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.”