Surely she’s not surprised that the weapon she built has finally turned on her. Like Frankenstein, she created a monster she couldn’t contain.
Without even thinking about it, I lunge forward. And a shot rings out.
CHAPTER 38
I look down at my chest, waiting for the pool of red to appear. I can’t feel the bullet lodged in me, but I know that’s just from the shock. The pain will come soon enough.
But when it comes, I don’t feel it in my chest. I feel it in my arm, and it isn’t as blinding as I expected it to be.
I watch in horror as Morgana falls forward in front of me. There is a mass of blood and hair on the side of her head. One of her arms reaches out toward me, lying there pale and lifeless on the ground. I step back, away from her outstretched hand. She can’t touch me.
I realize then that it wasn’t one shot I heard, but two. One from Morgana’s gun, a shot that seems to have torn out a piece of my upper arm. And another shot, just a fraction of a second earlier than Morgana’s, from the policeman standing in the doorway, the policeman who must have snuck up to the cottage with his partners and subdued Helper outside.
Then, suddenly, everything is motion. Arthur bursts into the room just behind the policeman, staring at me with wild eyes. Collingsworth unfreezes and runs to untie Ben. Arthur runs to me, ripping off his shirt and wrapping it around my arm to stop the bleeding. “Is she dead?” I whisper, though I already know the answer.
He looks back at Morgana’s lifeless form. “She’s dead,” he assures me.
And then he shocks the hell out of me by gathering me roughly in his arms and kissing the top of my head. The surprise of it eclipses the pain, and for a moment, I feel only that same shower of sparks that his touch has given me before. I stand frozen for a second, but finally I bring my good arm up and wrap it around his middle. I lean my cheek onto his broad chest and close my eyes.
Two more cops burst into the room. After Collingsworth gets his son free, they trap him in handcuffs. He doesn’t protest, though Ben tries to pull the policemen off. “He didn’t do anything! He was trying to save me!”
Ben isn’t even looking at me, and I can’t blame him. After everything I’ve done to him, he must never want to look at me again.
“He contacted us when he received the email you copied him on,” one of the new cops tells Ben. “He confessed to being an accessory to murder and armed robbery.”
Collingsworth doesn’t say anything, but he looks soberly at his son as they drag him off.
“Miss?” one of the policemen says, standing in front of me. “We need to get you to a hospital. Can you walk?”
I nod, pulling my head away from Arthur’s chest. Shuddering, I step around the body and crimson blood of the woman who raised me and let the policeman lead me out to the car. Arthur stays with me the whole time, keeping his arm around me.
A policeman has wrestled Helper to the ground outside, and Helper grimaces at both of us as they handcuff him. His eyes pierce into me from their crevices, and he looks more demon than man. But they push him into a car and drive off, and I can breathe again. Arthur watches, but says nothing. He just helps me into another car and gets in beside me, holding my hand.
“You did well,” he says finally.
I nod, my throat too thick to say anything. There’s a lump there, like I’m about to cry. Though I don’t have any idea what I should be crying about. She’s out of my life forever. She took so much from me. I should be satisfied.
It must be the pain, I decide. And the shock. I lean my head on Arthur’s shoulder and try not to think anymore as we hurry to the nearest hospital. Somewhere during this strange journey, he has become the one thing that comforts me. Just like he’d been when we were children. And instead of pulling away, he rests a careful arm around me and keeps me close.
The wound is mostly clean, they tell me, though the bullet tore off a chunk of my skin and some muscle. I lie on a stark white bed with scratchy sheets, a bandage wrapped heavily around my upper arm. There’s an IV in my wrist, and the sound of the slow drip of pain medication fills the room. I drift in and out of this world.
Every time I wake, groggy and confused, Arthur is there. He doesn’t leave my side. He sits in a chair by my bed, and when a wave of pain crashes through me so intensely that I want to scream, I reach out my hand and he takes it with both of his.
It takes me two full days to get back to normal, though I wince any time I try to move my arm. Arthur has no news about Morgana. Every time I close my eyes, I see her body lying there, the side of her head bleeding out on the stone floor of the cottage.
The police keep coming in to talk to me, but Arthur has staved them off while I’ve been in and out of consciousness. When Arthur is being interrogated somewhere else in the hospital, a bumbling man comes into the room and asks for my statement. I tell him everything I know and everything I suspect, and he says they have Collingsworth in custody, as well as another man whose identity they are still trying to uncover, who I know must be Helper. Though Morgana is, in his words, “no longer a problem,” they will do a DNA test on Rose and me to corroborate my story. A single word on a piece of paper will tell me what I already know: that I am Sarah Travers, and I have been loved my whole life without my knowledge of it.
My doctor, a middle-aged man prone to nervous smiles and clicking his pen repetitively, says he wants to keep me another night to make sure my wound heals properly. I’m confined to this scratchy bed for only a few more hours.
As soon as he comes back from his questioning, Arthur wraps his hand firmly around mine once more. He won’t let me go this time.
There’s a knock on the door, and Ben enters. It takes me a moment to recognize him within the grim reality of this hospital room. To notice the pale pallor of his face and the tired drooping of his eyes. He is not the king of confidence here. He’s just a boy, and, thanks to me, he’s all alone.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. My words are harsh, but my voice is soft.
Arthur looks back at me and, squeezing my hand, gets up and leaves the room without a word. Ben watches him go, a flicker of confusion and hurt in his eyes.
The door closes behind Arthur, and Ben shifts his weight from one foot to the other, taking in my bandages and the IV hookup. Finally, he looks at my face. “I had to see if you were all right.”
I sit up and resist the urge to smooth back my hair. It looks abominable, I know, but I shouldn’t care. I’m no longer playing Morgana’s game. “You’ve got to have so many questions.”
He nods.
Silence fills up the corners of the room. He doesn’t know where to start. I wait.
“You never loved me, did you?”
I blink. I didn’t think he would start there. I figured he’d be too preoccupied with his father, trying to discover how this man he knew his whole life could have hidden such a history from him.
Ben steps forward, his hazel eyes locked on mine.
I owe him the truth, at the very least. “No,” I say simply. “It was all a manipulation. But I did grow to care about you. A lot. And everything I did was to make sure you didn’t get hurt anymore.”
He drops his eyes, but not before I see the pain flooding them.
“I think I could have loved you, if I weren’t—if I were normal. You were my safe haven,” I whisper. “As screwed up as that sounds. But, no. I’m sorry. I’m not in love with you.”
He nods at the ground, and we’re stuck in silence again.
“How’s your father?” I ask finally.
“I don’t know what to think of him anymore. I always knew he was a bastard, and now I know he’s a thief, too. But he, you know, he came for me. I thought that blind-copying him on that email was just a shot in the dark, but he showed. He’s the one who called the police, even though he knew getting them involved would probably mean his arrest.
He confronted that woman and risked his life for me. I just—I don’t know.”
I don’t know what to say to him.
“They said that the guy they stole the programming from is your real father. That you were kidnapped when you were a baby.”
I nod.
“Then it’s your money. My dad stole the legacy that’s rightfully yours.”
I look away. I hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t want anything to do with it,” I declare. “That money has blood on it.”
He doesn’t say anything, but I see him step forward again out of the corner of my eye. I sigh and look back at him. “I guess everything’s going to be different for you now.”
He nods. “I’m going back to Madigan. In light of everything, they’re willing to ignore my absence this week. Oh, and they’re dropping the drug charges against you, too. Claire woke up and told them you had nothing to do with it.”
Claire. A sharp pain lances through me. With everything that happened, I’d forgotten about her. “She’s all right?”
“She’s fine, except for having to have her stomach pumped. She’s just down the hall here, if you want to see her.”
I nod, tears filling my eyes. We’re both surprised to find them there, I think.
“What will you do? Will you come back to Madigan?” he asks.
“I—I don’t know.” I look down at my hands clasped over the covers and wait for him to ask me not to come back. For him to tell me that he never wants to see me again.
“You should,” he says after a moment. “You shouldn’t let her take everything away from you.”
I look back up at him in surprise, tears spilling down my cheeks now.
He leaves with a quiet goodbye, and I do my best to wipe away the tracks my tears have made. I know if I go back to Madigan, I’ll see him again. But it won’t be the same. He used to look at me like I was someone worthy of love and care. Now seeing me will only remind him of everything he’s lost. Including his heart.
I know it’s for the best that he knows the truth. But that thought still hurts.
“You have another visitor,” Arthur says, appearing at my door a few moments later. There’s something strange but soft in his tone, and I look up as my mother—my real mother—follows him into the room.
She’s like a bird freed from her cage: unsure of her movements and wary of everything. Her long black hair looks ratty and unkempt but still beautiful. Her eyes dart around the room, but then she rests them on me, and she rushes to my bed. “My darling girl,” she cries, taking my hand gingerly.
I let her take it, biting my lip. Arthur leaves us alone.
It takes me several minutes to assure her that I’m all right and to finally say what I’ve been wanting to say. “I don’t want anything from you,” I tell her. “I mean, any money or anything like that. If you get any payout from Collingsworth especially, I don’t want it.”
She curls her lip, her distaste at the thought of that mirroring my own. “I would give any of that money to charity. Money won’t bring your father back, and I don’t think we need it at all.” She pauses. “I won’t give you anything but my love,” she tells me.
“I don’t know how to love,” I admit to her. “Not anymore. Morgana beat that out of me.”
She draws in a breath, then bites her lip and looks into my eyes resolutely. “Then I’ll show you.”
I nod, unable to say how grateful I am.
“Is there anything I can do for you right now?” she asks.
I answer without hesitation. “Can you help me up? My friend is down the hall, and I need to see her.”
She gives me a frail arm to lean on as I swing my legs over the side of the bed and rise slowly. My muscles feel a bit weak from all the stress and the medication, but they’ll hold me fine.
I shuffle down the hall on my mother’s arm and ask a nurse what room Claire is in.
I take a deep breath before the closed door of her room, and my mother squeezes my arm for support.
I knock quickly, and a faint “Come in” seeps through the door.
Claire is sitting in a chair by the window, a notebook in her lap and a pen in her hand. As soon as she sees me, she jumps up, tossing the notebook and hurrying to throw her arms around my neck.
I’m so surprised that I find I’m bracing myself for attack, and I will my body to untense. She pulls away before I can hug her back, but she’s smiling radiantly at me. “I didn’t want to bother you until you were all better, but I wanted to see you so badly! You have to tell me everything—the stories are just so crazy.”
She notices my mother in the doorway for the first time. She makes a strange apparition there, her black coat contrasting so sharply against the otherworldly paleness of her skin. I’m in no state to catch anyone’s eye in my shapeless robe and disheveled state, but Rose is striking.
Claire looks at me, a question in her eyes. “Your mother?” she asks softly.
As soon as I nod, she’s across the room and hugging Rose. Rose seems less shocked by this than I am, and she gives a small crack of a smile as she hugs Claire back.
“I thought you were going to die,” I tell Claire. I assumed my voice would sound warm, happy. Instead, it’s as scorching as the heat of a fire. “I held your head in my lap and thought you were going to die.”
Claire blanches, looks down. “My parents are putting me in a rehab program. They weren’t even mad. They just—they were actually worried about me.” She pauses, a smile sparkling on her lips. Like she can’t believe it. Her expression darkens again, and, still staring at the floor, she tells me, “I’m sorry.”
The flames lick at my throat. “You should be.”
“Sarah!” Rose hisses.
Her use of that name draws both Claire’s eyes and mine. “Sarah,” Claire repeats, savoring it as she looks back at me. I wonder if I look anything like a Sarah to her.
I close my eyes. What would Sarah do in this situation? “I’m sorry,” I say. “I know it’s not your fault. I—I should have noticed. I should have done something, said something. I didn’t think. I’m just glad you didn’t die.”
Claire seems to find this amusing, and she half smiles at me. “I’m glad you’re glad I didn’t die?”
I nod. She doesn’t realize how big that is for me.
CHAPTER 39
They release me that afternoon, and I’m led into the shining world outside. Rose has gone home to prepare a bedroom for me, and Arthur is the only one left with me now as I sign the discharge papers, though I make him leave the room when I put on my jeans and the shirt that he brought me from Madigan to replace my bullet-torn one. I let the orderlies wheel me out to the front of the hospital and step out into a dreary, cool afternoon.
“Where do you want to go?” Arthur asks.
I consider this, looking out into the parking lot and the village beyond. Everything is unfamiliar and new. I feel like it suffocates me, makes my chest tight and nervous.
“Can we go back to the cottage?”
Arthur raises his eyebrows at me, and I know it’s a strange request. But I have to see it again.
He leads me to his car. Without a word, we drive the winding roads back onto the moors, and I look out at them eagerly. They’re home to me now, I realize. This wild place, the mist clinging to the wide expanse, the wind-battered trees: It’s home.
It’s growing darker now, night throwing a chill on the land. We come upon the stone structure of Madigan, its lights shining out into the gathering darkness, inviting us in. But as soon as I step out of the car, I turn away from them.
We wander down the hill and into the wild, helped by the light of the moon, only slightly dampened by the clouds drifting over its surface. The night is calm, almost eerily quiet. There’s only a breeze ruffling the heather, not the full-blown whistling wind I’m used to.
I move faster.
I stop when I catch the first glimpse of the cottage’s black shadows. Arthur steps closer to me, almost touching but not quite. “Are you sure you want to go in?” he asks.
I nod and force one foot in front of the other. I’m here, and I’m not as fragile as I feel. I can face this place.
It’s still an active crime scene, so we can’t enter. But I can shine a flashlight into the window and look inside. They removed Morgana’s body, of course, but harsh yellow tape cordons off the area where she fell. I think I see a dark outline on the floor, like a bloodstain, but I look away quickly before I can confirm.
My drawings are still on the walls, though, and all of the candles and warm blankets are still there. If I put a good fire in the hearth and come out here with my sketchbook in hand, it will look almost exactly as it used to.
It’s still mine.
Arthur gently places an arm around my shoulders, drawing me into his embrace. “Are you okay?” he asks softly.
I nod. “I think I will be.” I let myself lean against him, let him support my weight a little bit. I feel like I’m fourteen again, when Arthur was the singular strength and warmth in my life. I didn’t realize how much I needed that back then.
I force myself to step forward. “I’m sorry,” I murmur without turning around to look at him.
“For what?” he asks.
“For touching you. I know you don’t feel that way about me.”
He places his hand on my arm, gently turning me to face him. He stares at me, his deep brown eyes concentrated on mine as if he’s trying to figure something out. Before he can say anything, though, the question that I’ve wanted to ask him for so many years bursts out of me. “Why?”
“Why what?” he says.
“Why did you leave me after I told you I loved you?” I feel suddenly dizzy, my head swimming. But now the words are out, and there’s no taking them back.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“You know what I mean. You left me. You didn’t even say goodbye. Why?”
I Am Her Revenge Page 21