What kind of determination would it take to stab a blade into your flesh over and over again? What kind of person could kill his own flesh and blood and then calmly turn the knife on himself?
I pictured myself holding a bloodied knife, pictured myself turning it inward, pictured the light glistening off the blade.
“I’m afraid Mr. Lowell is unavailable.” The home health aide who answered Lowell’s front door couldn’t tell us much more than that. The old man had taken his leave shortly after Agent Sterling had interviewed him— and hadn’t told a soul where he was going.
As I paced Lowell’s house, looking for some shred of evidence, something to confirm Sloane’s theory that he’d killed his daughter and son-in- law, then turned the knife on himself to bar suspicion, I couldn’t help remembering the statement he’d given to Agent Sterling about the murdered animals.
You said that you believed that Mason had watched. I pictured the knife again, picture myself holding it. It must have pleased you to be able to say those words, knowing Agent Sterling wouldn’t see the truth behind them. You weren’t talking about the way Mason watched Darren Darby kill those animals. You were talking about what your grandson watched you do.
“What are you thinking?” Dean asked, slipping in beside me.
“I’m thinking that maybe Nightshade did see his parents murdered.
Maybe he did watch.” I paused, knowing that my next words would hit home for Dean. “Maybe it was a lesson. Maybe when Kane arrived later, Nightshade threw suspicion on Darren because little Mason Kyle had learned that a boy who tortured animals wasn’t worthy of following.”
Dean was quiet then, the kind of quiet that told me he’d gone to a dark and cavernous place in his own memory the moment I’d said the word lesson. Eventually, he clawed himself out.
“My daughter was a disappointment.” When Dean spoke, it took me a moment to realize that he was speaking from Lowell’s perspective. “I tried to raise her right. I tried to raise her to be worthy of my name, but she ended up being just another whore—pregnant at sixteen, defiant. They lived with me,
Anna and her pathetic husband and the boy.”
The boy. The one who would grow up to be Nightshade.
“You thought Mason was cut from your daughter’s cloth,” I said, picking up where Dean had left off. “And then he started sneaking out.” By Malcolm Lowell’s own admission, he had tried to cage his family. He’d tried to control them. I’d assumed that the proud old man would have considered Mason’s behavior an affront.
But what if you didn’t? Air entered and exited my lungs. I took a step forward, even though I didn’t know what I was walking toward. What if you considered Mason’s little pastime a sign?
“When the animals started turning up,” Dean mused, his voice sounding uncannily like his father’s, “I thought it might be the boy. Perhaps he had potential after all.”
“But it wasn’t Mason.” I pressed my lips together as I thought about Kane, broken and hollow. “It was Darren Darby.”
“A disappointment,” Dean said harshly. “A sign of weakness. One that required an object lesson for my grandson about who he was and where he came from. We are not followers. We do not watch.”
Dean’s words coated me like oil, bringing me back to my own encounter with Malcolm Lowell as a child.
You knew what it was like to feel the life go out of your victims. You knew the power. You wanted Mason to see you for what you really were, to know exactly whose blood ran in his veins.
Out loud, I let myself take that thought to its logical conclusion. “To kill his own family, to plan it out so coldly, to go as far as to calmly and brutally attack himself…By the time of the Kyle murders, Malcolm Lowell was already a killer.”
Dean waited a beat and then took my statement a step further. “Already a Master.”
A chill spread slowly down my spine, like the cracking of ice. You were tested. You were found worthy. You’d already killed your nine.
“The timing doesn’t add up,” I said, pushing down the urge to look over my shoulder, like the old man might be there, watching me the way he had when I was a child. “The poison Master who trained Nightshade—the one who chose him as an apprentice—didn’t become a Master himself until years after the Kyle murders.”
And that meant that if my instincts—and Dean’s—were correct, Malcolm Lowell was not the poison Master.
You were something more.
“You groomed your grandson for greatness,” I said, my heart thumping in my chest. “You saw the potential, and you made Mason a monster. You made him your heir.” I paused. “You sent him to live with a man who knew—
intimately knew—the thin line between medicine and poison.”
Mason Kyle had left Gaither when he was seventeen years old. He’d attempted to bury all traces of his identity. He’d lived as a ghost for two decades before he’d become an apprentice and then a Master.
He knew it was coming. He always knew what he was meant to be. Even thinking about Nightshade, I never left the old man’s perspective. You made him in your own image. You made him worthy.
A flicker of shadow was the only warning I had that Dean and I were no longer alone.
“Basements are actually relatively rare in Oklahoma,” Sloane commented, popping up beside us. “But this house has one.”
My heart had leapt into my throat before I’d realized that Sloane was the one who’d joined us. It stayed there as I turned the word basement over and over in my mind, thinking about the fact that Laurel had grown up inside and underground.
Thinking that Holland Darby might not be the only one in Gaither with shackles built into his walls.
I knew, logically, that it couldn’t be that simple. I knew that my mother had probably never been here, knew that wherever the Masters kept her, wherever they conducted their business, it probably wasn’t in one of their basements. But as I wound my way toward the basement, Dean and Sloane on my heels and Lia and Michael falling in beside us, I couldn’t push down the roar building in my mind, the incessant thumping of my heart as I thought, You built this house. For your wife. For your family. For what was to come.
The basement floor was made of concrete. The beams overhead were covered in cobwebs. A surplus of cardboard boxes made the room’s function clear.
Just storage. Just a room.
With no idea what I was looking for, I began to open boxes and go through the contents. They told a story—of a man who’d gotten started on his family later in life. Of the local girl he’d married. Of the daughter who’d lost her mother when she was six years old.
Six years old.
Suddenly, I was taken back to the day Malcolm Lowell had caught Melody and me in the apothecary garden.
“How old are you?” the man demands.
“I’m seven,” Melody answers. “But Cassie’s only six.”
I was six years old when I met Malcolm Lowell. His daughter was six years old when her mother died. Mason Kyle was nine when he watched his grandfather murder his parents.
“Six,” I said out loud, sitting down hard between the boxes, the concrete digging into the skin under my legs. “Six, six, and nine.”
“Three plus three,” Sloane rattled off, unable to stop herself. “Three times three.”
The Masters kill nine victims every three years. There are twenty-seven— three times three times three—Fibonacci dates total. My hand brushed up against something etched into the concrete. I shoved a box to the side to get a better look.
Seven circles around a cross. It was the Masters’ symbol, one I’d first seen etched into a wooden casket and later seen carved into a killer’s flesh. Like Laurel, Beau Donovan had been raised by the Masters. Like Laurel, his mother was the Pythia.
“Beau was six years old when he was tested by the Masters,” I said, looking up from the floor. “Six years old when they cast him out to die.”
Beau—and Laurel—had been born for one purpose and one purpose alone.
Nine is the greatest of us, Nightshade had told me months ago. The constant. The bridge from generation to generation.
I traced my fingers around the outside of the symbol. “Seven Masters,” I said. “The Pythia. And Nine.”
If Laurel passed their tests, if she was worthy, someday she would take the ninth seat at the Masters’ table. But whose seat is it now?
The greatest of us. The bridge from generation to generation. There had been awe in Nightshade’s voice when he’d spoken those words. There had been warmth.
“I know that face, Colorado,” Michael said, narrowing his eyes at me. “That’s your holy bleep face. That’s—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish. “We were never looking for the poison Master who preceded Nightshade,” I said, moving my finger from the outer circle to the inner cross. “We were looking for someone who’d been a part of the Masters for longer than twenty-seven years. Someone who held sway over the others. The whole time—we were looking for Nine.”
