The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #3)(46)

Whatever. It didn’t matter about the bag. I’d change into one of Noah’s shirts. He wouldn’t mind.

I rummaged through it, but I could barely tell one piece of clothing from another. I bit my lip, clenched my jaw to keep myself from losing it, to keep myself here. As I did, my fingers curled around something in his bag that wasn’t clothes. I pulled it out.

My hand shifted into focus, and so did the thing in it. A straight razor. Noah’s razor. I remembered asking him once why he used it. He’d said it was the sharpest kind.

It gleamed under the fluorescent light. The weight of it was solid and reassuring, somehow, in my hand. I wasn’t shaking anymore. I could stand up.

I looked at it, and then at myself, in the mirror. Pain shot through my stomach—in an arc, it felt like. Left to right.

No one else felt like this. No one else was acting like this. Not Stella, not Jamie. Something inside me was different.

Something inside me.

Something inside me.

I looked at my face in the mirror.

“Something inside you is different,” my reflection said.

The razor hovered just an inch above my lower belly. A rushing sound filled my ears, like the sound of a thousand voices breathing, Yes. There was so much pressure, but my fingers didn’t shake. I looked at myself again.

“Get them out,” my reflection said.

Time skipped forward. One second I stood there, facing my reflection, listening to it. The next, my hand had already drawn the razor against my stomach.

It was just a tiny line. An inch long, no bigger. Little beads of blood welled from the cut, jewel-like and shimmering. Vivid. Everything was, actually. Whatever haze had clouded my vision had now lifted. I didn’t feel sick or hot. The only strange thing was the pressure in my fingers, drawing the razor to my stomach again.

A knock on the bathroom door startled me before I could trace the line again.

“Mara?” Jamie’s voice was muffled through the door. “We’re here.”

Mechanically I wiped the blade off with the hem of my shirt and put it back into Noah’s bag. I dabbed at my skin with tissues and exchanged the T-shirt I was wearing for a clean black one. I walked out of the bathroom on steady feet, feeling impossibly light. Almost giddy.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said brightly as a trickle of blood ran down my stomach. “Much.”





29


I HADN’T BEEN TO NEW YORK since I was little, and I didn’t remember it like this.

We were practically the only non-suited people on the train, but when we stepped onto the track and climbed up the stairs, we blended right in. Penn Station swarmed with people—a man with dreadlocks down to his waist bumped my hip with his briefcase and apologized, but as I stepped aside, I was hit by a stroller being pushed by a mother with glazed, dead eyes. We got out of there as fast as we could.

The taxi line wasn’t much of an improvement. We were sandwiched between a preteen couple with matching acne, loudly making out, and an old couple wearing matching tennis shoes, arguing loudly over a map in a language I didn’t know.

“Ouch,” Jamie said.

“You okay?” Stella asked him.

“Oh, I am,” he said quietly. “But that dude’s wife just told him, ‘If they had to put your brain in a chicken, it would run straight to the butcher.’?”

“You understand them?”

“Hebrew,” Jamie explained, and then it was our turn in line. “Where to first, ladies?”

“I need a shower,” Stella said.

“Hotel?” I asked.

Stella tugged at a strand of hair. “I guess. If we have to. But I don’t like using you for that stuff, Jamie.”

“Pish tosh. But my aunt has a place on the Upper West Side. We could go there.”

“Except wouldn’t she maybe wonder why her nephew and his two female friends have turned up on her doorstep on a random school night?”

“She’s not there. She’s at her condo in Florida right now till the summer.”

“How would we get in?” Stella asked.

“I’m sure we could figure it out,” Jamie said. “And she’s not even my real aunt. She’s my mother’s BFF. Even if we’re being looked for, no one would tie us together.”

Good enough for me. Stella agreed, and so Jamie gave the driver directions to his aunt’s house. I didn’t pay much attention. My gaze kept wandering to my stomach. It was still bleeding a little—there was a small wet spot on the T-shirt, but luckily the shirt was black. No one would notice.

My thumb kept running over the tiny line, and I realized I was picking at the seams of the cut. I couldn’t seem to stop. I kept thinking about the train, and the edge of Noah’s razor, and the relief—the release—when I’d pressed it against my skin. A voice whispered in my mind.

Something inside us.

Get them out.

I glanced at Stella nervously. She didn’t see me; she was staring out the window on the left, and Jamie was looking out the one on the right. I ran my fingertips against my belly, pressing into it. I didn’t feel anything—no, wait. I slid my hand left, toward the inside of my left hip, pressing down. Something seemed to—to shift, like a tight muscle being kneaded out of place, but small. What was that?