The Naturals

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “When people ask me why I do what I do,” the woman who was that baby sister said, “I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered. I’d finally gotten out of that house. I went to college, and I spent years looking for my big sister. At first, I just wanted to find her. I just wanted to be with her—and with you. If she’d taken me with you, I could have helped! You would have loved me. I would have loved you.” Locke’s voice got very soft, and I realized that this was a scenario she’d played out in her head, growing up in that hellhole. She’d thought about my mom, and she’d thought about me before she ever met me, before she ever knew my name.

  “She shouldn’t have left you there.” I braved saying the words because they felt true. Locke was just a kid when my mother left, and my mom had never even looked back. She’d raised me on the road, moving from city to city, never letting it slip that she had a family out there, just like she’d never mentioned my dad.

  My whole life, we’d been running from something, and I didn’t even know it.

  “She never should have left me there,” Locke repeated. “Eventually, I stopped dreaming about finding her and being a family again, and I started dreaming about finding her and hurting her, the way Daddy hurt me. Making her pay for leaving me there. Peeling her face off until no one thought she was the pretty one, until just looking at her made you scream.”

  The dressing room. The blood. The smell …

  “But by the time I found her—by the time I found you—it was too late. She was already dead. She was gone, and it wasn’t fair. I was supposed to kill her. I was supposed to be the one.”

  My aunt hadn’t killed my mother—because someone else had gotten there first.

  “When I found out that she was dead, and you were gone, when I found out that they’d sent you to live with your father’s family—I was your family, too! I thought about taking you. I even went to Colorado, but when I got there, there was this junkie at my motel. She was cheap and loose and dirty, and her hair was the exact right shade of red. I killed her, and I said, ‘How do you like that, Lore?’ I carved her up until I could imagine Lorelai’s face underneath, and God, it felt good.” She paused. “It was the sweetest, you know. The first time. It always is. And after the first time, you always need more.”

  “Is that why you joined the FBI?” I asked. “Lots of travel, easy access, the perfect cover?”

  Agent Locke took a step toward me. Every muscle in her body was taut. For a moment, I thought that she would hit me—again and again and again.

  “No,” she said. “That’s not why I joined.”

  When people ask me why I do what I do, I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered.

  Locke’s words came back to me then, and I realized that she’d been telling the truth.

  “You joined the FBI because you wanted to find my mother’s killer.”

  Not because she was upset that my mom was dead. Because she’d wanted to be the one to kill her.

  “I changed my name. I studied. I planned. I passed the psych exams with flying colors. Even once Briggs and I started working together and he brought me in on the Naturals program, no one really saw me. They only saw what I wanted them to see. Lia never caught me in a lie. Michael never saw a hint of unsavory emotion. And Dean—I was like family to him.”

  Hearing Dean’s name made my eyes dart over to his body. He still wasn’t moving—but Michael was. His eyes were open. He was bleeding. He couldn’t walk, he couldn’t even crawl, but he was pulling himself slowly across the floor—to his gun.

  Locke moved to follow my gaze, but I stopped her.

  “It isn’t the same,” I said, my voice decisive and calm.

  “What isn’t?” Locke—no, her name wasn’t really Locke, not if she was my mother’s sister—said.

  I had less than a second to think of an answer, but growing up the daughter of a woman who made her living by pretending to be psychic hadn’t just taught me the BPEs. For better or worse, I’d learned to put on a show, so I said the one thing I could think of that would keep Lacey Hobbes’s attention focused solely and 100 percent on me.

  “You tried to restage my mother’s murder, but you got it wrong. What you’re doing to these women isn’t the same as what I did to my mother.”

  The woman in front of me had wanted to kill my mother, but she’d also desperately wanted her acceptance. She’d wanted to be a part of a family, and she’d brought me here tonight with some twisted hope that I could be that for her. She’d enjoyed being my mentor. She wanted me to be like her.

  Now my job was to convince her that I was.

  “My mother didn’t protect you,” I said, mirroring the rage and desperation and hurt I saw on her face. “She didn’t protect me, either. There were men. She didn’t love them. She didn’t stay with them. She didn’t say a word when they took their frustrations out on me. She was weak. She was a whore. She hurt me.”

  Lia would have known I was lying, but the woman in front of me wasn’t Lia. I smiled, letting the expression spread slowly across my face, keeping my eyes on my aunt, never looking, even for a second, at Michael.

  “So I hurt her.”

  My aunt stared at me, her face still twisted in disbelief, but her eyes wistful with longing.

  “She was getting ready. Putting on her lipstick. Pretending she was so perfect and so special, that she wasn’t a monster. I said her name. She turned around, and I took my knife. I plunged it into her stomach. She said my name. That was it. Just ‘Cassie.’ So I stabbed her again. And again. She fought. She kicked and she screamed, but this time, I was the one with the power. I was the one doing the hurting, and she was the one getting hurt. She fell on her stomach. I flipped her over so I could see her face. I didn’t drag the knife over her cheekbones. I didn’t carve her up. I dipped my fingers into her side. I made her scream. And then I painted her lips with blood.”

  Locke—no, Hobbes—Lacey was captivated. For a single second, I thought she might believe me. Her knife hand hung loosely by her side. Her other hand reached into her pocket. She pulled something out—I couldn’t see what. She fingered it for a moment—gingerly, carefully—and then she crushed her fingers into a fist.

  “An excellent performance,” she said. “But I’m a profiler, too. I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, Cassie, and your mother wasn’t killed by a twelve-year-old girl. You’re not a killer. You don’t have what it takes.” She lifted the knife and started forward, the longing in her eyes turning to something else.

  Bloodlust.

  “You’re not going to get away with this,” I said, dropping the act as she advanced on me. “They’ll know it was you. They’ll catch you—”

  “No,” Locke corrected. “I’ll catch Dean. You called me from his phone. I was worried, but when I called the house, you weren’t there. Everyone went into an uproar. They found out Dean was missing, too, and that he’d stolen Briggs’s guns. I tracked you down. I found Dean here with Genevieve. He shot Michael. He carved you up. I’m the heroic agent who stopped him, who figured out that the DC murders were the work of a copycat with access to our system, unrelated to the other murders altogether. I was too late to save you, but I did manage to kill Dean before he could kill me. Like father, like son.

  “Did you really think you could win?” she asked. “Did you think you could fool me?”

  Behind her, Michael had the gun in his hand. He rolled onto his side. He aimed.

  “I never expected you to believe me,” I said. “Or to let me live. I just needed you to listen.”

  Her eyes met mine. They widened. A gunshot went off. Then two, then three, four, five. And my aunt Lacey fell to the floor, her body splayed out next to Genevieve.

  Dead.

  PART FIVE: DECIDING

  CHAPTER 38

  Michael was in the hospital for two weeks. Dean was released after two days. But even once we were back at the house, even once the case was closed, none of us ha
d really recovered.

  Genevieve Ridgerton had survived—barely. She’d refused to see any of us—especially me.

  Michael had months of physical rehabilitation ahead of him. The doctors said he might never walk without a limp again. Dean had barely said a word to me. Sloane couldn’t talk about anything other than the absolute unlikelihood of a serial killer being able to pass the psych evals and background check necessary to join the FBI, even under an assumed name. And I was dealing with the fact that Lacey Locke, née Hobbes, was my aunt.

  Her story had checked out. She and my mother were born and raised outside of Baton Rouge, though both had shed their accents along the way. Their father, Clayton Hobbes, had been convicted twice of assault and battery—once against his wife, who ran off when my mother was nine and Lacey was three. The girls had attended school until the ages of ten and sixteen, but the system had lost them somewhere along the way.

  They’d grown up in hell. My mother had gotten out. Lacey hadn’t.

  The Bureau cross-referenced Lacey’s murders with cases that Briggs’s team had worked, and they discovered at least five more that fit the pattern. The agents would fly out on a case; Lacey would slip away, and somewhere, forty or fifty miles away, someone would disappear. They would die. And if a police report was filed, it never made its way to the FBI’s attention, because the crime didn’t appear to be serial in nature.

  The woman who’d called herself Lacey Locke had paid attention to state lines. She’d never killed in the same state twice—until I joined the Naturals program. She’d escalated then, committing a series of murders here in DC as she became increasingly fixated on me.

  At least fourteen people were dead, and a senator’s daughter had been kidnapped and gravely injured. The case was a nightmare for the Bureau—and a nightmare for us. The prohibition against Naturals’ participation in active cases was back and stronger than ever. Director Sterling had managed to keep our names out of the news this time. As far as he was concerned, all anyone needed to know was that the killer was dead.

  My aunt was dead.

  Just like my mother.

  Two weeks after Michael had pulled the trigger, I could still see those last moments playing out, over and over again. I sat beside the pool, dangling my feet in the water and wondering what happened next.

  Where did I go from here?

  “If you’re going to leave the program, leave. But for God’s sake, Cassie, if you’re going to stay, stop moping around like your kitty cat has cancer, and do something about it.”

  I turned to see Lia standing above me. She was the one person who hadn’t changed as a result of all of this. In a way, it was almost comforting to know that I could count on her to stay the same.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked, pulling my feet out of the pool and standing up so that we were eye to eye.

  “You can start by getting rid of that Rose Red lipstick I gave you,” Lia said. Leave it to her to know that I still had it, that I’d carried the tube she’d given me everywhere I went since discovering an ancient tube of Rose Red, worn to a nub, in my aunt’s hand the night she died. Apparently, it had been my mother’s color of choice even as a girl. Lacey had kept it all these years.

  That was what she’d carried in her pocket.

  That was what she’d held as I’d spun my story about my mother’s death.

  The FBI had found a dozen other lipsticks in a cabinet at her house. Keepsakes that she took from each victim. A little sister, dying to be like big sis, stealing her lipstick until the end.

  She was the one who’d given the makeup to Lia. She’d bought a fresh tube of Rose Red just for me, and Lia had played right into her hands. Now that it was over, I should have thrown the lipstick away, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to do it. It was a reminder: of the things my aunt had done, of what I’d survived, of my mother and the fact that Lacey and I had both joined the FBI in hopes of finding her killer.

  A killer who was still out there. A killer who not even a psychotic, obsessive FBI agent had been able to find. Since joining the program, I’d gained and lost a mentor and seen my mother’s only other living relative shot dead. I’d helped take down a killer who’d been recreating my mother’s death for years—but I was still no closer to finding the monster who’d actually killed her. I might never get answers.

  They might never find her body.

  “Well?” Lia had done a good impression of a patient person, but clearly, her capacity for waiting for me to reply had been stretched to its limit and then some. “Are you in or are you out?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m in this, but I’m keeping the lipstick.”

  “Rawrrrrr.” Lia made a scratching motion. “Somebody’s finally growing claws.”

  “Yeah,” I said dryly. “I love you, too.”

  I turned around to walk into the house, but Lia’s voice stopped me halfway there.

  “I’m not saying I like you. I’m not saying I’m going to stop eating your ice cream or stealing your clothes, and I’m certainly not saying that I won’t make your life a living nightmare if you jerk Dean around, but I wouldn’t want you to leave.” Lia strode past me, then turned around and flashed me a smile. “You make things interesting. And besides, I’m kind of into the idea of Michael’s war wounds, and having my way with him will be that much sweeter knowing you’re right down the hall.”

  Lia flounced back into the house. I thought of the scars Michael would have once he’d healed, thought of the kiss, the fact that he’d almost died for me—and then I thought of Dean.

  Dean, who hadn’t forgiven himself for not being able to pull the trigger.

  Dean, whose father was as much of a monster as my aunt.

  Weeks ago, Lia had told me that every person in this house was fundamentally screwed up to the depths of our dark and shadowy souls. We all had our crosses to bear. We saw things that other people didn’t—things that people our age should never have to see.

  Dean would never just be a boy. He’d always be the serial killer’s son. Michael would always be the person who’d put a round of bullets in my aunt. And part of me would never leave my mother’s blood-soaked dressing room, just like another part would always be at the safe house, with Lacey and her knife.

  We would never be like other people.

  “I don’t know what the back door did to you,” an amused voice told me, “but I’m sure it’s really, truly sorry.”

  Michael was supposed to be using a wheelchair, but he was already trying to maneuver on crutches—an impossible feat, considering a bullet had also been lodged in his shoulder.

  “I’m not glaring at the back door,” I said.

  Michael raised one eyebrow, higher and higher until I caved.

  “Fine,” I said. “I might have been glaring at the back door. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Like you didn’t want to talk about that kiss?” Michael’s voice was light, but this was the first time either of us had brought up that moment in my bedroom.

  “Michael—”

  “Don’t.” He stopped me. “If I hadn’t been so jealous of Dean, I wouldn’t have bought your little story for a second. Even as it was, I didn’t buy it for much longer than that.”

  “You came after me,” I said.

  “I’ll always come after you,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that made the words seem like more of a joke than a promise.

  Something told me it was both.

  “But you and Redding have something. I don’t know what it is. I don’t blame you for it.” On crutches, he couldn’t lean toward me. He couldn’t reach out and brush the hair out of my face. But something about the curve of his lips was more intimate than any touch. “A lot has happened. You have a lot to figure out. I can be a patient man, Colorado. A devastatingly handsome, roguishly scarred, heartbreakingly courageous, patient man.”

  I rolled my eyes, but couldn’t bite back a smile.

  “So take w
hatever time you need. Figure out how you feel. Figure out if Dean makes you feel the way I do, if he’ll ever let you in, and if you want him to, because the next time my lips touch yours, the next time your hands are buried in my hair—the only person you’re going to be thinking about is me.”

  I stood there, looking at Michael and wondering how it was possible that I could instinctively understand other people—their personalities, their beliefs, their desires—but that when it came to what I wanted, I was just like anyone else, muddled and confused and stumbling through.

  I didn’t know what it meant that my aunt had been a killer, or how I felt about the fact that she was dead.

  I didn’t know who had killed my mother, or what losing her and never getting any closure had done to me. I didn’t know if I was capable of really letting someone else in. I didn’t know if I could fall in love.

  I didn’t know what I wanted or who I wanted to be with.

  But standing there, looking at Michael, the one thing I did know, the way I always knew things about other people, was that sooner or later, as a part of this program—a part of this team—I was going to find out.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jennifer Lynn Barnes is the author of a dozen novels for young adults. She has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science and recently completed her Ph.D. at Yale University.

  She is now a professor of psychology.

  You can find her online at www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com and www.jenniferlynnbarnes.tumblr.com

  What’s next for Cassie?

  Find out in the second thrilling instalment of

  www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com

  Quercus

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Naturals might be the most challenging and rewarding book I’ve ever written. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to combine my love of psychology and knowledge of cognitive science with my passion for YA, and I owe a major debt of gratitude to the many people who help me along the way.