Page 23 of Bad Blood
“Shechoseto kill the woman we buried.” Saying those words was like tearing off a bandage, followed by five or six layers of skin.
“Your mother chose tolive.”
That was what I’d been telling myself for the past ten weeks. I’d spent more nights than I could count staring up at my ceiling and wondering: Would I have done what she did if I’d been the one forced to fight for my survival? Could I have killed another woman—the previous Pythia, pitted against me in a battle to the death—to save myself?
As I had dozens of times before, I tried to put myself in my mother’s shoes, to imagine what it must have been like for her after she’d been taken. “I wake up in near-darkness. I should be dead, but I’m not.” My mom’s next thought would have been of me, but I skipped over that and on to the realizations that must have been racing in her mind once she’d pieced together what had happened. “They cut me. They stabbed me. They took me to the brink of death. And then they brought me back.”
How many women, other than my mother and Mallory Mills, shared this story? How many Pythias had there been?
You wait for them to heal, and then…
“They lock me in a room. I’m not the only one there. There’s a woman coming toward me. She’s got a knife in her hands. And there’s a knife beside me.” My breath was jagged. “I know now why they came so close to killing me, why they brought me back.” To my ears, my voice evensoundedlike my mother’s. “They wanted me to look Death in the eyes. They wanted me to know what it felt like so that I would know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I wasn’t ready to die.”
I pick up the knife. I fight back. And I win.
“The Masters stalk these women.” Dean pulled me from the darkness. He didn’t use any of our profiling pronouns—notIorweoryou. “They watch them. They know what they’ve been through, know what they’ve survived.”
I stepped forward, stopping just short of resting my face on his chest. “They watched my mother—for weeks or months oryears, and I can’t even remember the names of all the towns we lived in. I’m the closest thing we have to a witness, and I can’t remember a single useful detail. I can’t remember a single face.”
I’d tried. I’d spent years trying, but we’d moved so often. And each time, my mother had told me the same thing.
Home isn’t a place. Home is the people who love you. Forever and ever, no matter what.
Forever and ever, no matter what.
Forever and ever—
And that was when I remembered—I wasn’t the only one my mother had promised to love. I wasn’t the only witness. I didn’t know what had been done to my mother or who she’d become. But there was someone who did. Someone who knew her. Someone who loved her.
Forever and ever, no matter what.
My sister, Laurel, was small for her age. The pediatrician thought she was about four—healthy, except for a vitamin D deficiency. That, along with her pale skin and what little we’d been able to glean from Laurel herself, had led to the theory that she’d spent the majority of her life indoors—quite possibly underground.
I’d seen Laurel twice in the past ten weeks. It had taken almost twenty-four hours to arrange this meeting, and if Agents Briggs and Sterling had their way, it would be the last.
It’s too dangerous, Cassie. For you. For Laurel. Agent Sterling’s admonition rang in my ears as I watched the little sister I barely knew stand opposite an empty swing set, staring at it with an intensity at odds with her baby face.
It’s like you can see something the rest of us can’t, I thought.A memory. A ghost.
Laurel rarely talked. She didn’t run. She didn’t play. Part of me had hoped that she’d look like a kid this time. But she just stood there, ten feet and light-years away from me, as still and unnaturally quiet as the day I’d found her sitting in the middle of a blood-drenched room.
You’re young, Laurel. You’re resilient. You’re in protective custody. I wanted to believe that with time, Laurel was going to be just fine, but my half sister had been born and bred to take a seat at the Masters’ table. I had no idea if she was ever going to be okay.
In the weeks that Laurel had been in FBI custody, no one had been able to get any actionable information out of her. She didn’t know where they’d been holding her. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—describe the Masters.
“Based on the level of deterioration on that merry-go-round, I would estimate that this playground was built between 1983 and 1985.” Sloane came to stand beside me. It had been Agent Sterling’s suggestion to bring another Natural with us. I’d chosen Sloane because she was the most childlike herself—and the least likely to realize just how psychologically scarred Laurel really was.
Sloane squeezed my hand comfortingly. “In the Estonian sport of kiiking, players stand on a massive swing and attempt to rotate it three hundred and sixty degrees.”
I had two choices: I could either stand here listening to every playground-related factoid Sloane could think of in her attempt to calm my nerves or I could talk to my sister.
As if she could hear my thoughts, Laurel pivoted, tearing her gaze away from the swing set and bringing it to me. I made my way toward her, and she turned her attention back to the swing. I knelt next to her, giving her a moment to acclimate to my presence. Sloane came and sat down one swing over.
“This is my friend Sloane,” I told Laurel. “She wanted to meet you.”
No response from Laurel.
“There are two hundred and eighty-five different species of squirrel,” Sloane announced as a greeting. “And that’s not counting any number of prehistoric squirrel-like species.”
