The Naturals: All In Part 22

This wasn't Agent Sterling's handwriting. It wasn't Agent Briggs's. I'd learned, months ago, to stop telling myself it's nothing, it's probably nothing when the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

"Judd." Dean's voice reached me a second before I turned toward the c.o.c.kpit myself.

"Just a little electrical trouble," Judd a.s.sured Dean. "We're taking care of it."

This isn't over. This isn't done.

I held the envelope wordlessly out to Judd. My hand didn't shake. I didn't say a word. Judd eyed it for a moment, then looked at me.

"It was on the seat." Dean was my voice when I had none.

Judd took the envelope. He turned his back on us to open it. Fifteen seconds later, he turned back around.

"Get off the plane." Judd's voice was gruff, no-nonsense, calm.

Michael responded like Judd had shouted. He grabbed his bag and Sloane's. He pushed Sloane lightly in front of him and turned to Lia. He didn't say anything-whatever she saw in his face was enough.

Off the plane. Into Judd's rental car. Michael didn't say a word about leaving his own car behind.

"The envelope," Dean said as we pulled away from the runway. "Who was it from?"

Judd gritted his teeth. "He signed it 'an old friend.'"

I froze, unable to exhale, a breath turning stale in my lungs.

"The man who killed your daughter." Lia was the only one with b.a.l.l.s enough to say it out loud. "Nightshade. What did he want?"

I forced myself to start breathing again.

"To warn us," I answered without meaning to. "Threaten us. Those electrical problems with the plane. They weren't an accident, were they?"

Judd was already on the phone with Sterling and Briggs.

Nightshade's here in Vegas, I thought. And he doesn't want us to leave.

I'd feared that thinking about Scarlett's killer might conjure him up like a ghost in the mirror. I'd known that our UNSUB was attempting to attract the attention of Nightshade and the others like him. I hadn't thought about what it would mean if the UNSUB succeeded. The organization-group-cult- They're here.

Five minutes later, Judd was at the airport ticket counter, attempting to book us on the next commercial flight anywhere. But the moment the woman behind the counter typed his name into the computer, her brow knit.

"I already have tickets reserved under your name," she said. "Six of them."

I knew before I'd even fully processed what she was saying that this was Nightshade's doing, too. You chose Scarlett for your ninth, I thought, unable to stop myself. You chose her because she mattered to Sterling and Briggs and they dared to think they might stop you. You chose her because she was a challenge.

Of all of Nightshade's victims, Scarlett was his greatest feat. She would be the one he went back to. The one he re-lived. You've watched Judd, haven't you? Every now and again, you like to remind yourself of what you took from him-from all of them.

I wanted that guess to be off the mark. I wanted to be wrong. But the fact that Nightshade wanted us to stay in Vegas-the fact that Nightshade even knew there was an "us"...

Six tickets. The woman behind the counter printed them off and handed them to Judd. I knew before I looked that they would have our names on them.

First names. Last names.

The flight was to D.C.

You know who we are. You know where we live. The implications were chilling. Nightshade had been watching-quite possibly since he'd killed Scarlett Hawkins and Judd had moved in with Dean.

Killers don't just stop, I thought, but in this group, they did. Nine and done. Those were the rules. Some killers take trophies, I thought. To re-live what they've done, to get some portion of that rush.

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 a.s.signed 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 nee 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.surance 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 h.e.l.lo 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 a.s.sumed 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."