Bad Blood

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  But yours will never let you go.

  I thought about Kane trying to intervene with Shane, trying to mitigate his own father’s harm. And then I thought about Dean, standing beside me in this garden, his blond hair falling into his face. What Kane had been to my mother, Dean was to me. Like Kane, Dean had spent years keeping a tight rein on his emotions. He’d spent years convinced that there was something dark and twisted inside of him, and that if he wasn’t careful, he would someday become his father.

  All of us had a way of regaining the control that life had taken from us. For Sloane, it was numbers. For Lia, it was keeping her true self buried beneath layers of lies. Michael intentionally provoked anger instead of waiting for someone else’s fuse to blow. Dean did everything he could to keep his emotions in check.

  And I use knowing things about people as an excuse to keep them from knowing me.

  Becoming a part of the Naturals program had meant letting a piece of that control go. For years, you were my everything. I wasn’t talking to Kane now. I was talking to my mother. You kept me from my father’s family. You made me the center of your world and yourself the center of mine.

  I wrapped my arms around Dean’s neck. I felt his pulse, steady against mine. His fingertips traced the edge of my jaw. I pressed my lips to his, let them part. I tasted and wanted and felt him, and I remembered:

  Mommy kissing Kane—

  The first day of school—

  Coloring at Ree’s—

  Melody, in the garden. “What’s the matter, scaredy-cat?” Melody is pigtails and skinned knees and bossy hands on bossy hips. “It’s just the poison garden!” She squats down next to a plant. “If you don’t come in, I’m going to eat this leaf. I’ll eat it right up and die!”

  “No, you won’t,” I say, taking a step toward her. She plucks a leaf off the plant and opens her mouth.

  “You kids stop horsing around in there!”

  I turn around. There’s an old man standing behind us. He looks mad and mean, and he’s wearing long sleeves, even though it’s summer. Rough white lines and ugly puckered pink ones snake out from underneath his shirt.

  Scars.

  “How old are you?” the man demands. I know with all of my being that he’s wearing long sleeves because those aren’t his only scars.

  “I’m seven,” Melody answers, coming to stand beside me. “But Cassie’s only six.”

  The memory jumps, and suddenly I’m running home. I’m running—

  Nighttime now. I’m in bed. There’s a thump. Muted voices.

  Something’s wrong. I know that, and I think about the old man in the garden. He got mad at Melody and me. Maybe he’s here. Maybe he’s angry. Maybe he’s going to eat me right up.

  Another thump. A scream.

  Mommy?

  I’m at the top of the stairs now. There’s something at the bottom.

  Something big.

  Something lumpy.

  And suddenly, my mother is on the stairs, kneeling in front of me. “Go back to sleep, baby.”

  There’s blood on her hands.

  “Did the old man come?” I ask. “Did he hurt you?”

  My mother presses her lips to my head. “It’s just a dream.”

  I came out of the memory with my body still pressed against Dean’s, my head buried in his shoulder, his hands combing gently through my hair.

  “There was blood on my mother’s hands,” I whispered. “The night my mom and I left Gaither, I heard something. A fight, maybe? I went to the top of the stairs, and there was something at the bottom.” I swallowed, my mouth so dry the words wouldn’t come. “There was blood on her hands, Dean.” I forced them out anyway and didn’t let myself stop. “And then we left.”

  I thought about the rest of the memory.

  “There’s something else?” Dean asked.

  I nodded. “The day we left,” I said, pushing back from his chest, “I’m fairly certain I met Malcolm Lowell.”

  Nightshade’s grandfather still lived in a house on a hill overlooking the Serenity Ranch compound. Malcolm Lowell was pushing ninety, confined to a wheelchair, and—as his home health aide informed Agents Sterling and Starmans—not up for visitors.

  Agent Sterling didn’t take no for an answer.

  Back at the hotel, I sat between Dean and Sloane as we watched the live feed from Sterling’s lapel camera, all too aware of the risk Agent Sterling was taking by flashing her badge. If word got around that Sterling was FBI, Holland Darby might start to consider Lia a liability.

  As the nurse reluctantly allowed Sterling and Starmans into the massive house, my mind went to what I’d remembered. The stairs. Something at the bottom.

  In my six-year-old mind, the scary old man who’d yelled at Melody and me and the events that had transpired that night were integrally related, but from a more mature perspective, I could see that they might well be two independent, traumatic events, linked in my mind only by their proximity to each other in time.

  An intimidating old man had scared me. And that night, something had happened—something that had ended with blood.

  “Mr. Lowell.” Agent Sterling took a seat across from a man who appeared no older than he had a decade earlier. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, just as he had then.

  The scars were still visible.

  As a child, they’d scared me. Now, they told me that Malcolm Lowell had woken up every day for the past thirty-three years with a very visible reminder of the attack that had left his daughter and son-in-law dead.

  “I’m Special Agent Sterling with the FBI.” Agent Sterling let her posture mimic his—straight and uncompromising, despite his age. “This is Agent Starmans. We need to ask you some questions.”

  Malcolm Lowell was silent for several seconds, and then he spoke. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe you do.”

  She wants to ask you some questions, I thought. There’s a difference.

  “We have reason to believe that your family’s tragedy may be related to a current serial murder investigation.” Agent Sterling danced the line between offering specifics and offering truth. “I need to know what you know about the original murders.”

  Lowell’s right hand crept up his left sleeve, running his fingertips over a scar. “I told the police what I knew,” he grunted. “Nothing else to tell.”

  “Your grandson is dead.” Agent Sterling made no attempt to soften those words. “He was murdered. And we would like, very much, to find his killer.”

  I glanced to Michael.

  “Grief,” Michael said. “And nothing but.”

  Malcolm Lowell had disowned his grandson when the boy was nine years old, but more than thirty years later, he mourned his passing.

  “If you know something,” Agent Sterling said, “anything that might help us find the person who attacked you—”

  “I was stabbed repeatedly, Agent.” Lowell met Agent Sterling’s gaze, his own uncompromising. “In my arms, my legs, my stomach, and my chest.”

  “Did your grandson witness the attack?” Agent Sterling asked.

  No response.

  “Did he participate in the attack?”

  No response.

  “He’s shutting down,” Michael told Agent Sterling over the audio feed. “Whatever emotions your questions might have provoked a couple of decades ago, he won’t let himself feel anything now.”

  “Sound familiar?” Dean asked me.

  I thought of Nightshade, stonewalling the FBI the exact same way his grandfather was now. He’d learned the power of silence firsthand.

  “Ask him about my mother,” I said.

  Agent Sterling did me one better. She withdrew a picture—one I hadn’t even been aware that the FBI had. In the picture, my mother was standing onstage, her eyes rimmed in thick black liner, her face alive with expression.

  “Do you recognize this woman?”

  “Eyesight isn’t what it used to be.” Malcolm Lowell barely even glanced at the picture.

&nb
sp; “Her name was Lorelai Hobbes.” Agent Sterling let those words hang in the air, using silence as her own weapon.

  “I remember her,” Lowell said finally. “Used to let her little girl run wild with Ree Simon’s hellions. Trouble, the lot of them.”

  “Like your grandson was trouble?” Agent Sterling asked softly. “Like your daughter before him?”

  That got a reaction. Lowell’s hands balled themselves into fists, loosened, and balled up again.

  “He’s getting agitated,” Michael told Sterling. “Anger, disgust.”

  “Mr. Lowell?” Agent Sterling prompted.

  “I tried to teach my Anna. Tried to keep her home. Safe. And how did she end up? Pregnant at sixteen, sneaking out.” His voice trembled. “And that boy. Her son. He cut a hole in the fence, found his way down to that godforsaken compound.” Lowell closed his eyes. He lowered his head, until I couldn’t make out a single one of his features onscreen. “That’s when the animals started showing up.”

  “The animals?” Sloane said, cocking her head to the side. Clearly, she hadn’t foreseen that admission. Neither had I. The difference was that I knew immediately that when Malcolm Lowell said animals, he meant dead animals.

  “They weren’t clean kills.” Lowell looked back up at the camera, a hard glint in his eyes. “Those animals died slowly, and they died in pain.”

  “You thought Mason was responsible?” Agent Starmans asked, speaking for the first time.

  There was a long pause. “I thought he watched.”

  YOU

  You’ve been chained to the wall for hours, bleeding for hours.

  But really, you’ve been chained and bleeding for years. Before this place. Before chaos or order. Before knives and poison and flame.

  You are the one who lay in Lorelai’s bed as a child.

  You took what she couldn’t.

  You did what she couldn’t.

  As the seconds and minutes and hours tick by, you can feel her, ready to stop hiding. Ready to come out.

  Not this time. This time, you’re not going anywhere. This time, you’re here to stay.

  Night falls. The Masters return. They have no idea who you are. What you are.

  They’re used to Lorelai’s dramatics.

  Let them see yours.

  I was aware, as the clock ticked past midnight, that another day had passed without answers. April fourth. Somewhere, Agent Briggs was waiting for the Masters’ next victim to turn up, strapped to a scarecrow post and burned alive.

  Unable to sleep, I sat on the counter of our kitchenette, staring out into the night and thinking about Mason Kyle and Kane Darby, dead animals, and the large, lumpy shape at the bottom of those stairs.

  It was a body. I hadn’t seen that at the age of six, but even with a fragmented memory, I knew it now. I’d been trying not to know it, trying not to remember since I’d gotten back in town.

  “No offense, but you have the survival instincts of a lemming.”

  I jumped at the sound of those words and scrambled off the counter. Lia stepped out of the shadows.

  “Relax,” she said. “I come in peace.” She smirked. “Mostly.”

  Lia was wearing the uniform I’d seen on the rest of Holland Darby’s people, not the white peasant top she’d been wearing when I saw her last. In all the time I’d known her, she’d never ceded control of her wardrobe to another person.

  In all the time I’d known her, she’d never looked so blank.

  “How did you get past Agent Starmans?” I asked her.

  “The same way I got out of Serenity Ranch. Sneaking around is just another form of lying, and God knows my body is even more talented at deception than my mouth.”

  Something in Lia’s words triggered an alarm in my head. “What happened?”

  “I got in, and I got out.” Lia shrugged. “Holland Darby likes making claims. That he would never hurt me. That he understands me. That Serenity Ranch has nothing to hide. All lies. Of course, the most interesting piece of deception I picked up on wasn’t from Darby. It was from his wife.”

  I tried to remember what the police files had said about Mrs. Darby, but she’d been little more than a footnote, a fixture in the background of the Holland Darby Show.

  “She told me they had nothing to do with what happened to ‘that poor family’ all those years ago.” Lia gave me a moment to process the fact that she’d seen deception in that claim. “And she said that she loved her son.”

  “She doesn’t?” I thought of the Kane my mother had known. And then I thought about the body at the foot of the stairs, the blood on my mother’s hands.

  There was a thump. Had Kane been there? Had he done something? Had my mother?

  It isn’t safe for you to be asking questions. Kane’s warning echoed in my mind. Your friend will be okay at Serenity, but you wouldn’t be.

  “Agent Sterling talked to Malcolm Lowell.” As I sorted through the bevy of thoughts in my head, I caught Lia up on what I knew. “Back before Nightshade’s parents were murdered, someone at Serenity Ranch had developed a fondness for killing animals.”

  “Cheery,” Lia opined. She reached past me and helped herself to a four-dollar Dr Pepper from the mini fridge. As she did, I caught sight of her wrist. Angry red lines crisscrossed the exposed skin.

  “You cut yourself?” My mouth went dry.

  “Of course not.” Lia turned her wrist over to examine the damage as she lied to my face. “Those lines just magically appeared and were not in any way a method by which to make sure Darby bought my story about how empty I feel inside.”

  “Hurting yourself isn’t the same as donning a costume, Lia.”

  I expected her to shrug the words off, but instead she met my eyes. “This didn’t hurt,” she told me quietly. “Not really. Not in any way that mattered.”

  “You’re not okay.” My voice was every bit as quiet as hers. “You weren’t okay before you went there, and you sure as hell aren’t okay now.”

  “I forgot what it was like,” Lia said, her voice absolutely devoid of expression, “to be special one moment and nothing the next.”

  I thought about what Dean had told me about Lia’s childhood. When you pleased him, you were rewarded. And when you displeased him, he put you in a hole.

  “Lia—”

  “The man I grew up with? The one who controlled everything and everyone I knew? He never laid a hand on us.” Lia took a sip of her soda. “But some days, you’d wake up and everyone would know that you were unworthy. Unclean. No one would speak to you. No one would look at you. It was like you just didn’t exist.”

  I heard the implication buried in those words. Your own mother would look right through you.

  “If you wanted anything—food, water, a place to sleep—you had to go to him. And when you were ready to be forgiven, you had to do it yourself.”

  My heart jumped into my throat. “Do what?”

  Lia looked down at her angry red wrists. “Penance.”

  “Cassie?”

  I turned to see Sloane standing a few feet away.

  “Lia. You’re home.” Sloane swallowed. Even in dim lighting, I could see her fingers beginning to tap against her thumbs. “You two probably want to talk. Without me.” She turned.

  “Hold up,” Lia said.

  Sloane stayed where she was, but didn’t turn back to face us. “That’s what you were doing. Talking to Cassie. Because Cassie’s easy to talk to. She understands, and I don’t.” A breath caught in Sloane’s throat. “I just blurt out stupid statistics. I get in the way.”

  “That’s not true.” Lia stalked toward Sloane. “I know I said it, Sloane, but I was lying.”

  “No. You weren’t. If Cassie or Dean or Michael had been the one to catch you leaving, you wouldn’t have said it. You wouldn’t have meant it, because Cassie and Dean and Michael could go with you and lie and keep secrets and not say exactly the wrong things at exactly the wrong times.” Sloane turned to face us. “But I can’t. I would
have been in the way.”

  Sloane was different from the rest of us. That was easy for me to forget—and impossible for Sloane to.

  “So?” Lia retorted.

  Sloane blinked several times.

  “You can’t lie worth a damn, Sloane. That doesn’t mean you matter any less.” Lia stared at Sloane for a few seconds, then seemed to come to a decision. “I’m going to tell you something,” she said. “You, Sloane. Not Cassie. Not Michael. Not Dean. You know the Salem witch trials?”

  “Twenty people were executed between 1692 and 1693,” Sloane said. “An additional seven died in prison, including at least one child.”

  “The girls who started the whole thing off with their accusations?” Lia took another step toward Sloane. “That was me. The cult I grew up in? The leader claimed to have visions. Eventually, I started playing his game. I started having ‘visions,’ too. And I told everyone that my visions showed me that he was right, that he was just, that God wanted us to obey him. I built myself up by building him up. He believed me. And when he came into my room one night…” Lia’s voice was shaking. “He told me that I was special. He sat on the end of my bed, and as he leaned over me, I started screaming and thrashing. I couldn’t let him touch me, so I lied. I said that I’d had a vision, that there was a betrayer in our midst.” She closed her eyes. “I said the betrayer had to die.”

  I killed a man when I was nine years old, Lia had told us months ago.

  “If I had to choose between being like you and being like me,” Lia continued, holding Sloane’s gaze, “I’d want to be like you.” Lia tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Besides,” she said, shedding the intensity she’d borne a moment ago like a snake wriggling out of its skin, “if you were like Cassie and Michael and Dean and me, you wouldn’t be able to do anything with this.”

  Lia reached into her back pocket and pulled out several folded pieces of paper. I wanted to see what was on them, but was still paralyzed by the words Lia had spoken.

  “A map?” Sloane said, thumbing through the pages.

  “A layout,” Lia corrected. “Of the entire compound—the house, the barns, the acreage, drawn to scale.”