All In: (The Naturals #3) (35 page)

Poison.

“Breathe,” Dean repeated.

“We need help in here!” Sterling was screaming.
Beau is screaming, and Sterling is screaming
—and finally, the convulsions stopped. Finally, Beau was still.

Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.

I forced myself to suck in a breath. And then another and another.

Beau’s cracked lips moved. He looked at Briggs in one final moment of clarity. “I don’t,” he struggled to say. “I don’t wish I was Nine.” He sounded
like a child.

“You’ve been poisoned,” Briggs told him. “You need to tell us—”

“I don’t believe in wishing,” Beau murmured. And then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he died.

B
eau was poisoned.
I thought the words, but didn’t understand them.
The cult killed him. Nightshade killed
Beau.
Beau, who’d carved a symbol onto his own chest—a symbol someone else had carved into the box that contained my mother’s remains.

“My mother didn’t die on a Fibonacci date,” I said. “It was June. There are no Fibonacci dates in June, none in July….”

I realized on some level that Michael and Lia were staring at me, that Dean had wrapped his arms around me, that my body had collapsed against his.

My mother had disappeared five years ago—six in June. The person who’d attacked her had used a knife.
It was poison that year. In the pattern, it was poison. Nightshade was the
killer. The knife was New York, six years before that. There wasn’t supposed to be another one for twenty-one years.

Nothing about my mother’s death fit the pattern—so why was the symbol etched onto her coffin?

I struggled out of Dean’s arms and went for my computer. I pulled up the pictures—the royal blue shroud, the bones, my mother’s necklace. My finger hit at the keys again and
again until the symbol showed up.

Lia and Michael came up behind us. “Is that…”

“Seven Masters,” I said, forcing my hand around the circles on the outside of the symbol. “The Pythia.” The vertical line. “And Nine.”

“Seven Masters.” Sloane appeared in the doorway, as if the mere mention of numbers had called her to us. “Seven circles. Seven ways of killing.”

I pulled my eyes from the screen to look at Sloane.

“I always wondered why there were only seven methods,” she said, her eyes swollen, her face pale. “Instead of nine.”

Three.

Three times three.

Three times three times three—but only seven ways to kill.

Because this group—whatever it was, however long it had been around—had nine members at a time.
Seven Masters. The Pythia. And Nine.

“Beau Donovan is dead,” Lia told Sloane. “Poison. Presumably Nightshade’s.”

Sloane’s hands smoothed themselves down over the front of the shirt Aaron had given her. She trembled slightly, but all she said was, “Maybe the flower was for him.”

The white flower in the photograph that Nightshade had sent Judd.
White flower.
Something stuck in the back of my brain, like food caught in between the teeth. Nightshade always sent
his victims the bloom of a white nightshade plant.
White. White flowers.

I walked into the kitchen, scrambled until I found what I was looking for. I pulled out the evidence envelope, opened it, removed the photo inside.

Not white nightshade.
The photo Nightshade had sent Judd wasn’t of a white nightshade bloom. It was a picture of a paper flower.
Origami.

I stumbled backward and grabbed the edge of the counter for balance, thinking of Beau’s last moments, the words he’d said.

I don’t believe in wishing.

I saw the little girl in the candy store, staring at a lollipop. I saw her father come and put her on his shoulders. I saw her beside the fountain, holding the penny.

I don’t believe in wishes,
she’d said.

There was a white origami flower behind her ear.

In my mind, I saw her mother come to get her. I saw her father, tossing a penny into the water. In my mind, I saw his face. I saw the water, and I saw his face—

And just like that, I was back on the banks of the Potomac, a thick black binder on my lap.

“Enjoying a bit of light reading?”
The voice echoed through my memory, and this time, I could make out the speaker’s face.
“You live at Judd’s place,
right? He and I go way back.”

“Nightshade,” I forced out the word. “I’ve seen him.”

Lia looked almost concerned despite herself. “We know.”

“No,” I said. “In Vegas. I’ve seen him here. Twice. I thought…I thought I was watching him.”

But maybe—maybe he was watching me.

“He had a child with him,” I said. “There was a woman, too. The girl, she came up next to me at the fountain. She was little—three, four at most. She had a penny in her
hand. I asked if she was going to make a wish, and she said…”

I couldn’t coax my lips into forming the words.

Dean formed them for me. “I don’t believe in wishing.” His gaze flicked to Michael’s, then to Lia’s. “The same thing Beau Donovan said when Sterling told him
he only
wished
he were Nine.”

Right before he died.

“You said Nightshade had a woman with him,” Dean said. “What did she look like, Cassie?”

“Strawberry blond hair,” I said. “Medium height. Slender.”

I thought of my mother’s body, stripped to the bones and buried at the crossroads. With honor. With care.

Maybe they weren’t trying to kill you. Maybe you weren’t supposed to die. Maybe you were supposed to be like this woman—

“Beau said the ninth member was always born to it. How did he phrase it?”

Dean stared at a point just to the left of my shoulder and then repeated Beau’s words exactly. “The child of the brotherhood and the Pythia. Blood of their blood.”

Seven Masters. A child. And the child’s mother.

The woman at the fountain had strawberry blond hair. It would be red in some lights—like my mother’s.

Nine members. Seven Masters. A woman. A child.

“The Pythia was the name given to the Oracle at Delphi,” Sloane said. “A priestess at the Temple of Apollo. A prophetess.”

I thought of the family—the picture-perfect family I’d looked at, knowing to my core that it was something I’d never have.

Mother. Father. Child.

I turned to Dean. “We have to call Briggs.”

T
he man we knew as Nightshade stared back at me from the page. The police artist had captured the lines of his face: strong jaw,
thick brows, dark hair with just enough curl to make his remaining features look boyish. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes told me he was older than he looked; light stubble masked the
fullness of his lips.

You came to Vegas to take care of a problem. Watching me, tormenting Judd—that, you enjoyed.

I felt someone take a seat next to me at the kitchen table. The FBI had taken the sketch and run with it. They were monitoring the airport, bus stations, traffic cameras—and, courtesy of
Sloane, the casinos’ security feeds.

You look like a thousand other men. You don’t look dangerous.

The man in the sketch looked like a neighbor, a coworker, a Little League coach.
A dad.
I could see him in my mind, hoisting the little red-haired girl up onto his shoulders.

“You’ve done everything you can.”

I tore my gaze from the police sketch to look at Judd.
This man killed your daughter,
I thought.
This man might know what happened to my mother.

“Trust Ronnie and Briggs to do what
they
can,” Judd continued.

A manhunt didn’t fall under Naturals’ jurisdiction. Once the FBI figured out who the man in the picture was, once we had a name, a history, information, maybe we could be of some
use, but until then, all we could do was wait.

By then,
a voice whispered in the back of my head,
it might be too late.
Nightshade might disappear. Once he left Vegas, we might never find him again.

Judd wouldn’t get justice for Scarlett’s death. I wouldn’t get answers about my mother’s.

Beside me, Judd let himself look at the police sketch—
made
himself look at it.

“You do what you can,” he said, after seconds of silence had stretched to a minute, “to make sure your kids are safe. From the second they’re born…” He stared at
the lines of Nightshade’s face, the ordinariness of it. “You want to protect them. From every skinned knee, from hurt feelings and punk kids who push smaller ones into the dirt, from
the worst parts of yourself and the worst parts of this world.”

This man killed your daughter. She died in pain, her fingernails torn, her body contorting—

“Briggs saved my life.” Judd forcibly shifted his eyes away from the man in the picture and turned to look at me. “He saved me, the day he brought me Dean.”

Judd’s right hand slowly worked its way out of a fist. He closed his eyes for a moment, then reached for the picture of his daughter’s killer and turned it facedown.

You do what you can to make sure your kids are safe.

This was Judd, trying to protect me. This was Judd, telling me to let it go. I thought about the little red-haired girl, about Beau Donovan, about
seven
and
nine
, the symbol
carved into my mother’s coffin, the pattern of murders stretching back over years and generations.

I didn’t want anyone’s protection.
I want Nightshade. I want answers.

Judd responded like I’d said the words out loud. “You have to want something else more.”

“Home isn’t a place, Cassie. Home is the people who love you most.”
Standing on the back porch, looking out at the safe house backyard, I let the
memory wash over me. I lost myself to it. I needed to remember. I needed my mom to be my mom—not a body, not bones, not a victim—
my mom
.

We’re dancing, right there on the side of the road. Her red hair escapes the scarf. It frames her face as she moves—wild and free and absolutely unabashed. I spin in circles, my
hands held out to the side. The world is a blur of colors and darkness and snow. She tilts her head back, and I do the same, sticking out my tongue.

We can shed the past. We can dance it off. We can laugh and sing and spin—forever and ever.

No matter what.

No matter what.

No matter what.

I didn’t want to forget—the smile on her face, the way she’d moved, the way she’d danced like no one was watching, no matter where we were.

I sucked in a breath and wished—fiercely, vehemently—that I didn’t understand how a stranger could have looked at her and thought,
She’s the one.

They were watching you,
I thought.
They chose you.

I’d never asked myself what my mother’s killer had chosen her
for
. I thought of the woman I’d seen with Nightshade—the little girl’s mother.
Do you
know what he is?
I asked the woman, holding the image of her in my mind.
Are you a part of this group? Are you a killer?

Seven Masters. The Pythia. And Nine.
I thought of the hundreds of people who’d passed through my mother’s shows.
Seven Masters.
Had one of them been there? Had they
seen her?

Did you expect my mom to go willingly?
I asked them silently.
Did you try to break her? Did she fight you?

I looked down at my wrists, remembering the feel of zip ties digging into them. I remembered being stalked, hunted, trapped. I remembered Locke’s knife. I remembered fighting—lying,
manipulating, struggling, running, hiding,
fighting
.

I was my mother’s daughter.

They didn’t know what they were getting into with you,
I thought, my mother still dancing in my memory, fearless and free. My mom and Locke had grown up with an abusive father.
When my mom got pregnant with me, she got out. She left her father’s house in the dead of night and never looked back.