I rocked back, a wholly different kind of confusion falling through me. I shook my head, certain I was imagining the tall man with copper hair standing in the doorway to the kitchen, gun in a holster and sheriff’s badge at his hip. Dane Walker’s eyes cut first to his brother, still gasping in pain against the wall, before the lawman’s gaze landed on me.
A flash of surprise took over his face, before he quickly smothered it into a neutral expression. “Stand back,” he ordered, motioning me with his chin.
“Dane.” I wasn’t sure when Izzy had entered the room. She turned her palms up in surrender as she came to stand between us. “What are you doing?”
“I’m arresting him.”
“You can’t!” she fired back.
“Isobel,” Dane Walker said in a low voice.
“It was an accident,” Izzy said, turning pleading eyes on me. The tiny kitchen was taut with tension, made all the worse when Jack let out a groan.
“Need… the honey.”
“Daddy?” Eva’s hands fluttered uselessly over Jack’s chest, as though she wasn’t sure whether she should touch him. “What did you say?”
Instead of meeting her worried gaze, Jack kept his eyes steady on me, his expression pleading, glasses slightly askew. “The honey,” he rasped. “Lottie’s…” He coughed hard, coughed again, until red-green spittle smeared over his hand. Soon he was wheezing.
Izzy rushed to the phone. “I’m calling an ambulance.” She looked directly at Dane Walker. “Don’t touch Arthur!”
“I have to take him in,” Dane said.
“You don’t understand,” Izzy snapped. “Youcan’ttouch him. No one can.”
The air pulsed around me. No one had ever said that out loud. The summer I had lived here, the Moreaus had kept my secret. No one had told a soul what I could do, that I killed things, even when I didn’t want to.
Dane looked between me and Lenny in quick assessment. His younger brother had taken a step back, still seething and looking for all the world like the human equivalent of a coiled snake. Maybe Dane could sense that. Maybe he finally understood what I’d known for years about the bastard he’d given so many fucking chances, and for once, he’d see through Lenny’s bullshit.
But I couldn’t depend on that. I still felt the monster in my tingling palms, the remnants of its cold invasion stretching up my arms. My knuckles ached, and blood dribbled from the cut in my eyebrow. I licked my lips instinctively, and a wave of self-loathing rolled over me.
It tasted good.
Izzy turned to Lenny. “Why areyouhere?”
“Isobel—”
“No, I want to know.”
Their voices faded into the background as I stepped forwardand slipped my gloves back on, careful to make sure all my skin was covered. I knew what I had to do.
“Take me in,” I said as I stretched out my hands.
“What are you doing?”The monster spoke inside our shared mind for the first time since losing control. I ground my teeth.
Coming here had been a mistake. Clearly, my hope that fulfilling Mom’s last request would help me shuck off the monster’s control had been woefully misplaced. Or maybe I was just too far gone to be saved. Either way, today had proven that I couldn’t trust myself to hold the monster off.
I couldn’t let it out again.
The monster carved a nail down my ribs in desperation. I imagined it splitting me open, peeling back the skin and viscera to reveal the heart beneath. Would it find anything still beating? At the end of the day, under all my fruitless struggle to be someone good, I was nothing but meat. Nothing but bone.
“Don’t do this,”the monster begged.“Please, I… I’ll be good!”
Pity was a chasm I would gladly fall into to swallow that voice. “I don’t believe you,” I whispered, not caring who heard.
With a click, Dane placed the handcuffs on my wrists. “You have the right to remain silent,” he said. “Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.”
Instead of taking root, the sheriff’s words slipped through me like grains of sand in an hourglass, my full attention fixed on the giant man slumped against the oven. Jack’s teakettle had fallen, water spilling out its spout.
