CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT #2
“It’s okay,” Kate said softly. “Take my hand.”
Emily lifted her hand and moved it slowly toward Kate. Below, the noise of the crowd surged in hopeful anticipation. Behind Kate, Coulter and her officers muttered their surprise.
Emily stopped halfway to Kate’s hand. She looked at Kate and smiled through her tears. “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.”
Kate’s chest froze. “Emily, no—”
Emily jumped. Kate cried out and lunged forward, missing the woman’s hand by millimeters. The crowd below and behind exclaimed in horror.
Kate grabbed the rope and gripped it tightly. The rope seared her palms, and she screamed in agony but didn’t let go. When the rope finished uncoiling through her fingers, she was yanked forward into the rail. It slammed into her hips hard enough to send a tremor through her legs.
She looked over the edge. Emily dangled forty feet below. Her legs jerked and twitched, and her arms scrabbled instinctively at her neck. The rope hadn’t broken her neck as intended but was instead suffocating the life out of her slowly.
Kate planted her feet, grimacing at the pain in her hands. Blood trickled out from her palms, and when she tried to lift Emily, the blood caused her hands to slip.
“Help me!” she called to Coulter. “Help me pull her up!”
“You’re only making the rope tighter around her neck,” Coulter said. Her eyes and those of her officers were as wide as dinner plates. “If we pull her up, we’ll just cut off any remaining blood flow.”
Kate looked back over the edge. Emily was still kicking, but her arms were weakening in their attempts to loosen the rope. “Damn it.”
She called Marcus, who answered immediately. “Kate, are you all right?”
The brief glimpse Kate got of her palms when she dialed the number told her that her hands would be in bandages for at least two weeks after this, but she didn’t care to dwell on that right now. “Get a trampoline underneath her now!”
Marcus paused but only for a half-second. “Hey! Fire Department! Trampoline, stat!”
A wave of love for him washed through Kate, pure and warm and strong.
He trusted her. No matter how crazy she got, no matter how obsessed, no matter how committed to the impossible, Marcus trusted her.
That’s why she wanted him. That’s why she was attracted to him.
That’s why she wanted to be more than friends.
All the rest was just delicious icing on top of a big, warm, fluffy cake of a man who trusted her.
She pulled her knife and held it to the rope. Coulter saw her and cried out, “Hey, what the hell are you doing?”
“Saving her life,” Kate said.
“What?”
One of the other officers put a hand on her shoulder. “They’re getting a trampoline.”
“Jesus Lance Henriksen Christ,” Coulter muttered. “You are one crazy bitch.”
She said it with admiration, but Kate didn’t think she was admirable. Just stubborn.
The firefighters spread the trampoline below Emily. The murderer was still kicking weakly, but her arms had fallen limp at her sides.
Kate sawed at the rope. It was a plastic cable, threads twisted into twine twisted into ropes twisted into a thick cable. The thickness was probably what saved Emily’s neck from being broken, but it also made cutting through the plastic next to impossible, even for Kate’s sturdy utility knife.
The plastic threads snapped free one at a time with ephemeral twangs.
The air wafting around Kate from the rotors stung her eyes and sent dust into her nose.
Snot trickled downward, and though the night was warm, a chill ate through her shirt and caused goosebumps to rise on her chest and shoulders.
Her shoulder burned as she cut. It felt like she had been slicing into the plastic forever, but when she looked at the rope, she was barely halfway through. She released a soft cry of anguish and looked down.
Emily wasn’t moving.
“Shit!” she cursed. “Shit!”
She cut faster, ignoring the burn in her shoulder, ignoring the voice in her head—Cox’s, of course—that told her it was pointless. God’s will would be done whatever pitiful resistance she provided.
“You’re not God,” she whispered.
That phrase, simple, obvious, powerful, lent her strength. Her arm pistoned back and forth, and the plastic threads separated faster and faster, two, then three at a time.
With each stroke, she imagined another of the bonds tying her to Cox separating.
His escape, the murders he committed while she hunted him.
Their first fight, when he tried to kill her by burning a church around them.
The disciples and the murders they committed in his name.
Robert Denton, Cox’s first student, who had nearly killed her over ten years ago.
Peter S. Gadd, possibly her father’s murderer, possibly also Cox’s student, possibly Cox’s mentor, possibly just another psychopath who couldn’t find a way to fill the emptiness in his soul.
Each snapping thread was severance from the hold he so desperately wanted to have on her. Each separated twine was freedom from the clutch of his nails scrabbling for purchase in her mind.
You’re not God. I am not your spotted calf. I am not your scapegoat. I don’t belong to you.
The knife flinched as the last thread was cut. The rope fell away, and Kate sank to her knees and cried up to the sky as tears streamed down her cheeks. She took a deep breath of clean, cool air and didn’t care that it caused more mucus to stream from her nostrils.
Her phone buzzed. She answered. Marcus. “Kate, you beautiful bastardess, you. You did it.”
Kate laughed. She wiped the snot from her nose with her sleeve and looked down. Emily was sitting up on the trampoline, the rope removed from around her neck. Her hands were cuffed behind her, and when the paramedics tried to help her stand, she went to her knees and had to be lifted onto a gurney.
But she was alive. Cox had failed. His mission had been left incomplete.
And Kate was free.