New Year Island (75 page)

Straightening into a ready stance, JT raised his fists. He peered into the darkness, straining to see.

Keeping out of the light, the silhouetted figure circled toward him along the wall of the cistern, staying low. Puffs of steam rose into the cold air: the intruder’s breaths, a steady panting.

“Hello, JT,” Veronica said.

“I
t’s illogical to hate survivors,” Camilla said. “Nobody lives forever.”

She stared up into Brent’s forbidding, impassive face, needing to understand why they were here, why he had done this to them. She didn’t believe any of the reasons he had given them so far. She chose her words carefully.

“Whether we’re survivors or not doesn’t matter in the end. We
all
die, Brent. It’s inevitable.”

He hung in front of her, chained to the wheel, his wet suit-clad arms stretched wide. The chains around them looked tight—agonizing, if Brent had been capable of feeling pain. His eyes rose to meet hers, and she could see no antagonism in his face—only fatherly affection.

Mason stepped up beside Camilla, grinning. Her stomach coiled in disgust.

“You’re not like
him,
” she said to Brent. “I know you can love.”

Brent lowered his head. She tried to see his face, but couldn’t.

“Survival isn’t about the individual,” she said to him. “It serves only one purpose. We survive so we can care about each other and help each other. So we can pass on what’s best in us to future generations.”

She laid a hand on his chained wrist. He raised his head, and she looked into his eyes.

“You’ve already done that, Brent. I know you’re estranged from your family and haven’t seen them for years, but that doesn’t matter. Your son—he’s a part of you. He always will be, no matter what. Don’t you see?—you’re a survivor, too. You’ll live on through your son…”

“That’s right.” Brent’s eye twitched. “When the biopsies came back positive after the second drastic course of chemotherapy—when all the alternative therapies I tried failed to arrest the disease—I told myself that. I finally understood I was not one of nature’s select ten percent. I was not a survivor. But I made my peace with dying.”

He leaned his head back against the wheel, looking at her steadily.

“Because of the restraining order, I could only watch his progress from afar—the way I watched yours, Camilla. But I
loved
my son. He was my legacy…”

Camilla closed her eyes.

“…and then Jonathan met Jordan,” she said.

M
ason erupted in surprised laughter. Camilla stared at him in shock. His eyes were bright with amusement.

“Love
and
revenge,” he said. “How classic. And how boring. We had made him out to be some kind of monster, Camilla. But he’s only a bitter, grieving, lonely old man.”

“Mason, stop!” she said. “That’s enough.”

More pieces were falling into place for her now. She looked at Brent, trying not to hate him for what her own role in this meant. What it said about Camilla herself.

Mason faced Brent, grinning. “I think you’ve got this whole ‘survivor-guilt’ thing backward,” he said. “But how Jordan must have intimidated you, old man… How she must have
terrified
you. Because of the restraining order, you had to watch from the sidelines while she chewed Jonathan up and spit him out like a woodchipper.”

He laughed again—a bright and manic sound that split the pregnant silence.

“She drained the life out of your boy and discarded the empty husk that was left. When he killed himself, she hardly noticed.”

“There’s no reason for this,” Camilla said, trying to pull him away. “He’s suffered enough.”

Mason resisted her tug on his arm.

“You already
knew
she was a survivor type, didn’t you? You’d done your homework. Even before you got sick, you’d been collecting survivors for years, and keeping track of them. They fascinated you, didn’t they? They were everything you could never be.”

“Stop,” Camilla said. “Be better than him.”

Brent’s face was utterly white. He seemed incapable of speech.

“So, father of the groom… did you violate the court order to try and warn your son about her?” Mason leaned into Brent’s face and screamed with laughter. “I can see that you did. But he wouldn’t listen, would he? When Jordan turned her personality on full force, she got her way.
Always.
”

Dmitry stirred, awakened by the commotion. He gripped his forehead and sat up, looking puzzled. Turning her back on Brent and Mason, Camilla went to help him.

Mason paced back and forth in front of Brent like a trial lawyer in a courtroom, grandstanding for the jury.

“When Jordan got bored with Jonathan,” he said, “the sun must have gone out in his world. And Jonathan was needy. Weak.” He chuckled. “After all, he was a chip off the old block. Like father, like son.”

Camilla had had enough. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said to Mason.

She slipped an arm under Dmitry’s shoulder and helped him stand. He swayed.

“Oh, I get it, all right,” Mason said. “You have to admire his ambition. He decided to fight fire with fire.”

He turned to grin into Brent’s face. “You asked yourself what it would take to kill a survivor, and the answer was obvious:
other
survivors.”

Spinning to face her with realization dawning in his eyes, he cupped his chin in one palm.

“There’s your answer to what the final game was going to be: ‘The Most Dangerous Game.’ He was going to have the rest of
us
hunt Jordan. Eight survivors against one. To the death.”

Reaching into his pocket, Mason pulled out a knife and flipped it open.

“JT’s,” he said.

With his other hand, he pulled out another, similar knife, and flicked it open, also. He grinned at Camilla. “Veronica’s.”

“Mason, put those down right now!” Camilla said.

“And finally, we know why
I’m
here.” Mason winked at her. “Why he included me. I was his insurance policy. Even if the rest of you survivors failed to get Jordan, he figured I would.”

He limped over to stand before Brent. “How were you going to con us all into going after Jordan? Oh, well, I don’t suppose it matters now.”

Mason grinned a soulless, horrifying grin.

“Surgery is open, Doctor. But I’m afraid
you’re
the patient this time.”

C
amilla let go of Dmitry, and he slumped to his knees. Heart pounding, she crossed the floor to grab Mason’s arm again. Heedless of the knives he held, she spun him around to face her.

“You really don’t get why he brought us here,” she said. “How could someone like you possibly understand?”

He raised an eyebrow, puzzled.

“You were just another exhibit in the menagerie he put together for her,” she said. “This wasn’t about
killing
Jordan. That wouldn’t have been enough. First, she had to learn to see herself the way he saw her. Brent wanted her to
hate
herself.”

She pictured Jordan’s face at the end: emotionless, cold, withdrawn.

“We were supposed to be a mirror, weren’t we?” she said to Brent. “You brought the rest of us here, turned us on each other, and shoved us in Jordan’s face to show her what she really was.”

She covered her hand with her mouth. “That’s why Jordan isolated herself. She figured it out. Oh god, she
knew
.”

Had Jordan really thought Camilla was the same as Mason? As Veronica?

Was
she?

She recalled Jordan’s words on the beach, from the last time she had seen her alive:
“I’m really sorry he brought you here, Camilla, because you don’t deserve this.”

“We all liked her,” she said. “We would have found a way to pull together again. We would have listened to her. She would have beat you in the end, Brent.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them back.

“If it weren’t for Juan. If only Jordan hadn’t fallen in love with him.”

V
eronica moved into the light. Fog from her breath chuffed out of her mouth in deep, steady pants. Her pale silver eyes were luminous, burning with their own inner fire. Her lips curled in a hungry openmouthed smile.

She looked bat-shit insane to JT.

He made his voice as soothing as he could. “We got him, Veronica. It was Brent all along. You’re safe now.”

Veronica snorted. “You’re making my head hurt.I know goddamn well it wasn’t Brent.”

She tossed her head in an impatient predatory motion.

“You know what I think?” she said. “It’s all of you together. This is some sick, secret little men’s-club adventure. Male bonding. You’re taking turns tormenting and killing the poor women you lured here.”

A cloud of flies rose from Julian’s slumping, squirming corpse and swirled in the air between them. Veronica’s pupils dilated. She licked her teeth in unnatural excitement, circling toward him.

“Jesus Christ, woman.” JT shook his head slowly. “You’re disturbed.”

“And
you
don’t find any of this disturbing? Figures.” She laughed, sexy and sultry. “Men.”

She tilted her head sideways so her chopped gothic mop of hair hung over her cheek. Staring at him with her bulging eyes, her features twisted in horrible amusement.

“Look at you, JT—you were a good-looking kid, but not any more. Now you’re a sideshow freak.” Her voice dripped with malice. “Big, tough Marine… a woman half your size kicked your ass. I
ruined
you. I popped your eye like a fucking grape.”

Anger surged through his body, but he fought it down.

“You’ve lost your shit completely,” he said. “You need serious help.”

“
Help?
JT, if someone did that to
my
eye, I wouldn’t stand there like a fucking pussy asking them if they needed my help. You know what I’d do to them?”

Her voice rose, harsh and strident, echoing from the walls around him.

“I’d kill them. I swear to
God
, I’d destroy them. I’d cave in their face, crush their skull, twist their head around backward, rip their heart right out of their body…”

She shook her head sadly at him, moving forward with her arms raised.

Her voice dropped to a seductive purr.

“But that’s me.”

T
he mouth of the ravine lay before Juan, opening into blue water. He scanned the water above, ahead, and all around him. Seeing nothing, he kicked cautiously forward to glide out into the blue.

Point of no return.

“L
ove’s a funny thing,” Mason said. “I can’t say I really understand it. But if this is the kind of thing that happens because of it, then I’m probably better off the way I am.”

“That’s not true,” Camilla said. “I’m sorry for you, too, Mason.”

“Don’t be. I’m always happy.” He walked up to Brent with a knife in each hand. “But
he
looks glum. Let’s give him a great big smile that shows off those pearly whites.”

A droning noise interrupted him. Camilla’s eyes widened at the familiar sound, but it took her a moment to place it: the buzz of a cell phone set to vibrate. She looked down at the floor, where Mason had left Brent’s touch-screen phone.

Brent’s expression changed. He grinned, and she understood who was truly in control here. The blood drained from her face. He had been biding his time, waiting for this call.

He nodded toward the broad plank wall above her head.

“Take that panel off,” he said. “I think you’ll all want to see this.”

Mason and Dmitry lifted away a six-foot section of shiplap paneling from the wall and set it aside. They stepped back to reveal another large flat-screen monitor that had been concealed behind it.

The screen flickered to life, revealing a blue and watery scene.

Camilla’s hand flew to her mouth.

A wet-suited diver kicked out of a narrow canyon in the sloping seafloor, out into blue water. Behind him, a small red LED began to blink rapidly from a recess in the edge of the canyon wall. Concealed amid the rocks all around him, small packages of electronics came to life. Green LEDs flickered. Lenses focused silently.

With his senses intent on the water ahead of him, Juan did not appear to see them.

Camilla’s stomach clenched in dread but she could do nothing but watch.

She had no way to warn him.

O
utside the mouth of the channel, the rocky slope dropped away. Juan kicked out into blue water, feeling exposed and vulnerable. The greater depth made it hard to breathe, the increased water pressure on his chest hurting his injured lung with every inhalation. His head swam with dizziness and he shook it away.

He had to stay alert now. He was leaking blood—a magnet for hungry sharks. It was only a matter of time until one of them found him.

But would that be so bad? It would be an end to the way he felt. He would just become part of the food chain—one more animal that had lost the struggle for survival. He wouldn’t have to live any longer with what he had done. Wouldn’t have to see Jordan’s face every time he closed his eyes.

But he thought of Dmitry, JT, Mason. And Camilla, her sleeping face so innocent and caring.

Juan’s jaw clenched. He would not let
her
die here.

Now he could see the entrance to another ravine, branching away in a V from the channel he had swum out of. The second canyon angled back toward the island, providing a relatively safe route that would undoubtedly lead him to his destination: Brent’s hidden cave.

But something else caught Juan’s eye. He turned away from safety to stare out into the blue.

A vast, dark, spidery shape hung there at the limit of visibility, spreading across his entire field of vision. Like a giant underwater tree hundreds of feet wide, it faded into the murky distance on each side. Heavy anchor chains, bolted to the rocks nearby, trailed into the blue toward the looming branches of the tree. Glints of light reflected at regularly spaced intervals above the branches: silver float-barrels, holding the sprawling web of chains suspended in mid-water.