I made my way through the room. I knelt next to the chair.
“Hi,” I said.
The little girl blinked. Her eyes met mine. I saw a hint—just a hint—of recognition.
Beau Donovan had been six years old when he’d been abandoned in the desert by the people who’d raised him, deemed unsuitable for their needs.
Whatever those needs might be.
You’re three, I thought, slipping into the girl’s perspective. Maybe four.
Too young to understand what was happening. Too young to have been through so much.
You know things, I thought. Maybe you don’t even know that you know them.
Beau had known enough at the age of six to uncover the pattern once he was older.
You might be able to lead us to them.
“I’m Cassie,” I said.
The child said nothing.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She looked down. Beside her on the ground, there was a white origami flower, soaked in blood.
“Nine,” she whispered. “My name is Nine.”
A chill ran down my spine, leaving nothing but fury in its wake. You’re not a part of them, I thought, fiercely protective. She was just a baby—just a little, little girl.
“Your mommy called you something else,” I said, trying to remember the name the woman had used that day at the fountain.
“Laurel. Mommy calls me Laurel.” She turned to look at the woman on the ground. Her face held no hint of emotion. She didn’t flinch at the blood.
“Don’t look at Mommy, Laurel.” I moved to block her view. “Look at me.”
“That’s not my mommy.” The little girl’s tone was dispassionate.
My heart thudded in my chest. “It’s not?”
“The Master hired her. To watch me when we came here.”
Laurel’s chubby baby hands went to an old-fashioned locket around her neck. She let me open it. Inside, there was a picture.
“That’s my mommy,” Laurel said.
Not possible. The necklace. The bones. The blood—it was her blood. The tests said it was her blood.
I felt the world closing in on me. Because there were two people in the photo, and Laurel looked exactly the same in the picture as she did today.
It was recent.
That’s my mommy, Laurel had said. But the woman in the picture was my mother, too.
I always knew—I always thought—that if she’d survived, she would have come back to me. Somehow, some way, if she’d survived—
“Forever and ever,” Laurel whispered, each word a knife in my gut. “No matter what.”
“Laurel,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Where is Mommy?”
“In the room.” Laurel stared at me and into me. “Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.”
I stood in front of the tombstone. Dean stood beside me, his body lightly brushing mine. The others stood behind us in a semicircle. Michael and Lia and Sloane. Sterling and Briggs and Judd.
The remains the police had recovered from that dirt road had been released to the family. To my dad. To me. My father didn’t know that the remains weren’t my mother’s. He didn’t know that she was alive.
Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.
We had no idea who the woman we’d just buried in my mom’s grave was. The necklace she’d been buried with, the blood on the shawl—those had been my mother’s.
The Pythia chooses to live, Nightshade had told me, knowing quite well that my mother was the one who’d made that choice.
I didn’t know how long it was after my mother had been taken that she had been forced to fight for her life—again. I didn’t know if it was standard operating procedure for these men to stage a woman’s death before they took her.
All are tested. All must be found worthy.
What I did know was that my mother was alive.
Masters come, and Masters go, but the Pythia lives in the room.
My mother hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t been buried at the crossroads with care. She’d buried her predecessor. My mom’s favorite color. Her necklace. Traces of her blood. From the beginning, Dean and I had seen the funeral rites as rife with remorse. My mother’s.
“Are you ready?” Dean asked, his hand on my shoulder.
I stared at the tombstone marked with my mother’s name a moment longer. For Laurel’s sake, the cult needed to think we hadn’t put the pieces together. They needed to think that I believed I’d buried my mother. They needed to think that we hadn’t read much into the fact that the woman I’d mistaken for Laurel’s mother was actually a nanny, a disposable Las Vegas native Nightshade had hired earlier that week.
They needed to believe that the FBI had put Laurel into protective custody because of her connection to Nightshade, not her connection to me.
We don’t kill children.
I thought of Beau, wandering the desert, and pushed back the bitter taste in my mouth. “I’m ready,” I told Dean. I turned, meeting each of the others’ eyes, one by one. Home is the people who love you.
I was ready to go home. To do whatever it took to find the Masters. To protect Laurel. Forever and ever. To find my mother. Find the Pythia. Find the room.
No matter what.