The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #3)(52)

So I told them. About the botanica in Little Havana, where he had seen me, recognized me, and tried to kick me out before giving me some weird concoction to drink that had made me finally remember what I had done to Rachel and Claire. I told them about trying to find him again, after I’d killed everything in the insect house at the Miami zoo. I explained how it had been his face I’d seen in the hospital after Jude had slit my wrists, him on the platform as the train had pulled out of DC. By the time I’d finished, Jamie had backed up onto the bed, his head in his hands.

“So, what you’re telling me is”—he held out his hand—“some Santeria voodoo guy from south Florida followed you—followed us—all the way to DC, and he knows we’re in New York, and he knows where we are, but won’t show himself?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why, though? What would he stand to gain?”

I remembered words that had once belonged to Noah, but that now belonged to me. “You never know what a person stands to gain or lose by anything.”

“I don’t get it, though,” Stella said. “Why would he just leave the bag? If he wants to help us, then he should just f*cking help us.”

“Maybe he can’t,” Jamie said.

“Or maybe he doesn’t want to,” I said, the thought forming as the words left my mouth. “Maybe he’s . . . responsible for it.”

“Responsible how?” Jamie asked.

“Responsible like, maybe he’s the one behind it. All of it,” I said. “If this—if we’re some kind of experiment or whatever, him following us could be part of it. Watching what we do, how we react, what happens to us when we do react.” I thought of the things we had seen in Horizons, the things Kells had said to us. “Maybe he’s the one—maybe he’s the one who funded Dr. Kells.”

“But then why bring us the bag? Why would he want to help get those—whatever they were—out of you?” Stella asked.

“Maybe she put them in without permission,” Jamie suggested. “Speaking of which.” He looked at me. “Do you think the rest of us have them too?”

“I don’t feel any different,” Stella said. “You?”

Jamie swallowed. “I don’t really know what ‘different’ means anymore. I woke up one day on the island and couldn’t walk, just like you,” he said, staring at me. “But then why aren’t I sick?”

“You are sick,” Stella said carefully. “But you’re a year younger than us. Maybe you’re just in the first stage of whatever’s happening . . .”

I remembered the words written on the whiteboard when I’d first woken up in Horizons.

J. Roth, manifesting.

“Manifestation,” I said out loud. “That list, remember it? It said Stella and Noah, they’ve manifested already. Kells wrote that, in her notes.”

“What does that even mean, though?” Jamie asked.

“It means that you’re going to get sicker,” Stella said. “When it was happening to me—I got worse before I got better.”

“What, you mean when you were—”

“Manifesting, or whatever. The voices, they weren’t always loud. In the beginning I could kind of ignore them. Sometimes I even listened to them,” she said quietly. “I heard things I shouldn’t have, and sometimes I—did things,” she said. “I used what I knew, even though part of me knew it was wrong. I cheated on a test. This girl who was bullying me, I exposed her secrets to everyone. And each time I did something, the voices got louder. Stronger. There were more of them. It got so I couldn’t tell which thoughts were mine and which belonged to someone else. I felt like I was going crazy. I was going crazy.” She rounded on Jamie. “Using your ability—it’s not free, even if it seems that way now. It’s working pretty nicely for you right now, and for that you’re lucky—but it’s going to eventually bite you in the ass.”

Jamie seemingly had no reaction to this.

“And if there is something inside of you,” Stella went on, “like whatever was inside Mara? It’s going to activate at some point, just like it did with her, and you’re going to go through the same shit.”

Jamie rolled his eyes, but he was unsettled. I could tell. “So fine,” he said. “What do we do now?”

I interrupted the both of them. “I almost died tonight,” I said. “Tomorrow we’re going to find out who almost killed me.”





35


IT WAS ELEVEN-ISH WHEN WE finally dragged ourselves out of bed the next morning. I could walk on my own, but it hurt. A lot. So I was slow. But our only real lead was the tax stuff Stella had taken from Kells’s office with the address of the accountant on them, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Probably.

The cab burped us up in the bowels of Midtown. The three of us stared up at a squat, ugly building sandwiched between a Laundromat and a FedEx, a building that bore the address where Ira Ginsberg, CPA, purportedly filed taxes for evil corporations such as Horizons LLC.

“So, what’s the plan exactly?” Stella asked.

“We’re going to ask him who he works for,” I said.

Stella scratched her nose. “And what if he doesn’t just . . . volunteer that information?”