If Nightshade had been watching off and on, whenever he needed a fix—if he was in Vegas—then he knew what was happening here.
You’ve never killed Judd—never killed us, because the rules say you stop at nine. But an organization like yours—a cult like yours—would have a way of dealing with threats.
Lia had said it herself: if the Vegas UNSUB had been a part of this group, he would be dead. And if the cult realized that we’d made the connection, if they saw us as a threat…
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.”
The 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.