I stood in front of the tombstone. Dean stood beside me, his body lightly brushing mine. The others stood behind us in a semicircle. Michael and Lia and Sloane. Sterling and Briggs and Judd.
The remains the police had recovered from that dirt road had been released to the family. To my dad. To me. My father didn’t know that the remains weren’t my mother’s. He didn’t know that she was alive.
Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.
We had no idea who the woman we’d just buried in my mom’s grave was. The necklace she’d been buried with, the blood on the shawl—those had been my mother’s.
The Pythia chooses to live, Nightshade had told me, knowing quite well that my mother was the one who’d made that choice.
I didn’t know how long it was after my mother had been taken that she had been forced to fight for her life—again. I didn’t know if it was standard operating procedure for these men to stage a woman’s death before they took her.
All are tested. All must be found worthy.
What I did know was that my mother was alive.
Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.
My mother hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t been buried at the crossroads with care. She’d buried her predecessor. My mom’s favorite color. Her
necklace. Traces of her blood. From the beginning, Dean and I had seen the funeral rites as rife with remorse. My mother’s.
“Are you ready?” Dean asked, his hand on my shoulder.
I stared at the tombstone marked with my mother’s name a moment longer. For Laurel’s sake, the cult needed to think we hadn’t put the pieces together. They needed to think that I believed I’d buried my mother. They needed to think that we hadn’t read much into the fact that the woman I’d mistaken for Laurel’s mother was actually a nanny, a disposable Las Vegas native Nightshade had hired earlier that week.
They needed to believe that the FBI had put Laurel into protective custody because of her connection to Nightshade, not her connection to me.
We don’t kill children.
I thought of Beau, wandering the desert, and pushed back the bitter taste in my mouth. “I’m ready,” I told Dean. I turned, meeting each of the others’ eyes, one by one. Home is the people who love you.
I was ready to go home. To do whatever it took to find the Masters. To protect Laurel. Forever and ever. To find my mother. Find the Pythia. Find the room.
No matter what.
