Page 77 of Bad Blood
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 attackhimself…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 yearsafterthe 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 decadesbeforehe’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 wordbasementover 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.
