The Naturals

CHAPTER 29

For the next three days, I could barely manage to go to the bathroom without someone else following me in. And every time I looked out the window, I knew that the FBI was out there, watching and waiting, hoping the killer would try again.

“There are approximately thirty thousand working morticians in the United States.”

Sloane—who was the only person in the house I couldn’t justify throwing out of my room, since it was her room, too—had pulled Cassie babysitting duty when I’d tried to sneak away for some time alone.

“Morticians?” I repeated. I eyed her suspiciously. “Did someone give you coffee?”

Sloane very pointedly did not answer the coffee question. “I thought you could use a distraction.”

I plopped down on my bed. “Don’t you have any more cheerful statistics?”

Sloane frowned in contemplation. “Are balloon animals cheerful?”

Oh dear lord.

“Balloonists are more likely than other circus performers to suffer from subconjunctival hemorrhages.”

“Sloane, subconjunctival hemorrhages are not cheerful.”

She shrugged. “If you had a balloon, I could make you a dachshund.”

Another few days of this and I might willingly serve myself up to the UNSUB. Who would have thought my fellow Naturals would take Briggs’s decree that I not be left alone so seriously? Dean and Michael could barely stand to be in the same room with each other, but the second I stepped out of my bedroom, one or both of them would be there waiting for me. The only thing that could have made this whole situation more awkward was if Lia hadn’t magnanimously decided to stay out of the fray.

“Knock, knock!”

So much for Lia’s magnanimousness.

“What do you want?” I asked her, not bothering to sugarcoat my words.

“My, but we’re cranky today.”

If looks could kill, Lia would have been dead on the floor, and I would have been on trial for murder.

“I suppose,” Lia said, with the air of someone making a most generous concession, “that the argument you had with Dean about his father wasn’t entirely your fault, and since this whole hair-in-a-box thing seems to have given him a renewed purpose in life, I’m not morally obligated to make you miserable anymore.”

I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Thank you?”

“I thought you could use a distraction.” Lia smiled. “If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s distractions.”

The last time I’d let Lia dictate our plans, I’d ended up kissing Dean and Michael in a span of less than twenty-four hours, but after three days of house arrest and way too many statistics about dachshunds, I was desperate.

“What kind of distraction did you have in mind?”

Lia tossed a bag on my bed. I opened it.

“Did you rob a cosmetics store?”

Lia shrugged. “I like makeup—and nothing says distraction like a makeover. Besides …” She reached in the bag and pulled out a lipstick. Smiling wickedly, she uncapped it and twisted the bottom. “This is definitely your color.”

I eyed the lipstick. The color was dark—halfway between red and brown. Way too sexy for me—and strangely familiar.

“What do you say?” Lia didn’t actually wait for an answer. She pushed me into a sitting position on the bed. She leaned into my personal space and tilted my chin back. And then she dragged the lipstick across my lips.

“Kleenex!” Lia barked.

Sloane supplied the Kleenex, a goofy grin on her face.

“Blot,” Lia ordered.

I blotted.

“I knew that would be a good color on you,” Lia told me, her voice smug and self-satisfied. Without another word, she turned her attention to my eyes. When she was finally finished, I pushed her off me and walked over to the mirror.

“Oh.” I couldn’t keep the sound from escaping my mouth. My blue eyes looked impossibly big. My lashes had been thoroughly mascara-ed, and the color on my lips was dark against my porcelain skin.

I looked like my mother. My features, the way they came together on my face—everything.

Blue dress. Blood. Lipstick.

A series of images flashed through my mind, and I realized with sudden clarity why the color of this lipstick had seemed so familiar. I turned back to the bed and scavenged through the bag of makeup until I found it. I turned the tube upside down, looking for the color’s name.

“Rose Red,” I read, swallowing after I said the words. I turned to Lia. “Where did you get this?”

“What does it matter?”

My knuckles went white around the tube. “Where did you get this, Lia?”

“Why do you want to know?” she countered, folding her arms over her chest and examining her nails.

“I just do, okay?” I couldn’t tell her more than that—and I shouldn’t have had to. “Please?”

Lia gathered the makeup off the bed and made her way to the door. She gave me one of those smiles that wasn’t a smile. “I bought it, Cassie. With money. As part of our fine system of capitalistic exchange. Happy?”

“The color—” I started to say.

“It’s a popular color,” Lia cut in. “If you bribe Sloane with some java, she could probably tell you exactly how many millions of tubes of it they sell every year. Seriously, Cassie. Don’t ask why. Just say thank you.”

“Thanks,” I said softly, but I couldn’t help feeling that the universe was mocking me, and I couldn’t keep from looking down at the tube in my hand and thinking, over and over again, that once upon a time, I’d known someone else who was partial to Rose Red lipstick.

My mother.

YOU

“Hold still.”

The girl whimpers, her eyes filling with tears, her hands pulling at the bindings. You backhand her, and she falls to the ground. There’s no pleasure to be had in this.

She’s not Lorelai.

She’s not Cassie.

She’s not even a proper imitation. But you had to do something. You had to show the people closing ranks around Cassie what happens when they try to stand between you and what is yours.

“Hold still,” you say again.

This time, the girl obeys. You don’t kill her. You don’t even hurt her.

Not yet.

CHAPTER 30

I woke midmorning to slanting rays of light breaking through my bedroom window. Sloane was nowhere to be seen. After doing a cursory check of the hallway, I slunk into the bathroom and locked the door behind me.