64
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE HOLDING the body of the person you love and knowing those heartbeats are numbered.
Noah was still breathing, but shallowly. His eyes didn’t open when I said his name. I cradled him in my arms, and looked up at Jude with hate in my eyes.
“Why?” I barely recognized the sound of my own voice.
“I needed to trigger you. Doctor said. She said if you manifested, you could kill me. And I want that. It’s the only way I can die. I knew if I killed him, you’d be mad enough to do it.”
But I didn’t feel mad. I felt empty.
“Mara?” Jamie’s voice. The laptop was still on the stack of boxes. I craned my neck to look at it. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I thought you died.”
“Is Daniel—my brother—”
“They took him,” Jamie said. “Fuckers took him and left me here.”
“Is he—”
“He was alive, yeah. They put something in his drip. Mara, I’m here—somewhere in the building. Come get me?”
I looked down at Noah’s face. His pulse fluttered in his throat. I glanced at the knife in his chest. Maybe—if I pulled it out . . .
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know.
“Do it before he gets back,” Jude said.
“Who?” Noah’s father? I didn’t care about him. He would get what he deserved. I would make sure of it.
“The one inside me,” Jude said, sending a ripple of revulsion through me. “Doctor was working on something, a cure. I gave myself a shot, but it pushes the other one away for only a little while. You’ve gotta do it, Mara. Please. There’s no one else who can. You couldn’t do it before you manifested, but now, now you’re done. You came back. You healed yourself. You can do it now. Please.”
Jude was asking me to kill him. And I would. He couldn’t live, not after what he’d done. But what he was saying, how he was saying it, peeled the skin off of a memory.
I remembered him standing in the torture garden at Horizons, telling me I had to be afraid, afraid enough to bring Claire back. Which was impossible.
The moment I thought this was the moment Noah stopped breathing.
I watched as the pulse died in his throat, and a breath, his last one, escaped from his lips like a sigh.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. One tear fell, then another. I looked at the knife through blurred vision.
Jamie said, “Mara, do you hear that?”
But I heard nothing. Saw nothing. Felt nothing but Noah. I pulled the knife from his chest, hoping, desperately, that it might not be too late, that somehow he could heal, would heal, despite the things his father had said, despite the fortune-teller’s words.
“You will love him to ruins.”
I thought about all of the choices that had led us here, how each one could have gone a different way. How Noah might never have met me. How he would have been whole and unbroken and alive now if he hadn’t.
“Sirens,” Jamie said with hope in his voice. “Is he—is Noah—”
But it was too late. The life I’d almost had died in my arms.
“He’s gone,” I said, holding his body, and the knife that had killed him.
“Please,” Jude said again. “Please, please.”
I looked at the knife in my hands, the blade wet with Noah’s warm blood. There was so much of it, on his chest, beneath him. Even in his hair.
The knife didn’t kill him. Jude did.
But maybe I could bring him back.
I let Jude’s pleading voice fade into the background with Jamie’s, with the sirens, with everything else. I closed my eyes and pictured it.
Noah, alive, tying my shoelaces in front of my house before he drove me to school.
Noah, alive, looking at the picture I’d drawn of him, folding it and putting it into his pocket to keep.
Noah, alive, looking down at me with his messy hair and sleepy eyes, his arms wrapped around me as we lay in my bed.
I opened my eyes.
Noah was still gone.
I was doing something wrong. I flipped through memories, mine and not mine, searching desperately for a way to fix this. Noah’s father and Dr. Kells had given Jude an ability but hadn’t been able to control him. They’d tried to take mine away, and I’d lost the ability to control myself. Until now.
I wiped Noah’s blood from the knife, looked at the sliver of my reflection in it, hoping it would speak to me, tell me how to fix this. But it was silent.
Jude was begging now, shivering. I got that he wanted me to kill him for his sake, so he wouldn’t have to become the thing he was ever again. But I didn’t care. I wanted him to suffer. He should suffer every day for what he’d done. That was what he deserved.
But I knew I wouldn’t make him.
Noah’s body was warm in my hands. The weight of him filled my lap. I didn’t want to think about Jude. But unless I wished him gone, he wouldn’t go.
So I thought about his corrupted heart stopping, his blunted nerves dying, his pointless lungs drowning in fluid. I thought those things and more, but he was still alive. He was hunched over himself. I thought I saw a drop of blood drip from his nose, but I wasn’t sure.
“Please,” he whispered again. “Please.”
I could kill him without touching him, but I didn’t know when he would actually, finally die. That was always the part I couldn’t seem to predict, couldn’t control. Or if I did, I didn’t know how yet.
So I said to him, “Come here.”
Jude looked at me. Something hateful and sly flashed behind his eyes. How had I missed it, all those months ago? How could I have looked at that blond head and those dimples and missed what an empty, nothing, shell of a thing he was? How had I ever let him get close enough to hurt me?
Whatever. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
It physically hurt to rest Noah’s head on the floor, to empty my arms of him and stand up to face his murderer. Jude was kneeling, but he was straining to do it. He was at war with himself; his muscles were corded and the veins stood out on his forehead and neck.
Maybe I should have taken the opportunity to make him recount his sins before he died, to force some grand confession of regret from his lips, to make him own all of the pain he was responsible for. But that felt like more than he deserved. Jude was no better than an animal really, so in the end, I slaughtered him like one. I slashed the knife across his throat and he fell to his side. I watched as he bled out.
I was vaguely aware of bodies, living ones, rushing into the room, shouting things as red and blue lights flashed through the grime-clouded windows. I glanced briefly at the laptop, watched as police broke into the room where Jamie was being held. Something moved at the corner of my vision.
“Drop the weapon,” a female voice shouted. I hadn’t realized I was still holding the knife. I opened my fist. It clattered to the dusty floor.
“Put your arms above your head and turn around slowly.”
I did. About a dozen NYPD officers stood among the mannequins, holding guns, pointing them at me.
I looked down at Jude’s body, and at Noah’s. Then back up, at the female officer. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me. A grieving girl? A murderer?
I realized I didn’t care. I’d told Noah he wasn’t going to die. The last words I ever spoke to him were lies. I was a liar. He did die, and even though I’d tried, I hadn’t brought him back.
I wasn’t crying anymore. Instead there was just the sob that wouldn’t come, the sting of tears that wouldn’t fall, the ache in my throat that was dying to become a scream. Crying would have been a relief, but I wasn’t filled with sadness. I was filled with rage.
Rage because he’d died, for no reason, for bullshit, while everyone else got to live. If people heard about what had happened, their faces would turn into masks of horror for a moment, but then it would become just a story to them. They would go on living, and laughing, and I would be alone with my grief.
“He tried to kill her,” Jamie shouted from the crappy laptop speakers as an officer on screen untied him. It drew the attention of one of the cops in the room with me, but the other pairs of eyes didn’t waver in their focus.
If they’d known me, what I’d been through, what I’d lost, they might have said they were sorry for me, sorry for my loss. They might even have meant it. But beneath that would have been relief—that death hadn’t happened to them.
All I wanted in the world right then was for Noah to live. That was what he deserved. But thinking something does not make it true. Wanting something does not make it real.
Except that when I want it, it should. That was supposed to be my gift. My affliction.
I closed my eyes, squeezed them shut. Saw writing in my mind, in handwriting that wasn’t mine.
You can choose to end life or choose to give it, but punishment will follow every reward.
Punishment. Reward.
I wanted to give Noah life. To reward him with it. But it wouldn’t be free. Nothing was. If I wanted something, I would have to trade for it.
I wanted Noah. What would I trade for him?
Who would I trade for him, was the question I needed to be asking.
“The people we care about are always worth more to us than the people we don’t. No matter what anyone pretends.”
They’d been Noah’s words once. But they were mine now. Who wouldn’t I trade for him? I would not trade my family. Never them.
But there were other people. The world was full of them. How many would have to be punished so I could reward? What was Noah’s life worth?
His father, David, needed to be punished for what he’d done, no question. But a million of him wouldn’t equal one Noah. He was worthless. Less than.
But not all people were worthless. I looked around me, at the men and women who filled the room, rushing into danger in the hope of saving someone’s life. They were good people. Brave. Selfless. Heroes, really.
Would I trade one of them to have Noah back?
Would I trade all of them to have him back?
I was stripped of all illusions, about this and myself. I knew without thinking that the answer was yes.