Luke was perfectly still, just another marble statue in the monument.
Somehow his silence just made me angrier. I found I could get to my feet, and I did, staring down at him from across the ever-widening space between us. "Were you going to kill me, is that what it was? Save me from Them so you could stab me in peace and quiet?"
146
He still didn't move. But he asked, his voice dead, "Aren't you afraid?" "No! I'm pissed."
Finally, he looked at me, and his eyes silently begged for understanding. But how could there be understanding for this? It wasn't wild sex or drugs or a mammoth collection of Britney Spears posters that I'd uncovered in his mind. It was a trail of bodies. Real people, the life cut out of them as quickly as that wild cat's. It was maybe the one thing I couldn't forgive. I'd opened up my tightly sealed armor and let him in--and now it hurt.
"So, all those times you asked me if I thought you were sketchy or whatever--it's because you're a killer? A murderer?
His voice was flat. "It's not like that."
I hugged my arms around myself. "Oh, how is it, then? They just accidentally got stuck on your knife? Let me guess. It was self-defense. That girl I saw, she was going to kick your ass."
He shook his head.
He wasn't even denying it. "How many? How many have you killed?" As if that mattered. As if it were like a math test, where the number of wrong answers affected your score. He was a killer, no matter how many bodies he'd left behind.
"Don't make me remember."
"Why? Does it hurt? Don't you think it hurt them more?" Luke looked like my words cut him, but he had no right to mercy. "How many?" I snapped.
"Don't make me remember."
147
My anger shook my voice, which was wild and out of control. "You asshole. You let me believe you were the good guy. You made me trust you!"
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry doesn't friggin' cut it! You killed people. Not soldiers. Innocent people. I saw them. They weren't hurting you! You're just--you're just--a monster." The images were still flashing through my head, the violence perfectly preserved at the moment of death. I wanted to throw up, to somehow get the poison out of my system, but for once, I couldn't. He hadn't just killed them--he'd burdened me with the memories of their deaths. As if I'd done it.
I swiped a tear--a real tear, not a weird, bloody one-- from my cheek and sank back down onto the floor. My anger was gone as quickly as it had come. I didn't want to feel anything at all.
"Can you forgive me?" Luke whispered.
I wiped another tear before it had a chance to fall. I wanted him to hurt as badly as I did. I looked at him, shaking my head, wondering how he could even ask.
"How could I?" His eyes held me, begging me to change my mind, pleading for forgiveness. I shook my head again. "No."
There was a long silence. Years passed before he spoke again.
His voice was barely there. "I didn't think so." He slowly stood up, and then he reached out a hand to me. "Come on. I'll take you home."
I stared at his hand. Did he really think I was going to
148
take it? Those fingers, that strangled a man? That gripped a knife and carved a fine deadly line across a girl's throat? He must have seen my thoughts in my face, because he dropped his hand.
The miserable line of his mouth would have broken my heart if I'd let myself forget all the blood he'd spilled.
I stood up without his hand and lifted my chin. If I'd learned anything from my mother, it was how to look like you were all right when you weren't. When nothing would be all right again. I turned my expression on him, emotions carefully packed away under ice, and said, "Okay, let's go."
I should have been afraid; I knew from his memories that he could kill me before I even knew to run. I even knew where he still kept that wicked dagger, in a scabbard underneath the leg of his jeans. But my fear was locked away with everything else, and I didn't think I was going to open that box for a long time. Maybe not ever.
Luke sighed and retrieved his three nails from the entrance of the monument. "For what it's worth--I'm not going to hurt you. I can't."
I eyed him frostily. "The same way you 'can't' tell me anything about yourself?"
He shook his head, not looking at me. His eyes scanned the graveyard, though nothing was visible through the cloying mist. "Not that way at all. Come on. Before They come out.
A tiny chill escaped from my locked-away emotions. Just when he said "They"--then, it was gone. It was probably stupid to be afraid of Them and not him, but I believed 149
They wanted to hurt me. I couldn't believe that of Luke. I followed him from the monument, moving between the graves. We were as silent as ghosts. The mist fooled my eyes, but I was pretty sure we weren't going back the way we came.
"Why this way?" I whispered.
Luke's eyes darted past me. "We're climbing over the fence. They'll be expecting us to come out the gate." He looked back at me, his eyes finding the key that was still hanging against my skin, and kept moving. The mist shifted and shimmered, hiding even the massive trees until we were upon them. I didn't see the iron fence until I was close enough to touch it. The waist-high iron was solid and black, in a way that nothing else in the cloud around us was.
Luke gripped it and was over in half-a-breath's time. He held out a hand to me again.
Without touching him,
