Page 40 of Bad Blood
Dean caught up to me. The others weren’t far behind. I caught sight of our protection detail out of the corner of my eyes.
“Where are we going?” Dean asked.
I wasn’t following the dog walker anymore. She’d gone one way, I’d gone another. Gaither’s historical charm had melted away blocks back. Now there were houses—most of them on the small side and in need of repairs.
“Cassie,” Dean repeated, “where are we going?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Lia fell in beside us. “Lie.”
I hadn’t realized that I was lying, but now that Lia had called me out, it was clear.Idoknow where I’m going. I know exactly where I’m going.
The niggling feeling of déjà vu, the deeply unsettlingsomethingthat had fallen over me the moment we’d stepped foot in this town, solidified into something more concrete.
“I know this place,” I said. I hadn’t been sensing something off about Gaither. I’d been sensing somethingfamiliar.
I know, my mom whispered in my memory.You liked the town and the house and our little front yard—
There had been so many houses over the years, so many moves. But as I came to a stop in front of a quaint house with blue siding and a massive oak tree that cast shade over the entire lawn, I felt like someone had tossed ice-cold water directly into my face. I could see myself standing on the front porch, laughing as my mom attempted to throw a rope over a branch on the oak tree.
I made my way to the tree and fingered the tattered rope swing that hung there. “I’ve been here before,” I said hoarsely, turning back to the others. “Ilivedhere. With my mother.”
Nightshade had been born in Gaither. Decades later, my mother had lived here. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Hyperaware of the blood rushing through my veins, I forced myself into the Masters’ perspective.Each of you chooses your own apprentice. Who chooses the Pythia?I took a step toward the house, my heartbeat drowning out all other sounds.
“Nightshade wasn’t the one who selected your mother.” Dean’s voice broke through the cacophony inside my head. “If he had…ifIhad,” Dean said, shifting from third person to first, “I wouldn’t have waited until Lorelai’s daughter joined the Naturals program to introduce myself.”
Frozen halfway between a memory and a nightmare, I thought of Nightshade—of the way his shoulders had shaken with laughter when I’d interrogated him, of his still, gray corpse.If you didn’t choose my mother, there’s a good chance that the same person chose you both.
“This changes things.” Agent Sterling whipped out her cell phone. She’d brought us here hoping to gain some information about Mason Kyle—who he had been before becoming Nightshade, how long ago he’d disappeared from this town. She hadn’t expected to find a direct tie between Gaither and the Masters.
I forced air into and out of my lungs, forced my racing heart to slow.This is the break we’ve been waiting for. This is our chance. And based on the unearthly calm with which Agent Sterling had spoken, the way she’d gone from person to agent in two seconds flat—she knew it.
“There is a ninety-eight percent chance you’re calling Agent Briggs.” Sloane assessed Agent Sterling. “And a ninety-five-point-six percent chance that you’re going to try to pull us out of Gaither.”
You can’t. My mouth was too dry to form the words.I won’t let you.
“We came here looking for a needle in a haystack.” Sterling’s uncanny calm never faltered. “And we just found a sword. We’ll have to reassess the risk involved in poking around Gaither. If Judd and I say you’re out, you’re out—no arguments, no second chances.” Briggs’s phone must have gone to voice mail, because Sterling didn’t say anything else before she hung up.
“You’re pushing down an adrenaline rush.” Michael took his time reading Agent Sterling. “You’re frustrated. You’re scared. But more than anything, beneath the Agent Veronica Sterling mask, you look the way a thrill seeker does frozen at the top of the roller coaster, hovering on the verge of plunging down.”
Agent Sterling didn’t bat an eye at his commentary. “We’ll have to reassess the risk,” she said again. I knew that she was thinking about Laurel. About Scarlett Hawkins. About collateral damage and the true meaning ofrisk.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, my voice as intense as Sterling’s was calm. I’d spent years berating myself for the holes in my memory—for the fact that I couldn’t remember half the places my mother and I had lived, for the fact that I hadn’t been able to tell the police a single thing to help them identify the person or people who had taken her. I wasn’t leaving Gaither, Oklahoma, without answers—about my mother, about Nightshade, about the connection between the two.
“I’ll quit the program if I have to,” I told Agent Sterling, my throat tightening. “But I’m staying.”
“If Cassie’s staying,” Sloane said mutinously, “I’m staying.”
Dean didn’t have to say that he was staying, too.
“I do find Cassie borderline tolerable,” Lia commented casually.
“It would be a shame to leaveborderline tolerablebehind.” Michael smiled in a way that wasn’t really a smile, his skin pulling tightly against the remnants of bruises.
“Judd.” Agent Sterling turned for backup, her voice tightly controlled. I wondered if Michael could hear a full spectrum of emotion underneath that control. I wondered how close Veronica Sterling was to becoming the woman she’d been before Scarlett was murdered—someone who felt things deeply. Someone who acted before she thought.
