All In
Page 76

“You’re not Nine,” Sterling said. “You’re never going to be Nine.”
Beau lifted cuffed hands to his own collar. He latched his fingers over his shirt and pulled it roughly off his shoulder. Underneath, etched onto his chest, was a series of jagged cuts, halfway healed and on their way to a scar.
Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.
I stopped breathing. That symbol—I knew that symbol.
“Seven Masters.” Beau’s face was taut, his voice full of fury. He ran his fingers around the outside of the heptagon. Seven circles. “The Pythia.” He pressed his finger into the wound and pulled it down the vertical line on the cross. His hand trembled as he went to do the same with the horizontal. “And Nine.”
The symbol. I know that symbol. Seven circles around a cross.
I’d seen it carved into the lid of a plain wooden coffin, uncovered at the crossroads on a country dirt road.
“You wish you were Nine,” Agent Sterling said, still pressing. I felt my limbs going numb. Blackness crept in on my field of vision.
“Dean,” I wheezed.
He was with me in an instant. “I see it,” he said. “I need you to breathe for me, Cassie. I see it.”
The symbol Beau had carved into his own flesh had also been carved into my mother’s coffin. Not possible. June twenty-first. Not a Fibonacci date. My mother died in June.
On-screen, Beau’s hands were still trembling. His fingers tensed. They clawed at his neck. His back arched. And then he fell to the floor, convulsing.
Screaming. I registered the sound as if it were coming from very far away. He’s screaming.
And then he was gargling, choking on blood as it poured from his lips, his fingernails clawing violently against his own body, against the floor.
Poison.
“Breathe,” Dean repeated.
“We need help in here!” Sterling was screaming. Beau is screaming, and Sterling is screaming—and finally, the convulsions stopped. Finally, Beau was still.
Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.
I forced myself to suck in a breath. And then another and another.
Beau’s cracked lips moved. He looked at Briggs in one final moment of clarity. “I don’t,” he struggled to say. “I don’t wish I was Nine.” He sounded like a child.
“You’ve been poisoned,” Briggs told him. “You need to tell us—”
“I don’t believe in wishing,” Beau murmured. And then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he died.
Beau was poisoned. I thought the words, but didn’t understand them. The cult killed him. Nightshade killed Beau. Beau, who’d carved a symbol onto his own chest—a symbol someone else had carved into the box that contained my mother’s remains.
“My mother didn’t die on a Fibonacci date,” I said. “It was June. There are no Fibonacci dates in June, none in July….”
I realized on some level that Michael and Lia were staring at me, that Dean had wrapped his arms around me, that my body had collapsed against his.
My mother had disappeared five years ago—six in June. The person who’d attacked her had used a knife. It was poison that year. In the pattern, it was poison. Nightshade was the killer. The knife was New York, six years before that. There wasn’t supposed to be another one for twenty-one years.
Nothing about my mother’s death fit the pattern—so why was the symbol etched onto her coffin?
I struggled out of Dean’s arms and went for my computer. I pulled up the pictures—the royal blue shroud, the bones, my mother’s necklace. My finger hit at the keys again and again until the symbol showed up.
Lia and Michael came up behind us. “Is that…”
“Seven Masters,” I said, forcing my hand around the circles on the outside of the symbol. “The Pythia.” The vertical line. “And Nine.”
“Seven Masters.” Sloane appeared in the doorway, as if the mere mention of numbers had called her to us. “Seven circles. Seven ways of killing.”
I pulled my eyes from the screen to look at Sloane.
“I always wondered why there were only seven methods,” she said, her eyes swollen, her face pale. “Instead of nine.”
Three.
Three times three.
Three times three times three—but only seven ways to kill.
Because this group—whatever it was, however long it had been around—had nine members at a time. Seven Masters. The Pythia. And Nine.
“Beau Donovan is dead,” Lia told Sloane. “Poison. Presumably Nightshade’s.”
Sloane’s hands smoothed themselves down over the front of the shirt Aaron had given her. She trembled slightly, but all she said was, “Maybe the flower was for him.”
The white flower in the photograph that Nightshade had sent Judd. White flower. Something stuck in the back of my brain, like food caught in between the teeth. Nightshade always sent his victims the bloom of a white nightshade plant. White. White flowers.
I walked into the kitchen, scrambled until I found what I was looking for. I pulled out the evidence envelope, opened it, removed the photo inside.
Not white nightshade. The photo Nightshade had sent Judd wasn’t of a white nightshade bloom. It was a picture of a paper flower. Origami.
I stumbled backward and grabbed the edge of the counter for balance, thinking of Beau’s last moments, the words he’d said.
I don’t believe in wishing.