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.”