For the last two years, we’d all missed Jeb so much, with a horrible, aching, wailing pain that just wouldn’t stop. You know—like if your dad or mom died. It had been so awful in the beginning, when he hadn’t come home, and then when we’d had to accept that he never would.
Dead or alive, he’d been my hero. Every day. For the last four years.
Now my eyes were telling me that he was one of them. That maybe he’d been one of them all along. That everything I’d ever known or felt about him had been a rotten, stinking lie.
Now Angel’s words, her fear, her tears, made horrible sense. She’d known.
I was dying to look at her, at Fang or Nudge, to see their reactions.
I just wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
Like a door slamming shut, everything in me that had loved and trusted Jeb closed down. In its place rose new feelings that were so powerful and full of hate that they scared me.
Which is saying something.
“I know you’re surprised,” he said with a smile. “Come on. I need to talk to you.”
He unlatched my dog door and held it open. In a nanosecond, I had a plan of action: not to act. Just to listen and watch. To absorb everything and give out nothing.
Okay, as a plan, it wasn’t the blueprint of Westminster Abbey, but it was a start.
Slowly, I climbed out of my crate. My muscles groaned when I stood up. I didn’t look at any of the flock when I passed, but I put my right hand behind my back, two fingers together.
It was our sign that said “Wait.”
Jeb had taught it to us.
61
Jeb and I walked past a bank of computers, out of sight of the others. A door in the far wall led into a smaller, less lablike room furnished with couches, a table and chairs, a sink, microwave.
“Sit down, Max, please,” he said, gesturing to a chair. “I’ll get us some hot chocolate.” He said it casually, knowing it was my favorite, as if we were in the kitchen back home.
“Max, I have to tell you—I’m so proud of you,” he said, putting mugs in the microwave. “I just can’t believe how well you’ve done. No, I can believe it—I knew you could do it. But seeing you so healthy, so powerful, such a good leader, well, it just makes me so proud.”
The microwave beeped, and he set a steaming mug on the table in front of me. We were in a top-secret facility in the middle of Death Valley, officially called “freaking nowhere” on any map, and yet he managed to produce marshmallows, plopping two into my cup.
I looked at him steadily, ignoring the hot chocolate, which was making my stomach growl.
He paused as if to give me time to reply, then sat down across from me at the table. It was Jeb—my brain finally accepted the inescapable truth. I recognized the fine pink scar on his jawline, the slight bend to his nose, the tiny freckle on his right ear. This was not his evil twin. It was him. He was evil.
“You must have so many questions,” he said. “I don’t even know where to start. I just—I’m just so sorry about this. I wish I could explain—wish I could have explained two years ago, to you, if no one else. I wish I could explain what I’d give just to see you smile again.”
How about your head on a stick?
“But in time, Max, it will all come out, and you’ll understand what’s happening. That’s what I told Angel. I told her that everything is a test, even when you don’t know it. That sometimes you just have to do what you have to do and know it will all be clearer later. All of this has been a test.” He waved his hand vaguely, as if to encompass my entire experience.
I sat there, conscious that my sweatshirt was crusted with blood, that my face hurt, that I was hungry again—quelle surprise—and that I had never, ever wanted to kill anyone more, not even last summer when Iggy had shredded my only, favorite pair of non-Goodwill pants to make a fuse long enough to detonate something from fifty feet away.
I said nothing, had no expression on my face.
He glanced at me, then at the closed door. “Max,” he said, with a new tone of urgency in his voice. “Max, soon some people will come in to talk to you. But I need to tell you something first.”
That you are the devil incarnate?
“Something I couldn’t tell you before, something I thought I’d have time to prepare you for later.”
He looked around, as if to make sure no one else could hear. Guess he was forgetting all our surveillance lessons, about hidden mikes and heat sensors that can see through walls, and long-distance listening devices that could pick up a rat sneeze from a half mile away.