Beau 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.”
