Mara goes home the next day and sinks into an extreme depressive state. She refuses to get up for days on end and barely eats. Her mom *gasp* doesn’t immediately try to have her institutionalized, and instead says that her birthday probably stirred up a lot of bad memories about losing her best friend, and that they’ll wait a few days before getting worried enough to take action.

Again, Mara’s guilt-ridden depression is not half-bad, as far as the writing goes. But then, that part has always been pretty decent.

Noah comes by to visit and reads children’s books with dirty lines slipped in. Why? No clue. He doesn’t even try to talk to her first, he just goes straight to dirty tales because reasons.

After Noah stops acting like an ass while assuming it’s funny, Mara spontaneously tells him everything. This prompts Noah to spontaneously tell her that he’s got magic, too! He sometimes hears/sees/experiences other people. First it was a girl who got hit by a car, then it was a sick boy. Then, he heard Mara’s voice and saw only her hands during the asylum incident. Hearing her voice was what first made him obsessed with her.

Then he had more visions, first of a guy going through documents, and second of Joseph being kidnapped. It was only with Joseph that he finally realized he was really seeing real stuff, since they found him in that spot.

Okay, I see two main problems here:

1. If you were drawn to Mara because you heard her voice in your visions, why did you react to her with “hey, there, sexy” instead of “o.O”?
2. If the thing with Joseph really happened, why did you react with “pretend it didn’t happen” instead of “HOLY SHIT, MARA, SOMEONE KIDNAPPED YOUR BROTHER LAST NIGHT, LIKE WTF, DID YOU TELL YOUR PARENTS? BUT WHY NOT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!”

See, this is a nice little turn, but the book was so invested in Mara’s “am I crazy” storyline that it forgot to leave any room for Noah’s reveal. When we look backwards with this information, nothing is actually illuminated, it just gets more confusing, because it wasn’t properly set up. This is actually a common problem with twist endings; too much effort was made to make sure we never saw it coming, and the act of keeping it vague actually makes the reveal nonsense. (I had this problem at lot with Leverage, too, but at least they were fun enough to make me not care.)

Noah admits that he wondered if he knew where Joseph was because he took him, but now he’s convinced he didn’t. Mara says “then who did” and Noah says they should find out. Again, why was this not a priority…you know, back when it actually happened?

Oh, Noah also has super hearing and can heal people. He fixed Mara’s burn and her shoulder with magic.

Mara is upset that Noah can heal people and she can only kill people, so she asks Noah to fix whatever is wrong with her, but he says he can’t because she isn’t broken. And I know he means that her magic isn’t a “broken”ness about her, but she also admits (in her narration) that she does have some mental problems that are just heaped on top of the magic and only some of her hallucinations are magic instead of actually seeing stuff. So, like, there’s still some stuff he could fix, right?

Or does the book not consider depression to be an actual illness? Noah’s healing powers work on everything except brains?

Noah stays the night at her house and sneaks into her room to sleep (not that kind of sleep) with her. They stay up late speculating about their superpowers.

Mara finally decides that they should go back to the Lukumi, because that guy obviously knew something was up and also made that drug that helped her. Except I’m still pretty suspect, since the book didn’t bother to write out a great reveal and instead it feels like she simply stopped being in denial more than she actually remembered anything. Spending 8 hours acting like you’re drunk only to wake up and then know things you already knew doesn’t seem like a great recommendation.

Noah shares my suspicions, but he doesn’t have a better idea so they agree to go back anyway.