Page 3 of Bad Blood
“You won’t tell my son what you had to do to get me to talk.” Redding drummed his fingers along the tabletop, one after another. “But every time he reaches for your hand, every time you touch his scars, you’ll remember this conversation. I’ll be there. Even if the boy doesn’t know it,youwill.”
“Tell me what you know,” I said, the words ripping their way out of my throat.
“Very well.” Satisfaction played along the edges of Redding’s lips. “The group you’re hunting looks for a specific type of killer. Someone who longs to be a part of something. A joiner.”
This was the monster, giving me my due.
“I’m not much of a joiner myself,” Redding continued. “But I am a listener. Over the years, I’ve heard rumors. Whispers. Urban legends. Masters and apprentices, ritual and rules.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, watching my reaction, as if he could see the workings of my brain and found them enticing. “I know that each Master chooses his own replacement. I don’t know how many of them there are. I don’t know who they are or where they’re located.”
I leaned forward. “But you did know that they took my mother. You knew she wasn’t dead.”
“I’m a man who sees patterns.” Redding enjoyed talking about what kind of man he was, demonstrating his superiority to me, to the FBI, to Briggs and Sterling, whom he must have suspected were hiding behind the glass. “Shortly after I was incarcerated, I became aware of another inmate. He’d been convicted of murdering his ex, but insisted she was still alive. There was never a body, you see. Just a copious amount of blood—too much, the prosecutors argued, for the victim to have lived.”
Those words were familiar enough to send a chill down my spine.My mother’s dressing room. My hand fumbling for the light switch. My fingertips touching something sticky, something wet and warm and—
“You suspected this group was involved?” I could barely hear myself ask the question over the deafening beating of my own heart.
One edge of Redding’s mouth quirked upward. “Every empire needs its queen.”
There was more to it than that. There had to be.
“Years later,” Dean’s father added, “I was moved to take on an apprentice of my own.”
He’d taken on three, but I knew which one he was referencing. “Webber.” The man had kidnapped me, loosed me in a forest, and hunted me. Like I was an animal. Like I was prey.
“Webber brought me information. About Dean. About Briggs. About you—and about Special Agent Lacey Locke.”
Locke, my original FBI mentor, had started life as Lacey Hobbes, my mother’s younger sister. She’d ended life a serial killer, re-creating my mother’s murder over and over again.
Not a murder, I reminded myself. The whole time Locke had been killing women in my mom’s image, my mother had beenalive.
“You found out the details of my mother’s case.” I focused, as much as I could, on the here and now, on Redding. “You saw a connection.”
“Whispers. Rumors. Urban legends.” Redding fell back on what he’d said before. “Masters and apprentices, rituals and rules, and at the center of it all, a woman.” His eyes gleamed. “A very specific kind of woman.”
My lips and tongue and throat were dry—so dry, I almost couldn’t force out the words. “What kind?”
“The kind of woman who could be formed into something magnificent.” Redding closed his eyes, his voice humming with pleasure. “Something new.”
YOU
You take the knife. Step by step, you make your way to the stone table, testing the balance of the blade in your hand.
The wheel is turning. The offering turns with it, chained to the stone, body and soul.
“All must be tested.” You say the words as you drag the flat of the knife across the offering’s neck. “All must be found worthy.”
Power thrums through your veins. This is your decision. Your choice. One twist of your wrist and blood will flow. The wheel will stop.
But without order, there is chaos.
Without order, there is pain.
“What do you need?” You lean down as you whisper the ancient words. The knife in your hand angles into the base of the offering’s neck. You could kill him, but it would cost you. Seven days and seven pains. The wheel never stops turning for long.
“What do I need?” The offering repeats the question, smiling as blood streams down his naked chest. “I need nine.”
“Well, that was cheerful.” Lia jumped off the table she’d been sitting on.
