I saw now what my mother had meant.
They can make you do anything.
The director slid a knife out of his own pocket. “You fight,” he said, holding the blade to Laurel’s throat, “or she dies.”
The director didn’t wait for a response before he began to cut. Just a little. Just a warning. Laurel didn’t scream. She didn’t move. But the high-pitched mewling that came out of her throat hit me like a physical blow.
“How sure are you that your team will find you?” My mother bent down to pick up her own blade. “We’re halfway to the desert, in the middle of nowhere, underground. If they dig into Malcolm’s past, if they go back far enough, they might see a pattern, but most people wouldn’t.”
Dean. Michael. Lia. Sloane.
“I’m sure,” I said. “Wherever we are, they’ll find us.”
My mother nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I repeated. What are you saying?
She advanced on me. “We have to fight. Laurel’s just a baby, Cassie. She’s you, and she’s me, and she’s ours. Do you understand?”
They can make you do anything.
“You have to kill me.” My mother’s words sliced into me, ice-cold and uncompromising.
“No,” I said.
“Yes.” My mother circled me, the way her alter ego had earlier. “You have to fight, Cassie. One of us has to die.”
“No.” I was shaking my head and backing away from her, but I couldn’t make myself take my eyes off the knife.
You don’t have to play the game anymore. The promise I’d made my sister came back to me. Not ever again. You don’t have to be Nine.
“Take the knife, Cassie,” my mother said. “Use it.”
You do it, I thought. You kill me. I understood now why she’d asked me how sure I was that help was coming. If you thought you were dooming me to life as the Pythia, you’d give me mercy. You’d plunge your knife into my chest to save me from your fate.
But I’d told her that I was sure.
A piercing scream cut through the air. Laurel wasn’t silent now. She wasn’t stoic. She wasn’t Nine.
She’s just a baby. He’s hurting her. He’ll kill her if I don’t—
No.
“Yes,” my mother said, closing the space between us. She’d always known exactly what I was thinking. She’d known me the way only someone with our particular skill set could.
Someone who loves me, forever and ever.
“Do it,” my mother insisted, pressing her knife into my hand. “You have to, baby. You are the best thing I ever did—the only good thing I ever did. I can’t be that for Laurel, not now.” She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t panicked.
She was sure.
“But you can,” she continued. “You can love her. You can be there for her. You can get out of here, and you can live. And to do that…” She placed her left hand over my right hand, guiding the knife to her chest. “You have to kill me.”
Dancing in the snow. Curled up in her lap. Behavior. Personality. Environment.
I love you. I love you. I—
Her grip on my hand tightened. Her body blocking the motion from the Masters, she jerked me forward. My hand on the knife. Her hand on mine. I felt the blade slide into her chest. She gasped, blood blooming around the wound. I wanted to pull the knife out.
But for Laurel, I didn’t.
“Forever and ever,” I whispered, holding the knife in place. I held her. She slumped forward, bleeding, the light beginning to drain from her eyes.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I didn’t look away. I didn’t so much as blink, not even when I heard a door slam open.
Not even when I heard Agent Briggs’s familiar voice. “Freeze!”
My mom isn’t moving. Her heart isn’t beating. Her eyes—they don’t see me. I pulled the knife out of her chest, and her body fell to the ground as FBI agents poured into the room.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Gone.
On some level, I was aware of the fact that shots were being fired. On some level, I was aware of the fact that arrests were being made. But as I stood there, the bloody knife in my hand, I couldn’t bring myself to look up. I couldn’t watch.
I couldn’t look at anything but the body.
My mother’s red hair was splayed out around her, a halo of fire against the bright white of the sand. Her lips were dry and cracked, her eyes unseeing.
“Put down the knife!” Agent Sterling’s voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. “Step away from the girl.”
It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking to me. She wasn’t talking about my knife. I turned, forcing my eyes to the stands.
To the director.
To Laurel.
He was crouched behind her, his knife at her throat. “We walk out of here,” he said, “or the child doesn’t.”
“You don’t kill children.” It took me a moment to realize that I was the one who’d said the words. Of the hundreds of victims we’d identified as being the work of the Masters, not one of them had been a child. When Beau Donovan had failed their test, they hadn’t taken a knife to his throat.
They’d left him in the desert to die.
“There are rituals,” I said. “There are rules.”
“And yet, you’re not quite eighteen yet, are you, Cassie?” The director never took his eyes off of his daughter. “I’ve always believed the rules are what we make of them. Isn’t that right, Veronica?”
Agent Sterling stared at her father, and for an instant, I could see the little girl she’d been. You adored him once. You respected him. You joined the FBI for him.
She pulled the trigger.
I heard the shot, but didn’t register what I’d heard until I saw the tiny red hole in her father’s forehead. Director Sterling fell to the ground. As the FBI rushed Laurel, my little sister knelt, touching the wound on her captor’s forehead.
She looked up and met my eyes. “The blood belongs to the Pythia,” she told me, her voice haunting, almost melodic. “The blood belongs to Nine.”
The EMTs who treated Laurel insisted on treating me as well. I tried to tell them that the blood wasn’t mine, but the words wouldn’t come.
Agent Sterling sat down beside me. “You’re strong. You’re a survivor. None of this was your fault.”
The profiler in me knew that those words weren’t just for me. I’d killed my mother. She’d killed her father.
How did a person survive that?
“As touching as this moment truly is”—a voice broke into my thoughts—“some of us had to mislead, blackmail, and/or explicitly threaten at least a half-dozen federal agents to get past the police line, and we’re not the kind of people who excel at waiting.”
I looked up to see Lia standing three feet away. Sloane was pressed to her side, a fierce look on her face. Behind them, Michael had a physical grip on Dean. Every muscle in my boyfriend’s body was tensed.
Michael blackmailed the feds, I thought. You threatened them, Dean. Explicitly.
Dean had spent his entire life keeping his emotions carefully in check, never losing control, fighting against even a hint of violence. I knew, just by the way he was standing, the way his eyes drank me in, like a man dying of thirst in a desert, unsure whether he was beholding a mirage—you didn’t care what you had to do, who you had to hurt, what you had to threaten.
All you care about is me.
I stood, my legs shaking as I did, and Michael let Dean go. My boyfriend caught me before I fell, and something inside me shattered. The numbness that had settled over my body receded, and suddenly I could feel everything—the ache in my throat, the ghost of the pain from the poison, Dean’s body folding around mine.
I could feel the knife in my hand.
I could feel myself holding my mother and watching her die.
“I killed her.” My face lay on Dean’s chest, the words ripped from my mouth like a tooth pulled out by force. �
�Dean, I—”
“You’re not a killer.” Dean’s right hand cupped my chin, his left gently tracing the line of my jaw. “You’re the person who empathizes with every victim. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, and if you’d been given a choice—if it had been up to you whether it was your life on the line or anyone else’s—you would have told the Masters to take you.” Dean’s voice was rough in his throat. His dark eyes searched my own. “That’s what the Masters never understood. You would have walked in there willingly, knowing you wouldn’t have walked out, and not just for me or Michael or Lia or Sloane—for anyone. Because that’s the person you are, Cassie. Ever since you walked into your mother’s dressing room, ever since you were twelve years old, part of you believed that it was your fault, that it should have been you.”
I tried to pull back from him, but he held me close.
“You’ve been looking—and looking and looking—for some way to make it right. You’re not a killer, Cassie. You just finally accepted that sometimes, the biggest sacrifice isn’t made by the person who gives up her life.” He lowered his forehead to touch mine. “Sometimes, the hardest thing to be is the one who lives.”
My body was shaking. My hands trembled as they found their way to his chest, his neck, his face, as if touching him, feeling him beneath the pads of my fingers, might make what he was saying true.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I heard the sobs before I realized I was sobbing. I dug my fingers into the back of his neck, his T-shirt, his shoulders, holding on for dear life.
“I love you.” Dean lifted the words from my mind. “Today, tomorrow, covered in blood, haunted and waking up in the middle of the night screaming—I love you, Cassie, and I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“None of us are.” Sloane’s voice was quiet. I knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t sure whether this was a private moment, wasn’t sure if she would be wanted.
But you can’t stay away.
“You aren’t alone,” Sloane said. “And I’m not going to ask if now would be an appropriate time to hug you, because I have calculated within a reasonable margin of error that it is.”
Michael didn’t say anything as he piled on behind Sloane.
Lia arched an eyebrow at me. “I didn’t cry when you were gone,” she informed me. “I didn’t break things. I didn’t feel like someone had put me in a hole.”
For the first time since I’d known her, Lia’s voice caught on a lie.
“How did you find me?” I did Lia the favor of changing the subject.
“We didn’t,” Sloane said. “Celine did.”
Celine? I looked for her and saw her standing behind the police line, watching from a distance, her dark hair caught in a faint wind.
“It was the picture,” Agent Sterling put in. “Of your mother and Laurel.” Behind her, my little sister lay curled in the back of the ambulance, asleep.
“What about it?” I asked.
“Celine saw the resemblance between you and your mother, between your mother and Laurel, and between Laurel”—Agent Sterling’s expression flickered, just for a moment—“and me.”
I thought of Director Sterling telling me that some privileges—such as torturing the Pythia—were reserved for active members of the cult, while others were open to Masters who’d already handed their seat off to a replacement.
You held a knife to my throat. You let one hand gently glide down the side of my face.
I’d tried, over the past few months, not to think about the way that Laurel had been conceived.
“She’s not just my sister.” I met Agent Sterling’s eyes. “She’s your sister, too.”
“We tracked the director.” Agent Briggs came and stood behind Agent Sterling, as close to her as Dean was to me. “And he led us to you.”
For a long moment, our FBI mentors stood there, Sterling’s gaze aimed forward. I expected her to go into Agent Veronica Sterling mode, to step away from him, to point out that her father had been manipulating them—both of them—for years.
Instead, Sterling let her veneer of calm waver. She leaned back into Briggs. And his arm wrapped around her.
We’re the same, I thought, watching Sterling let go. Now more than ever. Laurel was Agent Sterling’s, and she was mine—just like what had happened in the Masters’ tomb. What we’d done. What we had to live with now.
“Come on,” Dean said, brushing his lips over my temple. “Let’s go home.”
I buried my mother—for the second time—in Colorado. This time, the funeral wasn’t a sham. This time, her body was the one in the casket. And this time, I wasn’t just surrounded by the family I’d found in the Naturals program.
My father’s family was there as well. Aunts and uncles and cousins. My father. Nonna.
I’d told them a version of the truth—that I’d been working with the FBI, that my mother had died at the hands of the same people responsible for my cousin Kate’s death, that Laurel was my sister.
She’s you, and she’s me, and she’s ours. My mother’s words had never been far from my mind in the days since we’d wrapped up the Masters’ case.
The FBI had identified and neutralized nine killers that night—seven Masters, one apprentice, and the man born to rule them all. Six killers in custody, three—Malcolm Lowell, Director Sterling, and TA Geoff—dead. The FBI was keeping the case quiet for now, but it wouldn’t stay quiet for long.
In the meantime, Laurel needed something that I couldn’t give her alone.
“You will come back to the house with me,” Nonna declared, hoisting my little sister up like she was nothing. “We will make cookies. And you!” She pointed a finger at Michael. “You will help us.”
Michael grinned. “Sir, yes, sir.”
Nonna narrowed her eyes at him. “I hear you have a problem with the kissing,” she said, having jumped to that conclusion when I’d been reluctant to talk about my romantic status months earlier. “If you behave yourself, I will give you some pointers.”
Dean almost choked trying to keep a straight face. That was Nonna to a T—half general, half mother hen. She was the one I’d come home to—not my father, who couldn’t quite look me in the eye.
Watching Nonna putting Michael handily in his place, Judd smiled slightly. “Your grandmother,” he said. “She’s single?”
One by one, the others cleared away, leaving me alone at my mother’s gravesite. The therapist the FBI had sent me to had told me that there would be good days and bad days. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
I wasn’t sure how long I stood there by myself before I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see Agent Briggs. He looked exactly as he had the day I’d first met him, the day he’d thrown down the gauntlet and used my mother’s case to tempt me into meeting with him.
“Director.” I greeted him with his new title.
“You’re sure,” FBI Director Briggs said, “that this is what you want?”
I wanted to go back to our house in Quantico, like nothing had changed. I wanted to save people. I wanted to work behind the scenes, the way we always had.
But people didn’t always get what they wanted.
“This is where I need to be,” I said. “If anyone can give Laurel a normal childhood, it’s my grandmother. And I can’t abandon her—not after everything that’s happened.”
Briggs studied me for a moment. “What if you didn’t have to?”
I waited, knowing he wasn’t the type of person to bear silence for long.
“There’s a field office in Denver,” Briggs said. “And I hear Michael has acquired a large house not far from your grandmother’s. Dean and Sloane are in. Celine Delacroix has thrown her hat in the ring. Lia’s holding out for a raise.”
“We don’t get paid,” I commented.
Director Briggs shrugged. “You do now. We’ve got a task force running down the remaining Masters emeriti. The director of national security would prefer
to keep any teenagers in our employ away from it, given the attention the case is likely to attract. But you’re no longer minors, and there are other cases….”
Other victims, other killers.
“What about Agent Sterling?” I asked.
Briggs smiled ruefully. “I proposed. She keeps turning me down—something about the two of us having been down that road before.” The look on his face reminded me that Briggs had a competitive streak. He wouldn’t let his ex go without a fight. “She’s put in a request for a transfer to the Denver field office,” Briggs added. “I believe Judd said something about making a move as well.”
When I’d decided not to return to Quantico, I’d thought that I was giving up everything. But I should have realized—home wasn’t a place.
“We could go to college,” I said, thinking about the others. “Graduate and enroll at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Do things by the book.”
“But…” Briggs prompted.
But we’ve never been normal. We’ve never done things by the book.
“I was thinking,” I said after a moment. “Celine more than proved herself on this last case. There have to be others.”
Other young people with incredible gifts. Others with no home and no direction, with ghosts in their pasts and the potential to do so much more.
“Other Naturals,” Briggs filled in. “To continue the program.”
Hearing him say the words gave life to something inside of me—a spark, a sense of purpose, a flame. Feeling that, letting myself feel it, I held his gaze and nodded.
Slowly, the newly minted director of the FBI smiled.
Game on.
The Naturals series has been a labor of love for the last five years, and I owe so much to the wonderful people who helped shape and share this story. Huge thanks to my agent, Elizabeth Harding, who has been the Naturals’ number one advocate from day one, and to Ginger Clark, Holly Frederick, Sarah Perillo, Jonathon Lyons, and everyone else at Curtis Brown for working tirelessly on my behalf. Over the course of the series, I have been lucky enough to work with three outstanding editors. Thank you to Cat Onder, Lisa Yoskowitz, and Kieran Viola for helping to shape every aspect of this story and pushing me to take Cassie’s story to the next level. For Bad Blood in particular, I owe a huge debt to Kieran, who brings so much enthusiasm, wisdom, and understanding to the editorial process. I am so very proud of where we ended up!
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