Without Mercy

by Lisa Jackson

  “But you were so young … oh, God, why did you do it?” Jules asked, trying like crazy to wrap her mind around the depths of her sister’s depravity.

  “Duh! Can’t you figure anything out. I already told you I was saving us and I knew if he was gone, if Edie and I were left alone, you wouldn’t leave.” She was studying Jules carefully now, her bravado melting into suspicion. “You were going to. I knew it and you were the only one who really cared about me. At least that’s what I thought. But I was wrong. It all changed. You had plans to go away for college and you were hooked up with some boyfriend that I’d never met, the same son of a bitch who became my pod leader down here … how’s that for bad luck?”

  Trent. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Of course you can’t, Miss Goody Two-shoes.” Shay snorted a laugh. “You never believe anything bad about anyone. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to convince you the school was rotten, but I got lucky with Spurrier and his band of lunatics.” She was pleased with herself. Gloating again, though still wary. “You know, I wondered if you’d ever put two-and-two together. Those bloodstains near Andrew’s and Maeve’s bodies were a pretty big clue. I was just testing you and you failed, Jules. Really failed. I mean, how dense are you?”

  So it was true. Jules had to accept the truth.

  Shay was a cold-blooded killer. And standing between her and the door. This girl who had once adored her, now a woman who, in so many ways, resembled Jules, was planted firmly in the middle of the room as if she intended to block her sister’s escape. Had planned it. Dear God, what had happened to Shay? Where was that sweet little girl she’d once loved? How had she become this monster?

  Shay’s lips twisted as if she were reading Jules’s mind. Her eyes glimmered with a hideous light. “You still don’t ‘get’ me, do you, Jules?”

  “No.” It was the truth. Maybe she never had.

  “And you never will.” In a heartbeat, Shay’s eyes went blank, no emotion visible. Whatever connection they’d once had had been severed years ago and now, for the first time, Jules felt a tremor of fear.

  “It’s time to go,” Jules said firmly, one eye on the door.

  “Go where? Do you think I believe you’re interested in helping me? No way.”

  “Shay, there’s a chance with the right attorney—”

  “Fuck the right attorney!” Every muscle in Shay’s compact body tensed. In a second she transformed into a heartless murderer. Her gaze narrowed on Jules as she crouched, a position Jules recognized, one that indicated Shay was about to strike.

  At that moment Jules knew the truth: Shay would kill her. And she wouldn’t think twice about it.

  Eyes focused, Shay rounded.

  Damn! Automatically, Jules feinted toward one of the twin beds.

  Her sister adjusted. Aimed a kick square at Jules’s face. “Shay, don’t!!”

  Too late! Teeth bared, Shay spun rapidly, her booted heel slicing through the air near Jules’s head.

  Jules ducked.

  Bam! Shay’s heel hit her shoulder. Pain sizzled up her spine.

  “For the love of God, Shay, stop!”

  “No way.” She was already setting up again.

  Jules yelled. Sprang for the door!

  Shay, eyes dark with a bitter hatred, refocused.

  Jules had to get away!

  Again, she leapt, her hands scrabbling for the door handle.

  Shay anticipated her move.

  She adjusted. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” she said with evil satisfaction. She set up as Jules yanked on the door handle.

  Shay spun again, her toe sliding on the towel still lying on the floor. “Shit!” she yelled, her balance off. Still, she managed to kick out.

  Jules dropped. Hit the floor.

  Shay’s leg swooshed over her head and Jules grabbed Shay’s calf.

  With a squeal, Shay hit the floor. Her head thudded against the floor.

  Footsteps pounded down the hall.

  “In here!” Jules screamed.

  Shay struggled. She was strong, fighting and kicking, determined to kill her sister. They rolled across the floor. Jules’s back hit the leg of one of the twin beds and she cried out, screaming in pain.

  Hadn’t she heard someone in the hallway?

  “Help!” she yelled desperately. Pinned against the bed’s leg, Jules held fast to her sister’s deadly leg. Wouldn’t let go. Just like she had never let go of her stupid vision of her sister, held fast to the notion that Shay, troubled, could be redeemed. But the monster wrestling with her, swearing, spitting, clawing and raging, was too far gone, had crossed the frail line between rational thought and insanity.

  Shay’s free leg clamped down hard on Jules’s waist, pinning her against the bed leg. Strong fingers twisted in Jules’s hair, yanked hard, drawing her head back. Breathing rapidly, panting like an animal, Shay kicked and twisted, trying desperately to dislodge Jules’s grip, while doing damage with her own.

  No way would Jules release her. Shay had won too many competitions, had bragged to Jules in the past about how easy it was to take down an opponent.

  Shay arched her back. Fingers clawed Jules’s scalp, twisting her hair, and pulling up, stretching Jules’s neck. Shay’s free hand became a weapon. Fingers glued tightly together and stiff, as if she intended to give Jules a karate chop to her exposed throat!

  “God, I hate you!” Shay said, raising her hand, taking aim.

  Jules couldn’t move.

  She watched in horror as Shay swung down.

  Instantly, she let go of Shay’s leg and threw up a hand to deflect the blow.

  Too late!

  Shay’s hand sliced against her throat.

  Jules went limp. Coughed. Blinked as the world spun. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. Blackness closed in around her as Shay stripped her fingers from Jules’s hair and, breathing hard, rolled away. “Die, you miserable bitch,” she said as Jules dragged in a breath with difficulty, one hand at her throat, the other on the floor where the towel still stretched across the floor. “I talked to Dawg. He’s going to help me. All I have to do is jack one of the snowmobiles that Nell told me about and I’m home free.” She reached into her pocket and showed off the keys, letting them dangle from her fingers as Jules tried desperately to drag in a breath. Shay’s eyes glowed triumphantly. “I took these from that bitch Missy when I cuffed her. Things are gonna be different now. You’ll see!”

  She straightened, satisfied that her job was done, then, as Jules watched helplessly, snagged her backpack from the corner of the desk and started for the door.

  Jules’s fingers tightened on the towel as she gasped for breath.

  Shay didn’t notice. She had to step over Jules before she got there, and she couldn’t resist. Standing with one foot on the damned towel, she aimed the toe of her other boot so that it would smash into Jules’s face.

  “If you can find your voice, say ‘hello’ to Rip for me,” Shay taunted with a nasty laugh and swung her leg backward.

  Closing her eyes, Jules yanked hard on the towel.

  With all her strength, throwing her weight backward, she pulled, dragging the soggy terry cloth toward her.

  Shay teetered. Her mask of hatred gave way to surprise. “Shit!” Flailing, arms finding nothing to grab onto, Shay lost her balance and fell, hitting the floor hard, her backpack flying.

  More footsteps on the other side of the door!

  Shay landed. Hard!

  “Help!” Jules tried to cry, but had no voice.

  The door banged open.

  “Hold it right there!” a male voice commanded.

  From the floor, Shay, looking over Jules’s shoulder, scrambled to her feet, not ready to give up. Her teeth were bared, her lips pulled back into an awful grimace.

  Trent threw himself into the room. He tackled Shay. She went down again! Jules scooted away, trembling, the demons of the past becoming the present, morphing into one body, that of her little siste
r.

  “Let go of me!” Shay was kicking wildly, trying to roll away as Trent pinned her down.

  “Not on your life.” His body was stretched over hers, his hands trying to grab her wrists. But she was quick and determined, fists flying, booted feet striking out!

  “Bastard!” she cried.

  He caught one wrist and she bucked up, trying to kick him.

  “Get off of me or I’ll scream rape!”

  He grabbed her second wrist. She spat upward, spittle hitting him between the eyes.

  He growled, “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “Cocksucker! No good fucking cowboy!” she raged and Jules curdled inside. This shrieking, struggling psycho was her sister?

  “You okay?” Trent asked, looking over his shoulder as Shay fought and snarled beneath him.

  Jules could only nod. Of course she wasn’t okay. She never would be. Spying her sister like this was killing her.

  “Stop! Now!” Father Jake, weapon drawn, strode into the room. “Let her go!” he ordered, pistol trained on Shaylee.

  Trent, looking as if he were making the worst mistake of his life, breathed hard and rolled away from Jules’s sister. “Careful,” he warned the preacher as he swiped a sleeve over his face.

  “I will be.” Father Jake’s eyes were steady, his face set as he hauled Shaylee to her feet, then forced one of her wrists backward so that she squealed in pain and fell to her knees. Once she was on the floor, subdued, he clipped a pair of handcuffs on her. “It’s over.”

  “It will never be over!” Shay said defiantly, spittle running from the corner of her mouth, her hair a mess, her eyes crazed. She looked from Trent to Father Jake before her gaze landed on her sister. “As long as I’m alive, Jules, it will never be over!” she raged.

  “Then take it up with God,” Father Jake advised, before marching her from the room.

  Jules watched her sister disappear through the door.

  Trent knelt beside her and she was shaking, tears running down her face. She collapsed into his arms. “Shay’s right,” she whispered, grateful for Trent’s strength, but knowing the chilling truth deep in her heart. “It’ll never be over. Never.”

  EPILOGUE

  Seattle, Washington

  May

  Sweating in the spring sunshine, her legs aching from her workout, Jules unlocked the door of her condo. She walked inside and found Diablo curled on the sofa, only deigning to lift his gray head to greet her.

  “Lazybones,” she accused, rubbing him beneath his chin as she caught her breath. Her voice was still a little bit raspy, her larynx having been damaged in her struggle with Shay months earlier. But she was healing. Both inside and out.

  “So what do you think about a move, eh?” she asked as she eyed the mess that was her home. Every room was littered with boxes, some packed, some empty.

  Despite her mother’s trepidations, Jules knew moving in with Trent was the right thing to do. The only thing. Even if it was a major life change.

  He’d bought a ranch outside of Spokane and was settling in. Jules would join him and they’d start their new life together. Trent was in the process of buying rodeo stock, horses and cattle that he would breed on nearly a hundred acres of rolling farmland. Jules had already started sending out applications and hoped to land a teaching position. “Just not one that deals with troubled teens,” she told Diablo.

  Grabbing a hand towel, she dabbed at her face. Her friends Erin and Gerri applauded her move away from the city and her only regret was that she’d lost her sister. Not, she reminded herself, that they had ever been close. It had all been a mirage, nothing more.

  “Guess you won’t be a ‘city cat’ anymore,” she said to Diablo, walking to the kitchen and flipping on the radio. “And it might get tough. I’ll expect you to keep the rat and mice population down in the barns. Got it?”

  Diablo, uninterested, stretched and yawned, showing off his pink tongue and white teeth as pop music from the eighties filled the rooms. The first few notes of a familiar song filled the kitchen and Jules smiled as Rick Springfield began singing passionately about “Jessie’s Girl.”

  Jules turned on the tap and filled a glass. She gulped down the chilled water and felt better. Her nightmares had receded, and she no longer needed handfuls of Excedrin. She’d spent the last three months, her throat healing as she’d visited a counselor, retrieving all her repressed memories and her conflicting feelings about her sister.

  Rip Delaney’s murder case was reopened, and Shaylee was the prime suspect. Jules still didn’t remember the night with crystal clarity, but the images were becoming sharper. Scarier. How had she blocked out Shaylee’s guilt?

  As for the horror at Blue Rock Academy, Shaylee was the only suspect in the murders of Nona Vickers, Drew Prescott, and Maeve Mancuso. The prosecution was still putting its case together and Max Stillman had ponied up for the best lawyers money could buy to defend his only daughter.

  Both Kirk Spurrier and Roberto Ortega had died from their wounds, but with Zach Bernsen’s help, along with cadaver dogs and the spring thaw, the sheriff’s department had located Lauren Conway’s bones, buried in a shallow grave in the deep woods of the campus, in, of all things, a long-forgotten cemetery.

  For the moment Shaylee was ensconced in a mental hospital in Oregon, awaiting trial, though whether she was competent to stand trial was still unclear, psychiatrists and psychologists on both sides of the courtroom trying to prove or disprove her sanity.

  Max Stillman’s money was being spent on her treatment as well as her defense, more, Jules assumed, to save his name and reputation than his daughter’s freedom.

  Not that he should.

  Shay was guilty.

  Jules knew it in her heart.

  Was her sister psychotic? Absolutely. But calculatingly so. Shay had left her cap at Nona’s murder scene intentionally—to throw off the police by intentionally incriminating herself. No one knew why she’d staged the murders as she had. All part of her game, Jules supposed.

  “Yep,” she said, glancing at the cat again, “We all need a new start.” Through the open window, she heard the familiar rumble of Trent’s truck and she couldn’t help her stupid heart from kicking into a faster beat.

  Knocking once, he let himself in. From the kitchen, Jules spied Diablo scurrying to hide under the couch, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “How’re we doing?” he asked, as he found her by the sink. From behind, he wrapped his arms around her waist.

  “We’re not doing anything. I’m doing fine, except that I’m sweaty and gross.”

  “Just the way I love you.” To prove his point, he nibbled her neck.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Ew.”

  “A dirty, sweaty woman is the best.”

  “Spoken like a true cowboy,” she teased, but leaned against him.

  “Mmm. Just wait until after you move in and I come into the house after dealing with the livestock.”

  “Let’s not even go there,” she warned, but chuckled despite herself.

  The song ended and an announcer’s sober voice filled the room. “Is your teen troubled? Acting out? Has he been arrested? Is she disruptive to your family?”

  Jules froze.

  A worried woman’s voice said, “My daughter was having trouble in school and running with the wrong crowd. She was failing all her classes and sneaking out at night. I was at my wit’s end, and then I heard about Blue Rock Academy, and it changed my life, our lives, forever….”

  Shay sat in a corner. Rocking. Pretending that she didn’t see anything going on here at Halo Valley Security Hospital. Acting like she was just as out of it as most of the other deranged patients trapped inside these walls. She was on Side B, where all the real loonies, the scary ones, were housed, but she knew how to deal with them.

  They thought she fit right in with Alice May, the mumbler who had wielded a machete against her husband, and Sergio who never said a word, but had been found nake
d, covered in blood, in a forest near Tillamook. The blood hadn’t been his, but that of an unidentified female who’d never been found. Orville, probably fifty, sat in the corner, sucked his thumb, and watched everyone with a weird look on his face. Someone said he’d burned down his own house, with his family inside. Shay didn’t know if any of it were true or not and she really didn’t care.

  Oh, sure, she belonged here. Not! God, the authorities were ridiculous. She was way too smart to be confined in the asylum. Didn’t they know she was a genius? She looked at the psychos in this ward. Homicidal maniacs.

  But she wasn’t scared.

  She could handle herself.

  The truth was that nothing scared her.

  Nothing ever had.

  She stared out the window, watched a rainstorm coming in from the coast, the trees with their new leaves bending in the wind, the sky a dismal iron gray.

  Another prison; no better than Blue Rock Academy.

  Rock, rock, rock.

  She pretended to swing.

  Keep up the movement; let them think you’re lost in your own little world. Don’t let them guess for a minute you have any idea what’s really happening.

  “Time for your pills,” an apple-cheeked nurse said. Jesus, she was a pain. Her name tag read: Amy Dryer, L.P.N., and she was an idiot who droned on and on about her fiancé. If Shay heard Merlin’s name one more time, she thought she might get sick.

  Dressed in purple today, pants and matching V-neck top that didn’t disguise how soft her hips were, the nurse offered Shay her sickeningly plastic smile along with the cup of pills, all pre-measured, all precisely counted out.

  Shay didn’t look away from the window, only saw Nurse Amy’s pale reflection in the glass as she noted the first splatters of rain drizzling down the panes.

  “Shaylee?” the nurse said, her voice upping an octave as she was starting to get really agitated.

  Perfect!

  Swallowing a smile, Shay kept rocking while one of the aides adjusted the music that played from hidden speakers. Today: country. Taylor Swift. Again.

  “Please, honey,” Nurse Amy said, “it’s time.”

  Shay didn’t respond.