Page 74 of Just Dare Me
“Can’t be,” Charlotte says. “Their vamp just died. That would lift any compulsion.”
Nora shakes her head. “He wasn’t compelled. I know exactly what that feels like, trust me.”
“It’s magic,” Elle says. “If he has a master, maybe they spelled him to blank out certain subjects.”
“Fine,” I huff. “Forget about your master. Tell me about Tabitha Durran. Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit!”
Marco grasps at Nora’s hands, her wrists, her arms. “I swear it. We made sure no one would know.”
Nora recoils from him, trying to pull free. “Calm down. I believe you.”
Ilren pulls his sword. “Let her go.”
“It’s okay,” Nora says. “He won’t harm me.”
“Let her go, now!” Oliver demands.
“He won’t hurt me,” Nora insists, and finally she jerks her hands free and steps back from Marco. “It’s himself he wants to harm.”
“Himself?” Oliver asks, standing in front of Nora to shield her from Marco.
“He’s picturing himself burning by his own hands. It’s like he’s been programmed to resist any kind of interrogation.”
“A self-destruct button,” Charlotte says.
“I don’t know where Tabitha is. I don’t know. I don’t know,” Marco repeats. “Search my mind.”
“I believe you,” Nora says. “I read it in your thoughts. You all decided together. Tabitha would leave without telling any of you where she was going.”
Marco sighs with relief. “That’s right.”
“So there’s no need for you to hurt yourself. Agreed?”
He slumps back into the couch cushions. “Yes. Thank you.”
“This kind of self-destructive programming, it seems very specific, don’t you think?” Charlotte says.
I know exactly what she’s thinking, because this is Charlotte, the broken record. “Meaning, somebody knew we were coming down here with Nora Jacobs to read his mind. And there’s only one ‘somebody’ besides us who knew that.”
“Madison West,” she confirms, staring at me with hard eyes, challenging me to deny it, as I have every other theory she’s ever proposed.
But I don’t deny it. For the first time since I met Special Agent Hillerman of the UTF—maybe for the first time in my life withanyone—I listen and I thinkbeforeI speak. And in that one brief moment of hesitation, in which I allow my mind to open, to trust a proven friend over my own ego, a chain reaction of thoughts fires through my brain like lightning. With stunning clarity, a complete picture forms from the elusive puzzle pieces of this case. There’s no more ignoring it. I say to Charlotte what I should’ve been saying since she first sat in the passenger seat of my car a lifetime ago. “You’re right.”
As though the lightning chain reaction is arcing between our minds, she also puts together the complete picture, and says, “I know the secret to necromancy.”
“So do I.” The group holds its collective breath waiting for us to spell it out. “Ask him, Nora. Tell Marco Deus to give up the secret of necromancy.”
“But that would nullify my power,” he laments. “That would break my covenant to East Side.”
My heart races with the gravity of our predicament. “Doesn’t matter now, does it? You played the decoy long enough. It was never going to be you.”
“I don’t understand,” Nora says. “What is it, Marco? Tell us the secret to necromancy.”
He gives her a painful smile. “It’s so easy. That is, easy to know, but perhaps not to do. Unless you’re King Paul, of course. He was only too delighted to kill his own mother. But Madison couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see the awful truth. Not until I gave her the final clue. ‘It has to be you,’ I told her on that night, when the Agency decided I had to die. ‘It has to be you who kills me.’”
