Page 96 of Stay Away from Him

Melissa turned and saw Amelia coming through the trees. Then she looked back at Kendall, whose face had taken on a strange pallor, Amelia’s presence affecting her in some unexpected way.

“Kendall, please. You don’t want to do this. I know you don’t. Somewhere deep inside you, you know this is wrong. Don’t you?”

The last sentence was phrased like a real question, not rhetorical—Amelia really didn’t know whether Kendall knew the difference between right and wrong anymore. Wasn’t sure how far Kendall had fallen, how evil she’d become. The slightest hint of a flinch in Kendall’s face was an answer: She wasn’t completely gone. There was something in her, still, that wanted to stop.

“You don’t know anything about me,” she said, but theconviction had left her voice. She sounded like a little girl—the child that she was.

“I do,” Amelia said, taking a few steps forward, arms held out. “I’ve studied people like you, Kendall. And I can help you.”

Kendall shook her head. Her eyes crinkled in a way that looked like crying, even though no tears came. “Nobody can help me.”

“That’s not true,” Amelia said. She wetted her lips with a dart of her tongue. “Tell me, Kendall—why do you take their eyes?”

Kendall’s chin jutted out. Next to her, still collared, Bradley’s legs shook. A dark trickle started at the crotch of his pants and ran down his leg to his socks.

“It’s okay, baby,” Melissa whispered, urging strength across the distance that separated them, mother and son. “It’s almost over.”

Kendall’s eyes darted to Melissa, then back to Amelia. “I take their eyes,” she said slowly, “because…I don’t know why. Because I want to.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Amelia said. “I think you do it because you don’t want them to see you. These creatures, these victims, who’ve come to know you. The real you. You take their eyes because you’re ashamed. Because you want to hide.”

Kendall didn’t answer, didn’t argue—only breathed hard through her nostrils, twin plumes of steam.

“But you don’t have to hidehere, do you?” Amelia looked down into the hollow where Rhiannon still stood, hands bound. Looked down at the dead eyes dangling from tree branches. “This is a place where you can be seen. Seen for who you truly are.”

Amelia’s gaze stayed on the hollow for a few seconds, long enough that Kendall looked too, as though seeing the place—herplace, her secret place—for the first time.

“Everyone will see it soon,” Amelia said then, and Kendall’s gaze came back to her, fiery and off-kilter. Amelia stretched outher hand. She held a phone, the screen lit up. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed.

“They’re coming, Kendall,” Amelia said. “I followed Melissa and Rhiannon into the woods before they got to the house—but I’ve been talking to them this whole time, telling them where to find us. Telling them exactly what’s happening. There’s nothing you can do about it now. You could kill all four of us if you wanted to, but the world is still going to see you. See you for exactly who you are. And that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? That’s what he taught you to be afraid of most.”

He.Melissa knew she was talking about Thomas. That he was there with them in the woods, responsible in his way for the people who’d died and the danger they were in—even if he never picked up the knife, never spilled blood, never killed a soul.

The mention of him seemed to break something in Kendall. Melissa watched it in her, something new coming over the girl, starting in her eyes then bleeding downward, shifting the substance of her in a different direction.

“Everyone will see,” Amelia said. “They’ll see that you’re a monster.”

Kendall’s hold on Bradley loosened, and she began to lean away from him. Began to orient herself toward Amelia instead. She gathered her energy, her rage, and then launched herself at Amelia with an unearthly shriek, the knife held out in front of her.

Wrists still bound, Melissa balled her hands into fists and punched at the ground, rocks and dirt digging into her knuckles as she pushed herself to her feet. She rushed to Bradley as he fell to the ground, his legs going limp with relief. She looped her arms around him, pulled him to herself.

“I’ve got you, baby,” she whispered into his hair as she felt his weight against her arms. The heat of his body. Even the smell of the urine he’d let out, his bladder loosened with terror—Melissawas glad for all of it, every bit of evidence of the physical reality of him, because it meant he was alive, it meant he was safe, it meant he was still hers.

She turned around and saw Kendall on top of Amelia. Amelia had her hands on Kendall’s wrists, holding the girl back as she tried to push the tip of the knife into Amelia’s chest. The point of it was inches from her, Kendall seeming to have a superhuman strength in her rage. Her face red, her neck ropy with muscles and sinews. Teeth bared, spittle flying in Amelia’s face.

Melissa heard a rustle, and suddenly Rhiannon was next to her.

“We have to help her.”

Somewhere in the distance, the sirens grew louder. In the encroaching dark, flashlights bounced in the distance, past the tangle of the undergrowth. Men’s voices shouting indistinctly, coming closer.

Melissa grabbed Bradley’s face between her bound hands, cradled his cheeks in her palms. “Look at me,” she said. “You have to run. You have to go with Rhiannon. Go toward the light and the voices. Shout for them.”

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You can. You have to be brave. Now go.”

Rhiannon and Bradley ran away, disappearing through the trees. Melissa breathed a sigh of relief, but it was short-lived. Amelia and Kendall still struggled on the ground, and Amelia was starting to lose her strength. She screamed as the tip of the knife got closer, as it began to pierce the down of her jacket and press against her skin, against her rib cage. A guttural sound that started low and then broke high.

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