Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Detecting lies was as much about the words people used as the way they said them.

“Lia, I will give you one thousand dollars to never refer to Sterling and Briggs as Mommy and Daddy again.”

There was an intimate connection between a killer and the person they’d killed. Bodies were like messages, full of symbolic meanings that only a person who understood the needs and desires and rage that went into snuffing out another life could fully decode. This isn’t a language anyone should want to speak.

Getting inside people’s heads, understanding them, even if they didn’t know I was alive—growing up, that was the closest to friendship I’d been able to come.

I couldn’t keep from feeling his pain and recognizing in it an echo of my own.

But at the same time, I couldn’t keep from thinking that maybe shutting the rest of us out was less about what Dean wanted and more about what he wouldn’t let himself want. There was a chance—a good one—that Dean didn’t need to be alone so much as he thought being alone was what he deserved.

“Maybe,” I said softly, “to do what you and I do, we have to have a little bit of the monster in us.”

When Sloane got absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist.

Knowing what people wanted and knowing what they feared were two sides of the same coin.

There was a point in time when he would have pushed the hair out of my face and let his hand linger on my jaw. Not anymore.

“People die. Young people, pretty people, people who have their whole lives in front of them. The only real immortality is doing something worth remembering.”

Lia’s had been to bury herself away under so many layers of deception that whatever anyone else did to her, they couldn’t really hurt her, because they couldn’t touch the real girl.

“People are allowed to care about you, and don’t tell me that when people care about you, they get hurt. That’s not you talking. That’s something you were told. It’s something your father wants you to believe, because he doesn’t want you to be close to anyone else.

“So Michael will go with Dean and Cassie, and Sloane and I will provide the distraction.” “I like this plan,” Sloane declared brightly. “I can be very distracting.”

“Okay, I’m calling it,” Michael announced when the quiet got to be too much. “I’m turning on the radio. There will be singing. I would not be opposed to car-dancing. But the next person whose facial expression approaches ‘brood’ is getting punched in the nose. Unless it’s Cassie. If it’s Cassie, I punch Dean in the nose.”

“It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart like that, Cassie. It’s the good ones.”

Sterling turned to Michael. I expected her to ask him something, but instead she just held out her hand. “Keys.” “Spatula,” Michael replied. She narrowed her eyes at him. “We aren’t just saying random nouns?” he asked archly.

“I wonder—do you ever get tired of the things you can’t do?

“It’s always the little things,” she told Sloane gently. “A tenth of a second, a single piece of information—you never know what will make a difference.”

“I can probably offend him without even trying to!” Sloane was sounding altogether too enthusiastic now. “If things get too intense, I’ll tell him some statistics about domesticated ferrets.”

“When the odds are bad,” she said, removing something from one of them, “you change the rules.”