Bad Blood: (The Naturals #4) (Naturals, The)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  When I’d first met Michael, I’d found him difficult to profile. But now I understood. Reading emotions was never your only survival mechanism. He’d learned not to feel things, to turn everything into a joke, to shrug off revelations that shook his worldview to its core.

  A quick glance at Celine told me that was a trait they shared. The edges of her lips quirked up in a slight smile. “Not bad,” she told Michael, taking in the lights of the Ferris wheel in the distance.

  “What can I say?” he replied. “Good taste runs in the family.”

  The subtext to those words was deafening.

  Sloane frowned. “The number of taste buds one has is heritable, but that does not affect aesthetic or entertainment preferences, to the best of my knowledge.”

  Celeste didn’t miss a beat. “The brainy type,” she declared loftily. “I approve.”

  Sloane was quiet for several seconds. “Most people don’t.”

  My heart hurt at the matter-of-fact way Sloane said those words.

  Her manner uncharacteristically gentle, Celine hooked an arm through Sloane’s. “How would you feel about trying to win me a goldfish?”

  Sloane clearly had no idea how to reply, so she went with the path of least resistance. “Goldfish don’t have stomachs or eyelids. And their resting attention span is actually one-point-oh-nine times that of the average human.”

  As Celine led Sloane toward the carnival games, I started to follow, but Michael held me back. “She’ll be fine,” he told me. “Celine is…” He trailed off, then changed course. “I trust her.”

  “It’s good to have someone you can trust.” Lia’s tone wasn’t cutting, but that meant nothing. She was more than capable of coating razor blades in sugar.

  “I never said you could trust me,” Michael shot back. “I don’t trust me.”

  “Maybe I’m saying that you can trust me.” Lia played with the tips of her jet-black ponytail, making those words sound like nothing more than a lark. “Or maybe I’m saying that you absolutely cannot trust me not to wreak vengeance upon you in creative and increasingly absurd ways.”

  With that somewhat concerning statement, Lia hooked her arm through Dean’s the way Celine had hooked hers through Sloane’s. “I see a roller coaster with my name on it, Dean-o. You game?”

  Lia rarely asked Dean for anything. He wasn’t about to refuse now. As the two of them peeled off from the group, I pushed down the instinct to follow.

  “And then,” Michael murmured, “there were two.”

  We ended up in the house of mirrors.

  “You’re trying very hard not to profile me,” Michael commented as we wove our way through the mazelike expanse.

  “What gave me away?” I asked.

  He tapped two fingers against my temple, then indicated the tilt of my chin. We passed a set of curvy mirrors that distorted our reflections, stretching them out, condensing them, the colors in my reflection blending into the colors in his. “I’ll save you the effort, Colorado. I’m a person who wants what he can’t have as a method of proving to himself that he doesn’t deserve the things he wants. And for someone with my abilities, I have an uncanny knack for not seeing the obvious staring me in the face.”

  I read between the lines. “You had no idea. About Celine. About who her father really is.”

  “And yet the moment she said something, it made perfect sense.” Michael paused, then tried out the words he’d been avoiding. “I have a sister.”

  I caught sight of myself in another mirror. The distortion made my face rounder, my body smaller. I thought of Laurel, staring at the swing set. I have a sister, too.

  “Down-turned lips, tension in your neck, unfocused eyes seeing something other than the here and now.” Michael paused. “You went to see your sister today, and no amount of Townsend Baby Daddy Drama can make you forget what you saw.”

  We hit the end of the house of mirrors and stepped back out onto the boardwalk. I bit back my response to Michael’s statement when I saw Celine waiting for us. She was holding a fishbowl.

  “Sloane won you a goldfish,” Michael commented.

  “Sloane won all of us goldfish,” Celine corrected. “Girl is crazy good at carnival games. Something about ‘doing the math.’”

  I did some math of my own and decided that whether Michael wanted to or not, he needed to talk to Celine. And I needed to get away from the mirrors and the memories and the sudden reminder that the next Fibonacci date was less than thirty-six hours away.

  I found Sloane sitting near the Ferris wheel, surrounded by goldfish in bowls. I sat down beside her. Whatever conversation Michael and Celine were having was drowned out by the music accompanying the Ferris wheel’s turns.

  The wheel is turning, I heard a tiny voice whisper in my memory, round and round…

  Beside me, Sloane was humming. At first, I thought she was humming along to the music, but then I realized that she was humming the same seven notes, over and over.

  Laurel’s song.

  Goose bumps rose on my arms. “Sloane…” I started to ask her to stop, but something about the expression on her face stopped me.

  “Seven notes, six unique.” Sloane stared at the Ferris wheel, watching it turn. “E-flat, E-flat, E, A-flat, F-sharp, A, B-flat.” She paused. “What if it’s not a song? What if it’s a code?”

  Seven. I know seven. Laurel’s words played on repeat in my head as we pulled into the driveway and I registered the fact that there were cars—plural—parked there. The lights were on, not just in the kitchen, but throughout the entire first floor.

  Something’s wrong.

  I was out of the car before Michael had even pulled it to a stop. On my way to the front door, I passed a trio of agents. Agent Vance. Agent Starmans. It took me a moment to place the third—one of the two agents on Laurel’s detail.

  No.

  I burst through the front door to find Briggs talking to another agent. From behind, I couldn’t make out the other man’s features, and I told myself that I was overreacting. I told myself that I didn’t recognize him.

  I told myself that Laurel was fine.

  And then the man turned. No. No, no, no—

  “Cassie.” Agent Briggs caught sight of me and brushed past the man. Agent Morris. My brain supplied the name. Agent Morris and Agent Sides. Two agents assigned to protect my sister.

  It’s too dangerous, Cassie, Agent Sterling had told me when she’d explained why my most recent sisterly meeting had to be the last. For you. For Laurel.

  “Where is she?” I asked, my entire body shaking with the intensity of that question. On some level, I was aware that Briggs had laid a hand on my shoulder. On some level, I was aware that he was steering me into another room. “Both of the agents on Laurel’s detail are here,” I said, my jaw clenched. “They’re supposed to be in hiding. With her.”

  My eyes darted to either side of Briggs, like Laurel might be there. Like if I just looked hard enough, I would find her.

  “Cassie. Cassandra.” Briggs tightened his grip on my shoulder slightly. I barely felt it. I didn’t even realize that I was fighting him, frantically pushing him away, until his arms encircled my body.

  “What happened?” I asked. My voice sounded alien. It felt foreign in my own throat. “Where’s Laurel?”

  “She’s gone, Cassie.” Briggs was the one who’d recruited me to the program. Of all the adults in our lives, he was the most focused, the most driven, the most likely to pull rank.

  “Gone as in missing?” I asked, going suddenly still. “Or gone as in dead?”

  Briggs relaxed his hold on me, but didn’t let go. “Missing. We got a call from her protection detail several hours ago. We issued an AMBER Alert, blocked off all outgoing roads, but…”

  But it didn’t help. You didn’t find her.

  “They have her.” I forced myself to say the words. “I promised her she would never have to go back there. I promised her that she was safe.”

  “This isn’
t on you, Cassie,” Briggs told me, moving his hand to my chin, forcing my eyes to his. “This program is my responsibility. You are my responsibility. I made the call to bring Laurel in.”

  I knew, without asking, that Briggs was thinking of the fight he’d had with Agent Sterling back in New York, about Scarlett Hawkins and Nightshade and the sacrifices we’d all made on the altar of winning.

  “Where’s Sterling?” I asked.

  “Looking for leaks at FBI headquarters,” Briggs replied. “Trying to figure out how the hell this happened.”

  It happened, I thought, the words tightening around my heart like a vise, because I went to see Laurel.

  It happened because of me.

  YOU

  The child lies unconscious on the altar, her tiny limbs forming an X against the stone. So small. So fragile.

  All must be tested. All must be found worthy.

  Your own throat is raw, ringed with bruises. Your hands are shaking.

  But the Pythia cannot show weakness.

  The Pythia cannot falter.

  Your hands close around the child’s neck. You tighten your grip. The girl is drugged. The girl is sleeping. The girl would feel no pain.

  But the Pythia’s job is not protecting the girl.

  You release your grip on the little one’s throat. “The child is worthy.”

  One of the Masters—the one you call Five—reaches out and lays a hand on the girl’s forehead. One by one, the others follow suit.

  “There is,” Five says, once the ritual has been observed, “one other matter that requires your attention.”

  By the time the little girl wakes up on the altar, they’ve slammed your body against the wall. You don’t struggle as they chain your ankles and wrists.

  The Pythia is judge. The Pythia is jury. Without order, there is chaos. Without order, there is pain.

  I bolted for my room. With each step, my brain sank further and further into the Masters’ perspective. Laurel will never be safe. You’ll always find her. You made her, and hers is a glorious purpose. She is Nine, and the only way she leaves your custody is if you test her and she fails.

  Nightshade had told me that the Masters didn’t kill children. But that hadn’t stopped them from leaving one of Laurel’s predecessors to die of thirst and heat exposure when he was six years old—just two years older than Laurel was now.

  All must be tested. Nightshade’s prescriptive statement echoed in my memory. All must be found worthy.

  If I had been a normal person, I might not have been able to imagine what kind of test these monsters might design for a child. But I could—I could imagine it in horrifying detail.

  You won’t just hurt her. You’ll make her hurt someone else.

  “Cassie?” Sloane stood in the doorway to our room, hovering outside it, like a force field kept her at bay.

  “Did you figure it out?” I asked her. “The code?”

  Sloane took a ragged breath. “I should have figured it out faster.”

  “Sloane—”

  “Seven isn’t just a number.” She didn’t let me tell her that this wasn’t her fault. “It’s a person.”

  My heart thudded in my chest as I thought about the fact that my mother had almost certainly been the one to teach Laurel that song.

  “Seven is a person,” I repeated. “One of the seven Masters.” My mouth was suddenly dry; my palms were sweating. Laurel had been safe, right up until the meeting where she’d passed on this information. “You know who he is?”

  “I know who he was,” Sloane corrected. “E-flat, E-flat, E, A-flat, F-sharp, A, B-flat. Those aren’t just notes. They’re numbers.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. On it, she’d drawn an octave’s worth of piano keys. “If you sit down at the piano and you number the keys, starting with middle C…” She filled the numbers in.

  “E-flat, E-flat, E…” I said. “Four, four, five?”

  “Exactly,” Sloane said. “Seven notes translate into nine numbers—two digits each for A and B-flat. 445-97-1011.”

  It took me a moment to make the connection between what Sloane was saying and the fact that she knew one of the Masters’ identities. “It’s a Social Security number.”

  “That’s the thing,” Sloane replied. “It isn’t a Social Security number—or at least, it’s not anymore. I’ve been going in circles trying to figure out what else it could be, but then instead of cross-referencing it against current Social Security numbers, I decided to do a historical search.”

  “How much of this required illegal hacking?” a voice asked from the doorway. I looked up to see Lia and, behind her, Michael and Dean.

  “Almost all of it,” Sloane answered without skipping a beat. “When I went back a few decades, I found it. That Social Security number was given to a baby boy born in Gaither, Oklahoma, forty-three years ago. His name was Mason Kyle.”

  I could barely hear my own thoughts over the pounding of my heart. “Mason Kyle,” I repeated.

  “Why doesn’t Mason show up in the database now?” Lia asked. “Is he dead?”

  “That’s the thing,” Sloane replied, sitting down next to me on the bed. “Other than the Social Security number, there is virtually no record of Mason Kyle ever having existed. No birth certificate. No death certificate. No employment history. Whoever wiped his record wiped it clean. The only reason I even found the Social Security number was that I hacked a decades-old archive.”

  This was what Laurel had given us. This was what I’d risked her safety for. This was why she was back in their hands.

  To become a Master, you have to leave your old life behind. You have to erase all traces of your prior self. You used to be Mason Kyle, I thought, addressing the words to a phantom, and now, you’re a ghost.

  “That’s it?” I asked Sloane, my stomach heavy, a slight roaring in my ears.

  “When I heard Laurel was missing, I kept looking,” Sloane said. “I looked and I looked and…” She bit her lip and then opened the tablet on her lap, angling it toward me. A picture of a young boy stared back at us. He was six, maybe seven years old. “This is Mason Kyle,” Sloane said, “circa thirty-seven years ago. It’s the one and only picture I was able to find.”

  The photograph was faded and fuzzy, like it had been scanned in by someone who didn’t quite know how to work a scanner, but I could still make out most of the little boy’s features. He had dimples. A smile missing one of its front teeth.

  He could have been anyone.

  I should have left Laurel alone. Instead, I led them right to her. The implication that the Masters were watching us—that they could be anyone, anywhere—made me think of Daniel Redding’s chilling smile.

  I wish I could be there to see what this group will do to you for coming after them.

  “There’s software that does age progressions,” Sloane said softly. “If I can clean up the image and find the right parameters, we might be able to—”

  I stood.

  “Cassie?” Dean was the one who said my name. When he stepped toward me, I stepped back.

  I didn’t deserve comfort right now. I thought of Agent Sterling saying that Scarlett Hawkins had been sacrificed on the altar of ambition. I thought of the promise I’d made Laurel.

  I lied.

  The backyard was pitch-black, except for the light from the pool. I’d come out here to be alone, but as I approached the water, it became apparent that I wasn’t the only one looking for refuge.

  Celine Delacroix was swimming laps.

  As I went closer, I saw that she’d turned on the black light. Like the rest of the house, the pool had been designed to facilitate our training. The outline of a body glowed at the bottom of the pool. Spatter patterns—visible only under the black light—marred the pool’s edge.

  Months ago, Dean had shown me this. He’d tried to convince me to leave the Naturals program. He’d told me that murder and chaos wasn’t a language that anyone should want to speak.

  Realizing tha
t she wasn’t alone, Celine turned toward me, treading water. “No offense,” she said, “but you all really suck at hiding the fact that you work for the FBI.”

  This girl was Michael’s sister. She was safe here. But if she hung around, she might not be for long.

  “You should leave,” I told her. “Go back to school.”

  Celine swam to the edge and pulled herself out of the pool, the water clinging to her body. She had to have been freezing, but didn’t shiver. “I’ve never excelled at should.”

  I’d heard Michael say the same thing—more than once.

  “Are you okay?” Celine asked.

  “No.” I didn’t bother elaborating and turned the question around on her. “Are you?”

  She sat down next to the pool, allowing her legs to dangle in the water, tilting her head back toward the sky. “I’m trying this new thing,” she told me. “Ultimate honesty. No more secrets. No more lies.” This was the girl from the painting—the one who painted her self-portrait with a knife. “So, in answer to your question, Cassie, I’m not okay. I am incredibly and quite possibly irreversibly screwed-up. That’s what happens when you figure out at the ripe old age of seven that your father isn’t your father—and that his best friend is. That’s what happens when, at the age of fourteen, your mother drunkenly admits to your biological father that you’re his. And that’s what happens when said biological father finally figures out that you know and corners you in your own studio to tell you that your dad—the man who raised you, his business partner and supposed friend—ruined you. That you would be so much more if he’d been the one in control. That, if he’d had the chance, he could have stamped the bad blood out of you when you were young, just like he did for his son.”

  Bad blood. I could imagine Thatcher Townsend saying the words, could imagine him beating out of Michael the weaknesses he saw in himself. And then I thought of Laurel—the way she was being raised, the things she was expected to do.

  The blood belongs to the Pythia. The blood belongs to Nine.