He turns, looking toward the window.
“Does it have anything to do with the tattoo?” The words leave my mouth before I give a moment to consider them.
Jack looks over his shoulder at me. He bears a complicated expression. Frustration. Determination.
“It was an attempt to further the…bond,” Jack says, looking back to the window. “But it didn’t seem to have an effect. All of this is uncharted territory. A task of trial and error.”
“So Iona is permanently marked for nothing,” I say flatly.
“Not for nothing,” Jack says, turning back around. “It’s all in the name of science.”
“Hypnotism,” I say. “That’s how you got in their heads.”
Jack’s eyes slide over to mine. “It was a late night walk with Sharon,” he says. He takes a step forward, beginning a slow walk around the room. “She was so tired, but so desperate to spend the evening with me, like a grown woman. She leaned her head on my shoulder and I brought out that watch. It was incredibly easy.”
My hands curl into fists. My teeth clench together.
“I caught Joanne just as she was waking up,” he says. “There was a group of us on a camping trip. I knew she wasn’t going to be easy to…persuade.” He smiles. “But I wanted a real challenge.”
My hands close around the pocket watch, and I feel the metal give under the pressure of my fingers.
“Simone just thought I was kidding around,” he says as he finally stops circling. He leans back against the wall, folding his arms over his chest. “She was laughing, teasing me about being a hack. She thought it was so funny when I swung it in front of her, speaking so calm and even. She walked right into it.”
“And Iona?” I ask. I don’t really want to know the answer.
Jack’s smile confirms that I’m not going to like what I hear.
“We’d just made love,” he says, boring into my eyes with a steely gaze. “She’d moaned my name, twice. She smelled like sex, sweaty and utterly satisfied.”
My grip on the watch tightens. I hear something snap inside.
Jack’s eyes flit down to it, and a snarl crosses his face for a moment.
Good.
“So she was good and tired when I picked up the heirloom you’re now crushing with your brutish hands.” His gaze burns, embers nearly lighting in his eyes. “It wasn’t hard. She fell asleep right after. And when she woke up, everything fell into action.”
The first time they made love. That was the day Iona suspected it all started.
Jack just confirmed it.
“I take everything,” Jack says. The temperature in the room grows colder. “Bit by bit, I take everything that makes them who they are.”
My heart thunders in my chest, rumbling toward a grand finale. The tug of the gate pulls at the back of my brain.
“I call it total occupation,” he says at last. “I’m there, in every corner of their mind. I implant the steps. The triggers. And one by one, I set them off. Gliding down the path as I take every one of their elements of humanity.”
The breath in my chest stills.
There it is.
He strips them of the basic elements of humanity.
Possessing every one of them.
“And the final, grand finale, that last step where I own every bit of their minds—death. Cementing total occupation.”
Jack nearly glows, radiating power and confidence, so assured of himself.
Because he has done this three times before. And very nearly has completed the fourth experiment.
“You said you own Iona,” I say quietly. “That you are Iona. But really, she is you now.”
Jack nods. “If you could look into that brain of hers, it is now more Jack Caraway than Iona Faye.”
“How?” I question, stumbling over the words. “How…who taught you to do this? Who would be so reckless?”
“Taught?” Jack barks out, offense in his volume. “You think total occupation can be taught? That someone can learn it out of some kind of textbook? No,” he shakes his head, an expression of disgust on his face. “This was my grand opus. My life’s work. The greatest experiment ever conducted in psychological history. And I mastered it.”
Mad. That’s what Jack is.
Brilliant. But insane.
Evil.
“My father was a brilliant psychologist, himself,” Jack says, and his eyes become unfocused. “He founded the department at the local university. His name…well, he was rather well known in the field, we’ll leave it at that.”
Jack wraps his fingers around his opposite wrist, behind his back. “My parents never let me forget, that as a child, I was what you might call…manipulative. With my friends. With my teachers. I knew how to get what I wanted.”
A cold smile curls on his lips. “In high school, I began to realize just how moldable people are. I read my father’s books, the ones he brought home from the university, and the ones he wrote. If you knew certain things about people, watched them closely enough, you could learn how to work them.”
“That’s when the idea for total occupation came to you,” I clarify.
Jack’s eyes slide over to mine. A smile curls on his lips. “Yes.” He takes two steps forward, and begins slowly circling the room. “I presented the rough idea to my father. The man was intrigued, perhaps even impressed. But even more so, he was mortified. He told me to forget what I was studying, what I was even trying to practice in some small form. So when he didn’t support me, I decided I would study elsewhere.”
“You went to New York.” Iona has told me the details he didn’t lie to her about.
“I studied, for six years. How to speak calmly. How to gain trust. How to wield that pocket watch that had once belonged to my grandfather.”
Jack stops, and I feel him studying me.
“There were two women I practiced on during my years at NYU,” he continues. “The first didn’t stick well. I could never get her to confess her love. And she always regained her appetite after a week or so.
“The second…” Jack smiles. I want to smash it. Crush all of his teeth. Make him bleed. Make it so he can never speak again. “It worked. But not smoothly. She went mad after four weeks. And she took her life just a week after that.”
I squeeze the pocket watch, threatening to crush it.
“I thought things were over, that I would never be able to master total occupation,” Jack speaks again. “I was overwhelmed, thinking maybe I was just trying something too impossible. But that woman’s death, it sparked an idea.”
His voice grows quieter, but his eyes widen as he stares at the floor. His shoulders seem to broaden, his balance rising onto his toes just slightly. Excitement builds under his skin, sending him nearly manic.
“She threw my plans askew with her death, but then I realized: that was the finale to my beautiful experiment.” Jack’s eyes flick to mine. “That would be the final step to total occupation. That I would own them enough to claim everything. Even their very lives.”
I feel two steps away from snapping. From breaking, with an aftershock powerful enough to drag the entire world to hell with me.
“And I would have perfected it even further,” Jack says, taking a step forward. “I would have expanded into other arenas beyond love. I would have created tools to get into any head. Make even the best spy spill their secrets. Get entire colonies to become compliant and accomplish incredible movements and advancements in human society.”
Jack stops, just inches from my face. “I could have been a god, shaping people as I needed, creating new, better ones.”
Over the past few weeks, this has been one of my biggest questions: why?
And here is the answer.
Jack has a god complex.
A controlling appetite like never seen before.
“How did you trigger it all?” I ask. I have to throw water on that bright, hot fire burning inside of Jack.
His face transforms into a smile. “A magician
never reveals his secrets, right?”
I stalk forward, only a breath between us. “How do I stop it?”
Eye to eye, Jack and I stare at one another.
“Please,” I whisper. “I can’t let her die.”
Two heartbeats. Three. Ten. Twenty heartbeats.
“You’ve proven you’ve mastered this…total occupation,” I say. And I’m begging now. Pleading with a dead man. “When the gate closes today, you can go in peace. You’ll never see me again. And you’ll never see Iona again. So please, tell me how to stop this.”
He stares at me a full minute longer. His expression doesn’t soften. He just continues to look at me, his brows slightly furrowed. His eyes hard.
“Say the words ‘absolution of resurrection’ to her.”
Jack turns away and walks back across the room. He stands at the window, looking out.
“That’s it?” I ask. I take three steps forward. “Say those words, and she’s fixed?”
He looks over his shoulder, but not at me. “I’ve never used the fail safe before. I can’t make any guarantees. But everything else has worked so well, I expect positive results.
“Absolution of resurrection,” I repeat the words. “Thank-”
But I cut myself off. “No, I won’t thank you,” I say, turning away. “You’re only helping me fix your evil obsession.”
“God does terrible things in the name of creation and advancing human society,” Jack says. “Am I truly any different? It’s four lives in three billion.”
A great roar climbs up my chest and I whirl back around. “You are a monster. A soulless, arrogant, viper of a monster. Did you ever, ever love any of them?”
Every fiber inside of me hates it when he crooks a little smile.
“I loved them all, Sully Whitmore,” he says. “In my own way.”
And in the blink of an eye, Jack Caraway disappears once more from the face of the earth.
Chapter Fifty-Four
IONA
Everyone is smiling at me.
Smiling at me while I down the slice of carrot cake Mom made for this Sunday dinner.
I laugh, wiping a bit of frosting from the corner of my mouth, looking up to catch their eyes as they smile once more and look away.
Mom—looking genuinely happy to see me for the first time in so, so long.
Cressida, who took one look at me when I showed up for this family gathering, and pulled me into her arms, for the first real hug she’d given me in about a year.
My niece and nephews, they run around without even noticing anything at all has changed.
But even Harold’s face brightens at the sight of me.
And Viola. She stays at my side, watching closely. Monitoring me as I use my right hand a little with the aide of the sling.
There’s a knowing look in her eye when she glances at me. There’s still doubt in it. She doesn’t really know whether to believe everything I told her or not. I don’t blame her. I probably wouldn’t believe all the facts either.
But there she is again. My best friend.
“It’s so good to have you here again,” Mom says for the fifth time since I walked through the front doors of my childhood home.
I look up at her, and smile. “It’s good to be back.”
Such a strange thing to say, considering I’ve hardly left town, other than to go to Roselock. But every one of them catches my meaning. That I haven’t really been here in a long, long time.
“Do you want another piece?” Cressida asks, leaning over the cake pan with a knife in hand.
I laugh and shake my head. “I think two was enough. Thank you.”
Two pieces of cake. An entire meal of roast, potatoes, carrots, rolls, butter, the Sunday works.
I ate it all. Every single bite on my plate.
I look up at the clock above the kitchen sink and find it reads nine o’clock.
“I better get home,” I say. “I can’t be late to work tomorrow.”
“Are you sure?” Mom asks, and the wrinkles in her forehead deepen just a little. The worry that I’m going to disappear again, and not really return. “It’s been such a perfect day.”
I smile and step forward to hug her. “It has. Let’s do dinner at my place on…Wednesday. Does that work?”
We step back, and the glowing look on Mom’s face warms my heart. “That’s perfect.”
I cross to the bench by the front door and grab my purse. “Do you both want to go to a movie with me on Thursday?”
The flash of doubt on Cressida’s face twists my stomach. But there’s hope there. A little door opened to me once more. “I’d like that.”
Viola bounds across the room, a wide smile as she pulls me into a hug.
She hasn’t stopped hugging me since I was in the hospital and opened up to her. “I’ll be there.”
With smiles, I say goodbye, and walk out into the dark. Fumbling through my bag for my keys, I unlock my car and start the engine.
It’s just a short five-minute drive from my parent’s home to my apartment. I park and hurry inside, getting out of the cold. Up three flights of stairs, down the hall, to apartment 308.
It’s warm and cozy inside when I walk in. Clean floors, a cleared kitchen, and a scented candle burns on the coffee table. I hang my purse on the hook, and breathe a contented sigh.
Sully steps out from my bedroom and leans in the doorframe.
“I’d guess dinner went well?”
I smile, looking at him there. With his wild hair and beard. So solid and so real.
“It was perfect,” I say. I lean back against the kitchen counter. “It was just like it used to be. Smiles and jokes and old stories.”
Sully smiles. And something cracks in my chest when he does.
I cross the space, and as if sensing what I’m looking for, he steps forward. We meet somewhere in the middle, and I wrap my arms around his middle, his going around my shoulders.
“Thank you,” I breathe into his broad chest. “For everything. For hanging in there. For saving me. For knowing how to patch things up with my family.”
It was Sully’s idea that I needed to go to this family dinner on my own. He’d been around, ever present in the last week and a half. All of my family members met him at the hospital.
But today, Sunday dinner, was about just the Fayes patching things back together.
He’d waited here in my apartment, by himself, until I returned.
“You’re welcome,” he breathes, pressing his lips to the top of my head.
A week and two days ago, I’d just finished telling Viola about everything that was happening, when Sully burst in through the door.
“Absolution of resurrection,” he’d blurted the second his eyes met mine.
It was like a wet, soaked, wool blanket was removed from over my shoulders, my face; a weight lifted.
I…I could breathe.
My chest loosened.
I looked at my sister, and I didn’t want to cringe away from her. I wanted…I wanted to hug her, and never let go.
I took one glance at my hospital tray of food and was ravenously hungry.
But the biggest of all: I didn’t feel a hollow void in my chest.
Where Jack had once resided, where he had once occupied every corner of my being, even though I tried to ignore him, there was just…me, again.
Thinking on Jack, I felt nothing but hatred and betrayal. No lingering feelings of love. Of obsession.
I didn’t love Jack anymore.
And it was all thanks to Sully.
Who had saved me. Literally.
“You should get to bed,” Sully says. He releases me.
I look up at him once more. And I just feel happy. Alive. Free.
I turn to get ready for bed, looking over at Sully once more.
Come tomorrow, he will head back to Roselock, because he can’t survive being gone for long. And I will go to work.
But when I am done, I will be at the library, researching
.
Looking for ways to break his curse. Looking for anyone who might be able to do something about what is happening in Roselock.
Sully saved my life. I’m determined to save his.
“Goodnight, Iona,” he says as he heads toward the couch.
And there is a little empty void when we walk opposite directions.
I miss him there in my bed, a protective presence.
But I’ve just escaped the clutches of needing a man in a way there was no logical explanation for. I need to make sure I can stand on my own two feet again. That I can do something as simple as sleep, on my own.
“Goodnight, Sully,” I call, looking at him one more time, before I close the door behind me.
Every book in the library catalogue referencing curses sits on the table I sit at. There are sixteen of them. Five are fairy tales. Two are old wiccan texts. They’re the ones I pour through more carefully, but am the most afraid of. And the rest are textbooks, referencing old witch-hunts and other bloody historical events.
Two days later, I pull up everything I can find on the Native American tribes who used to come through this area of West Virginia.
Sully went home to Roselock Monday morning. I went to work. And then I went to the library.
Every day, from the moment I got off work, until the library closed, I researched.
My head ached.
My eyes burned.
But still, my fingers turned the pages, my eyes continued to scour text after text, hoping and praying for something.
Anything.
And the entire week, I thought of Sully. Alone in that church. Sitting inside it while the town went insane every single night.
My heart breaks for him. Bleeds.
Such a good-hearted man, someone willing to sacrifice so much for another, being utterly alone, waiting for a fate he’s resigned that he cannot fight.
Chapter Fifty-Five
SULLY
March third had arrived.
Throughout the entirety of the day, I had wandered through town, scattering red roses. Thirty-three of them for the souls of the Shawnee tribe who were slaughtered. Four for the settlers who had been killed, as well. Thirty-three for the men and boys trapped in the mountain side.