I scream. There is a searing, burning pain like I hadn’t known existed.
I force myself to look down. See without understanding where three of my fingers used to be. They are now somewhere on the ground. Along with the last of the Hypnosis Variants. Spilled and useless.
And then there is blood, so warm, and a pounding in my ears.
My hands, I had told Phineas. I’ve always been good with my hands.
I don’t let myself look down again. I don’t want to know how bad it is.
How? I think blurrily. How did the girl slip through the power of the Hypnosis Variants, like no one ever has?
Larkin is wondering the same thing. His face darkens as he advances toward Aila, and he growls, “How did you do that?”
She lets out a cry of terror, and he wrestles her across the lawn to tie her to a chair. Straps her into it with his belt and tightens the notches so her breath starts to hitch.
Everything is like a dream, and I stand for one stunned moment, reeling in the pain, and then rip off my coat and wrap it around my hand to staunch the bleeding. “Miles, it’s going to be all right,” the girl says, over and over, until Larkin finally covers her mouth with a hankerchief.
“We gotta get your hand back together. She got you pretty good,” he says to me. “Good thing she didn’t hit your jugular.”
“I need to see a doctor,” I say.
“Then let’s get what we came for,” Larkin says nervously. He picks up a vial. “I can’t risk anyone knowing I was here.”
I fish out my bird and return to nursing my hand. “You’ll have to do it.”
But when I look up again, he hasn’t moved toward Aila.
He’s standing next to Matilda.
She smiles the sweetest smile and starts to say something I can’t hear, but he doesn’t let her finish. He plunges the needle into the side of her neck and empties it.
Something inside of me simultaneously withers and explodes when he pulls the syringe back to fill the vial with her Peace. It isn’t the thin brown of Laurette or the mottled yellow Larkin described from the addicts. Matilda’s Peace is so pink it’s almost golden. I’m woozy. Blood is streaming down my arm.
Aila’s cry is smothered when she strains against the chair, and tears slip down her cheeks.
“Aila, don’t cry,” Miles begs, his own voice wavering, and seeing him is like looking back through the years at myself.
I wasn’t expecting him to look so much like me.
I take a staggering step. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. I was going to love Matilda, not destroy her, even though she destroyed me, and Juliet was supposed to send the Stone, and Phineas was supposed to live.
My beautiful Matilda, my little red bird, lying on the ground.
“What have you done?” I snarl at Larkin.
“Don’t worry, Stefen,” Larkin says. He sets the first vial in the grass and reaches for another. “I’ll find you a good doctor.”
I’ve only ever loved three people in my entire life.
Now two of them are dead.
And Larkin just made the last one disappear forever. Her Peace swirls like galaxies from the vial in his hand.
“Matilda,” I say, my voice breaking. “If only you’d chosen me, this all could have been so different.”
Then I turn and shoot Victor Larkin in the heart.
Chapter Fifty-Five
As soon as the bullet enters Victor Larkin’s body, Stefen drops the gun.
I can hardly breathe around the handkerchief, Larkin tied it so tight. Stefen shot him. Victor Larkin, who just did something to Mrs. Cliffton, and now . . . I squeeze my eyes shut and then force them open.
Stefen is going to kill us all.
But instead he abandons the gun and crawls toward Mrs. Cliffton.
My Star glitters in the grass, tinged with red. Stefen had turned and intercepted it before it hit him in the neck. I might have killed him. For my brother.
Suddenly Miles is next to me, working on my bindings, his hands shaking, and when he frees my mouth, I whisper to him, “Don’t look over there.” A bloodstain is soaking into the grass around Larkin’s body.
“What do we do?” Miles whispers, his eyes wide pools of terror. He works at the last knots around my hands. I look at Dr. Cliffton and Will. See a twitch of muscle in Dr. Cliffton’s forehead. Will blinks rapidly. Stefen’s hold on the Hypnosis appears to be dissolving.
“As soon as you untie me,” I whisper. “You run.”
Dr. Cliffton’s eyes dilate first, then Will’s. They come awake, their muscles twitching. Then Dr. Cliffton sees Matilda.
He cries out.
Dr. Cliffton shouts at Stefen, “Stay away from her!” and Will yells something else. He takes one jerking step forward.
Mrs. Cliffton opens her eyes. Blinks at the sight of Stefen. He hovers over her, and she gives one wild, hollow laugh.
It abruptly turns to a soul-piercing scream.
I wish I could shelter my ears from the horrible, unending sound. Why isn’t Stefen running away? I think numbly. His hand is bleeding heavily, streaming down his arm, but he is ignoring it. Trying to staunch it with the fabric of his coat while also tightly holding something he’s taken from Larkin—?something glass, almost like a vial. He crouches over Mrs. Cliffton, fumbling with it, his hands shaking, when Will suddenly launches across the grass to tackle him.
Dr. Cliffton is one step behind him, but Stefen doesn’t try to defend himself against them. “Don’t break it,” he gasps as Will wrenches his arms behind him and slams him face-first onto the ground.
Miles frees me, and my arms spring forward, aching, burning from being tied.
Dr. Cliffton yells, “Aila! Call for help!” His voice is urgent. “Hurry.”
I run for the telephone, pulling Miles along with me just as Stefen recovers the breath that’s been knocked from his lungs.
“I’m the only one who can help her. Please—” he chokes. “Let me try.”
By the time the police and the doctor arrive, we’ve moved Mrs. Cliffton inside to the bed. Restraining her takes the combined effort of me, Will, Dr. Cliffton, and even Genevieve, who had been knocked unconscious by the Hypnosis on the kitchen floor. We hold Mrs. Cliffton down on the bed, thrashing and screaming, until the doctor arrives with something strong enough to sedate her. She collapses back into the bed. Whimpering until she’s silent, and only occasionally twitching.
Will paces near the foot of her bed. Wipes away a tear with the heel of his palm.
“What have you done?” Dr. Cliffton asks quietly.
Stefen sits in a chair in the corner. The doctor has bandaged the stumps of fingers on his hands, and they are now handcuffed behind him. Three policemen ring him, hands on their guns.
“I invented something,” Stefen says. “Something new. An extrapolation of your Variants, Malcolm.” He looks up through a long fringe of hair. “Something so much bigger than them, though. I call them the Virtues.”
Dr. Cliffton inhales. “Virtues?”
“Peace, to start.” Stefen shifts in his chair. “I found a way to extract it and store it,” he says with an edge of pride. “I was working on others. Courage. Joy.”
“For what purpose, exactly?” Dr. Cliffton’s voice is shaking.