All In: (The Naturals #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  That poison. Your poison. Your legacy.

  “Go.” Judd spoke for the first time since the man who’d killed his daughter had been brought into the room. He met Sterling’s gaze and repeated himself. “He’s telling the truth. Go.”

  Go get the antivenom.

  Go save Briggs.

  “We’re done here,” Sterling said, reaching for the button on the wall.

  “Stop.” The word burst out of my mouth. I couldn’t draw my gaze away from the killer’s. You brought me here for a reason. You do everything for a reason—you all do.

  Nightshade smiled. “I thought,” he said, “that you might have some questions for me.”

  I saw now, the game he was playing. He’d brought me here. But staying? Listening to him? Asking him for answers?

  That was on me.

  “Go,” Judd told Sterling again. After a split second’s hesitation, she did as he said, dialing her phone on the way out. Judd turned back to me. “I want to tell you not to say another word, Cassie, not to listen, not to look back.”

  But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t make me walk away. I wasn’t sure he could walk away himself. You can look at the files, Judd had said, back when this all began, but you’re not doing it alone.

  Neither one of us was doing this alone now.

  “Beau Donovan.” I turned back to the monster waiting patiently on the other side of the glass. I couldn’t make my mouth form the words to ask about my mother, not yet. And I couldn’t—wouldn’t—bring up Scarlett. “You killed him.”

  “Was that a question?” Nightshade asked.

  “Your people left him in the desert fifteen years ago.”

  “We don’t kill children.” Nightshade’s tone was flat.

  You don’t kill children. That was a rule they lived by. A sacred law. But you have no problems leaving them in the desert to die of their own accord.

  “What was Beau to you? Why raise him at all, if you were going to turn him out?”

  Nightshade smiled slightly. “Every dynasty needs its heir.”

  My brain whirred. “You weren’t raised the way Beau was.”

  The rest of them, Beau had said, they’re recruited as adults.

  “The term Master suggests an apprentice model,” I continued. “I’m assuming Masters choose their own replacements—adults, not children. The cycle repeats every twenty-one years. But the ninth member, the one you call Nine—”

  “Nine is the greatest of us. The constant. The bridge from generation to generation.”

  Your leader, I filled in. Beau hadn’t just been born in their walls. He’d been born to lead them.

  “You left him to die,” I said.

  “We do not kill children,” Nightshade repeated, his voice just as flat as it had been the first time he said the words. “Even if they prove themselves unworthy. Even when they fail to do what is asked and it becomes clear they will never be able to take the mantle to which they were born. Even when the way must be cleared for a true heir.”

  What did they ask you to do, Beau? What kind of monster were they molding you to be? I couldn’t let my mind go down that path. I had to concentrate on the here and now.

  On Nightshade.

  “And the little girl?” I said. “The one I saw you with. Is she worthy? Is she the new heir? A true heir?” I took a step forward, toward the glass. “What are you doing to her?”

  I don’t believe in wishing.

  “Are you her father?” I asked.

  “The girl has many fathers.”

  That answer sent a chill down my spine. “Seven Masters,” I said, hoping to jar him into telling me something I didn’t know. “The Pythia. And Nine.”

  “All are tested. All must be found worthy.”

  “And that woman I saw with you? She’s worthy?” The question tore out of me with quiet force. My mother wasn’t worthy.

  My mother fought.

  “Did you take her, too?” I asked, my mind on the woman I’d seen. “Did you attack her, cut her?” I continued, my heart pounding in my chest. “Did you torture her until she became one of you? Your oracle?”

  Nightshade was quiet for several moments. Then he leaned forward, his eyes on mine. “I like to think of the Pythia more as Lady Justice,” he said. “She is our counsel, our judge and our jury, until her child comes of age. She lives and dies for us and we for her.”

  Lives and dies.

  Lives and dies.

  Lives and dies.

  “You killed my mother,” I said. “You people took her. You attacked her—”

  “You misunderstand.” Nightshade made the words sound reasonable, gentle even, when the room around him was charged with an unholy energy.

  Power. Games. Pain. This was the cult’s stock-in-trade.

  I reached for a piece of paper and drew the symbol I’d seen on Beau’s chest. I slammed it against the glass. “This was on my mother’s coffin,” I said. “I don’t misunderstand anything. She wasn’t part of the pattern. She wasn’t killed on a Fibonacci date. She was attacked with a knife the same year you were ‘proving yourself worthy’ with poison.” My voice shook. “So don’t tell me that I don’t understand. You—all of you, one of you, I don’t know—but you chose her. You tested her and you found her unworthy.”

  They didn’t kill children. They left them to die. But my mother?

  “You killed her,” I said, the words rough against my throat and sour in my mouth. “You killed her and stripped her flesh from her bones and buried her.”

  “We did no such thing.” The emphasis on the first word somehow managed to break through the haze of fury and sorrow clouding my mind. “There can only be one Pythia.”

  Every instinct I had told me this was what Nightshade had brought me here to hear. This was what he’d traded his last remaining bit of leverage to say.

  “One woman to provide counsel. One woman to bear the child. One child—one worthy child—to carry the tradition on.”

  One woman. One child.

  You killed her.

  We did no such thing.

  All are tested. All must be found worthy.

  My mother had been buried with care. With remorse. I thought of the woman I’d seen with the little girl.

  One woman. One child.

  I thought about how a group could possibly persist for hundreds of years, taking women, holding them, until captive became monster. Lady Justice. The Pythia.

  I thought about the fact that the woman I’d seen by the fountain hadn’t taken her child. She hadn’t run. She hadn’t asked for help.

  She’d smiled at Nightshade.

  There can only be one Pythia.

  “You make them fight.” I wasn’t sure if I was profiling or talking to him. I wasn’t sure it mattered. “You take a new woman, a new Pythia, and…”

  There can only be one.

  “The woman,” I said. “The one I saw with you.” My voice lowered itself to a whisper, but the words were deafening in my own ears. “She killed my mother. You made her kill my mother.”

  “We all have choices,” Nightshade replies. “The Pythia chooses to live.”

  Why bring me here? I thought, aware, on some level, that my body was shaking. My eyes were wet. Why tell me this? Why give me a glimpse of something I’m not blessed enough to know?

  “Perhaps someday,” Nightshade said, “that choice will be yours, Cassandra.”

  Judd had been standing ramrod stiff beside me, but in that instant, he surged forward. He slammed the heel of his hand against the switch on the wall, and the pane darkened.

  You can’t see us. I can see you, but you can’t see us.

  Judd took me by the shoulders. He pulled me to him, blocking my view, holding me, even as I started to fight him.

  “I’ve got you,” he murmured. “You’re okay. I’ve got you, Cassie. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  An order. A plea.

  “Two-one-one-seven.” Until Nightshade spoke, I hadn’t realized
the speaker was still on. At first, I thought he was saying a Fibonacci number, but then he clarified. “If you want to see the woman, you’ll find her in room two-one-one-seven.”

  The Pythia chooses to live. The words echoed in my mind. Perhaps one day, that choice will be yours.

  Room 2117.

  The hours after Nightshade’s interrogation blurred into nothingness. Sterling called to say that Briggs had received the antivenom. She called to say that he was expected to make a full—if slow—recovery. She called to say they found the woman.

  They found the little girl.

  Fewer than twenty hours after Nightshade had named my mother’s killer, I stepped into room 2117 at the Dark Angel Hotel Casino. You could smell the blood from fifty yards away. On the walls. On the floor. The scene was familiar.

  Blood. On the walls. On my hand. I feel it. I smell it—

  But this time, there was a body. The woman—strawberry blond hair, younger than I remembered—lay in her own blood, her white dress soaked through. She’d been killed with a knife.

  Wielded by Nightshade, before he was captured? One of the other Masters? A new Pythia? I didn’t know. And for the first time since I’d joined the Naturals program, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. This woman had killed my mother. Whether she’d had a choice, whether it was kill or be killed, whether she’d enjoyed it—

  I couldn’t be sorry she was dead.

  The little girl sat in a chair, her small legs dangling halfway to the ground. She was staring blankly ahead, no expression on her face.

  She was the reason I was here.

  The child hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even seemed to see a single one of the agents who had come into this room. They were afraid to touch her, afraid to remove her by force.

  I remember coming back to my mother’s dressing room. I remember there was blood.

  I made my way through the room. I knelt next to the chair.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The little girl blinked. Her eyes met mine. I saw a hint—just a hint—of recognition.

  Beau Donovan had been six years old when he’d been abandoned in the desert by the people who’d raised him, deemed unsuitable for their needs.

  Whatever those needs might be.

  You’re three, I thought, slipping into the girl’s perspective. Maybe four.

  Too young to understand what was happening. Too young to have been through so much.

  You know things, I thought. Maybe you don’t even know that you know them.

  Beau had known enough at the age of six to uncover the pattern once he was older.

  You might be able to lead us to them.

  “I’m Cassie,” I said.

  The child said nothing.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She looked down. Beside her on the ground, there was a white origami flower, soaked in blood.

  “Nine,” she whispered. “My name is Nine.”

  A chill ran down my spine, leaving nothing but fury in its wake. You’re not a part of them, I thought, fiercely protective. She was just a baby—just a little, little girl.

  “Your mommy called you something else,” I said, trying to remember the name the woman had used that day at the fountain.

  “Laurel. Mommy calls me Laurel.” She turned to look at the woman on the ground. Her face held no hint of emotion. She didn’t flinch at the blood.

  “Don’t look at Mommy, Laurel.” I moved to block her view. “Look at me.”

  “That’s not my mommy.” The little girl’s tone was dispassionate.

  My heart thudded in my chest. “It’s not?”

  “The Master hired her. To watch me when we came here.”

  Laurel’s chubby baby hands went to an old-fashioned locket around her neck. She let me open it. Inside, there was a picture.

  “That’s my mommy,” Laurel said.

  Not possible. The necklace. The bones. The blood—it was her blood. The tests said it was her blood.

  I felt the world closing in on me. Because there were two people in the photo, and Laurel looked exactly the same in the picture as she did today.

  It was recent.

  That’s my mommy, Laurel had said. But the woman in the picture was my mother, too.

  I always knew—I always thought—that if she’d survived, she would have come back to me. Somehow, some way, if she’d survived—

  “Forever and ever,” Laurel whispered, each word a knife in my gut. “No matter what.”

  “Laurel,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Where is Mommy?”

  “In the room.” Laurel stared at me and into me. “Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.”

  I stood in front of the tombstone. Dean stood beside me, his body lightly brushing mine. The others stood behind us in a semicircle. Michael and Lia and Sloane. Sterling and Briggs and Judd.

  The remains the police had recovered from that dirt road had been released to the family. To my dad. To me. My father didn’t know that the remains weren’t my mother’s. He didn’t know that she was alive.

  Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.

  We had no idea who the woman we’d just buried in my mom’s grave was. The necklace she’d been buried with, the blood on the shawl—those had been my mother’s.

  The Pythia chooses to live, Nightshade had told me, knowing quite well that my mother was the one who’d made that choice.

  I didn’t know how long it was after my mother had been taken that she had been forced to fight for her life—again. I didn’t know if it was standard operating procedure for these men to stage a woman’s death before they took her.

  All are tested. All must be found worthy.

  What I did know was that my mother was alive.

  Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.

  My mother hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t been buried at the crossroads with care. She’d buried her predecessor. My mom’s favorite color. Her necklace. Traces of her blood. From the beginning, Dean and I had seen the funeral rites as rife with remorse. My mother’s.

  “Are you ready?” Dean asked, his hand on my shoulder.

  I stared at the tombstone marked with my mother’s name a moment longer. For Laurel’s sake, the cult needed to think we hadn’t put the pieces together. They needed to think that I believed I’d buried my mother. They needed to think that we hadn’t read much into the fact that the woman I’d mistaken for Laurel’s mother was actually a nanny, a disposable Las Vegas native Nightshade had hired earlier that week.

  They needed to believe that the FBI had put Laurel into protective custody because of her connection to Nightshade, not her connection to me.

  We don’t kill children.

  I thought of Beau, wandering the desert, and pushed back the bitter taste in my mouth. “I’m ready,” I told Dean. I turned, meeting each of the others’ eyes, one by one. Home is the people who love you.

  I was ready to go home. To do whatever it took to find the Masters. To protect Laurel. Forever and ever. To find my mother. Find the Pythia. Find the room.

  No matter what.

  Over the course of the Naturals series, I’ve been lucky enough to work with multiple incredible editors who are experts at asking the right questions and are just as invested in these characters and this story as I am. In particular, All In owes a great debt to Lisa Yoskowitz, who was so passionate about this book that I couldn’t wait to sit down and write it for her, and Kieran Viola, who knows exactly what a writer needs to hear. I am also incredibly grateful to the fabulous Julie Moody, who has been with this series since the very first book, and to Emily Meehan, Dina Sherman, Jamie Baker, Seale Ballenger, Mary Ann Zissimos, and the rest of the folks at Hyperion for all of their support!

  As always, I’d also like to thank my amazing team at Curtis Brown: Elizabeth Harding, Ginger Clark, Holly Frederick, and Jonathan Lyons, as well as Sarah Perillo and Kerry Cullen. I am incredibly blessed to wor
k with people who are not only good at their jobs, but also exceptionally lovely people, and I am extremely thankful for you all!

  With the Naturals series, I’ve also gotten the chance to meet readers all over the country, and I’d like to give a shout-out to the hardworking folks behind the North Texas Teen Book Festival, the Rochester Teen Book Festival, the Texas Teen Book Festival, the Southwest Florida Reading Festival, and the Miami Book Fair for hosting me in the past year. The amount of work you all put into bringing readers and authors together is astounding, and I am profoundly grateful for it.

  I could not survive as a writer—let alone thrive—without the support of some of the most wonderful and brilliant women I know. Thanks go to Ally Carter, Elizabeth Eulberg, Carrie Ryan, Rachel Vincent, Rose Brock, and Sarah Rees Brennan, for Rose Fest in all of its incarnations, and special thanks go to Rachel Vincent for Panera Thursdays, Ally Carter, who knows exactly how hard thrillers (and series!) can be to write, and Sarah Rees Brennan, for reading an earlier draft of this book on very short notice. Thanks also to my colleagues and students at the University of Oklahoma, Ti30, NLPT, and everyone else who kept me sane during the writing of this book.

  Finally, I owe my family more than I could ever say. My mom and dad are among the very first readers of all of my books, and I would not be where I am today without them. I am also extremely grateful to my husband, Anthony, for being my best friend, support system, sounding board, and the love of my life. And thank you also, Anthony, for keeping me from stressing too much when I was doing some final tweaks on this book while preparing for our wedding! Finally, thank you to my wonderful siblings, nephews, and niece: Justin, Allison, Connor, Jeana, Russ, Daniel, Gianna, Matthew, Joseph, Michael, Lindsey, Dominic, and Julian. You guys are the best!

  JENNIFER LYNN BARNES has written over a dozen acclaimed young adult novels, including the first two books in this series, The Naturals and Killer Instinct. She has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science. She received her PhD from Yale University and is now a professor of psychology. You can find her online at www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com or follow her on Twitter @jenlynnbarnes.