Without Mercy (Mercy 1)

Ever admit to the murders?

She doubted it. Even Zach and Missy were screaming that their leader had no intention of killing anyone. But then they were blind and trusting, almost as if Spurrier were part of their family, like children who refuse to see the evil side of their parents.

Family loyalty was usually deep; sometimes to the point of the ridiculous. Just look how much she, herself, had gone through, the lies and deception, all for her sister.

She glanced at the area in front of the clinic, the trampled snow, the blood that sti

ll remained. The horses had been rounded up and were back in their stalls, once again safe under Bert Flannagan’s care. But the students involved in the attack would never forget, be changed forever.

As would she.

And Shay.

She changed her mind about returning to her suite and decided to check on her sister instead. There was something false about Shay’s reactions to the ordeal, and Jules wanted to be certain her sister was okay, that she would be able to put all this horror to rest and live a normal life.

Well, as normal a life as Shay could sustain.

Truth to tell, Jules was bothered by something else. Shay’s being able to leave today, within the hour, just didn’t ring true, despite Father Jake’s rationale.

Shaylee was known to lie, to bend the truth to her own way of thinking, to work Jules into doing what she wanted and damn the consequences. Her track record spoke for itself.

Shay might believe she was miraculously “cured” of the horror of being confined and kept hostage by Eric Rolfe, but Jules knew it would take years of therapy, if that, before her sister stopped playing the people around her, pretending that she was “just fine.” Deep in her heart, Jules wondered if Shay ever would be normal, whatever that was. Ever since Edie had remarried Rip Delaney, Jules’s father, Shay had been acting out, adolescence stealing the sweet child within. As Father Jake had said, “A pity.”

Jules hurried up the stairs of the empty dorm. It was still, other-worldly quiet with most of the students either being questioned in the admin building, or gathering in the cafeteria. Jules knocked on Shay’s door. “Hey, are you about ready?” Unlatched, the door opened of its own accord, swinging into the hallway.

Shay, alone, a cell phone jammed against her ear, jumped. Startled, she turned around to face the open door. “What the hell?” she demanded, angry, one hand knocking over her half-drunk can of soda. “Shit, Jules, you scared me!”

“Sorry,” Jules said, realizing her sister wasn’t as calm as she’d pretended. Jules pulled the door shut behind her as the Coke continued to gurgle from the can. “I thought—”

“I’ll call ya back, Dawg,” Shay said into Nona’s cell phone, the one she’d never returned, as she clicked off and turned to face Jules. “He’s out, you know. On bail,” she said with a grin.

“Maybe you should avoid him.” Jules walked to the desk, searching for something to clean up the mess.

“Right.” Without thinking, Shaylee grabbed a towel from her desk, dropped it over the spreading stain of dark soda, then placed her foot atop the towel and smoothed it over the floor.

Nudging the towel with her toe.

Sopping up the liquid. Slowly.

In an S formation.

As natural as if she did it all the time.

Jules, standing near the window, stared at Shay’s foot. The circular motion. Familiar. Dark.

Her heart nearly stopped beating.

In a flickering memory, one that she’d repressed for years, she saw her sister’s small boot-clad foot on another towel, dropped onto the floor near Rip Delaney’s body, covering a small stain of blood. Not blood that Jules had spilled from pulling the knife from her father’s body, but from the wound already there.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. In her mind’s eye, in jagged pieces she caught a glimpse of her father, lying dead, the knife in his leg, bleeding out from his femoral artery. She was already too late as she’d walked into the room with the flickering television screen and found Shay mopping up the blood with her foot. Jules had screamed and yanked out the butcher knife, but it had been too late.

What had been Shay’s excuse? She was trying to help?

The memory, so long a blur, was clear as glass.

Jules’s insides turned to ice.

It couldn’t be!