The Naturals
Page 8

I glanced at Judd, wondering if these were his relatives, or if they belonged to someone else in this house.
“They’re killers.” An Asian girl about my age stepped around the corner. She moved like a cat—and smiled like she’d just eaten a canary.
“The people in the pictures,” she clarified. “They’re serial killers.” She twirled her shiny black ponytail around her index finger, clearly enjoying my discomfort. “It’s the program’s cheery way of reminding Dean why he’s here.”
Dean? Who was Dean?
“Personally, I think it’s a little macabre, but then again, I’m not a profiler.” The girl flicked her ponytail. “You are, though. Aren’t you?”
She took a step forward, and my eyes were drawn to her footwear: black leather boots with heels high enough to make my feet shudder in spasms of sympathy. She was wearing skintight black pants and a high-necked sleeveless sweater, electric blue to match the streaks in her black hair.
As I took in her clothing, the girl closed the space between us until she was standing so close to me that I thought she might reach out and start twirling my hair instead of her own.
“Lia,” Judd said, absolutely unfazed, “this is Cassie. If you’re finished trying to scare her, I’m betting she’d really like to set that bag down.”
Lia shrugged. “Mi casa es su casa. Your room is through there.”
“Your” room, I thought. Not “our” room.
“Cassie’s really broken up about not rooming with you, Lia,” Michael said, interpreting my facial expression with a wink. Lia pivoted to face him, and her lips twisted upward in a slow, sizzling grin.
“Miss me?” she asked.
“Like a thorn in my paw,” Michael replied.
Coming up the stairs behind us, Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “Lia,” he said. “Nice to see you.”
Lia gave him a look. “Now, Agent Briggs,” she replied, “that’s simply not true.”
Agent Locke rolled her eyes. “Lia’s specialty is deception,” she told me. “She has an uncanny knack for being able to tell when people are lying. And,” Agent Locke added, meeting Lia’s eyes, “she’s a very good liar.”
Lia didn’t seem to take offense at the agent’s words. “I’m also bilingual,” she said. “And very, very flexible.”
The second very was aimed directly at Michael.
“So,” I said, my duffel bag digging into my shoulder as I tried to process the fact that Lia was a Natural liar, “the pictures on the wall aren’t serial killers?”
That question was answered with silence. Silence from Michael. Silence from Judd. Silence from Agent Locke, who looked a bit abashed.
Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “No,” he said finally. “That’s true.”
My eyes were drawn to the portrait of the elderly couple.
Smiling serial killers, five-inch heels, and a girl with a gift for lying? This was going to be interesting.
CHAPTER 8
Briggs and Locke left shortly after Judd showed me to my room. They promised to return the next day for training, but for now, all that was expected of me was to settle in. My roommate—whoever she was—had yet to make an appearance, so for the moment, I had the room to myself.
Twin beds sat at opposite ends of the room. A bay window overlooked the backyard. Tentatively, I opened what I assumed to be the closet door. The closet was exactly half full: half of each rack, half of the floor space, half of the shelves. My roommate favored patterns to solids, bright colors to pastels, and had a healthy amount of black and white in her wardrobe, but no gray.
All of her shoes were flats.
“Dial it back a notch, Cassie,” I told myself. I’d have months to analyze my roommate’s personality—without creepily stalking her half of the closet. Quickly and efficiently, I emptied my own bag. I’d lived in Colorado for five years, but before that, the longest I’d ever lived in one place was four months. My mother was always off to the next show, the next town, the next mark, and I was an expert unpacker.
There was still space on my side of the closet when I was done.
“Knock-knock.” Lia’s voice was high and clear. She didn’t wait for permission before coming into the room, and I realized with a start that she’d changed clothes.
The boots had been replaced with ballet flats, and she’d traded the tight black pants for a lacy, flowing skirt. Her hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck, and even her eyes looked softer.
It was like she’d given herself a makeover—or switched personalities altogether.
First Michael, now Lia. I wondered if he’d picked up the trick of changing clothing styles from her, or if she’d gotten it from him. Given that Lia was the one who specialized in deception, my money was on the former.
“Are you finished unpacking yet?” she asked.
“I’m still working on some stuff,” I said, busying myself with the dresser.
“No. You’re not.”
I’d never considered myself a liar until that moment, when Lia’s ability took the option away.
“Look, those serial killer pictures give new meaning to the word creepy.” Lia leaned back against the doorjamb. “I was here for six weeks before someone told me that Grandma and Gramps were actually Faye and Ray Copeland, who were convicted of killing five people and made a cozy little quilt out of their clothes. Trust me, it’s better that you know now.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
“Anyway,” Lia said, dragging out the word, “Judd gives crappy tours. He’s a surprisingly decent cook, and he’s got eyes in the back of his head, but he’s not exactly what one would call chatty, and unless we’re about to burn the place down, he’s pretty hands-off. I thought you might want a real tour. Or that you might have some questions.”
I wasn’t sure that a person renowned for her skill at lying was the ideal information source or tour guide, but I wasn’t about to turn down a peace offering, and I did have one question.
“Where’s my roommate?”
“Where she always is,” Lia replied innocently. “The basement.”
— — —
The basement ran the length of the house and stretched out underneath the front and back yards. From the bottom of the stairs, all I could see was two enormous white walls that ran the width of the space, but didn’t quite reach the fourteen-foot ceilings. There was a small space between where one wall ended and the next began.
An entrance.
I walked toward it. Something exploded, and I jumped backward, my hands flying up in front of my face.
Glass, I thought belatedly. Shattering glass.
A second later, I realized that I couldn’t see the source of the sound. I lowered my hands and looked back at Lia, who hadn’t so much as flinched.
“Is that normal?” I asked her.
She gave a graceful little shrug. “Define normal.”
A girl poked her head out from behind one of the partitions. “Conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern.”
The first thing I noticed about the girl—other than the chipper tone in her voice and the fact that she had literally just defined normal—was her hair. It was blond, glow-in-the-dark pale, and stick straight. The ends were uneven and her blunt-cut bangs were too short, like she’d chopped them off herself.
“Aren’t you supposed to be wearing safety goggles?” Lia asked.
“It is possible that my goggles have been compromised.” With that, the girl disappeared back behind the partition.
Based on the self-satisfied curve of Lia’s lips, I was going to go out on a limb and guess that I had just met my roommate.
“Sloane, Cassie,” Lia said with a grand gesture. “Cassie, Sloane.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. I took a few steps forward, until I was standing in the space between the partitions and could see what they had hidden before. A narrow hallway stretched out in front of me. It was lined with rooms on either side. Each room had only three walls.
Immediately to my left, I found Sloane standing in the middle of what appeared to be a bathroom. There was a door on the far side, and I realized that the space looked exactly the way a bathroom would if someone had removed the back wall.