I dreamed, as I had so many times before, that I was walking down the hallway toward my mother’s dressing room. I could see myself reaching for the door.
Don’t go in. Don’t turn on the light.
No matter how many times I had this dream, I was never able to stop myself. I was never able to do anything but what I’d done that night. Grapple for the light switch. Feel the blood on my fingers.
I flipped the switch and heard a faint rustling, like leaves in the wind. The room remained pitch-black. The sound got louder. Closer. And that was when I realized it wasn’t rustling leaves. It was the sound of chains being dragged over a tile floor.
“That’s not how you play the game.”
The room was flooded with light, and I whirled to see Laurel standing behind me. She was holding a lollipop, the kind she’d been staring at the first time I’d seen her. “This is how you play the game.”
Hands slammed me back into the wall. Shackles appeared on my wrists. Chains slithered across the floor like snakes.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see—
“You can do better than that.”
It took me a moment to realize that the chains were gone. Laurel was gone. The dressing room was gone. I was sitting in a car. My mother was sitting in the front seat.
“Mom.” The word was strangled by my throat.
“Dance it off,” my mom told me. That had been one of her go-to phrases. Every time we’d left a town, every time I’d skinned a knee. Dance it off.
“Mom,” I said urgently, suddenly sure that if I could just get her to turn around and look at me, she would see that I wasn’t a little girl anymore. She would see, and she would remember.
“I know,” my mom called back over the music. “You liked the town and the house and our little front yard. But home isn’t a place, Cassie.”
Suddenly, we weren’t in the car anymore. We were standing on the side of the road, and she was dancing.
“We all have choices,” a voice whispered behind me. Nightshade emerged from the shadows, his gaze on my mother as she danced. “The Pythia chooses to live.” He smiled. “Perhaps someday that choice will be yours.”
I woke with a start to find Dean asleep beside me and Celine Delacroix standing in the doorway.
“I came to say good-bye,” she said. “Michael performed an impressive encore of your you don’t belong here and you need to leave number.”
If there was one thing my last conversation with Celine had taught me, it was that she did belong here. But I couldn’t blame Michael for wanting to send her away. The rest of us were in this. We were already in danger.
Celine didn’t have to be.
“When this is over—” I started to say.
Celine held up one perfectly manicured hand. “Unless you feel like letting me in on what this is—don’t.” She paused. “Take care of Michael for me.”
I will. I couldn’t make that promise out loud.
“And if you get a chance,” Celine continued, a subtle smile pulling at the edges of her lips, “put in a good word for me with Sloane.”
She didn’t wait for a reply before strolling out the door.
Beside me, Dean stirred. “What do you need?” he asked me quietly.
I needed to do something other than stand in front of the wall in the basement, waiting for a body to show up. I needed to get out of this house.
I needed to follow up on the one lead we had.
“I need to go to Gaither, Oklahoma.”
YOU
You forget sometimes what it was like Before. Before the walls. Before the chains. Before the turning of the wheel and the bleeding and the pain.
Before the rage.
They bring photographs to show you what they did to Seven. They place another diamond around your neck.
Your fingertips gingerly touch the edge of a photograph—proof of death. There was blood. There was pain. You did this. Judge and jury, you held his life in your hands.
You did this. You killed him.
You smile.
The town where Nightshade had been born wasn’t the kind of place where the FBI turned up on a regular basis.
“Gaither, Oklahoma, population 8,425,” Sloane rattled off as we stepped out of the rental car. “In the early days of Oklahoma’s statehood, Gaither thrived, but its economy collapsed during the Great Depression, and it never recovered. The population has dwindled, and the average age of residents has risen steadily for the past sixty years.”
In other words, Gaither had more than its share of senior citizens.
“Three museums,” Sloane continued, “thirteen historical landmarks. While local tourism is a substantial source of income for the city proper, the surrounding rural communities rely primarily on farming.”
The fact that there was tourism in Gaither meant that we could get the lay of the land without announcing our intentions—or the fact that Agent Sterling was carrying a badge. Agent Briggs had stayed behind in Quantico. I didn’t fool myself as to why.
April second. Today was a Fibonacci date, and Laurel’s disappearance was almost certainly a harbinger of things to come.
Judd had accompanied us to Gaither, as had Agent Starmans. My gut said that Briggs had sent the latter to protect Sterling as much as the rest of us.
Don’t think about that, I told myself as we began the walk down historic Main Street. Think about Mason Kyle.
I tried to picture Nightshade growing up in this town. The storefronts had a Victorian charm to them. Stone signs detailed the town’s history. As I laid a hand flat on one of them, an odd feeling came over me. Like something was missing.
Like I was missing something.
“You okay?” Agent Sterling asked me. In an attempt not to look like a cop, she’d chosen to wear jeans. She still looked like a cop.
“I’m fine,” I told her, glancing back over my shoulder, then forcing my eyes to the front. As we turned a corner, a wrought-iron gate came into view. Beyond it was a stone path, landscaped on either side with all manner of plants.
For a split second, I couldn’t breathe, and I had no idea why.
Dean walked ahead and stopped at the sign in front of the gates.
“Either Redding is constipated,” Michael said as he took in a subtle shift in Dean’s body posture, “or things are about to get interesting.”