“I have something to tell you,” I said, my voice surprisingly solid, surprisingly even. “It’s about your daughter.”
“Sarah?” Ree arched her brows, her chin thrusting slightly outward. “What about her?”
“Can we sit down?” I asked Ree.
Once we were ensconced in a booth, I laid a folder on the table between us and removed the picture that Celine had drawn. “Is this Sarah?”
“Sure is,” Ree replied steadily. “She looks a bit like Melody there.”
I nodded. My mouth wasn’t dry. My eyes weren’t wet. But I felt those words, all the way to my core.
“Sarah didn’t leave Gaither,” I told Ree, taking her hand. “She didn’t leave her kids. She didn’t leave you.”
“Yes,” Ree replied tersely, “she did.”
I amended my previous statement. “She never left Serenity Ranch.” Knowing in my gut that Ree wouldn’t believe me without proof, I withdrew a photograph from the file—Sarah’s body.
Ree was smart. She connected the dots—and abruptly rejected the conclusion. “That could be anyone.”
“Facial reconstruction says it’s Sarah. We’ll do a DNA test as well, but a witness has verified that Sarah was killed ten years ago by a man named Darren Darby.”
“Darby.” That was all Ree said.
You never looked for her. You never knew.
“Melody is home now.” Ree stood abruptly. “I suppose I have you to thank for that.” She said nothing, not a single word, about her daughter. “I’ll get you some coffee.”
Watching as Ree busied herself with the task, I pulled a picture up on my phone, one I’d taken months before of a locket that Laurel had worn around her neck—and the photo inside. In it, my half sister sat on my mother’s lap.
How many times had I looked at this picture?
How many times had I wondered who—and what—my mother was now?
“Mind if I join you?” Celine slid into the booth across from me.
“Where have you been?” I asked, my gaze still on my mother’s picture.
“Here and there,” Celine replied. “Bodies don’t creep me out. Murders do. I decided pretty quickly that Creepy Serial Killer House probably fell closer to your expertise than mine.”
Ree returned with two cups of coffee, one for me and one for Celine. “Here you go.”
Ree didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want this—any of it—to be real. I could relate.
“Who’s that?” Celine asked, craning her head to get a better look at the photo on my phone.
“My mother,” I replied, feeling like that answer was only half true. “And my half sister.”
“I see the resemblance,” Celine replied. Then she paused. “Mind if I take a closer look?”
She took the phone without waiting for a reply. I closed my eyes and took a long drink of my coffee. Instead of thinking about my mother, about Kate, strung up like a scarecrow and burned alive, about Nonna and what this would do to her, I fell back on an old game, profiling everyone around me.
Behavior. Personality. Environment. Without looking, I knew that Dean was facing away from me. You want to come to me, but you won’t—not until you know that I want you to.
I switched from second person to third, playing this game the way I would have when I was young. Michael is reading me. Lia is next to Dean, pretending that she’s not worried. Sloane is counting—the tiles on the floor, the cracks in the wall, the number of patrons in the room all around her.
I opened my eyes, and the room swam around me. I thought, at first, that there were tears in my eyes, that thinking of the family I’d found in the program had broken the dam inside of me and let in the grief for my family of blood.
But the room didn’t stop spinning. It stayed blurred. I opened my mouth to say something, but words wouldn’t come. My tongue felt thick. I was dizzy, nauseous.
My right hand found its way to the cup of coffee.
The coffee, I thought, unable to form the words out loud. Even my thoughts were scrambled. I tried to stand up, but fell. I grabbed for the booth, and my hand hit Celine’s thigh instead.
She didn’t move.
She’s slumped over. Unconscious. I fought my way to my feet. The world kept spinning, but as I stumbled forward, I realized—the room was silent. No one was talking. No one was coming to help me.
Dean and Lia, Michael and Sloane—they were slumped in their booths, too.
Unconscious, I thought. Or…or…
Someone caught me under my armpits. “Easy there.” Ree’s voice came to me from a great distance. I tried to tell her, tried to make my mouth say the word, but I couldn’t.
Poison.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you did for Melody—or for Sarah.” As the world went black, Ree leaned down. “But all must be tested,” she whispered. “All must be found worthy.”
I woke up in darkness. The floor beneath me was cold and made of stone. My head hurt. My body hurt—and that was when I remembered.
Ree. The coffee. All of the others, slumped over…
I tried to push myself to my feet, but couldn’t stand. My body felt heavy and numb, like my limbs belonged to someone else.
“It will wear off.”
My head snapped up as my eyes searched through the darkness for the source of that voice. I heard the strike of a lighter, and a second later, a torch flamed to life on the wall.
Ree stood before me, looking every bit the woman I remembered. No-nonsense. Warm.
“You’re one of them?” I meant it as a statement, but the words came out a question.
“I was retired.” Ree obliged me with an answer. “Until my former apprentice got himself killed.” She gave me a look. “I understand I have you to thank for that.”
“You recruited Nightshade.”
She snorted. “Nightshade. Boy always did have notions—but I owed his grandfather, and the old man was insistent that I choose him as my heir.”
“You owed Malcolm Lowell.” My brain whirred. “Because he was the one who brought you to the Masters’ attention.”
Ree smiled fondly. “I was younger then. My no-good husband had left me. My no-good daughter was already showing signs of being her father’s daughter. Malcolm started coming by the diner. Never was a man as good at seeing secrets as that one.”
Secrets. Like the fact that you had a homicidal streak.
“Malcolm saw something in me,” Ree continued softly. “He asked me what I would do if I ever saw Sarah’s father again.”
The man who left you, pregnant and alone.
“You would have killed him.” The feeling was starting to come back into my body. I became hyperaware of the world around me—the rough stone floor, the crackling of the fire, the shackles on the wall. “He left you, and people who leave deserve what they get.”
Ree shook her head fondly. “You always did favor your mama—good at reading people.”
You tried to help my mom, and she left. She didn’t even say good-bye. I thought back to Michael’s read on Ree the first time we’d met her. He’d said that Ree had been fond of my mother, but that there was anger there, too.
“Were you the one who suggested my mother as Pythia?” I asked. “You knew that she was alone in the world, except for me. You had to have at least suspected that there was abuse in her past.”
Ree didn’t reply.
“You told me once that we, every one of us, reap what we sow. To become one of the Masters, you had to kill nine people.” I paused, thinking of the victims on the wall back at Quantico. “You chose people who deserved it. People like your husband. People who left.” When I didn’t get a reaction, I continued. “Life is full of drowning people,” I said, continuing to parrot her own words back at her, “ready and willing to drown you, too—unless you drown them first.”
For a moment, I thought Ree might snap. I thought she might reach for me. But instead, she closed her eyes. “You have no idea how different the wor
ld looks once you know what it’s like to watch some son of a bitch who abandoned his four kids crumple to the ground. His eyes roll back in his head. His body seizes. Then the pain comes. He scratches at himself, at the walls, at the floor—until his nails are bloody. Until there’s nothing left but pain.”
The picture Ree was painting was familiar. Beau Donovan had died from Nightshade’s poison. He’d scratched at himself, at the floor…
You chose Nightshade. You trained him. You have a gift for poisons. It made sense. Statistically, poison was a woman’s weapon. And when the patrons of the Not-A-Diner had started answering our questions about Mason Kyle’s family, Ree had shut the conversation down with a single word. Enough.
I pushed myself unsteadily to my feet. I was still weak—too weak to be a threat.
“The people you killed deserved to die,” I said, playing into her pathology. “But what about me? Is this what I deserve?”
I willed her to see me as the child I’d once been—one that she’d been fond of.
“I don’t leave people,” I continued. “I’m the one who gets left.” My voice shook slightly. “What about my friends, back at the diner? Did they deserve to die?”
Until now, I hadn’t let myself even think those words. I hadn’t let myself remember Celine slumped in the booth across from me. Michael and Lia and Sloane and Dean. Agent Sterling. Judd.
I stared at the psychopath across from me. Tell me they were unconscious. Tell me you just drugged them. Tell me they’re alive.
“You came to Gaither asking questions,” Ree said sternly. “Running around with your FBI friends, making us wonder if there was some memory buried in your head—some clue—that would lead you straight to our door. You found Malcolm. It was only a matter of time before you found the rest of us, too.”
“Are we still in Gaither?” I asked. “Are we nearby?”
Ree didn’t answer the question. “There were some who wanted you dead—all of you,” she said instead. “Others made a case for an alternative solution.”
I thought about what Nightshade had told me about the Pythia. She was judge and jury. She was the one they tortured, purifying her so that she could pass judgment.
Again. And again. And again.
My mother had tried to get me out of Gaither. Had they broken her? Had she told them to bring me here?
The sound of a door creaking open ripped me from those thoughts. A figure in a hooded robe stood in the door. The hood fell down over his face, obscuring his features.
“I’d like a word with our guest.”
Ree snorted. Clearly, she didn’t think too much of the guy in the hood. The exchange told me something about the power dynamics at play here. You’re a veteran. He’s a blowhard on the front lines for the first time.
I turned my attention from Ree to the man in the hood. You’re young, and you’re new. She’s a Master, and you’re not—not yet.
I was looking at the man who’d killed my cousin. The one who’d killed Tory and Bryce. And there was something familiar about him, something familiar about his voice….
“I told you once,” the hooded figure intoned, “that if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
“Friedrich Nietzsche.” I recognized the quote—and the haughty, overblown delivery. “TA Geoff?”
I’d met him on the Redding case, when he’d attempted to pick me up in the wake of a girl’s death by sharing his “vast” knowledge of serial killers. I’d spent an evening in an abandoned lecture hall with this guy, Michael, and Bryce.
“It’s Geoffrey,” he corrected tersely, lowering his hood. “And your name isn’t Veronica.”
The last time we’d met, I’d given him a fake name. “Really?” I said. “That’s the issue you really think is worth discussing here?”
When last we’d met, I’d pegged Geoffrey as being low on empathy and high on himself—but he hadn’t struck me as a killer. You weren’t then. You weren’t even an apprentice. Death was a game to you. It was abstract.
How had the Masters found him?
“You’re asking yourself how you could have been so wrong about me,” Geoffrey said smugly. “I know all about you, Cassandra Hobbes. I know that you were investigating the Daniel Redding case. I know that you helped catch his apprentices.” He offered me a twisted smile. “But you didn’t catch me.”
You killed Bryce—she always did get under your skin. Then the Pythia whispered in your ear. Did she play to your ego? Tell you who to kill? Was she the abyss, looking at and into you?
I took a step forward on legs that weren’t as unsteady as they’d been a moment before. “You burned those girls.” I let myself sound mesmerized, playing to his ego the way my mother had. “You strung them up, and you burned them, and you left no evidence behind.” I stared at and into him. “You need nine, but the nine you will choose?” My voice was low, seductive as I advanced on him. “They’ll make you legendary.”
“Enough,” Ree snapped. She stepped between Geoffrey and me. “She’s playing you,” she informed him. “And I don’t have the time or stomach to stand here and watch.”
Geoffrey’s eyes narrowed. His hands hung loosely by his sides. One minute, he was just standing there, and the next, his left hand had reached for the torch. “Let me test her,” he said. “Let me purify her, bit by bit.”
The flame flickered. You want to burn me. You want to watch me scream.
“No,” Ree said. “Your time will come—after your ninth kill and not a second before.” She removed something from her pocket—a small, round tub, no larger than a container of lip gloss. “Over time,” she told me, unscrewing the lid, “one builds up immunity to poisons.”
She dipped her finger into a colorless paste.
I thought of Beau, who’d died screaming, and of everything Judd had told me about Nightshade’s poison of choice. Incurable. Painful. Fatal.
Ree’s left hand closed around my chin. She jerked my face to the side, her grip like steel.
Too late, I tried to fight. Too late, my hands tried to block hers.
She smeared the paste down my neck.
Some poisons don’t have to be ingested. My heart thudded in my chest. Some poisons can be absorbed through the skin.
Ree let go of me and stepped back. At first, I felt nothing. And then, the world exploded into pain.
My body was on fire. Every nerve, every inch of skin—even the blood in my veins was boiling.
On the ground. Seizing. God, help me—
Someone, help me—
My fingers scraped against my throat. On some level, I was aware that I was tearing at my own flesh. On some level, I was aware that I was bleeding.
On some level, I heard the screams.
My throat closed around them. I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocating, and I didn’t care, because all there was—all I was—was pain.
On some level, I was aware of the sound of footsteps rushing into the room.
On some level, I was aware of someone saying my name.
On some level, I was aware of arms hoisting me upward.
But all there was…all I was…
Pain.
I dreamt of dancing in the snow. My mother was beside me, her head tilted back, her tongue darting between her lips to catch a snowflake.
The scene jumped. I stood in the wings of the stage as my mother performed. My gaze fell on an old man in the audience.
Malcolm Lowell.
Without warning, my mother and I were back in the snow, dancing.
Dancing.
Dancing.
Forever and ever. No matter what.
I woke to the sound of beeping. I was lying on something soft. Forcing my eyes open, I remembered—
The poison.
The pain.
The sound of footsteps.
“Easy.”
I turned my head toward the voice, unable to sit up. I was in a hospital room. The beeping machine beside me tracked the bea
ting of my heart.
“You’ve been unconscious for two days.” Director Sterling sat next to my bed. “We weren’t sure you were going to make it.”
We. I remembered the sound of footsteps. I remembered someone saying my name.
“Agent Sterling?” I asked. “Judd. Dean and the others—”
“They’re fine,” Director Sterling assured me. “As are you.”
I remembered the poison. I remembered gasping for breath. I remembered the pain.
“How?” I said. Beneath the covers, my body shook.
“There’s an antidote.” Director Sterling kept his answer direct and to the point. “The window during which to administer it is small, but you should be back to your full strength soon.”
I wanted to ask where they’d gotten the antidote. I wanted to ask how they’d found me. But more than anything, I wanted the others. I wanted Dean and Lia and Michael and Sloane.
Beside me, Director Sterling held up a small object for my inspection. I recognized it instantly—the tracking device Agent Sterling had given me. “This time my daughter had the foresight to activate the device.” He paused.
For reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint, my breath caught in my throat.
“It’s a shame,” the director continued slowly, turning the device over in his hand, “that the tracking software that would have led the FBI here had been tampered with.”
A chill slid down my spine.
“Dean,” I said suddenly. “If he knew where I was, if they’d found me…”
“He’d be here?” Director Sterling suggested. “Given what I know of Redding’s whelp, I tend to agree.”
I surged upward and winced as something bit into my wrists. I looked down.
Handcuffs.
Someone had tampered with the tracking software. Someone had cuffed me to this bed. I looked back up at the director.
“This isn’t a hospital,” I said, my heart beating in my throat.
“No,” he replied. “It’s not.”
“There’s an antidote to the Masters’ poison,” I repeated what Director Sterling had told me earlier, my chest tightening. “But the FBI doesn’t have it.”
“No. They don’t.”
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