The Naturals: All In Part 28

You don't talk to outsiders. Lia's insight into cult mentality rang in my head. You don't tell them what they're not blessed enough to know.

"Get out," Beau told his lawyer.

"I can't just leave-"

"I'm the client," Beau said. "And I said get out. Now."

The lawyer left.

"You're under no obligation to speak with us without your lawyer present," Briggs said. "But then, I'm not convinced you want him to hear about this. I'm not convinced you want anyone to hear about this." Briggs paused. "You're right when you said we might not have enough for a conviction."

Sterling picked up where Briggs left off. "But we do have enough for a trial.

"Twelve people on a jury," Sterling said. I recognized her strategy of playing up the numbers, playing into his pattern of thinking. "Dozens of reporters. The victims' families will want to be there, of course...."

"They will destroy you," Beau said.

"Will they?" Sterling asked. "Or will they destroy you?"

Those words landed. I could see Beau straining against the handcuffs, straining to keep from turning back and looking over his shoulder.

"Tell him a story," Dean instructed the agents. "Start with the day someone found him in the desert."

Dean and I were used to using our abilities to catch killers. But profiling was just as useful in knowing how to break them.

"Let me tell you a story," Briggs said on-screen. "It's a story about a little boy who was found, half-dead, in the desert, when he was six years old."

Beau's breath was coming quicker now.

"No one knew where he'd come from," Briggs continued.

"No one knew what he was," I said. Briggs repeated my words to Beau.

We weren't positive how Beau had spent those first six years, but Dean had a theory. I'd wondered, days ago, if Dean had seen any of himself when he looked at Beau. I'd thought that if the UNSUB was young, his profile wouldn't be dissimilar from Daniel Redding's apprentices'.

You didn't just stumble across the pattern. You knew to look for it. You spent your whole life looking for it. And the reason you did that lies in those first six years.

"You don't know what you're talking about." Beau's voice was no louder than a whisper, but it cut through the air. "You couldn't possibly know."

"We know they didn't want you." Sterling went for the kill. Beau's murders had taken the cult's pattern to the next level. He'd been appealing to them, attacking them, showing them just how worthy he was. "They left you to die. You weren't good enough for them." Sterling paused. "And they were right. Look at you. You got caught." Her eyes trailed over his orange jumpsuit, his cuffs. "They were right."

"You have no idea what I am," Beau said, his voice shaking with emotion. "You have no idea what I'm capable of. Neither do they. No one knows." His voice rose with each word. "I was born for this. The rest of them, they're recruited as adults, but number nine is always born within their walls. The child of the brotherhood and the Pythia-blood of their blood. Nine."

"Nine is a name to him," Dean said. "A t.i.tle. Tell him it's not his. Tell him he doesn't deserve it."

"You're not Nine," Sterling said. "You're never going to be Nine."

Beau lifted cuffed hands to his own collar. He latched his fingers over his s.h.i.+rt and pulled it roughly off his shoulder. Underneath, etched onto his chest, was a series of jagged cuts, halfway healed and on their way to a scar.

Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.

I stopped breathing. That symbol-I knew that symbol.

"Seven Masters." Beau's face was taut, his voice full of fury. He ran his fingers around the outside of the heptagon. Seven circles. "The Pythia." He pressed his finger into the wound and pulled it down the vertical line on the cross. His hand trembled as he went to do the same with the horizontal. "And Nine."

The symbol. I know that symbol. Seven circles around a cross.

I'd seen it carved into the lid of a plain wooden coffin, uncovered at the crossroads on a country dirt road.

"You wish you were Nine," Agent Sterling said, still pressing. I felt my limbs going numb. Blackness crept in on my field of vision.

"Dean," I wheezed.

He was with me in an instant. "I see it," he said. "I need you to breathe for me, Ca.s.sie. I see it."

The symbol Beau had carved into his own flesh had also been carved into my mother's coffin. Not possible. June twenty-first. Not a Fibonacci date. My mother died in June.

On-screen, Beau's hands were still trembling. His fingers tensed. They clawed at his neck. His back arched. And then he fell to the floor, convulsing.

Screaming. I registered the sound as if it were coming from very far away. He's screaming.

And then he was gargling, choking on blood as it poured from his lips, his fingernails clawing violently against his own body, against the floor.

Poison.

"Breathe," Dean repeated.

"We need help in here!" Sterling was screaming. Beau is screaming, and Sterling is screaming-and finally, the convulsions stopped. Finally, Beau was still.

Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.

I forced myself to suck in a breath. And then another and another.

Beau's cracked lips moved. He looked at Briggs in one final moment of clarity. "I don't," he struggled to say. "I don't wish I was Nine." He sounded like a child.

"You've been poisoned," Briggs told him. "You need to tell us-"

"I don't believe in wis.h.i.+ng," Beau murmured. And then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he died.

Beau was poisoned. I thought the words, but didn't understand them. The cult killed him. Nightshade killed Beau. Beau, who'd carved a symbol onto his own chest-a symbol someone else had carved into the box that contained my mother's remains.

"My mother didn't die on a Fibonacci date," I said. "It was June. There are no Fibonacci dates in June, none in July...."

I realized on some level that Michael and Lia were staring at me, that Dean had wrapped his arms around me, that my body had collapsed against his.

My mother had disappeared five years ago-six in June. The person who'd attacked her had used a knife. It was poison that year. In the pattern, it was poison. Nightshade was the killer. The knife was New York, six years before that. There wasn't supposed to be another one for twenty-one years.

Nothing about my mother's death fit the pattern-so why was the symbol etched onto her coffin?

I struggled out of Dean's arms and went for my computer. I pulled up the pictures-the royal blue shroud, the bones, my mother's necklace. My finger hit at the keys again and again until the symbol showed up.

Lia and Michael came up behind us. "Is that..."

"Seven Masters," I said, forcing my hand around the circles on the outside of the symbol. "The Pythia." The vertical line. "And Nine."

"Seven Masters." Sloane appeared in the doorway, as if the mere mention of numbers had called her to us. "Seven circles. Seven ways of killing."

I pulled my eyes from the screen to look at Sloane.

"I always wondered why there were only seven methods," she said, her eyes swollen, her face pale. "Instead of nine."

Three.

Three times three.

Three times three times three-but only seven ways to kill.

Because this group-whatever it was, however long it had been around-had nine members at a time. Seven Masters. The Pythia. And Nine.

"Beau Donovan is dead," Lia told Sloane. "Poison. Presumably Nightshade's."

Sloane's hands smoothed themselves down over the front of the s.h.i.+rt Aaron had given her. She trembled slightly, but all she said was, "Maybe the flower was for him."

The white flower in the photograph that Nightshade had sent Judd. White flower. Something stuck in the back of my brain, like food caught in between the teeth. Nightshade always sent his victims the bloom of a white nightshade plant. White. White flowers.

I walked into the kitchen, scrambled until I found what I was looking for. I pulled out the evidence envelope, opened it, removed the photo inside.

Not white nightshade. The photo Nightshade had sent Judd wasn't of a white nightshade bloom. It was a picture of a paper flower. Origami.

I stumbled backward and grabbed the edge of the counter for balance, thinking of Beau's last moments, the words he'd said.

I don't believe in wis.h.i.+ng.

I saw the little girl in the candy store, staring at a lollipop. I saw her father come and put her on his shoulders. I saw her beside the fountain, holding the penny.

I don't believe in wishes, she'd said.

There was a white origami flower behind her ear.

In my mind, I saw her mother come to get her. I saw her father, tossing a penny into the water. In my mind, I saw his face. I saw the water, and I saw his face- And just like that, I was back on the banks of the Potomac, a thick black binder on my lap.

"Enjoying a bit of light reading?" The voice echoed through my memory, and this time, I could make out the speaker's face. "You live at Judd's place, right? He and I go way back."

"Nightshade," I forced out the word. "I've seen him."

Lia looked almost concerned despite herself. "We know."

"No," I said. "In Vegas. I've seen him here. Twice. I thought...I thought I was watching him."

But maybe-maybe he was watching me.

"He had a child with him," I said. "There was a woman, too. The girl, she came up next to me at the fountain. She was little-three, four at most. She had a penny in her hand. I asked if she was going to make a wish, and she said..."

I couldn't coax my lips into forming the words.

Dean formed them for me. "I don't believe in wis.h.i.+ng." His gaze flicked to Michael's, then to Lia's. "The same thing Beau Donovan said when Sterling told him he only wished he were Nine."

Right before he died.

"You said Nightshade had a woman with him," Dean said. "What did she look like, Ca.s.sie?"

"Strawberry blond hair," I said. "Medium height. Slender."

I thought of my mother's body, stripped to the bones and buried at the crossroads. With honor. With care.

Maybe they weren't trying to kill you. Maybe you weren't supposed to die. Maybe you were supposed to be like this woman- "Beau said the ninth member was always born to it. How did he phrase it?"

Dean stared at a point just to the left of my shoulder and then repeated Beau's words exactly. "The child of the brotherhood and the Pythia. Blood of their blood."

Seven Masters. A child. And the child's mother.

The woman at the fountain had strawberry blond hair. It would be red in some lights-like my mother's.

Nine members. Seven Masters. A woman. A child.

"The Pythia was the name given to the Oracle at Delphi," Sloane said. "A priestess at the Temple of Apollo. A prophetess."

I thought of the family-the picture-perfect family I'd looked at, knowing to my core that it was something I'd never have.

Mother. Father. Child.

I turned to Dean. "We have to call Briggs."

The man we knew as Nightshade stared back at me from the page. The police artist had captured the lines of his face: strong jaw, thick brows, dark hair with just enough curl to make his remaining features look boyish. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes told me he was older than he looked; light stubble masked the fullness of his lips.

You came to Vegas to take care of a problem. Watching me, tormenting Judd-that, you enjoyed.

I felt someone take a seat next to me at the kitchen table. The FBI had taken the sketch and run with it. They were monitoring the airport, bus stations, traffic cameras-and, courtesy of Sloane, the casinos' security feeds.

You look like a thousand other men. You don't look dangerous.

The man in the sketch looked like a neighbor, a coworker, a Little League coach. A dad. I could see him in my mind, hoisting the little red-haired girl up onto his shoulders.

"You've done everything you can."

I tore my gaze from the police sketch to look at Judd. This man killed your daughter, I thought. This man might know what happened to my mother.

"Trust Ronnie and Briggs to do what they can," Judd continued.