The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #3)(4)

So I was alone now, definitely. I might not have been sure what was real and what wasn’t, but I knew that I didn’t want Kells to know I was awake. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Good morning, Mara,” Dr. Kells said crisply. “Open your eyes.”

And they opened, just like that. I saw Dr. Kells standing beside my bed and reflected in front of me hundreds of times in the small, mirrored room. Wayne was beside her, large and puffy and sloppy, where she was slim and polished and neat.

“Have you been awake long?” she asked me.

My head shook from side to side. Somehow, I don’t know how, it didn’t feel like I was the one who shook it.

“Your heart rate spiked not long ago. Did you have a bad dream?”

As if I weren’t living a bad dream. She looked genuinely concerned, and I’m not sure I’d ever wanted to hit someone as much in my entire life.

The urge was sharp and violent and I enjoyed it while it lasted. Which wasn’t very long. Because as soon as I felt it, it thinned. Vanished, leaving me cold and hollowed out.

“Tell me how you’re feeling,” Kells said.

I did. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to. I didn’t have a choice.

“I want to run some tests on you. Is that all right?”

No. “Yes,” I said.

She took out a composition notebook. My handwriting was on the front of it, my name. It was my journal, the one I was supposed to write my fears in, at Horizons. From days ago. Or weeks, if what my reflection had said was true.

“You remember this, don’t you, Mara?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent,” she said, and smiled genuinely. She was pleased that I remembered, which made me wonder what I might have forgotten.

“We’re going to work on your fears together today. G1821—the genetic condition that’s harming you, remember?—causes your ability to flare. Different factors switch it on. But at the same time, it switches off a different part of you.” She paused, studying my face. “It removes the barrier between your conscious thought and your unconscious thought. So to help get you better, Mara, I want to be sure I can prescribe you the accurate dosage of medication, the variant of Amytal you’re being given—Anemosyne, we call it. And in order to see if it’s working, we’re going to trigger the fears you recorded in this journal. Sort of like exposure therapy, combined with drug therapy. Okay?”

Fuck you. “Okay.”

Wayne opened a case he’d been carrying and laid out the contents on a small tray next to the bed. I turned my head to the side and watched, but then wished that I hadn’t. Scalpels, syringes, and needles of different sizes gleamed against the black fabric.

“We are going to measure your response to your fear of needles today,” she said, and on cue Wayne lifted a plastic-capped cylinder. He pinched the cap between his fingers and twisted it. The seal broke with a loud snick. He fitted the needle onto a large syringe.

“You’ve certainly seen plenty of these, considering your time in hospitals, and judging from your records, your instinct is to fight back when touched nonconsensually by medical professionals,” she said, raising her penciled brows a fraction. “You punched a nurse on your first hospital stay in Providence after the asylum incident, in response to being touched and forcibly held.” She looked down at a small notepad. “And then you hit the nurse at the psychiatric unit in the hospital when you were admitted after you attempted suicide.”

At that moment two images competed for space in my mind. The first one was sharp and clear, of me standing alone on a dock and taking the shining blade of a box cutter to my pale wrists. In the other image, blurred and soft, the outline of Jude stood behind me, whispering into my ear, threatening me and my family until the box cutter bit deep into my skin.

My mind clamped down on the second image, the one with Jude. I hadn’t tried to kill myself. Jude had just tried to make it look like I had. And Kells, somehow, was trying to make me forget it.

Wayne bent down then and withdrew something from below the bed, beyond my range of vision. He stood up, holding a complicated-looking system of leather and metal restraints. Shackles, really. Still no fear.

But then Kells said, “Just relax.”

Her words echoed in my mind, in someone else’s voice.

Just relax.

There was a little flip in my chest, and the monitor beside my bed beeped. I didn’t understand. Was it the words? A bead of sweat rolled down Wayne’s forehead. He wiped it away with his sleeved forearm, then moved his thick fingers to the crook of my elbow. My mind flinched and my muscles went tense.

Wayne seemed to feel it. “Are you sure—are you sure she’s stable?” He was nervous. Good.

Kells looked at my arm. “Mara, I want your body, your arms, and your hands to go limp.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, they did. I looked at myself in the ceiling mirror. My expression was slack.

“When you see something you’re afraid of, your mind tells your body to react. It tells your kidneys to release adrenaline, which makes your heart rate increase, and your pulse, and your rate of breathing. This is to prepare you to run away from, or to fight, the thing you’re afraid of, regardless of whether that fear is rational. In your case fear triggers your anomaly. So what we’re doing is making sure that the medicine we’ve developed to help you is doing what it’s supposed to, which is to separate your mental reactions from your physical reactions. The main goal, of course, is total aversion—blocking the pathway that transforms your . . .” She rubbed a thumb over her bottom lip as she searched for words. “Negative thoughts,” she finally said, “into action. Anemosyne doesn’t prevent your thoughts, but it prevents the physical consequences of them, rendering you as harmless as a non-carrier. Now turn her,” she said to Wayne.