Bad Blood

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment. “Am I on speaker?” Briggs asked, his tone reminding me that he didn’t have his ex-wife’s impenetrable control.

  “You are.”

  Briggs processed Agent Sterling’s answer—and her tone—before proceeding. “What do we think the chances are that someone in the Gaither cult has ties to the Masters?”

  I registered the logic behind that question. We’d come to Gaither looking for members of one cult; we’d found another. Those people had been implicated in at least one set of murders—those of Anna and Todd Kyle. What were the chances that there were more victims? Lia’s situation was precarious enough, but if the Masters had a tie to Serenity Ranch, she could be in more danger than we knew.

  “The killings started today,” I said, reading into the fact that it had taken him this long to return Agent Sterling’s call. “Didn’t they?”

  “April second.” Sloane shivered. “4/2.”

  Briggs’s silence answered that question. Finally, he elaborated. “Victim was a female,” he said, clipping the words. “Early twenties, abducted from a college campus. She was found in an open field, strapped to a scarecrow’s post.”

  Burned alive, I filled in. I swallowed hard.

  “We can’t leave Gaither,” Dean told Briggs. “Not without Lia.”

  “I’m not asking you to.” Agent Briggs was the type of person who developed and executed plans, the type who never backed down. “You keep working the case in Gaither,” he continued. “Give Lia the chance to dig into Darby. And then, Ronnie?”

  Agent Sterling didn’t bat an eye at the nickname or the emotion that made its way into Briggs’s voice as he said it.

  “Get her out.”

  YOU

  You aren’t surprised when they come for you. You don’t remember the hours following your conversation with Five, but you remember his words. You knew that it was only a matter of time before you were asked to pass judgment.

  Of the nine seats at the table, four are filled at this midnight conference. Yours makes five.

  “There is a threat.” Five has laid his knife on the table for you to see. “I believe the situation to be worthy of the Pythia’s counsel.”

  There is a promise in his tone. He will slice and dice and cut and bleed you, then ask you whether your daughter and her friends should live or die.

  “There is no threat.” You speak like one who knows the truth of things, like one who has seen that which mortal eyes may never see.

  They pay you no heed.

  Two is on the verge of losing his seat to the acolyte. This may be his last chance to hear you scream, to burn you, if Five and his knife prove less than convincing. Four believes himself a man of great discernment. You can already feel his fingers closing in around your neck.

  It would be so easy to run and hide, deep inside your own head. To go away from this place—from the pain.

  “The FBI is closing in.” The fifth member of this quorum is the one who has never laid a hand on you. The one you loathe. The one you fear. “In my judgment, their very presence in Gaither makes this group a threat.”

  “They are not yours to judge.” Your voice is dangerous, low. This is the lie that you must sell. You are what they have made you. You are judge and jury, and without a fifth vote, they cannot put you through the rites.

  It will happen. Tomorrow, the next day at the latest, but for now…

  The door opens. You recognize the person who stands there, and you see now what you should have seen before.

  There are nine seats at the table. You sentenced Seven to die. You knew his seat would not remain empty. You knew that the Master who trained him would return to the fold.

  But you didn’t know…didn’t know…

  “Shall we begin again?” Five picks up his knife, his smile spreading.

  Six seats filled. Five votes, excluding yours.

  The next morning, we still hadn’t heard from Lia. If Ree noticed we were one short as we slid into our booth at the Not-A-Diner, she didn’t comment on it. “What can I get you?”

  “Just coffee.” Dean’s voice was barely audible. He hadn’t slept and wouldn’t until Lia was out of that place.

  “Coffee,” Ree repeated, “and a side of bacon. Cassie?”

  “Coffee.”

  Ree didn’t even ask Sloane and Michael what they wanted. She gave us a look. “I heard your friend has fallen under Holland Darby’s spell.”

  I wondered if she’d also heard—from her grandson—that we were with the FBI. You might not say anything if you had. You know how to keep a secret. You know when to keep your mouth closed.

  “Lia’s coming back.” Dean’s voice was quiet, but his expression was hard.

  Ree eyed Dean. “That’s what I thought when my daughter joined Darby’s flock. She split town, and I never heard from her again.”

  “You weren’t surprised when your daughter left.” Michael was entering dangerous territory, pressing Ree on this, but I let him do it.

  “Her daddy hightailed it out of Gaither when I was pregnant. Sarah was always more like him than me—full of big dreams and restless in her own skin, always looking for the promise of something more.”

  “Holland Darby is big on promises,” Dean commented, assessing Ree. “You’re not.”

  Ree pursed her lips. “We, every one of us, reap what we sow. I hope your friend makes it out, but don’t let her choices pull you down in the meantime. Life is full of drowning people, ready and willing to drown you, too.”

  The door to the diner opened. With a harrumph at the person who stood there, Ree disappeared back into the kitchen. Beside me, Dean laid one hand over mine.

  The person who’d just walked in was Kane Darby.

  I knew, from the moment that his gaze landed on our table, that he hadn’t seen me the day before at the apothecary museum, but that he recognized me now.

  “Gut-punched,” Michael told me under his breath, his eyes methodically scanning Kane’s face, his posture. “Like he can’t decide whether to smile or throw up.”

  Staring at the man, I could suddenly remember riding on his shoulders when I was very small. If Michael had read my expression, he probably would have said that I looked gut-punched, too.

  “If you need an icebreaker,” Sloane told me, pitching her voice in a whisper, “you should tell him that eighty percent of Americans believe that a weevil is similar to a weasel, when in reality, it’s a type of insect.”

  “Thanks, Sloane.” I squeezed Dean’s hand once, then stood, crossing the room until Kane Darby and I were standing face to face.

  “You look like your mother.” Kane’s voice was muted, like he thought I was a dream and if he spoke too loudly, he might wake up.

  I shook my head. “She was beautiful, and I’m…” I searched for the right words. “I can fade into the background. She never learned how.”

  I realized, as I said those words, that there was a part of me that had always believed that if my mother and I were more alike, if she’d been less of a performer, if she hadn’t been the center of attention just walking through a room, she might still be here.

  “Women shouldn’t have to fade into the background to be safe.” Kane’s response told me that he could read me, nearly as well as I could read him.

  “You heard what happened to my mom?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

  “It’s a small town.”

  I assessed him for a moment, then went straight for the jugular. “Why did my mother leave you? We were happy here. She was happy. And then we left, with no warning, in the middle of the night.” Until I’d said the words, I hadn’t realized that I had any memory of leaving Gaither, other than dancing with my mother on the side of the road.

  Kane looked at me, really looked at me this time, instead of just seeing my mom in my features. “Lorelai had every right to leave, Cassie, and every right to take you with her.”

  “What happened?” I repeated the question, h
oping for an answer.

  “This town wasn’t a good place for your mom, or for you. I kept things from her. I thought I could shield her from what it meant to be with me, here.”

  “Your father isn’t well-liked in Gaither.” I spoke out loud, instead of profiling him in my head. “You broke away from him, but you stayed local.” I thought back to the memory of Kane sweeping me into his arms after a nightmare. “When my mom and I left, you didn’t follow.”

  Did you resent her for leaving? Did you keep track of her? Did you find a way, years later, to make her yours?

  I couldn’t ask a single one of those questions out loud. So instead, I asked him about Lia.

  Kane glanced around the diner. “Can we take a walk?”

  In other words, he didn’t want an audience for what he was about to say. Knowing I would catch hell for it, I followed him out the door.

  “My father prizes certain things.” Kane waited until we were a block away from the diner before he began speaking. “Loyalty. Honesty. Obedience. He won’t hurt your friend. Not physically. He’ll just slowly become more and more important to her, until she’s not sure what she’d be without him, until she’ll do anything he asks. And any time she doubts herself or doubts him, there’ll be someone there to whisper in her ear about how lucky she is, how special.”

  “Were you lucky?” I asked Kane. “Special?”

  “I was the golden son.” His voice was so even, so controlled, that I couldn’t hear even a tinge of bitterness underneath.

  “You left,” I commented. When that didn’t engender a response, I pressed on. “What happens if Lia wants to leave?”

  “He won’t stop her,” Kane said. “Not at first.”

  Those three words sent a chill down my spine. Not at first.

  “I wish I could do something, Cassie. I wish that I’d had any right to keep your mother here, or to go after her once she was gone. But I am my father’s son. I made my choices long ago, and I accept what those choices have cost me.”

  I’d wondered why Kane Darby had stayed in Gaither. What if staying isn’t an act of loyalty? What if it’s penance? My mind traveled back to Mason Kyle, Kane Darby’s childhood friend.

  What choices did you make? What exactly are you repenting?

  “I never stopped thinking about you.” Kane stopped walking. “I know I wasn’t your father. I know that, to you, I’m probably just some guy who briefly dated your mom. But, Cassie? You were never just some kid to me.”

  My chest tightened.

  “So, please, listen to me when I say that you need to leave Gaither. It isn’t safe for you to be here. It isn’t safe for you to be asking questions. Your friend will be okay at Serenity, but you wouldn’t be. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “You’re telling me that your father is a dangerous man.” I paused. “And that my mother left this town for a reason.”

  YOU

  Five admires his handiwork as blood drips down your arms, your legs. It will be hours before the others return. Hours before they ask you if Cassie and her friends should die.

  No. No. No.

  That’s Lorelai’s answer. That will always be Lorelai’s answer. But Lorelai isn’t strong enough to bear this. Lorelai isn’t here right now.

  You are.

  There was a thin line between a warning and a threat. I wanted to believe that Kane Darby had been warning me, not threatening me, when he’d suggested I leave town, but if my time with the FBI had taught me anything, it was that violence didn’t always simmer just below the surface. Sometimes, the serial killer across from you quoted Shakespeare. Sometimes, the most dangerous people were the ones you trusted most.

  Kane Darby’s non-confrontational manner wasn’t any more natural than Michael’s tendency to wave red flags at any and all passing bulls. That kind of steadiness could have come from one of two places: either he’d grown up in an environment where emotion was seen as unseemly—and outbursts were punished accordingly—or staying calm had been his way of seizing control in an environment where someone else’s volatile emotions had served as land mines.

  As I rolled that over in my mind, Dean fell in beside me. “I made a promise to the universe,” he said, “that if Lia gets out of this unscathed, I’ll go forty-eight hours without brooding. I will purchase a colored T-shirt. I’ll sing karaoke and let Townsend pick out my song.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “Did you learn anything from talking to Darby’s son?”

  The answer to Dean’s question sat heavy and unspoken in my throat as we made our way down Main Street, past Victorian storefronts and historical markers, until the wrought-iron gate of the apothecary garden came into view.

  “Kane said that he was the golden son,” I said finally, finding my voice. “He blames himself for that. I think staying in Gaither was a form of penance for him—punishment for, and I quote, ‘choices’ he made ‘long ago.’”

  “You’re talking about him,” Dean observed. “Not to him.”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “Or,” Dean countered softly as we came to a stop outside the garden, “you’re scared to go too deep.”

  In the entire time I’d known him, Dean had never pushed me further into another person’s perspective than I wanted to go. At best, he curtailed his protective instincts, profiled with me, or got out of my way—but right now, I wasn’t the one that Dean would have given anything to protect.

  “You came very close to remembering something back at your old house. Something that a part of you is desperate to forget. I know you, Cassie. And I just keep thinking that if you forgot an entire year of your life, it wasn’t because you were little, and it wasn’t the result of some kind of trauma. You’ve been through two lifetimes of trauma, just since I’ve met you, and you haven’t forgotten a thing.”

  “I was a child,” I countered, feeling like he’d hit me. “My mother and I left in the middle of the night. We didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t say good-bye. Something happened, and we just left.”

  “And after you left”—Dean took my hand in his—“it was just you and your mother. She was all you had. You were her everything, and she wanted you to forget. She wanted you to dance it off.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked Dean.

  “I’m saying that I think that you forgot the life you lived in Gaither for her. I’m saying that I don’t think you’re the one that your brain was protecting. I think it was protecting the only relationship you had left.” Dean gave me a moment to process, then pushed on. “I’m saying that you couldn’t afford to remember the life you had here, because then you would have had to be angry that she took it away.” He paused. “You would have to be angry,” he continued, switching to the present tense, “that she made sure you never had that again. She made you the center of her life and herself the center of yours, and knowing what we know now—about the Masters, about the Pythia—I think you’re even more terrified than you were as a child about what might happen if you do remember Gaither.”

  “And that’s why I’m using the third person when I talk to you about Kane Darby?” I asked sharply, stepping past the gates and walking the stone path of the apothecary garden, Dean two steps behind me. “Because getting close to him might mean getting close to my mother? Because I might remember something I don’t want to know?”

  Dean walked behind me in silence.

  You’re wrong. I’d done everything I could to see my mother through a profiler’s eyes and not a child’s. She’d been a con woman. She’d made sure that I had no one to depend on but her.

  She’d loved me more than anything.

  Forever and ever, no matter what.

  “Maybe I did forget Gaither for her sake,” I said quietly, allowing Dean to catch up with me. “I was good at reading people, even as a kid. I would have known that she didn’t want to talk about it, that she needed to believe that none of it had mattered, that the two of us didn’t need anyone or anything else.”

  My mom
had let herself care about Kane Darby. She’d let him in—not just into her life, but into mine. Based on the rest of my childhood, she’d learned her lesson.

  What happened? Why did you leave him? Why did you leave Gaither?

  I came to a standstill in front of an oleander, its reddish pink blooms deceptively cheerful for a poisonous plant. “Kane said that Lia would be safe,” I told Dean, cutting to the heart of the matter. “For now.” I wanted to stop there, but I didn’t. “He also said that I wouldn’t be safe in her position.”

  “Darby doesn’t know who and what Lia is.” Dean captured my gaze, unwilling to let me look away. “If you wouldn’t be safe there, she’s not, either.” This was Dean asking me to stop pulling back, asking me to remember. And all I could think was that he shouldn’t have had to ask.

  I swallowed, my mouth dry as I began profiling Kane—the right way this time. “My mother once told you that she didn’t deserve you, but she didn’t know your secrets, the choices you had made.” Saying the words out loud made them real. I kept my gaze on Dean’s, let his deep brown eyes steady me, even as I could feel my entire life—my entire worldview—begin to shift under my feet. “You said that you didn’t deserve her, didn’t deserve us. But you wanted it—you wanted a family, and you were good at being there for her and for me.” Saying the words physically hurt, and I had no idea why. “There had to be some shred of that desire, some kernel of what it meant to be a family in your background. Setting aside loyalty, honesty, obedience, and any other buzzword that dominated your childhood, you cared about people. And because you cared, you did horrible things.”

  Kane Darby was a man who’d been punishing himself for decades. Maybe he’d let himself believe, when he’d met my mother, that it was finally enough. That he could have her. That he could have a family.