The hours after Nightshade’s interrogation blurred into nothingness. Sterling called to say that Briggs had received the antivenom. She called to say that he was expected to make a full—if slow—recovery. She called to say they found the woman.
They found the little girl.
Fewer than twenty hours after Nightshade had named my mother’s killer, I stepped into room 2117 at the Dark Angel Hotel Casino. You could smell the blood from fifty yards away. On the walls. On the floor. The scene was familiar.
Blood. On the walls. On my hand. I feel it. I smell it—
But this time, there was a body. The woman—strawberry blond hair, younger than I remembered—lay in her own blood, her white dress soaked through. She’d been killed with a knife.
Wielded by Nightshade, before he was captured? One of the other Masters? A new Pythia? I didn’t know. And for the first time since I’d joined the Naturals program, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. This woman had killed my mother. Whether she’d had a choice, whether it was kill or be killed, whether she’d enjoyed it—
I couldn’t be sorry she was dead.
The little girl sat in a chair, her small legs dangling halfway to the ground. She was staring blankly ahead, no expression on her face.
She was the reason I was here.
The child hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even seemed to see a single one of the agents who had come into this room. They were afraid to touch her, afraid to remove her by force.
I remember coming back to my mother’s dressing room. I remember there was blood.
I made my way through the room. I knelt next to the chair. “Hi,” I said.
The little girl blinked. Her eyes met mine. I saw a hint—just a hint—of recognition.
Beau Donovan had been six years old when he’d been abandoned in the desert by the people who’d raised him, deemed unsuitable for their needs.
Whatever those needs might be.
You’re three, I thought, slipping into the girl’s perspective. Maybe four.
Too young to understand what was happening. Too young to have been through so much.
You know things, I thought. Maybe you don’t even know that you know them.
Beau had known enough at the age of six to uncover the pattern once he was older.
You might be able to lead us to them.
“I’m Cassie,” I said. The child said nothing.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She looked down. Beside her on the ground, there was a white origami flower, soaked in blood.
“Nine,” she whispered. “My name is Nine.”
A chill ran down my spine, leaving nothing but fury in its wake. You’re not a part of them, I thought, fiercely protective. She was just a baby—just a little, little girl.
“Your mommy called you something else,” I said, trying to remember the name the woman had used that day at the fountain.
“Laurel. Mommy calls me Laurel.” She turned to look at the woman on the ground. Her face held no hint of emotion. She didn’t flinch at the blood.
“Don’t look at Mommy, Laurel.” I moved to block her view. “Look at me.”
“That’s not my mommy.” The little girl’s tone was dispassionate.
My heart thudded in my chest. “It’s not?”
“The Master hired her. To watch me when we came here.”
Laurel’s chubby baby hands went to an old-fashioned locket around her neck. She let me open it. Inside, there was a picture.
“That’s my mommy,” Laurel said.
Not possible. The necklace. The bones. The blood—it was her blood.
The tests said it was her blood.
I felt the world closing in on me. Because there were two people in the photo, and Laurel looked exactly the same in the picture as she did today.
It was recent.
That’s my mommy, Laurel had said. But the woman in the picture was my mother, too.
I always knew—I always thought—that if she’d survived, she would have come back to me. Somehow, some way, if she’d survived—
“Forever and ever,” Laurel whispered, each word a knife in my gut. “No matter what.”
“Laurel,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Where is Mommy?”
“In the room.” Laurel stared at me and into me. “Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.”
