Bad Blood by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Something big.
Something lumpy.
Blood on my mother’s hands…
I couldn’t make out the face on the body. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
Kane. Kane was there. The knowledge swept over me. Wasn’t he?
Feeling like the world was falling out beneath me, I walked toward Celine, who’d picked up her sketch pad again. This time, I couldn’t stop myself from watching as she drew.
She let me.
She let me watch over her shoulder, and slowly, a man’s face emerged. Jawline first. Hairline. Eyes. Cheeks, mouth…
I took a step back. Because this time, there was no creeping feeling of familiarity, no searching the banks of my memory for some clue of who this body had belonged to.
I recognized that face. And suddenly, I was standing at the top of the steps again, and there was a body at the bottom.
I see it. I see the face. I see blood—
The man in the picture—the man in my memory, crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, the skeleton on the exam table, a decade dead—was Kane Darby.
YOU
The Masters find you sitting on the floor, the knife balanced on your knee. Five is in pieces beside you.
You look up, feeling more alive—more like yourself—than you ever have. “He was not worthy,” you offer.
You are not weak. You are not Lorelai. You decide who lives, who dies. You are judge and jury. You are executioner. You are the Pythia.
And they will play your game.
Impossible. That was the word for what Celine had drawn. Hours later, as I sat down across from Kane Darby at the nearest FBI field office, Agent Sterling on one side and Dean on the other, I found myself staring at his face—at those familiar features—my throat dry and my mind reeling.
You’re alive. You’re here. But it was your face in that sketch.
It was his face in my memory, his body crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, his blood on my mother’s hands. There was an explanation, and I knew in my gut that I could make Kane give it to me, but just looking at him, I was frozen, like a diver standing at the edge of a cliff staring down at rough waves breaking against the rocks below.
“Did my mother ever mention the BPEs to you?” I asked Kane, somehow managing to form the words. “Behavior. Personality. Environment.”
“Lorelai was teaching you the tricks of her trade,” Kane said. A decade on, I could still hear an echo of emotion when he said her name.
“She taught me well.” I let that sink in, sounding calmer than I felt. “Well enough that the FBI finds my skills useful on occasion.”
“You’re a child.” Kane’s objection was predictable enough to steady me, grounding me in the here and now.
“I’m the person asking the questions,” I corrected evenly. I knew instinctively that Agent Sterling had been right—if we’d tried this tactic without having identified our victims, I wouldn’t have been able to get anything out of Kane.
But Celine’s facial reconstructions had changed the game.
You’ll know, in a moment, that this is real. That your family’s secrets are coming out. That there’s no use in fighting it.
That the power of penance pales next to confession.
“We’ve identified the bodies found at Serenity Ranch.” I gave Kane enough time to wonder if I was bluffing, and then I glanced at Agent Sterling, who handed me a folder. I laid the first picture on the table, facing Kane.
“Sarah Simon,” I said. “She joined your father’s cult and then—by all accounts—skipped town when it wasn’t what she’d hoped.”
“Except she didn’t.” Dean took over where I stopped. “Sarah never left the property, because someone killed her first. Based on the autopsy, we’re looking at asphyxiation. Someone—most likely a male—slipped his hands around her neck and choked the life out of her.”
“Strangulation is about dominance.” I was all too aware of how strange it must have been for Kane, who’d known me as a child, to hear me say those words. “It’s personal. It’s intimate. And afterward, there’s a sense of…completion.”
For the first time, Kane’s expression faltered and something else peeked out from behind his light blue eyes. I didn’t need Michael to tell me that it wasn’t fear or disgust.
It was anger.
I laid the second picture down on the table, the one depicting a man with Kane’s face.
“Is this a joke?” Kane asked.
“This is the face of the second victim,” I said. Impossible—but not. “It’s funny—no one in Gaither ever mentioned that you had a twin.”
That was the only explanation that made sense—not Kane crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Not Kane covered in blood.
“Maybe,” I said, slanting my gaze to catch his, “no one in Gaither knew. You told me the other day that growing up, you were the golden son.” I looked down at the photo. “Your brother was something else.”
Sometimes, a profiler didn’t have to know the answers. Sometimes, you just had to know enough to push someone else into filling in the blanks.
“My brother’s name,” Kane said, staring at the picture, “was Darren.” The anger I’d seen in his eyes was replaced with another emotion, something dark, full of loathing and longing. “He used to joke that they’d gotten us mixed up at the hospital—that he was meant to be Kane. In his version, I was Abel.”
“Your brother liked to hurt things.” Dean read between the lines. “He liked to hurt you.”
“He never laid a hand on me,” Kane replied, his voice hollow.
“He made you watch,” Dean said. He knew what that was like—viscerally, in a way he could never forget.
Kane dragged his eyes away from Celine’s drawing. “He hurt a little girl back in California. He was the reason we moved to Gaither.”
When Kane had moved to Gaither, he and his twin were all of nine years old.
“Darren was the reason your father started Serenity.” I could see, now, shades in that action that went beyond the older Darby’s thirst for power and adoration.
In Serenity, I’ve found balance.
In Serenity, I’ve found peace.
“Darren wasn’t allowed to leave the property,” Kane said. “We kept a close eye on him.”
I’d theorized before that Kane had developed his unnatural calmness as a result of growing up around someone who was unstable, volatile, unpredictable.
“Your father’s followers kept Darren a secret.”
Kane closed his eyes. “We all did.”
I thought of Malcolm Lowell, saying that his grandson had found his way into the compound. I thought about the animals—
They weren’t clean kills. Those animals died slowly, and they died in pain.
“Your brother and Mason Kyle were friends.”
I thought of Nightshade and the monster he’d become. Had he been that way even as a child? A sadist?
“My parents thought Mason was good for Darren. Good for us. It was almost like…”
“Almost like you were normal kids,” Agent Sterling filled in. “Almost like your brother didn’t have a fondness for hurting animals—and people, when he could.”
Kane’s head bent so low that his chin nearly gouged his chest. “I let my guard down. I let myself believe that my parents were wrong about Darren. He wasn’t broken. He’d just made a mistake. Just one mistake, that was all….”
“And then came the Kyle murders.” Dean knew, better than anyone, what it felt like to carry the blood of someone else’s victims on your hands.
“Darren went missing that day.” Kane closed his eyes, reliving what he’d seen as a child. “I knew he’d gone to Mason’s. I followed, but by the time I got there…”
Anna Kyle, dead. Her husband, dead. Her father, dying…
“Mason was standing there,” Kane said. “He was just…standing there. And then he turned, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘Tell Darren—I won’t tell.’”
&
I think he watched.
“That was when your father built the chapel?” Agent Sterling asked. I translated the question—the cell underneath the chapel. The shackles on the walls. Not for sheep in his flock who’d gone astray—for his own monstrous son.
I tried to imagine being Kane, knowing that my father had locked my own twin away. Had Kane visited Darren? Had he seen the toll captivity was taking on him? Had he just left his own brother down there, day after day and year after year?
As if he could hear those silent questions, Kane closed his eyes, pain etched into his features. “You could catch Darren standing over a dying puppy and he’d tell you to your face that he didn’t do it. He swore, up and down, that he’d had nothing to do with the attack on the Kyles.” Kane swallowed. “My father didn’t believe him.”
You didn’t believe him, either. You let your father lock him up. For years.
I understood now why Kane had never been able to leave town. No matter how disgusted he’d become with his father’s manipulations, no matter how broken his family was, he couldn’t leave his brother.
“He was my twin. If he was a monster, I was, too.”
“Years later, you met my mother,” I commented, my mind racing. “And things were going so well….” My voice caught in my throat as I remembered Kane dancing with my mother on the front porch, Kane lifting me onto his shoulders.
“How does Sarah Simon tie in to all of this?” Agent Sterling redirected the conversation. “By all accounts, she joined Serenity more than two decades after the death of the Kyle family.”
“I’d left Serenity by that point,” Kane said, his voice hoarse enough to tell me that I wasn’t the only one who’d been caught up in memories of my mother. “But from what I understand, Sarah spent a lot of time in the chapel.”
I could hear the horror in the way Kane said chapel.
“Sarah found out about Darren,” I said, my mind on the cell where Holland Darby had kept his son.
“She discovered the room. She snuck down to see him, probably more than once, and when he tired of playing with her, he killed her.” Kane’s voice was like a dull-edged knife. “He wrapped his hands around her neck, just like you said. Power. Domination. Personal. And then, he got out and came after me.”
Not you, I corrected silently. Power. Domination. Personal.
“He went after the person you loved.” I wondered how Darren had known about my mother, if he’d followed Kane to our house, but those questions died under the force of a memory that hit me with a tsunami’s force.
Nighttime. There’s a thump downstairs.
I put myself in my mother’s position. Did you think he was Kane at first? Did he try to hurt you? Did he wrap his fingers around your throat?
You fought back.
I thought of my mother smiling, hours later, dancing with me on the side of the road. You killed him.
Kane’s eyes were closed now, like he couldn’t bear looking at me, couldn’t bear remembering, but couldn’t stop. “By the time I got to Lorelai’s house, she was gone. You were gone, Cassie. And Darren’s body was at the bottom of the stairs.”
I saw the entire scene through his eyes: the brother he’d hated and feared and loved, dead. The woman he’d fallen for, responsible. It was your fault he came after her. Your fault he hurt her.
Your fault he was dead.
“Lorelai killed Darren in self-defense,” Agent Sterling surmised. “Unless you’d told her about him, she probably thought that she’d killed you.”
I tried to reconcile that with the mother I remembered, the mother I knew.
“You cleaned up the crime scene,” Agent Sterling continued, offering Kane no respite. “You brought your twin’s body home.”
“I never told.” Kane sounded like a boy, like the child who’d been forced to keep his family’s secret, to carry his brother’s burden.
“Your family locked Darren away, under the chapel,” Sterling said softly. “He was dead, and they still put him in shackles. And Sarah Simon—you left her body down there. You let her family think she’d left town.”
Kane had no response. Something had snapped inside of him. Something had broken. And when he finally did speak again, it wasn’t to confirm Agent Sterling’s statements.
“In Serenity, I’ve found balance,” he said, a shadow of his former self. “In Serenity, I’ve found peace.”
YOU
You’ve always protected Lorelai. Borne what she could not. Done what she could not.
But this time? You didn’t kill for her.
You killed Five for yourself. Because you liked it. Because you could.
Lorelai is weak. But as the Masters take their seats at the table, you are not. Some want to punish you. Some want to take the knife forever from your hand. But others remember—what a Pythia is.
What a Pythia can be.
The Master who preceded Five—the man who chose and trained him and has reclaimed the empty seat, a man you recognize—puts an end to conversation when he hands you a diamond, bloodred, in honor of your kill.
This is a man used to leading. A man used to being in charge.
“There is a threat,” the newcomer says. “I can take care of it.”
He’s talking about Gaither. About Lorelai’s daughter and her little friends and how very close they are to discovering the truth.
You allow your gaze to capture his. “It’s already taken care of.”
The acolyte’s third kill is already under way. The body should be showing up soon, and if victim two didn’t send your message, this one will.
“And if the problem persists? If their investigation leads them to our door?”
“Well, then…” You turn the bloodred diamond in your hand. “In that case, I suppose you can ask for judgment once more.”
Kane’s twin killed Ree’s daughter. Darren tried to kill my mother, and she killed him in self-defense. I should have been overwhelmed. I should have had to fight to view the situation with detached eyes. But instead, I felt nothing.
I felt like this—all of it—had happened to someone else.
Lia, who’d been watching with Sloane and Michael from behind the scenes, confirmed that Kane Darby had believed every word he’d said, and I found myself turning toward Agent Sterling. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“Kane will testify against his father,” Sterling replied. “About the drugs, what his father did to Darren, the role he played in covering up the death of Sarah Simon. Given the extenuating circumstances, I think I can convince the district attorney to cut Kane a deal.”
That wasn’t what I’d been asking—not really. I was asking where a person like Kane could go after something like this, how he could possibly move on.
Celine, who’d observed the debrief, cocked her head to the side and raised one manicured hand. “Just to clarify: we’re actually buying the idea that a little kid killed two people and tried to kill a third, causing his parents to chain him up in a basement for twenty-three years, at which point in time he killed someone else, broke out, and got himself axed?”
There was a long pause. After a moment, Sloane answered her. “That seems to be an accurate depiction of the working theory.”
“Just checking,” Celine replied lightly. “On a related note, this is the most effed-up thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Stick around,” Lia told her. “The puppies and rainbows come after the murder and mayhem.”
Agent Sterling snorted. But the moment of levity didn’t last. I could see the FBI agent debating whether to open her mouth again. “I don’t know if I buy Darren’s involvement in the Kyle murders or not. Kane believes his brother killed them—that doesn’t mean he’s correct.”
You showed up, Kane. The Kyles were dead. Mason, who had a history of watching as your brother slaughtered animals, asked you to te
A boy someone had groomed for great things.
“We have the files from the Kyle murders.” The fact that Dean hadn’t spiraled into his own darkest memories—of being groomed, of watching—told me that even when normal wasn’t an option, going on was. “There must be some way of seeing if the story lines up.”
“The average ten-year-old male is fifty-four-point-five inches tall.” Sloane popped to her feet and began pacing the claustrophobic quarters of the observation room. “As an adult, Darren Darby was only slightly above average height. Allowing for variable growth patterns, I would estimate his height at the time of the Kyle murders to be between fifty-four and fifty-six inches tall.”
“I’m assuming that if we wait, we’ll see where Blondie is going with this?” Celine asked the room at large.
“Anna and Todd Kyle were stabbed to death,” Sloane told Celine, her eyes alight. “They were knocked to the floor prior to the attacks, making it difficult to gauge the height of their attacker. However, Malcolm Lowell put up more of a fight.”
Without another word, Sloane pulled a thick file out of her bag. The Kyle murders. She flipped through the contents at hyperspeed, pulling photos and crime scene descriptions.
“I take it that’s Malcolm Lowell?” Celine asked, staring down at a series of photos, each a close-up of one of Malcolm’s knife wounds. I thought of the scars winding their way in and out of his shirt.
People assumed you stayed quiet for your grandson’s sake—and maybe that’s true. Maybe Mason helped Darren. Maybe he watched and smiled. But everything I knew about Malcolm Lowell told me that he was a proud man. You isolated your family. You tried to control them.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Sloane said, staring at the pictures. “The angle of entry, especially on the torso wounds…it doesn’t make sense.”