Page 53 of Stay Away from Him

Fear spread icy-hot over the surface of Melissa’s skin when she saw them, and in that moment, she realized just how much trouble they all were in, how far gone Kendall really was.

They were just a couple pieces of plastic, something anyone could buy online, the instruments of horror and violence just a few clicks away.

You didn’t have zip ties in your possession unless you were planning on doing something with them—unless you thought about killing every day, yearned for it.

Melissa understood something about Kendall then: understood that her first two kills might have been accidents, of a kind, but that it had become more serious since then.

Maybe she’d pushed the boy off the cliff out of a sense of curiosity, a desire to find out what would happen; maybe she’d stabbed her mother to death in anger over the revelation that she’d cheated on Thomas.

But she’d grown a taste for killing then—and now, it was hard to imagine that they’d get out of this situation without someone dying.

Kendall nodded to the zip ties. “Put those on. I’m not stupid. I’m not going to let you get up here and attack me.”

“Okay,” Melissa said. “Okay. I’m doing it.”

She held out her hands to Rhiannon, wrists together. “Come on. Put it on.”

She knelt, grabbed a zip tie, looped it around Melissa’s wrists. The latch snapped as it zipped snug.

“Tighter,” Kendall said.

Rhiannon winced. “Sorry,” she whispered, then pulled the tie tighter, until the plastic cut against Melissa’s skin.

“You too, Rhiannon,” Kendall said.

Melissa helped with the tips of her fingers as Rhiannon looped a tie around her own wrist, then used her teeth to pull it tight.

“There,” she called up. “You happy?”

“Melissa, you come up,” Kendall said. “Rhiannon, you stay down there.”

Melissa turned and walked up the way she’d come. Without the use of her hands for balance, she stumbled and nearly fell on her way up the steep grade but managed to keep her feet beneath her. At the top, she circled the lip of the hollow toward Kendall and Bradley.

“Send him here,” Melissa called. “Then you can have me.”

Kendall grinned. “You really think I’m stupid, don’t you? You’re not getting him back. Just a closer look when I kill him.”

She tugged at Bradley’s collar, pulling him close. Brought the knife around. Agony gripped Melissa’s body, and her legs went weak. She dropped to her knees.

“No!” she screamed.

And then Kendall’s hand stopped.

“What are you doing here?” Kendall asked.

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 the conviction 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 hide here , 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— her place, 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 out her 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—Melissa was 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.

Melissa tugged her wrists apart, but the zip tie wouldn’t break. She couldn’t free her hands. And Amelia was running out of time.

Melissa moved fast, outrunning her ability to think or plan.

She darted behind Kendall and looped her wrists around her neck, pulling her back.

She didn’t want to choke the girl, only get her off Amelia.

First Kendall resisted, but then her weight lifted beneath Melissa.

She shifted her momentum and then wasn’t just coming up but actually launching herself backward, kicking her head back.

Melissa saw a flash of white as Kendall’s skull knocked against her forehead.

Then Kendall’s whole back caught Melissa’s chest like a battering ram, and they were flying together.

They landed in a heap on the ground. Melissa’s spine lit up with pain, and all the air went out of her. She wheezed as Kendall rolled off her, struggling to take a breath—and then Kendall was launching through the air, her face a picture of snarling rage.

By some instinct Melissa rolled to the side and got to her knees, oxygen finally filling her lungs. Kendall scrabbled up and stabbed out with the knife, making a straight line with her arm directly toward Melissa’s torso.

Melissa didn’t think, just moved—twisted her body, her arms, quicker and more gracefully than she thought possible.

Kendall’s arm shot into the loop made by her arms and her bound wrists, slicing the air all the way past her shoulder.

Melissa was a needle, Kendall’s arm the thread.

And when Kendall was tangled all the way into her, about to withdraw her arm and stab again, Melissa pulled her wrists back with all her might.

She caught Kendall’s forearm in the crook made by her wrists and the zip tie, pulled it hard against her shoulder.

She heard a crack. Kendall screamed. The knife fell. Melissa let go.

“You bitch!” Kendall yelled, staggering back, cradling her wrist. “You broke my fucking arm!”

“I’m sorry,” Melissa said—and she really was. She didn’t want to hurt anyone.

Kendall kept on staggering backward until her back hit a tree trunk, and then she sank to the ground, sobbing.

“Oh, God!” she yelled. The bobbing flashlights were getting closer now. The shouts.

“I didn’t mean to.” Her voice was hoarse, weak, and looking at her, Melissa almost felt sorry for her.

Almost believed her, that this was all a big mistake.

“I didn’t want any of this! I can’t help the way I am.

Oh my God, these things I’ve done. I didn’t know how to stop, don’t you see? Why didn’t anyone help me?”

Amelia walked to her, sank to her haunches, put a hand on Kendall’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Kendall leaned toward her, and Amelia caught her in a hug.

“I’m sorry,” the girl sobbed into her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Mom. Mom, I’m so sorry…”

Kendall’s mother wasn’t there to forgive her. The dead don’t speak. But Amelia didn’t correct her. “I know, sweetie. I know you’re sorry. Just hush now. Help is coming. You hear? We’re going to help you. You won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.”

Melissa fell to her knees, sat back on her heels, exhausted down to her bones.

And they stayed like that, a tableau in the middle of the woods—Kendall crying, Amelia comforting her.

After a moment, Melissa stood and moved into the darkness of the trees—stumbling through the undergrowth. Pressing toward light, toward hope. Toward her son, the boy she’d die to protect.