The Retribution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #3)(65)

Jamie nodded. “Of course it is. That doesn’t make this harder at all.”

“Whoever he is,” Daniel started, “he’s the only one who can actually prove that you’re innocent.”

Well, not innocent exactly.

“He’s the only one who knows about you.”

The only person alive, anyway.

“Which means that if I were a betting man, I’d bet he knows about Noah, too.”

I was betting on that too.

We watched interviews and read papers and worked all night, combing through everything we’d brought with us from the archives. Property records, the deed to my parents’ house, the bar admissions certificate of the man who’d referred my father to the Lassiter case, medical records from the sixties, medical records from the nineties, pictures of scarring on the inside of Jamie’s throat. (“What in fresh hell?” Jamie said.) But there were still so many pieces of the puzzle missing.

My thoughts hung like loose threads, frayed and tangled. It didn’t help that I was exhausted. I leaned my head in my hands, staring at the documents in front of me. The words on the page arranged themselves into an incomprehensible shape as I fought to stay awake, and lost.





43


BEFORE


Cambridge, England


IT HAD BEEN OVER A century since I fled London with the professor, and yet he still treated me like a child.

Tonight he was in a particularly sulky mood. The weather was customarily dreary, and his office was cold and damp and in ruins. He warmed himself with a bottle of whiskey, his preferred poison, and scribbled furiously in one of his books. Torn paper and worn books littered the scarred wooden floor. I watched him in silence.

Something had caught his attention recently, focused him in a way I had never before seen. A coming shift, he called it. He thought he might have discovered a way to trigger it. But he refused to share his thoughts with me.

He had cared for me during the fevers as my Gift blossomed inside of me, as my body changed to accommodate it. He forced me to eat when food lost all its taste. He comforted me during my night terrors and caught me, stopped me, the first time I tried to do myself harm.

But I didn’t need him for those things now—I hadn’t in many, many years. I had shed the girl who had fled London in darkness, the one who cried over her husband of one night. I was strong, bold, and I could control myself perfectly. If I wanted to.

I did not want to anymore.

I’d grown tired of pretending to be someone else just so I could be safe for others. I wanted to be who I was. The professor knew me the way no one else did, which was why I wanted to be with him. But no matter how I broached the subject, he dismissed it. Dismissed me. He still wouldn’t even tell me his name.

The sound of shattering glass snapped me to attention. The professor sat stick straight at his desk, staring at nothing.

No. Not nothing. I followed his gaze to a painting of himself that hung on the opposite wall. It had been given to him by a student, he’d said, and though he would not tell me which, I had my suspicions—the style was familiar and distinctive. But the picture glistened with the remains of his drink, making his skin and hair look wet. The fiery scent of spilled whiskey mingled with that of his old books.

“What is it?” I asked gently.

He didn’t answer, so I stepped between his desk and the portrait. He looked right through me, as if I were invisible.

But I would be seen tonight. I would be felt.

I skirted the edge of his desk, until I came to his chair. “What is your name?” I asked him, not gently at all. “Tell me.”

He smiled a little. I’d been asking that question for a very long time. Each time I asked, he would give me a different answer.

But this time, tonight, he reached for a scrap of paper, a torn-out map. My heartbeat quickened. He wrote something on it in a language I’d never learned to read, and showed it to me.

I smoothed my finger over the words. “I am in love with you,” I said.

“I raised you,” he replied, and did not meet my eyes.

“You did not raise me. Sarah Shaw raised me—”

“Until you were eighteen. Then I took you, I taught you—”

I moved over to him, pressed my hand to his cheek. He flinched. I didn’t move. “I know you watched me when I was young. I know you feel responsible for me. But you are not my parent and I am no longer young.”

“This is wrong.” His voice was blank and empty.

I climbed onto his lap. “It doesn’t feel wrong,” I said. There was no sound except for our breath, and the slither of a belt being pulled through its loop. I kissed him below his jaw. He shuddered a breath, and I kissed his lips, just once.

It was enough.

The professor was gone when I woke the following morning. I bore a daughter nine months later. I did not see the professor again for twenty-one years.

Laurelton, Rhode Island

Twenty-one years later

The Professor knocked on the door of my cottage on the morning of Indira’s graduation from Brown. I did not want to open the door for him, but I knew I had no choice. He didn’t look a day older than he had when I’d last seen him. Then again, neither did I.

“I found him,” he said to me, his eyes lit with a childish excitement that was incongruous with the dark, serious suit he wore. He looked like an undertaker.