Page 86 of Bad Blood
You read between the lines. “You killed your own mother.”
“And embalmed her corpse so that she could continue to sit at the table, perfectly preserved, for decades.” He shook his head. “Eventually, she was replaced. Woman after woman, child after child, and none were worthy.”
You can feel the blood thrumming in your veins as you remember the feel of the knife in Five’s flesh.
You are worthy.
“It’s been too long since you’ve been tested,” Nine continues. “There’s something poetic, don’t you think, about the nature of this one?”
He thinks you’re Lorelai.
He thinks Cassie isyourdaughter.
He thinks there are some things you wouldn’t do to survive.
Rough hands grasped me as a bag was thrown over my head. I wasn’t sure how long it had been since the director had left the room or who the men were who’d just entered it. I heard the handcuffs click open, and an instant later I was jerked to my feet.
This is it, I thought, unsure of where they were leading me or what might be waiting there.
I heard the creaking of metal.A door?
A hand in the middle of my back shoved me forward, hard enough to send me to the ground. My knees hit first, my hands catching the rest of my body moments before my face would have slammed into the ground. My palms registered the texture beneath them—sand—just before the hood was torn from my head.
I blinked against the blinding light, my eyes adjusting slowly enough that by the time I could make out the world around me, the men who’d brought me to this place were gone. I turned in time to see a metal gate slamming into the ground behind me.
I was locked in.
In where?I forced myself to concentrate. I was still indoors, but the ground was covered in sand, almost too hot to bear, like the desert sun had been shining down on it for days. The ceiling overhead was high and domed, made of stone and carved with a symbol I recognized.
Seven circles ringing a cross.
The room was circular, and recessed into the walls were stone seats, looking down on the sandpit below.
Not a pit, I thought.An arena.
And that was when I knew.You poisoned me. You healed me. Buried deep in my memory, I could hear the words Nightshade had spoken to me all those weeks ago. He’d told me that we all had our choices. He’d told me that the Pythia chooses to live.
Perhaps someday that choice will be yours, Cassandra.
The Masters had a history of taking women—women who had traumatic histories, women who were capable of being forged into something new. They brought their captives to the brink of death, close enough to taste it, and then…
A figure stepped forward from the shadows. My gaze flicked to either side, and I noticed seven weapons laid out along the wall behind me.
Seven Masters. Seven ways of killing.
The figure on the other side of the arena took another step forward, then another. I was aware of hooded figures filing into the seats above us, but all I could think was that if they’d brought me here to fight the Pythia, that meant that the woman walking toward me was someone I knew very well.
Her face was hidden by a hood, but as I made my way to my feet and stepped toward her, drawn like a moth to the flame, she lowered it.
Her face had changed in the past six years. She hadn’t aged, but she was thinner and pale and her features looked like they’d been carved from stone. Her skin was porcelain, her eyes impossibly large.
She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
“Mom.” The word escaped my throat. One second, I was stepping hesitantly toward her, and the next, the space between us had disappeared.
“Cassie.” Her voice was deeper than I remembered, hoarse, and when her arms wrapped around me, I realized that the skin on her face looked smooth in part because of contrast.
The rest of her body was covered in twisting, puckered scars.
