“Permission,” Dean said softly. “Absolution.”
I rolled away from him, and he let me. Days’ worth of exhaustion caught up to me in an instant, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I let myself sink into my mother’s perspective. “It’s not that I don’t have a choice,” I said softly, not bothering to tell him that I wasn’t speaking for myself anymore, that I was speaking for her. “I always have a choice: Do I suffer, or does someone else? Do I fight it? Do I fight them? Or do I play the role they’ve cast me in? Do I have more control, more power, if I make them break me or if I play the Pythia so well that they stop thinking of me as a thing that can be broken?”
Dean was quiet for several seconds. “Against the seven of us,” he said finally, “you will always be powerless.” He bowed his head. “But against any one of us, you hold the cards.”
I thought of Nightshade, dead in solitary confinement. “If I say you die, you die.”
“But first, one in our number has to ask.”
The Pythia passed judgment, but she didn’t bring the cases. One of the Masters had to present an issue for her to rule on—and before making a decision, she was tortured. If enough of the Masters opposed her answer, she was tortured again.
“You chose me because I was a survivor,” I whispered. “Because you saw in me the potential to become something more.”
“We chose you,” Dean countered, “because at least one among us believed that someday you might come to like it. The power. The blood. Some of us want you to embrace what you are. Some of us would rather you fight it—fight us.”
This group followed very specific rules. After their ninth kill, they were done—permanently. “What you do to me is the closest any of you can come to reliving the glory. You drag a knife across my skin or watch it blister under a flame. You hold my head under water or make me watch as you push a metal rod through my flesh. You close your fingers around my neck. You beat me.” I thought of Nightshade. “You force your most painful poison down my throat. And every time you hurt me, every time you purify me, I learn more about you. Seven different monsters, seven different motivations.”
My mother had always excelled at manipulating people. She’d made her living as a “psychic,” telling people what they wanted to hear.
“Some of us,” Dean said after a moment’s thought, “are easier to manipulate than others.”
I thought again of Nightshade. My mother hadn’t ordered his death when he’d been captured. The Masters had almost certainly presented the matter for her judgment, but she’d held out—and at least some subset of them had let her.
“Nightshade was a newly minted member of this group when they took my mother,” I said slowly, trying to think of facts—any facts—that might shed light on their dynamic. “He completed his ninth kill two months before she was taken.” I forced myself back into my mother’s point of view. “He was competitive. He was daring. He wanted to break me. But I made him want something else more. I made him want me.”
“What he wanted was immaterial.” Dean closed his eyes, his lashes casting shadows on his face. “The Pythia will never belong to one man.”
“But one of you must have identified me as a potential Pythia,” I said. I thought again about how new to the fold Nightshade had been when my mother was taken. “One of you chose me, and it wasn’t Nightshade.”
I waited for another insight, but nothing came, and that nothing ate away at me like a black hole sucking every other emotion in. I couldn’t remember who might have been watching my mother. I couldn’t remember anything that might have told us how—and by whom—she’d been chosen.
Dean lay down beside me, his head on my pillow. “I know, Cassie. I know.”
I thought of Daniel Redding, sitting across from me and gloating about the way he’d inserted himself between Dean and me—every time our hands brushed, every gentle touch.
I don’t need gentle right now. I let myself turn toward Dean, let my breath catch raggedly in my throat. I don’t want it.
I reached for Dean, pulling him roughly toward me. His hands buried themselves in my hair. Not gentle. Not light. My back arched as his grip on my ponytail tightened. One second I was beside him, and the next I was on top of him. My lips captured his—rough and hard and warm and real.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking. I couldn’t save Laurel. I couldn’t save my mother.
But I could live—even when I didn’t want to, even when it hurt. I could feel.
I dreamed, as I had so many times before, that I was walking down the hallway toward my mother’s dressing room. I could see myself reaching for the door.
Don’t go in. Don’t turn on the light.
No matter how many times I had this dream, I was never able to stop myself. I was never able to do anything but what I’d done that night. Grapple for the light switch. Feel the blood on my fingers.
I flipped the switch and heard a faint rustling, like leaves in the wind. The room remained pitch-black. The sound got louder. Closer. And that was when I realized it wasn’t rustling leaves. It was the sound of chains being dragged over a tile floor.
“That’s not how you play the game.”
The room was flooded with light, and I whirled to see Laurel standing behind me. She was holding a lollipop, the kind she’d been staring at the first time I’d seen her. “This is how you play the game.”
Hands slammed me back into the wall. Shackles appeared on my wrists. Chains slithered across the floor like snakes.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see—
“You can do better than that.”
It took me a moment to realize that the chains were gone. Laurel was gone. The dressing room was gone. I was sitting in a car. My mother was sitting in the front seat.
“Mom.” The word was strangled by my throat.
“Dance it off,” my mom told me. That had been one of her go-to phrases. Every time we’d left a town, every time I’d skinned a knee. Dance it off.
“Mom,” I said urgently, suddenly sure that if I could just get her to turn around and look at me, she would see that I wasn’t a little girl anymore. She would see, and she would remember.
“I know,” my mom called back over the music. “You liked the town and the house and our little front yard. But home isn’t a place, Cassie.”
Suddenly, we weren’t in the car anymore. We were standing on the side of the road, and she was dancing.
“We all have choices,” a voice whispered behind me. Nightshade emerged from the shadows, his gaze on my mother as she danced. “The Pythia chooses to live.” He smiled. “Perhaps someday that choice will be yours.”
I woke with a start to find Dean asleep beside me and Celine Delacroix standing in the doorway.
“I came to say good-bye,” she said. “Michael performed an impressive encore of your you don’t belong here and you need to leave number.”
If there was one thing my last conversation with Celine had taught me, it was that she did belong here. But I couldn’t blame Michael for wanting to send her away. The rest of us were in this. We were already in danger.
Celine didn’t have to be.
“When this is over—” I started to say.
Celine held up one perfectly manicured hand. “Unless you feel like letting me in on what this is—don’t.” She paused. “Take care of Michael for me.”
I will. I couldn’t make that promise out loud.
“And if you get a chance,” Celine continued, a subtle smile pulling at the edges of her lips, “put in a good word for me with Sloane.”
She didn’t wait for a reply before strolling out the door.
Beside me, Dean stirred. “What do you need?” he asked me quietly.
I needed to do something other than stand in front of the wall in the basement, waiting for a body to show up. I needed to get out of this house.
I needed to follow up on the one lead we had.
“I need to go to Gaither, Oklahoma.”
&nb
sp; YOU
You forget sometimes what it was like Before. Before the walls. Before the chains. Before the turning of the wheel and the bleeding and the pain.
Before the rage.
They bring photographs to show you what they did to Seven. They place another diamond around your neck.
Your fingertips gingerly touch the edge of a photograph—proof of death. There was blood. There was pain. You did this. Judge and jury, you held his life in your hands.
You did this. You killed him.
You smile.
The town where Nightshade had been born wasn’t the kind of place where the FBI turned up on a regular basis.
“Gaither, Oklahoma, population 8,425,” Sloane rattled off as we stepped out of the rental car. “In the early days of Oklahoma’s statehood, Gaither thrived, but its economy collapsed during the Great Depression, and it never recovered. The population has dwindled, and the average age of residents has risen steadily for the past sixty years.”
In other words, Gaither had more than its share of senior citizens.
“Three museums,” Sloane continued, “thirteen historical landmarks. While local tourism is a substantial source of income for the city proper, the surrounding rural communities rely primarily on farming.”
The fact that there was tourism in Gaither meant that we could get the lay of the land without announcing our intentions—or the fact that Agent Sterling was carrying a badge. Agent Briggs had stayed behind in Quantico. I didn’t fool myself as to why.
April second. Today was a Fibonacci date, and Laurel’s disappearance was almost certainly a harbinger of things to come.
Judd had accompanied us to Gaither, as had Agent Starmans. My gut said that Briggs had sent the latter to protect Sterling as much as the rest of us.
Don’t think about that, I told myself as we began the walk down historic Main Street. Think about Mason Kyle.
I tried to picture Nightshade growing up in this town. The storefronts had a Victorian charm to them. Stone signs detailed the town’s history. As I laid a hand flat on one of them, an odd feeling came over me. Like something was missing.
Like I was missing something.
“You okay?” Agent Sterling asked me. In an attempt not to look like a cop, she’d chosen to wear jeans. She still looked like a cop.
“I’m fine,” I told her, glancing back over my shoulder, then forcing my eyes to the front. As we turned a corner, a wrought-iron gate came into view. Beyond it was a stone path, landscaped on either side with all manner of plants.
For a split second, I couldn’t breathe, and I had no idea why.
Dean walked ahead and stopped at the sign in front of the gates.
“Either Redding is constipated,” Michael said as he took in a subtle shift in Dean’s body posture, “or things are about to get interesting.”
I walked toward Dean, overcome with the uncanny sense that I knew what the sign was going to say. Poison garden. Those were the words I expected to see.
“Apothecary garden,” I read instead.
“Apothecary,” Sloane said, coming to stand next to us. “From the Latin word meaning repository or storehouse. Historically, the term was used to refer to both the historic version of a pharmacy and to the historic version of a pharmacist.”
Without waiting for a reply, Sloane bopped past the gates. Lia followed her.
Dean slid his gaze over to me. “What do you think the chances are that it’s a coincidence that Nightshade grew up in a town with an apothecary garden and”—Dean jerked his head toward the building next door—“an apothecary museum?”
A chill spread slowly down my spine. Nightshade’s weapon of choice had been poison. There was a thin line between knowing the medicinal properties of plants and knowing how to use them to kill.
“I can sense this is a romantic moment for the two of you,” Michael said facetiously, patting us each on the shoulder. “Far be it from me to ruin it.” He strolled past us into the garden, but the way he glanced back tipped me off to the fact that he recognized the unsettled feeling twisting in my gut.
“If you folks think that garden’s something,” a voice called out, “you should venture inside.”
An older man—my guess put his age in the neighborhood of seventy—came to the door of the apothecary museum. He was small and compact, with round spectacles and a voice at odds with his appearance: deep and scratchy and utterly uninviting.
A much younger guy came to stand behind the old man. He looked to be nineteen or twenty and wore his white-blond hair combed back, accenting a widow’s peak hairline.
“The garden is free for all to enjoy,” Widow’s Peak said tersely. “Visitors to the museum are asked to make a donation.”
He may as well have stuck a giant NO TRESPASSING sign over the building’s entrance.
Agent Sterling moved to stand beside me. “I think we’re fine with the garden for now,” she told Widow’s Peak.
“Figures,” the boy muttered, retreating into the building. There was something about him that gave me the same unsettled feeling that had coated my body the moment I’d seen the wrought-iron gates.
“You folks stay cool,” the old man advised us, his gaze lingering on Sterling. “Even in spring, Gaither heat has a way of sneaking up on you.” Without another word, he followed Widow’s Peak back into the museum.
Agent Sterling preempted any comment from Dean or me. “Walk through the garden, pretend you’re enjoying this lovely spring day, and think about what you’ve learned,” she advised.
You want us to take this slow. To avoid tipping our hand.
I did as instructed. St. John’s wort. Yarrow. The alder tree. Hawthorne. As I passed each labeled plant in the garden, I parsed my first impressions. My gut said that the older man had lived in Gaither all of his life. Widow’s Peak was protective of him—and of the museum.
You don’t like tourists, but you work in a museum. That spoke of either a contradictory personality or a lack of employment options.
I turned on the path, following the loop back to the iron gates. As I reached them, I got that same sense of déjà vu I’d had when I saw the garden for the first time.
I’m missing something.
As I scanned the surrounding street, I pegged a pair of tourists, then turned my attention to a local walking her dog. She turned around a corner and disappeared. I didn’t mean to do more than follow her around the corner to see what was on the next block, but once I started walking, I couldn’t stop.
I’m missing something.
I’m missing—
Dean caught up to me. The others weren’t far behind. I caught sight of our protection detail out of the corner of my eyes.
“Where are we going?” Dean asked.
I wasn’t following the dog walker anymore. She’d gone one way, I’d gone another. Gaither’s historical charm had melted away blocks back. Now there were houses—most of them on the small side and in need of repairs.
“Cassie,” Dean repeated, “where are we going?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Lia fell in beside us. “Lie.”
I hadn’t realized that I was lying, but now that Lia had called me out, it was clear. I do know where I’m going. I know exactly where I’m going.
The niggling feeling of déjà vu, the deeply unsettling something that had fallen over me the moment we’d stepped foot in this town, solidified into something more concrete.
“I know this place,” I said. I hadn’t been sensing something off about Gaither. I’d been sensing something familiar.
I know, my mom whispered in my memory. You liked the town and the house and our little front yard—
There had been so many houses over the years, so many moves. But as I came to a stop in front of a quaint house with blue siding and a massive oak tree that cast shade over the entire lawn, I felt like someone had tossed ice-cold water directly into my face. I could see myself standing on the front porch, laughing as my mom attem
pted to throw a rope over a branch on the oak tree.
I made my way to the tree and fingered the tattered rope swing that hung there. “I’ve been here before,” I said hoarsely, turning back to the others. “I lived here. With my mother.”
Nightshade had been born in Gaither. Decades later, my mother had lived here. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Hyperaware of the blood rushing through my veins, I forced myself into the Masters’ perspective. Each of you chooses your own apprentice. Who chooses the Pythia? I took a step toward the house, my heartbeat drowning out all other sounds.
“Nightshade wasn’t the one who selected your mother.” Dean’s voice broke through the cacophony inside my head. “If he had…if I had,” Dean said, shifting from third person to first, “I wouldn’t have waited until Lorelai’s daughter joined the Naturals program to introduce myself.”
Frozen halfway between a memory and a nightmare, I thought of Nightshade—of the way his shoulders had shaken with laughter when I’d interrogated him, of his still, gray corpse. If you didn’t choose my mother, there’s a good chance that the same person chose you both.
“This changes things.” Agent Sterling whipped out her cell phone. She’d brought us here hoping to gain some information about Mason Kyle—who he had been before becoming Nightshade, how long ago he’d disappeared from this town. She hadn’t expected to find a direct tie between Gaither and the Masters.
I forced air into and out of my lungs, forced my racing heart to slow. This is the break we’ve been waiting for. This is our chance. And based on the unearthly calm with which Agent Sterling had spoken, the way she’d gone from person to agent in two seconds flat—she knew it.
“There is a ninety-eight percent chance you’re calling Agent Briggs.” Sloane assessed Agent Sterling. “And a ninety-five-point-six percent chance that you’re going to try to pull us out of Gaither.”
You can’t. My mouth was too dry to form the words. I won’t let you.
Bad Blood: (The Naturals #4) (Naturals, The) Page 11
