There Is No Devil (Sinners Duet, #2)(64)

“Valerie’s death drew much more attention than the professor’s disappearance. The arrival of TV cameras was exhilarating to Shaw. That was when he truly began to transform: he arrived at school with his hair freshly cut and combed, wearing an outfit that was almost stylish. He spoke confidently to the cameras, telling them how close he was to Valerie, how wonderful she was, what a loss her talent would be to the art world, and how he hoped whoever had done it would be caught quickly.

“Her death energized him. He made his first painting that scored the top mark in the class—a large abstract in brilliant color.”

Mara grimaces, finally understanding what each of those garish, vibrant canvases means to Shaw. His technicolor rainbows are the energy he feels when he brutalizes a girl, ripping her soul from her body in wild, erotic abandon.

“That’s what the inside of his head looks like,” I tell Mara. “And that’s why you have to be very fucking careful around him. I’ve killed from anger, or because I felt justified. Shaw delights in it. There is nothing more erotic to him than causing pain. Hearing a woman’s screams as he rips her apart. If he ever gets the chance, he will slaughter you without hesitation. He wants to kill you. More than anything else. More than he wants to kill me. He wants me alive to see what he’s done to you.”

Mara sways in her chair, her skin dull as chalk.

I take her cold hands in mine, looking her in the eye.

“But that’s not fucking happening,” I assure her. “We will make our plan, and he’ll never get closer to you than the length of a room. You won’t fight him. You won’t even touch him. I’ll do what needs to be done. I just need your help to create the illusion. He’s bigger than me—I need one moment of surprise. Just one single moment.”

Mara swallows hard.

“I can do it,” she says. “I want to do it. For Erin, for Valerie, for everyone he’s killed and everyone else he’ll hurt.”

She lays her right palm over the scar on her left wrist, and the left palm over the scar on the right, clamping her hands tight like a covenant, like an oath.

“And I want to do I it for me. He tried to kill me, too. I’m only alive because of myself. Because I ran down that fucking mountain.”

“Yes, you did,” I say, feeling another bolt of guilt. I could have carried her down. But I wasn’t awake yet. Mara hadn’t alivened me.

I explain to her, “Shaw has to die to protect you. But also, because I’m responsible. I didn’t think so at the time. I thought whatever he did was his business, and had nothing to do with me. I see it differently now. I may not be Doctor Frankenstein, but I helped flip the switch on that particular monster.”

“We’re the only ones who can stop him,” Mara says.

“We’re the only ones who will.”





17





Mara





Cole and I have made our plan.

We’ve run over it again and again in the safety of his living room.

Cole said he would prepare me for our confrontation with Shaw. At the time, I stupidly thought that meant that he would train me, like a fighting montage in a movie.

Now I realize how foolish I was.

I have no hope in an actual fight with Shaw. I might as well try to wrestle a grizzly bear. No training Cole could give me in months or even years could ever compensate for the biological imbalance in reach and mass.

Cole has no intention of me ever touching Shaw. But he’s intensely aware of the danger I’ll be in all the same. He knows what a killer can do. He knows Shaw’s violence because he knows his own.

So he drills me again and again and again, even though my only role is to be the mouse running from the cat.

Cole needs that one single moment of distraction to put a knife in the side of Shaw’s neck.

I’ll lure Shaw.

I’ll be the bait.

The real preparation was watching the tape.

Cole made me watch Randall die, because I had never seen someone killed before. Especially not someone I knew personally.

Cole knew I’d have to desensitize myself to blood, to screams, to the impulses of pity that might cause me to deviate from the plan. Cole knows the terror of violence, the physical effect it has on a person. He knows how it breaks apart your mind, causing you to act on instinct in all the wrong ways.

He drills me over and over and over, so that in the heat of the battle with Shaw, I’ll stick to our agreement.

“If worse comes to worse,” Cole says, fixing me with his dark stare. “If things are going wrong … you run, Mara. You don’t try to help me. You don’t try to stay. You fucking run. Because he’ll be right behind you—and if I’m gone, there’s no one left to save you.”

“That’s not going to happen. He’ll be dead before he even knows what’s happening.”

“That’s the plan,” Cole agrees.

That would comfort me, except I remember the old quote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

Another complication is the continued surveillance of Officer Hawks.

Cole complained to the SFPD. He has enough connections in city government that Hawks has been told to back off. Hawks ignored this order, still trailing Cole on his own off-hours, showing up to every event where they’ll let him in the door, and visiting Clay Street more than the artists that keep studio space in Cole’s building.