Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray
He wanted her.
“The time is now,” he said, and threw her over his shoulder, heading quickly to the woods on legs made even stronger by the serum coursing through him. Frightened and confused, she struggled against him. He held her tighter. They’d reached the clearing. He lay her down on the soft bed of pine needles, pinning her hands to the ground with his.
“Jericho! What are you doing?” Her voice was high-pitched. Terrified.
Some part of Jericho fought up from the depths. No, it said. What are you doing? Wrong. Not like this.
“Jericho! Please!”
He wanted her. Hadn’t she come to him last night? Hadn’t she kissed him and let him put his hands on her body? She wanted him. That was the only answer. He wanted her and he would have her. Like a hero. Like a conqueror. Conquerors did not ask. They took. He crushed his lips against hers. When she turned her face away, he forced it back and kissed her harder. She tried to shove him off. His hands pushed hers back against the grass, holding them down. He was on top of her. The victor. To the victor go the spoils. No. No. Not like this.
She fought. It infuriated and excited him. Her knee tried to come up and jab him in a sensitive spot. But he was bigger. Stronger. He ripped at her dress and she screamed. She slipped a hand free and slapped him hard. He liked it.
The report of a gun echoed in the forest. Jericho jolted as the tranquilizer dart pierced the back of his right thigh. He whirled around, angry. Ames held the gun. Jericho leaped up and lunged for it. Ames fired. Another dart caught Jericho in the side. Already, he could feel the drug entering his system, tripping along the veins and wires alike. Fight or flight. Hail, hail, the conquering hero. He staggered toward Marlowe. The third shot buckled Jericho’s knees, but he kept going. He had only one thought: Win. Win at all costs.
“Dammit, man, fire!” Marlowe instructed. Another dart and Jericho was now crawling, scraping up fistfuls of dirt in an effort to advance. “The world… belongs… to…” And then he was motionless, the scent of Evie’s perfume still inside him like a dream he needed to own.
Just before he lost consciousness, the serum began its retreat from his system, leaving him cold and confused, like an animal that had chased its prey and now stared up from the depths of a pit trap into which it’d fallen. He saw Evie’s horrified, tearstained face as Henry threw his coat over her and led her away.
“I’m sorry. So sorry,” he whispered, and blacked out.
In a gilded bathroom styled like an Egyptian palace, Sam sat on the marble floor beside Evie and held a cold washrag to her bruised lips. “When that son of a bitch wakes up, I’m gonna punch his lights out.”
“No, you’re not. That won’t solve anything.”
“It might.”
“It won’t. And I’m perfectly all right.”
“Bushwa, you are! You’re still shaking,” Sam said. “Excuse my language.”
“Whatever Marlowe’s putting into Jericho made him do that,” Evie said.
“Yeah? Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe that serum is just meeting up with what’s already inside Jericho to begin with. You ever think about that?” Sam folded the rag over, finding a cool spot and applying it to Evie’s forehead.
She winced as it hit a raw spot. “Ow!”
“Sorry.”
Evie took the washrag from him and held it to her face. “Really, Sam. I’m okay.”
Sam leaned back against the giant tub carved with rosettes. “This place gives me the creeps. It feels all wrong.” Sam gave Evie a long, searching look. “On the level—you jake?”
Evie could feel tears wanting to come, but she was determined not to let them. Jericho had attacked her. He wasn’t a stranger. He was her friend. But this morning, it felt as if she’d never really known him at all. “No. But going to bed seems like my best plan tonight,” she said.
“You want me to stay?”
“I doubt there’ll be trouble tonight. All those tranquilizers in his blood.”
“I don’t know. The giant’s pretty strong. I heard Marlowe say he’d be back to normal by morning. Whatever that means.”
“I’ll be okay.” She struggled to her feet, reached into the bathtub, and pulled up a baseball bat. “Found this in a closet. I’m keeping it close.”
Sam rinsed out Evie’s washrag and laid it on the side of the sink.
“Lock your door?” he said on the way out.
“Oh, yes. And a chair under the doorknob.”
On the walk back to his room, Sam detoured through the moonlight-dappled ballroom. He felt that strong presence again. It seemed to be coming up from the earth itself. He thought he heard his name being called very faintly.
“Mama?” he said to the still room once more, but there was no answer.
After Evie had locked her door and shoved a chair under the knob, she crawled into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Many times Evie had fantasized about petting with Jericho. In her fantasy, she imagined surrendering to a dominating Jericho. She’d liked it as a fantasy. There was something wild and hedonistic about the idea of allowing herself to be taken over by a big, strong, handsome man, as if she had no say in the matter and so no responsibility for making love with him: Why, it just happened! What could I do? I was helpless! But in reality, it hadn’t been that way. It had been confusing and utterly frightening to have no say and no control, like a rag doll wielded by a careless child. It was like not being a person at all.
Now that she thought about it, what Jericho had done to her, well, wasn’t that what Marlowe was doing to Jericho? Taking away his control? Making him an experiment, an object that Marlowe didn’t even take the time to read? Did Marlowe even see Jericho as a person anymore? Had he ever?
What if Sam was right, though, and there was some part of Jericho that really was that brute in the woods? What if it couldn’t be blamed completely on the serum? That thought made Evie’s stomach hurt. Tomorrow was their last day at Hopeful Harbor. Marlowe said Jericho would be back to normal in the morning. What if he didn’t remember what he’d done and he was sitting there at breakfast tomorrow morning as if nothing had happened? What would she say?
She wouldn’t go to breakfast.
No, that was a terrible plan. If there was anything Evie was unsuccessful at, it was avoiding breakfast. Most likely, Jericho would still be asleep tomorrow morning, she told herself. But just in case, she’d take the baseball bat with her.
She punched her pillow and waited impatiently for sleep. When it came, it was violent. Evie dreamed of the soldiers. Their faces, pale and ghostly, were carved in shadow, their eyes as prominent as a dying fish’s. There was a sound like a howling wind full of bees, and under that, a galloping, clanging heartbeat keeping time. The men shouted to her across a great distance, their voices sailing past in a fast whine like bullets:
Help usEye Stop stopHelpStop O
Godhim stopfree usss
HELP. US.
The soldiers’ screaming mouths opened unnaturally wide, as if the screaming had distorted their very bones. As if they were coming apart and there were no words for the agony. Conor Flynn appeared. His eyes were haunted. “Can you hear it? The Eye is close. You gotta find it. You gotta stop him. I can’t keep hiding from him forever,” he said.
When Evie woke the next morning, a note had been shoved under her door.
I am so sorry. Can we please talk? Jericho.
Just reading the note upset Evie. But she didn’t want to leave with only yesterday stretched between them. She needed answers.
Jericho was hunched over his untouched plate of eggs and flapjacks when Evie walked in, baseball bat in hand. He saw her and stood, like a gentleman would. Evie startled and raised her weapon. “I’m no Babe Ruth, but I have a decent swing.”
“You won’t need it. I promise,” Jericho said. “Ames is in the kitchen, right there.”
Evie flicked her eyes toward the swinging door behind Jericho with the inset porthole window. Through it, she could see
“His gun would.”
“Let’s talk,” she said. Jericho took his seat again, and Evie sat at the opposite end, keeping the long dining table between them. She did not drop the bat.
“I’m sorry. I’m… I’m horrified,” Jericho said, staring down at his plate. He still seemed a bit dazed, and Evie wasn’t sure if it was the tranquilizer darts or the guilt or both. Her earlier resolve retreated some. She hated that she felt frightened of Jericho and angry at Jericho and sorry for him and angry that she felt she should have sympathy for him when she was the one who got hurt. And still, underneath it all lurked that twisted, awful physical attraction to him. Never had she been more confused.
“Jericho, what’s in that serum Marlowe’s giving you?”
“I don’t know. He won’t tell me.”
“It seems dangerous.”
“It’s keeping me alive right now,” Jericho said, glancing up at Evie for just a second, then having to look away again. The shame he felt was like a trapped animal scratching inside him.
“Maybe it’s not,” Evie said. “Maybe that serum is making you sick and dependent. What if you stopped taking it? You could come back to the city with us. Right now. Today.”
Jericho’s head shot up. “Go back… with you?”
“On the train,” she said, and the implication was clear: with us but not with me.
Jericho shook his head. “I can’t. I made a promise.” He sneaked another look at Evie. There was a bruise on her neck. The shame was overwhelming. “I wouldn’t blame you for hating me. But if you could see it in your heart to give me a second chance…”
The way he was looking at her now, like the Jericho she had known and loved, the studious boy with all the books who had talked soothingly to her on the roof of the Bennington when she had been at her most vulnerable, the one who fed the pigeons, who burned with ambition just like she did, who understood the darkness that roamed her own soul—did that Jericho deserve another chance? Was she being unfair? Had what he’d done to her been brought about solely because of Marlowe’s serum, or was Sam right and the serum had only brought out something that already lived deep inside Jericho?
Yes, he was beautiful. Yes, her body still yearned for his touch, she hated to admit. And she’d seen tremendous good in Jericho. But now that she let herself see more clearly, there was something else in there as well. A deep, dark struggle whose ending she couldn’t read, something that both intrigued and frightened her.
“I don’t hate you, Jericho. But I’m all balled up right now. What happened yesterday… well, I need time to think,” Evie said.
Jericho nodded. “It’s more than I deserve.”
Evie shut her eyes and let out a long breath. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
She blinked her eyes open. “Don’t say things that make me feel sorry for you.”
Sam and the others arrived. Their suitcases were packed and waiting in the foyer. Jericho could feel everything slipping away from him. He’d always said that a man was defined by his choices. He didn’t want to only be defined by what he’d done yesterday.
“Before you go, there’s something I want to show you,” he said.
“She’s not going anywhere with you, pal. Not without the rest of us,” Sam said.
“I can speak for myself, Sam,” Evie said. She looked into Jericho’s face for an uncomfortable moment. “What is it?”
“I need you to follow me into the woods. All of you,” Jericho said.
Sam picked up the bat. Evie pushed his hand down. “I think we should trust him on this.”
Sam hoisted the bat onto his shoulder. “You know what helps with trust? A baseball bat.”
Henry had appropriated the old wheelchair in the abandoned soldiers’ quarters, which he used now to carry Ling into the forest over pine needles that stuck to the rickety wheels like stiff brown hair. Up ahead, Evie and Sam trailed after Jericho as he led them deeper into the forest.
“I’ve seen this picture,” Henry said in a low voice. “Where the trusting victims traipse off into the woods. It doesn’t end well.”
“I can hear you,” Jericho said from several feet away.
“Superhuman hearing,” Evie reminded him.
They came to the charred clearing. “This is where I’ve seen the soldiers,” Jericho said.
“It’s… it’s just like my dream. Just like what I saw with Luther.” Evie ran to a moss-covered tree stump. “This is where the Victrola plays. This is where it happened. Where my brother…” She swallowed hard.
“It feels like a graveyard,” Ling said. A flock of birds circled into the sky, crying.
“There are things I need to tell you. Things I’ve held back because I… I thought I was being disloyal to Marlowe. One night, I saw two men in dark gray suits dragging a young woman upstairs—”
“Shadow Men?” Sam asked.
“I think so, but I can’t be sure,” Jericho said.
“What are Shadow Men doing at Marlowe’s estate?” Ling asked.
“The men said that she was a mental patient that Marlowe was trying to help. But she sounded perfectly sane to me—sane and terrified. When I asked Marlowe about it later, he said she was a Diviner.”
“Have you seen her since then?” Henry asked.
“No. Not a peep. She wanted me to know her name, though. She kept screaming it at me: Anna Provenza.”
“Anna Provenza!” Evie exclaimed. “Mabel spoke to her sister, Maria. Her family was deported as anarchists. Mabel swears it’s not true, though. She said Anna disappeared and the family had been looking for her ever since.” Evie wished she could talk to Mabel. About everything.
“Why would you deport a family but keep one sister you claim is a mental patient? That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Henry said.
“Maybe he really is trying to help her,” Ling said. She didn’t want to think bad things about Jake Marlowe.
“So, what does Marlowe want with Anna Provenza?” Sam said.
“There’s more,” Jericho said. He flicked his eyes to Sam.
“What?” Sam challenged, and for a minute, Jericho wanted to hold back.
It is our choices that define us, he reminded himself.
“Marlowe did an experiment with me. Something called sensory deprivation. I felt as if I were not in my body but floating in some other dimension, some porous realm between worlds. I heard voices. Terrible voices.”
Evie frowned. “Where were they coming from?”.
“I don’t know. Marlowe wanted me to talk to them, though, and tell him what they were saying. The voices told me that the door must be opened as before and that the souls must be refreshed.”
“What does that mean?” Evie asked.
“I honestly don’t know. But there was another voice that broke through and told me to keep quiet. That those voices couldn’t be trusted. I honestly didn’t know what was happening—whether I’d just imagined it or not.” Jericho looked at Sam again. “The woman had a Russian accent. She told me her name was Miriam.”
“Just like Conor!” Evie said. “Sam…”
“You… you talked to my mother?” For all the reasons Sam had disliked Jericho, this one hurt the most. Why would she speak to these other fellas—to Jericho, of all people—and not to her own son? “What did she say? Did she tell you where she was?”
“No. But she said I was in danger. That he was making a mistake.”
“What if—” Ling stopped short.
“What if what?” Henry said.
“What if she was talking to you from the land of the dead?”
“No!” Sam said, pointing a finger at them. “She is not dead! Conor heard her, too.”
“That’s no guarantee,” Ling said.
“How do we even know it’s your mother, Sam? What if it’s just one more trick from the King of Crows?” Evie said.
&
“Our car,” Ling said. “They’ll be looking for us.”
Evie gave the clearing one last backward glance, hoping for some signal from James, but it was just a dead place inside the woods. “I don’t like that you’re here with him,” Evie said to Jericho on the walk back to the estate. “It’s not too late to come with us.”
“I don’t think I should just now,” Jericho said, and let the why remain unspoken. “I’ll stay here and keep looking for clues. See if I can find out anything more about Anna Provenza. It’s the least I can do. Somehow, I’ll get up to that solarium and poke around.”
Back at the estate, Marlowe’s fancy Rolls-Royce was packed and ready to transport the Diviners to the train station. “Well. We’ll see you at the exhibition, I suppose,” Evie said, looking uncomfortable.
“Sure. At the exhibition,” Jericho echoed.
He ached to hold her. He would probably never hold her again.
Evie watched Ames shutting the lid of the trunk over their cases. She didn’t know what to think. She’d cared deeply for Jericho; still did, really. Like her, he was deeply flawed. His open admission of his faults and foibles was a relief compared with the sanctimonious, sure-of-themselves people she’d known in Zenith, Ohio. The ones who’d turn up their noses at messy girls like Evie, then slink off and commit their sins in the dark. But was it enough? Where did you draw the line? Evie’s heart ached as she shook Jericho’s hand and climbed into the backseat. She had never been less sure of the lines between right and wrong, between desire and destruction in her life.
“So long, Jericho,” she said.
“So long, Evie,” he echoed.
Good-bye, Jericho thought. Because this was good-bye. Even if she didn’t say it outright. He hated Marlowe for what he’d done. And he hated knowing that a beast lurked somewhere inside his own soul. I’m sorry, he wanted to shout to the heavens. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
“Don’t take any wooden nickels,” he said. It was what Sergeant Leonard always said. For all Jericho knew, it was the last thing he’d probably ever say to Evie, and it was the dumbest.