I pretended that I could see through him. I knew this wall well enough that I could hold each and every photo in my mind’s eye.
“When we discovered that my father had a copycat, I withdrew. I beat at a punching bag until my knuckles were bloody. And do you remember what you did?”
Tears threatened my eyes. I knelt in front of you and wiped the blood from your knuckles. I pulled you back from the edge every time you went too far.
Dean latched one arm around my torso and the other around my knees and lifted me into his arms, physically prying me away from the wall. I could feel his heart beat in his chest as he carried me toward the basement door.
Drop me, I thought, my body going stiff as a board. Just drop me. Just let me go.
Dean held me close as he carried me all the way to my room. He sat down on the end of my bed. “Look at me.” His voice was gentle—so gentle, it undid me.
“Don’t,” I choked out.
Don’t be gentle. Don’t hold me. Don’t save me from myself.
“You think what happened to Laurel is your fault.”
Stop, Dean. Please don’t make me do this. Please don’t make me say the words.
“And you’ve always believed, deep down, that if you hadn’t left your mother’s dressing room that day, if you’d just come back sooner, you could have saved her. Every time the police asked you a question you couldn’t answer, what you heard was that you weren’t enough. You weren’t enough to save her. You weren’t enough to help them catch the people who did it.”
“And now they’re hurting her.” The truth burst out of me like shrapnel, exploding with deadly force. “They’re torturing her until she gives them what they want.”
“Permission,” Dean said softly. “Absolution.”
I rolled away from him, and he let me. Days’ worth of exhaustion caught up to me in an instant, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I let myself sink into my mother’s perspective. “It’s not that I don’t have a choice,” I said softly, not bothering to tell him that I wasn’t speaking for myself anymore, that I was speaking for her. “I always have a choice: Do I suffer, or does someone else? Do I fight it? Do I fight them? Or do I play the role they’ve cast me in? Do I have more control, more power, if I make them break me or if I play the Pythia so well that they stop thinking of me as a thing that can be broken?”
Dean was quiet for several seconds. “Against the seven of us,” he said finally, “you will always be powerless.” He bowed his head. “But against any one of us, you hold the cards.”
I thought of Nightshade, dead in solitary confinement. “If I say you die, you die.”
“But first, one in our number has to ask.”
The Pythia passed judgment, but she didn’t bring the cases. One of the Masters had to present an issue for her to rule on—and before making a decision, she was tortured. If enough of the Masters opposed her answer, she was tortured again.
“You chose me because I was a survivor,” I whispered. “Because you saw in me the potential to become something more.”
“We chose you,” Dean countered, “because at least one among us believed that someday you might come to like it. The power. The blood. Some of us want you to embrace what you are. Some of us would rather you fight it—fight us.”
This group followed very specific rules. After their ninth kill, they were done—permanently. “What you do to me is the closest any of you can come to reliving the glory. You drag a knife across my skin or watch it blister under a flame. You hold my head under water or make me watch as you push a metal rod through my flesh. You close your fingers around my neck. You beat me.” I thought of Nightshade. “You force your most painful poison down my throat. And every time you hurt me, every time you purify me, I learn more about you. Seven different monsters, seven different motivations.”
My mother had always excelled at manipulating people. She’d made her living as a “psychic,” telling people what they wanted to hear.
“Some of us,” Dean said after a moment’s thought, “are easier to manipulate than others.”
I thought again of Nightshade. My mother hadn’t ordered his death when he’d been captured. The Masters had almost certainly presented the matter for her judgment, but she’d held out—and at least some subset of them had let her.
“Nightshade was a newly minted member of this group when they took my mother,” I said slowly, trying to think of facts—any facts—that might shed light on their dynamic. “He completed his ninth kill two months before she was taken.” I forced myself back into my mother’s point of view. “He was competitive. He was daring. He wanted to break me. But I made him want something else more. I made him want me.”
“What he wanted was immaterial.” Dean closed his eyes, his lashes casting shadows on his face. “The Pythia will never belong to one man.”
“But one of you must have identified me as a potential Pythia,” I said. I thought again about how new to the fold Nightshade had been when my mother was taken. “One of you chose me, and it wasn’t Nightshade.”
I waited for another insight, but nothing came, and that nothing ate away at me like a black hole sucking every other emotion in. I couldn’t remember who might have been watching my mother. I couldn’t remember anything that might have told us how—and by whom—she’d been chosen.
Dean lay down beside me, his head on my pillow. “I know, Cassie. I know.”
I thought of Daniel Redding, sitting across from me and gloating about the way he’d inserted himself between Dean and me—every time our hands brushed, every gentle touch.
I don’t need gentle right now. I let myself turn toward Dean, let my breath catch raggedly in my throat. I don’t want it.
I reached for Dean, pulling him roughly toward me. His hands buried themselves in my hair. Not gentle. Not light. My back arched as his grip on my ponytail tightened. One second I was beside him, and the next I was on top of him. My lips captured his—rough and hard and warm and real.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking. I couldn’t save Laurel. I couldn’t save my mother.
But I could live—even when I didn’t want to, even when it hurt. I could feel.