Twelve (The Naturals, #4.5)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I needed this as much or more than Dean did. “I found a pair of brothers in Texas.” “Cover your ears, Redding,” Michael quipped. “Cassie is going to tell us more about these brothers.” I could practically hear him winking on the other end of the line. “Are they more handsome than Dean? Less broody? More favorable to incorporating colors into their wardrobe?”

Dean and I had been together since we were teenagers, and Michael had taken great joy in singing the same song nearly the whole time.

“You can call me, you know,” Dean said on the other end of the phone line. “Any time.”

Dean remained unruffled. After years of exposure, he was pretty much Michael-immune. “I don’t think Townsend would like it if I said the worst part of my week is not being there to wake you up from the dreams, Cassie.”

“Cape Roane is the home of one of the tallest lighthouses in the United States, and right now…” You climbed the stairs. You opened the window. You crawled out.… “Right now,” I managed to continue, “Mackenzie is standing on the edge of that lighthouse, threatening to jump.”

Agent Briggs. He was the FBI director now. He couldn’t just run off at a twelve-year-old’s call. Agent Sterling, his wife, hadn’t been part of the team during the Mackenzie McBride case—and she was thirty-six weeks pregnant. With twins.

The FBI will be here soon. They have to be. They have to listen. If they listened, maybe she could come in. Maybe she could end this. They have to believe me. Because the others? The dead ones? They didn’t leap or dive. They didn’t dance off the edge. They didn’t jump. They were pushed.

The other woman—late thirties, early forties, professional dress, hair down—was speaking softly to Mrs. McBride. I pegged her as the psychologist. Even-keeled. Exactly the right degree of empathetic. I disliked her on instinct.

“Tell me about the murders.” I did the only thing that I could do. I treated her like an adult. Like a person. Like a witness. Mackenzie was quiet for several seconds, and then she spoke again. “I’m not a normal twelve.”

I’d both been there and done that. Stop projecting. That warning came to me in Agent Sterling’s voice. My old mentor hadn’t just taught me how to profile. She’d taught me to separate my instincts from the rest of my subconscious.

Celine smiles sweetly. “Why would I be interested in boys,” she asks the table innocently, “when there are girls?”

“You’re going to be okay,” I told our newest Natural, my voice catching in my throat. “Lots of things in your life—things that have happened, things that are going to happen—won’t be, but you will.” I let that register. No kid gloves, no sugarcoating. “You won’t ever be normal, Mackenzie, but you’ll be okay.” “Personally,” Lia commented, “I find normal overrated.”

There’s something about heights. Something pure and true. There’s clarity in those final moments. You’ll feel it again soon.

It would be crazy if this were actualy mackenzie or her brother that we got one sentence of

“I sense a disturbance in the force,” Michael observed on the other end of the phone line. “Heavy silence of the emotionally laden variety.”

“We’re about a minute out from the church,” Lia informed me—and Michael. “When do you land, Batboy?” “Batman,” Michael loftily corrected.

Dean pictures it. Something gives inside of him, something visceral and hopeful and dark. Maybe he can make a difference. Maybe he can atone. Maybe thinking like a killer is enough.

“Strangling someone is intimate,” I said, well aware that was not the way that normal girls started conversations with their boyfriends.

“Mourning,” I said, parsing through it out loud. “Or marking.” I paused, then went ahead and took that logic one step further. “Someone found the bodies before the police did and marked the sites.”

“Is that what you think this is?” I asked. “Not murder, but mercy?” “There’s something holy about what I do,” Dean replied steadily. I couldn’t stay in Kelley’s perspective any longer. “Something holy,” I echoed Dean, “about the height and the fall.”

“Most often,” Dean said, “you’d be looking at someone whose occupation grants them access to victims whose health has degraded to the point that they cannot fight back.” Kelley had been young and healthy—physically. Mentally, however, she’d struggled.

The psychologist???? The way she was speaking would have led to mackenzie jumping

Medical training. Access. “Have you ever heard of an angel of death who preys on people with mental health issues?” I asked Dean. “No.” He hesitated, just for a moment. “But I’d give it ten to one odds that the person who fits that particular profile has some kind of background in the mental health field.”

I saw a flash of motion out of the corner of my eye. Lia rounded the corner, Michael beside her, gun in hand. He raised it. “You with the righteously indignant, yet distinctly guilty expression on your face! Hands in the air!” The psychologist’s gaze darted from me to Michael to Lia. “Batman said to put your hands in the air,” Lia told her. “And while you’re at it, repeat what you just said about the death of Kelley Peterson.”

“I don’t have visions.” Truths get more potent the longer you keep them from your tongue. There’s years of power in this one. “I never have. He doesn’t have them, either. He’s a liar. I’m a better one, and I will literally rip his eyes out of their sockets the next time he comes to my bed.” She was nine the first time. With the right lies—the right truths—she put him off. Until she was twelve.

After all, her mother was the one who told her, all those years ago—Pretend it’s not you. Whatever happens, pretend that it isn’t happening to you.

I didn’t need to turn too much of my profiler’s eye inward to know why it had been far too easy for me to see a psychologist as the enemy. I’d thought from the beginning that the woman didn’t—and couldn’t—understand what Mackenzie had been through. Just like the Bureau psychologist I’d been assigned when I was a teenager had never understood me.

“You think I should see someone.” I let my fingers curl slowly into a fist, and Dean cupped his hand around mine. “I think it might help.” His lips brushed, white-hot, over my knuckles.

“I killed my mother.” I’d said those words to Mackenzie’s psychologist. I could say them to Dean now. “I was holding the knife. I felt it go into her chest.” “You couldn’t stop it,” Dean told me. “The knife was in your hands. Her fingers wrapped around yours.” I laid my hand on his chest. There was a spot, just inside the rib cage… “You need to talk to someone,” Dean told me. I closed my eyes. “I know.”

Laurel tilted her head to one side. “Do you prefer the screams,” she asked Dean softly, “or the blood?” There was a single beat of silence, and then Lia sauntered into the room behind my little sister. “I give that a nine out of ten for delivery,” Lia told Laurel. “But a ten for creepy content.” Laurel shrugged, her expression unchanging. “I try.” Most of the time, Laurel tried not to be creepy—and failed. But my sister was strangely at ease with Lia, who was already training her to use her unnatural solemnity to her advantage and to spot lies.

I belong here. That was what the expression on Laurel’s tiny face said. Her mouth, in contrast, addressed Dean. “I was just messing with you about the blood.” She paused. “And the screams.” I glanced at Lia, and she shrugged, which I took to mean that statement was mostly true.

“Celine needs me.” Sloane fiddled with something, though I couldn’t quite make out what she held between her fingers. “No one has ever needed me before.” “We all need you,” Dean told her. Sloane was our light in the darkness. “Dean,” Sloane said very seriously, “I hope this is not oversharing, but Celine needs me in a very different way.”

“Exactly,” Michael declared. “Now, on a somewhat unrelated note: adorable onesies for the Sterling-Briggs Wonder Twins, yay or nay?”