Janeal stormed out of the house, catching a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror on the way. She looked awful. Her brown eyes were the color of a murky sewer. Flat and sick. She hadn’t washed her hair in two days, and it was coming out of its clip in oily strings. Her new clothes didn’t fit her right.
Janeal averted her eyes. Worse than her physical appearance was the condition of her heart, which was braking and railing at such a spasmodic pace that she felt faint.
I have to go. I hate her. I hate myself.
But she knew not all of it was true, that she didn’t hate anyone but Janeal Mikkado, Jane Johnson, Janice Regan—the beast she had willingly become. She was miserable and lonely and broken and everything else Katie had said she was. Good, wise Katie, who had from the beginning only spoken the truth.
Janeal had never wanted to be anyone other than herself. Never. What was so wrong with that? What was so wrong with what she’d become?
She muttered aloud as she headed for her car. “She’s nothing, nothing, nothing. I did the right thing. I did. It was best. I’m okay.”
But deep within her, not even Jane Johnson could pretend that Janeal was okay. She was divided, worse than a split personality, standing against herself and—worse—faced with the possibility that her other self was wiser, superior, and more powerful in every way.
What if that was true? What if Janeal had, in fact, reached the apex of her power while Katie was still shooting upward toward the stars? What if Janeal spent the rest of her life running from horrors she’d created for herself, having to waste precious energy conspiring against people like Milan and evading people like Sanso and lying to people like Robert?
All to preserve this miserable life.
The what-ifs only made her head murkier.
She fished her keys out of the bag as she marched down the driveway and walked the distance to the Kia. It seemed farther away than she remembered. When she came around the corner, a crumbling asphalt pavement that gave way to a sloping bank of grassy dirt, she stopped short. A police officer was speaking to a tow-truck operator, who was raising the Kia onto the truck’s flatbed.
They’d found her already? Robert had promised!
She dropped her head and turned around before she was noticed. The truth was, Robert hadn’t promised her anything.
She headed back toward the cabin without intending to return there, but she didn’t know where else to go. Her mind was confused, her heart still palpitating, and now she was in a sweat without her transportation.
Without her freedom.
Had Janeal ever truly been free? She thought she had, ever since she drove away from Salazar Sanso the first time with a real million dollars in the trunk of her father’s vandalized car.
Janeal stopped walking. Stopped in the middle of the road and wondered what her life might have been like if she’d never gone with Sanso the night he first approached her on the mesa.
A flash of fuchsia and gold drew her eye to the home she was standing in front of. An old woman sat on the porch in a rocker. The late afternoon sun glanced off her brightly colored skirt, which is what Janeal had noticed. The clothing seemed familiar.
So did the wrinkled brown hands, folded across the wide lap. And the long gray hair brushed smooth down the woman’s breast to her lap. She smiled at Janeal, a smile that should have been decayed at her age but instead was supernaturally straight and bright.
Mrs. Marković.
There are two chambers in every heart, one for Judas and one for John. One must be pumped out, or you will both die.
A car horn screamed behind Janeal. She whirled to face it. The impatient driver shrugged as if to say, Are you gonna stand there all day?
Breathless, Janeal took three steps out of his way, three steps toward Mrs. Marković, who should have been long dead.
The driver made a point of aggressively accelerating, and Janeal ignored him. She looked back to the porch, where an empty rocker now tipped back and forth.
This time, Janeal would not let her go so easily. She burst through the chain-link gate and the front of the yard and ran up the path to the swaying chair, then pounded on the door behind it. When no one answered, she pressed her forehead to the sidelights, trying to detect movement inside. She pounded again.
“Hello? Mrs. Marković?”
Janeal could be a patient woman when she wanted to be. She kept at it.
After several minutes, the door opened. A harried young woman with a baby on each hip glared at Janeal. One of the children was screaming. The other eyed Janeal curiously.
“I don’t want what you’re selling. I just want these guys to nap more than five minutes.”
“I need to speak to the woman who was on your porch.”
“What woman?”
“Mrs. Marković. She was right here.”
“No one here by that name.”
“I saw her—”
“I don’t know what you saw, okay? I don’t know who she was or why she was here or where you can find her.”
The screaming baby kicked it up a notch. The other babbled and handed a teether out to Janeal like a gift.
She looked at him and said to his mother, “I’m sorry I woke them.”
The woman set her lips in a line. “If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else.”
Janeal’s gaze shifted to the unhappy child. “Twins?”
“Yeah. As alike as angels and demons. I really have to go.”
She shut the door.
Janeal stood immobile on the porch for a full minute before her ringing phone snapped her out of her thoughts.