boy is born of the girl, Naomi, there might be a way—if you die by his hand, you might be able to reverse it. End the cycle completely.”

“Might.”

“There are no guarantees,” he said. “You know that.”

“And the girl? What will happen to her?”

“She makes the choice. She consents. She dies.”

It was a risk. But I would take it for my daughter’s sake. I flew to London with the professor the next day.

44

H
E’S HERE!” DANIEL SHOUTED. “HE’S
in New York!”

I lifted my head up from the kitchen table, wincing at the stiffness in my neck. Had I fallen asleep?

“What time is it?” I asked hoarsely.

“Wake-up time,” my brother said cheerily. He was neatly dressed in jeans and a henley shirt, standing next to Stella. She was also annoyingly alert, and freshly clothed.

“I thought about waking you to go to bed,” Stella said, then sipped from a glass of orange juice. “But Daniel said not to.”

“You looked pretty pitiful,” my brother added.

I couldn’t muster up an equally irritating response, but I
didn’t have to because Jamie appeared in the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Who’s in New York?” he asked.

“Lukumi! Whoever! He’s giving a lecture at Columbia.” Daniel flipped around his laptop to show me an online announcement for the Columbia Department of Comparative Literature, and he read it aloud as I read it silently:
The Final Girl: Jungian Archetypes in Pop Culture, a lecture presented by Dr. A. Lukumi, MD, PhD. Contact the Columbia Student Affairs office for tickets.

Jamie stood in front of the fridge. “Are you finished speaking?”

Daniel narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

“Can someone tell me why there’s no cream cheese in the house?”

Daniel ignored him. “It’s today,” Daniel said. “I’m leaving at four.”

I looked at the clock. That was in two hours. I felt a jolt of energy and stood up. I had time to change, maybe even shower. I wasn’t going to miss this.

“What are you doing?” my brother asked.

“I am going to get less gross,” I said, “And then I am going to go with you, obviously.”

Daniel shook his head. “That’s what he’ll be expecting. He knows who you are, Mara—he was in your hospital room, on the train platform. He’s been following you, right?”

“Right . . .”

“Then he’ll know if you show up.”

“He’ll know who
you
are too,” I said to my brother. “Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s calling us out. He knows
everything
, about
all
of us, about our whole family. He definitely knows what you look like.”

“Maybe, but I don’t plan on being seen. And if I am seen, so what? I’m visiting colleges, after all. It’s only natural that I’d be—”

“Auditing a lecture?” Jamie snorted. “I wouldn’t describe that as natural.”

“Natural for Daniel,” I said as I took a bagel from a bag on the counter. “Is there any peanut butter?” I asked Jamie.

Jamie made a face. “Peanut butter on a bagel?”

“Yes?”

“Who are you, Mara Dyer?”

I ignored him. “And what exactly is your big plan, then?” I said to my brother before taking a too-big bite of my peanut buttered bagel. “Are you going to bum-rush him at the podium?”

“I’m going to go to the lecture and then follow him. I want to know where he’s staying, where he lives, everything about him.”

“And then, after your Scooby-Doo mission is complete?”

“Then I’ll force him to tell me how to fix you,” Daniel said.

His words brought me up short. I’d wanted that, once upon a time. To be fixed. To be saved. I’d begged Noah to do it. He couldn’t, he’d said, because I wasn’t broken.

I turned to Stella, who had been noticeably quiet during this entire conversation. “Stella? What say you?”

“I want to see him,” she said firmly. “I want him to fix me, too.”

Hmm. Back to Daniel. “How do you think you’re going to be able to force Lukumi to do anything? He holds all the cards.”

“If he’s really behind all of this, then he has gone to great lengths to keep his identity a secret. We’ll threaten to splash his face, his name—”

“His fake name,” I corrected him.

“Everywhere,” Daniel continued. “We’ll publish all of this.” He swept his arm around the kitchen island, where stacks of files and notebooks were piled high. “What happened to you, what was done to you, what he was responsible for—and then he won’t be able to hide anymore. I’ll need to snap a picture of him at the podium and match it up to something else. I haven’t been able to find any of him online anywhere.”

“There’s that photo from McCarthy’s office,” Jamie said, whipping out his phone.

Daniel looked confused. “Let me see?”

Jamie handed him the phone.

“Wait, that’s him?” Daniel asked. “He looks familiar.”

Goose bumps rose on my arms.

“I can’t place him, but I feel like I’ve seen him before.”

Maybe you have,
I almost said.

Daniel shook his head as if to clear it. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that we have to follow him, find out as much as we can about him so we can find out who he really is—his real name, his real identity, so we can connect him to all of this, so you can have a normal life,” Daniel said to me.

In fact, almost
everything
he had said was to me.
For
me.
I
was the one who needed Lukumi more than anyone else in that room. I was the only one of us who wasn’t innocent.

“What do you think he’s hiding from?” Jamie asked quietly, but no one answered. None of us could guess.

“We’re going to have to talk to a lawyer,” my brother said, head cocked to the side. “You know that, right?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but he
was
right.

“The things you’ve—” He stopped himself before continuing. “The things that have happened to you, and what happened at Horizons—we need to get them out in the open, deal with them, make sure we can establish that you were tortured, that it was self-defense—”

Not always. But I bit my tongue.

“And then, once he tells us how to fix you guys, we’ll go public anyway.”

“Stop saying that,” Jamie said.

The three of us turned to him.

“Stop saying that we have to be fixed. I like who I am. I don’t think I need to fix anything. I’m not broken.” Jamie left the room.

Daniel leaned his elbows on the table and rubbed his face. “You knew what I meant, right, Mara?”

I did. But Jamie had voiced what I hadn’t been able to put into words until then, what the slight sting of shame kept me from saying out loud.

I didn’t think I needed to be fixed either. I liked who I was becoming too.

45

T
O DIFFUSE THE TENSION, DANIEL
suggested we take a break before the lecture. We were tired and cranky and confused, and we’d been trapped in the house for too long. Daniel wanted to keep reading, though, so he stayed home, leaving Stella, Jamie, and me to our own devices. Which to Jamie meant buying food.

Without a car, and with our agreement not to order out, we ended up having to take the train to a Whole Foods (Jamie insisted), which meant lugging bags of groceries with us on the way back. The platform was weirdly empty, except for a couple of preppily dressed guys urinating on a heap of what looked like rags. Stella and I were debating the artistic merits of graffiti (my opinion, art; hers, vandalism), but I digressed for a moment to
loudly inform the guys of their disgustingness. They didn’t say anything back. Not even when Jamie called out to them. It was only then that I noticed that the heap was actually a person.