All In: (The Naturals #3) (28 page)

Nightshade would probably love for the kids Judd was caring for to be the exception to the rules.

Judd slammed the tickets down onto the counter. He turned and was on his phone again in an instant. “I’m going to need transport, a security detail, and a safe house.”

T
he safe house was sixty-five miles northeast of Las Vegas. I knew this because Sloane felt compelled to share the
calculation—as well as at least half a dozen others.

We were all on edge.

That night, in a strange bed with armed federal agents in the adjacent room, I stared up at the ceiling, not even trying to sleep. Briggs and Sterling were still in Vegas, working against a
ticking clock to stop the UNSUB before he killed again. Another team had been assigned to take Judd’s statement about his communications with Nightshade. That statement hadn’t included
any information about a cult of serial killers that had gone undetected for more than sixty years.

That information had been declared need-to-know.

Outside of our team, only two people had been read in—Agent Sterling’s father, FBI Director Sterling, and the director of National Intelligence.

Two days,
I thought as the clock ticked past midnight. Two days until our UNSUB killed again—unless Nightshade killed him first.

You’re here to clean up a mess.
I could feel my heart pounding in my throat, but I forced myself to go deeper into Nightshade’s psyche.
Your work is neat. Clean. Poison
is an efficient enough means of removing pests.

I tried not to wonder if Nightshade was the only one whose attention our UNSUB had caught.

I tried not to wonder if the other members of the cult knew about us, too.

You could have killed this UNSUB,
I thought, focusing on Nightshade, the evil I could name.
As soon as you got here, you could have killed this imposter making a mockery of
something he does not understand. Throwing it in your faces. Attempting to fashion himself into something more.

So why wait? Had Nightshade not made any more progress than we had at identifying the UNSUB? Or was he biding his time?

That was the question that dogged me the first night in the safe house. The second night, my thoughts shifted toward the way Nightshade had signed his message to Judd.

An old friend.

It feels true to you, doesn’t it?
I thought.
That killing Scarlett linked you and Judd. You chose her for what she was—a challenge, a slap in the face to Sterling and
Briggs. But after…

When he’d stopped—when he’d completed his ninth and disappeared from the FBI’s radar—he’d have needed something to fill that void.

There were days when I couldn’t draw the line between profiling and guessing. Hovering on the verge of sleep, I wondered how much of my understanding of Nightshade was intuition and how
much was imagination, making mountains of molehills, because molehills were all that I had.

Even now, even after everything, Judd still wouldn’t let us touch the Nightshade file.

Exhaustion wore at me, like the elements biting at a body as it decomposed. I hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours. In that time, I’d received confirmation of my mother’s
death and been made aware of the fact that the man who’d killed Judd’s daughter was watching us all.

I fell asleep like a drowning man making a conscious decision to stop coming up for air.

This time, the dream started on the stage. I was wearing the royal blue dress. My mother’s necklace sat like a shackle around my throat. The auditorium was empty, but I could feel them out
there—eyes, thousands of eyes, watching me.

My skin crawled with it.

I whirled toward the sound of footsteps. It was faint, but I could hear the footsteps getting louder.
Closer.
I started backing away, slowly at first, and then faster.

The footsteps came faster, too.

I turned to run. One second, I was onstage, and the next, I was running through the forest, my feet bare and bleeding.

Webber. Daniel Redding’s apprentice. Hunting me like a deer.

A twig snapped behind me, and I whirled. I felt a ghost of a whisper on the back of my neck and a hand trailing lightly over my arm.

I scrambled backward and went down hard. I hit the ground and kept falling—down, down into a hole in the ground. Up above, I saw Webber, standing at the edge of the hole and holding his
hunting rifle. A second person stepped up beside him.
Agent Locke.

Lacey Locke née Hobbes looked down at me, her red hair pulled high on her head, a pleasant smile on her face.

She was holding a knife. “I’ve got a present for you,” she said.

No. No, no, no—

“You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin.” Those words came from my right. I turned. It was dark in the hole, but I could just barely make out the features of the girl next
to me.

She looked like Sloane—but I knew, deep in the pit of my stomach, that she wasn’t.

“There’s a sleeping cobra on your chest,” the girl wearing Sloane’s body said. “What do you do?”

Scarlett. Scarlett Hawkins.

“What do you do?” she asked again.

Dirt hit me in the face. I looked up, but all I saw this time was the glint of a shovel.

“You’ve been buried alive,” Scarlett whispered. “What do you do?”

The dirt was coming faster now. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe.

“What do you do?”

“Wake up,” I whispered. “I wake up.”

I
woke up on the banks of the Potomac River. It took me a moment to realize that I was back in Quantico, and another after that to
realize that I wasn’t alone.

There was a thick, black binder open on my lap.

“Enjoying a bit of light reading?”

I looked up at the person who’d asked that question, but couldn’t make out his face.

“Something like that,” I said, realizing even as I did that I’d said these words before.
The river. The man.

The world around me jumped, like a jarring film cut.

“You live at Judd’s place, right?” the faceless man was saying. “He and I go way back.”

Way back.

My eyes flew open. I sat up—in bed this time. My hands grappled with the sheet. I was tangled in it, shaking.

Awake.

My hands worked their way over my legs, my chest, my arms, as if looking for assurance that I hadn’t left part of myself back on the Potomac, in the dream.

The memory.

The stage, running, being buried alive—that was the work of my twisted subconscious. But the conversation on the riverbank? That was real. That had happened, right after I’d joined
the program.

I’d never seen the man again.

I swallowed, thinking of the envelope Nightshade had left for Judd on the plane. I thought of the message he’d signed from “an old friend.” Nightshade had known all of our
names. He’d made the ticket arrangements, because he wanted Judd to know:
you could have gotten to any of us, at any time.

If I was right about that—about why Nightshade had left the note, about his fixation on Scarlett as his crowning achievement and, through her, on Judd—it was all too easy to believe
that Nightshade might have dropped by to say hello when a new person arrived in Judd’s life.

The rules are specific. Nine victims killed on Fibonacci dates.
Normal killers kept killing until they got caught—but this group was different. This group didn’t get
caught.

Because they stopped.

Judd was in the kitchen. So were two of the agents on our protection detail. “Can you give us a minute?” I asked them. I waited until they’d left to speak again. “I need
to ask you something,” I told Judd. “And you’re not going to want to tell me the answer, but I need you to anyway.”

Judd had a crossword in front of him. He laid down his pencil. That was as close to an invitation to continue as I was going to get.

“Given what you know about the Nightshade case, given what you know about Nightshade himself, given whatever was in that envelope on the plane—do you think he came here for our
killer and just happened to spot you while he was here, or do you think…” My mouth went dry. I swallowed. “Do you think that he’s been watching us all this time?”

Theories were just theories. My intuition was good, but it wasn’t bulletproof, and I’d been given few enough details to work with that there was no way of knowing how far off the
mark I might be.

“I don’t want you working on Nightshade,” Judd said.

“I know,” I told him. “But I need you to answer the question.”

Judd sat, stone-still and staring at me, for more than a minute. “Nightshade sent something to the people he killed,” Judd said. “Before he killed them, he sent them a flower.
A bloom, taken from a white nightshade plant.”

“That’s how he got the name,” I said. “We assumed he’d used poison….”

“Oh, he did,” Judd said. “It wasn’t nightshade, though. The poison he used was undetectable, incurable.” A shadow flickered across Judd’s eyes.
“Painful.”

You sent them something to let them know what was coming. You watched them. You chose them. You marked them.

“It never occurred to me he might still be watching.” Judd’s voice was harder now. “Best we could figure, the person who killed Scarlett was in jail or dead. But knowing
what I know now?” Judd leaned back in his seat, his eyes never leaving mine. “I think the son of a bitch was watching. I think he’d have killed a dozen more if they’d have
let him. But if he had to content himself with nine…”

He would have made the most of it.

I closed my eyes. “I think I met him,” I said. “Last summer.”

I
couldn’t provide a description of the man. Michael, who’d been with me that day at the river, couldn’t do much
better

Three minutes, six months ago.
My brain stored all kinds of information about people—but even in a dream, I hadn’t been able to make out the phantom’s face.

Michael’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Now strikes me as the appropriate time for a distraction.”

I was sitting on the couch, staring at nothing. Michael took a seat on the other end, leaving space for Dean between him and me.

Whatever complications there were between us, this was so much bigger.

“Now,” Michael said, determined to bring levity to a moment where there was none, “having recently been involuntarily drafted into a rather
violent
mud wrestling
competition myself”—he shot a dirty look at Lia—“it occurs to me that perhaps we could—”

“No.” Dean took the seat between Michael and me.

“Excellent,” Michael replied with a smile. “That leaves Lia, Cassie, Sloane, and me for the wrestling. You can referee.”

“Tomorrow’s the twelfth.” Sloane sat down on the floor in front of us, pulling her legs to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “We keep talking about mud
wrestling and…and Nightshade, and how he knew we were here, and what he’s doing—but tomorrow’s the twelfth.”

Tomorrow,
I filled in for her,
someone dies.