One last trick up Nightshade’s sleeve. Your grand finale. Your au revoir. I’d been worried that the FBI wouldn’t catch him. It hadn’t occurred to me, even for a second, to worry about what might happen once they did.
Undetectable. Incurable. Painful. I didn’t want to remember what Judd had said about Nightshade’s poison, but the words kept repeating themselves in a loop in my head.
“Cassie.” Judd appeared, his face grim. “We need to talk.” What else was there to say?
Undetectable. Incurable. Painful.
Sloane’s lips were moving as she silently went through a list of every poison known to man. Dean had gone ashen.
“He claims there’s an antidote,” Judd said. Our guardian didn’t specify who “he” was. He didn’t have to.
Nightshade.
“And what does he want?” Dean asked hoarsely. “In exchange for that antidote?”
I knew the answer—knew it based on the way Judd had said my name, the number of times I’d seen Nightshade, the time he’d spent watching me.
My mother fought, tooth and nail. She resisted whatever it was you people wanted from her, whatever you wanted her to be.
I looked from Dean to Judd. “He wants me.”
I stood on one side of a two-way mirror and watched as guards escorted the man I’d identified as Nightshade into the room on the other side. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his body. His hair was mussed. A dark bruise was forming on one side of his face.
He didn’t look dangerous. He didn’t look like a killer.
“He can’t see you,” Agent Sterling reminded me. She looked at me, her own eyes shadowed. “He can’t touch you. He stays on that side of the glass, and you stay here.”
Behind us, Judd placed one hand on my shoulder. You won’t put me in the same room as Scarlett’s killer, I thought. Not even to save Briggs.
I tried not to think about Briggs and instead focused on the man on the other side of the glass. He looked older than he had in my memory— younger than Judd, but significantly older than Agent Sterling.
Older than my mother would have been, if she’d lived.
“Take your time,” Nightshade said. Even though I knew he couldn’t see me, it felt like he was looking directly at me.
He has kind eyes.
My stomach twisted with unexpected nausea as he continued. “I’m here when you’re ready, Cassandra.”
Judd’s grip tightened slightly on my shoulder. You’d kill him, if you could, I thought. Judd wouldn’t have lost a single night’s sleep over snapping this man’s neck. But he didn’t make a move. Instead, he stood still, with me.
“I’m ready,” I told Agent Sterling. I wasn’t, but time was a luxury we didn’t have.
Judd met Agent Sterling’s gaze and gave a curt nod. Sterling stepped to the side of the room and hit a button, converting the two-way mirror in front of us to a clear pane.
You can see me, I thought as Nightshade’s eyes landed on mine. You see Judd. Your lips curve slightly. I kept my face as blank as I could. One last card to play. One last game.
“Cassandra.” Nightshade seemed to enjoy saying my name. “Judd. And the indomitable Agent Sterling.”
You watched us. You get off on Judd’s grief, on Sterling’s.
“You wanted to talk to me?” I said, my voice unnaturally calm. “Talk.”
I expected the man on the other side of the glass to say something about Scarlett or about my mother or about Beau. Instead, he said something in a language I didn’t recognize. I glanced at Sterling. The man opposite us repeated himself. “It’s a rare snake,” he translated after a moment. “Its venom is slower-acting than most. Find a zoo that has one, and you’ll find the antivenom. In time, I hope.” He smiled, and this time, it was chilling. “I always have had a certain fondness for your Agent Briggs.”
I didn’t understand. This man—this killer—had brought me here. He’d used the only bargaining chip he had to bring me here, and now, having seen me, he was handing it in?
Why? If you enjoy tormenting Judd and Sterling, if you want to leave them with the taste of fear in their mouths, with the bitter knowledge that the people they love will never be safe, why cure Briggs?
“You’re lying,” Agent Sterling said.
We should have brought Lia, I thought. And a second later: I shouldn’t be here. The feeling started in my gut and snaked its way out to my limbs, weighing them down.
“Am I?” Nightshade countered.
“Incurable. Painful.” I spoke the words out loud without meaning to, but didn’t pull back from talking once they’d made their way out of my mouth. “You wouldn’t just hand away your secret. Not this easily. Not this fast.”
Nightshade’s eyes lingered on mine a moment longer. “There are limits,” he admitted, “to what one might say. Some secrets are sacred. Some things you take to the grave.” His voice had taken on a low, humming quality. “But then, I never said your Agent Briggs had been afflicted with that poison.”
That poison. Your poison. Your legacy.
“Go.” Judd spoke for the first time since the man who’d killed his daughter had been brought into the room. He met Sterling’s gaze and repeated himself. “He’s telling the truth. Go.”
Go get the antivenom. Go save Briggs.
“We’re done here,” Sterling said, reaching for the button on the wall. “Stop.” The word burst out of my mouth. I couldn’t draw my gaze away
from the killer’s. You brought me here for a reason. You do everything for a reason—you all do.
Nightshade smiled. “I thought,” he said, “that you might have some questions for me.”
I saw now, the game he was playing. He’d brought me here. But staying? Listening to him? Asking him for answers?
That was on me.
“Go,” Judd told Sterling again. After a split second’s hesitation, she did as he said, dialing her phone on the way out. Judd turned back to me. “I want to tell you not to say another word, Cassie, not to listen, not to look back.”
But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t make me walk away. I wasn’t sure he could walk away himself. You can look at the files, Judd had said, back when this all began, but you’re not doing it alone.
Neither one of us was doing this alone now.
“Beau Donovan.” I turned back to the monster waiting patiently on the other side of the glass. I couldn’t make my mouth form the words to ask about my mother, not yet. And I couldn’t—wouldn’t—bring up Scarlett. “You killed him.”
“Was that a question?” Nightshade asked.
“Your people left him in the desert fifteen years ago.” “We don’t kill children.” Nightshade’s tone was flat.
You don’t kill children. That was a rule they lived by. A sacred law. But you have no problems leaving them in the desert to die of their own accord.
“What was Beau to you? Why raise him at all, if you were going to turn him out?”
Nightshade smiled slightly. “Every dynasty needs its heir.” My brain whirred. “You weren’t raised the way Beau was.” The rest of them, Beau had said, they’re recruited as adults.
“The term Master suggests an apprentice model,” I continued. “I’m assuming Masters choose their own replacements—adults, not children. The cycle repeats every twenty-one years. But the ninth member, the one you call Nine—”
“Nine is the greatest of us. The constant. The bridge from generation to generation.”
Your leader, I filled in. Beau hadn’t just been born in their walls. He’d been born to lead them.
“You left him to die,” I said.
“We do not kill children,” Nightshade repeated, his voice just as flat as it had been the first time he said the words. “Even if they prove themselves unworthy. Even when they fail to do what is asked and it becomes clear they will never be able to take the mantle to which they were born. Even when the way must be cleared for a true heir.”
What did they ask you to do, Beau? What kind of monster were they molding you to be? I couldn’t let my mind go down that path. I had to concentrate on the here and now.
On Nightshade.
“And the little girl?” I said. “The one I saw you with. Is she worthy? Is she the new heir? A true heir?” I took a step forward, toward the glass. “What are you doing to her?”
I don’t believe in wishing. “Are you her father?” I asked. “The girl has many fathers.”
That answer sent a chill down my spine. “Seven Masters,” I said, hoping to jar him into telling me something I didn’t know. “The Pythia. And Nine.”
“All are tested. All must be found worthy.”
“And that woman I saw with you? She’s worthy?” The question tore out of me with quiet force. My mother wasn’t worthy.
My mother fought.
“Did you take her, too?” I asked, my mind on the woman I’d seen. “Did you attack her, cut her?” I continued, my heart pounding in my chest. “Did you torture her until she became one of you? Your oracle?”
Nightshade was quiet for several moments. Then he leaned forward, his eyes on mine. “I like to think of the Pythia more as Lady Justice,” he said. “She is our counsel, our judge and our jury, until her child comes of age.
She lives and dies for us and we for her.”
Lives and dies. Lives and dies. Lives and dies.
“You killed my mother,” I said. “You people took her. You attacked her
—”
“You misunderstand.” Nightshade made the words sound reasonable,
gentle even, when the room around him was charged with an unholy energy.
Power. Games. Pain. This was the cult’s stock-in-trade.
I reached for a piece of paper and drew the symbol I’d seen on Beau’s chest. I slammed it against the glass. “This was on my mother’s coffin,” I said. “I don’t misunderstand anything. She wasn’t part of the pattern. She wasn’t killed on a Fibonacci date. She was attacked with a knife the same year you were ‘proving yourself worthy’ with poison.” My voice shook. “So don’t tell me that I don’t understand. You—all of you, one of you, I don’t know—but you chose her. You tested her and you found her unworthy.”
They didn’t kill children. They left them to die. But my mother?
“You killed her,” I said, the words rough against my throat and sour in my mouth. “You killed her and stripped her flesh from her bones and buried her.”
“We did no such thing.” The emphasis on the first word somehow managed to break through the haze of fury and sorrow clouding my mind. “There can only be one Pythia.”
Every instinct I had told me this was what Nightshade had brought me here to hear. This was what he’d traded his last remaining bit of leverage to say.
“One woman to provide counsel. One woman to bear the child. One child—one worthy child—to carry the tradition on.”
One woman. One child. You killed her.
We did no such thing.
All are tested. All must be found worthy.
My mother had been buried with care. With remorse. I thought of the woman I’d seen with the little girl.
One woman. One child.
I thought about how a group could possibly persist for hundreds of years, taking women, holding them, until captive became monster. Lady Justice. The Pythia.
I thought about the fact that the woman I’d seen by the fountain hadn’t taken her child. She hadn’t run. She hadn’t asked for help.
She’d smiled at Nightshade.
There can only be one Pythia.
“You make them fight.” I wasn’t sure if I was profiling or talking to him. I wasn’t sure it mattered. “You take a new woman, a new Pythia, and…”
There can only be one.
“The woman,” I said. “The one I saw with you.” My voice lowered itself to a whisper, but the words were deafening in my own ears. “She killed my mother. You made her kill my mother.”
“We all have choices,” Nightshade replies. “The Pythia chooses to live.”
Why bring me here? I thought, aware, on some level, that my body was shaking. My eyes were wet. Why tell me this? Why give me a glimpse of something I’m not blessed enough to know?
“Perhaps someday,” Nightshade said, “that choice will be yours, Cassandra.”
Judd had been standing ramrod stiff beside me, but in that instant, he surged forward. He slammed the heel of his hand against the switch on the wall, and the pane darkened.
You can’t see us. I can see you, but you can’t see us.
Judd took me by the shoulders. He pulled me to him, blocking my view, holding me, even as I started to fight him.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured. “You’re okay. I’ve got you, Cassie.
You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”
An order. A plea.
“Two-one-one-seven.” Until Nightshade spoke, I hadn’t realized the speaker was still on. At first, I thought he was saying a Fibonacci number, but then he clarified. “If you want to see the woman, you’ll find her in room two-one-one-seven.”
The Pythia chooses to live. The words echoed in my mind. Perhaps one day, that choice will be yours.
Room 2117.
