I opened my eyes underwater, but couldn’t see anything. There was darkness all around me, and then suddenly, there was a flicker of light at the pool’s surface.
I wasn’t alone.
You don’t know that, I told myself, but I saw the faintest blur of motion, and that protest died a quick and brutal death. There was someone up there—and I couldn’t stay underwater indefinitely.
Just like that, I felt like I was back in the narrow hallway of my dreams, walking slowly toward something awful.
It’s nothing.
Still, I fought the need for air. I wanted—irrationally—to stay underwater, where it was safe. But I couldn’t. Water plugged my ears, and as my lungs screamed for air, the sound of my own heartbeat surrounded me.
I came up slowly, breaking the surface as quietly as I could. Treading water, I turned in a circle, my eyes scanning the yard for an intruder. At first, I saw nothing. And then I saw a pair of eyes, the moonlight caught in them just so.
Looking at me.
“I didn’t know you were out here,” the owner of those eyes said. “I should go.”
My heart kept right on pounding, even once I realized the voice belonged to Dean. Now that my brain had identified him, I could make out a few more of his features. His hair hung in his face. His eyes—which I’d seen as a predator’s a moment before—now just looked surprised.
Clearly, he hadn’t expected anyone to be swimming at three in the morning.
“No,” I said, my voice traveling along the surface of the water. “It’s your yard, too. Stay.”
I felt ridiculous for being so jumpy. This was a quiet, sleepy little town. The yard was fenced. No one knew what the FBI was training us to do. We weren’t targets. This wasn’t my dream.
I wasn’t my mother.
For an elongated moment, I thought Dean would turn and walk away, but instead, he sat a few inches away from the edge of the pool. “What are you doing out here?”
For some reason, I felt compelled to tell him the truth. “I couldn’t sleep.”
Dean gazed out at the yard. “I stopped sleeping a long time ago. Most nights, I get three good hours, maybe four.”
I’d given him a truth, and he’d given me one. We fell into silence then, him at the edge of the pool and me treading water at the center.
“It wasn’t real, you know.” He spoke to his hands, not to me.
“What wasn’t real?”
“Today.” Dean paused. “At the mall with Locke. Playing games in parking lots. That’s not what this is.”
In the scant light of the moon, his eyes looked so dark they were nearly black, and something about the way he was looking at me made me realize—he wasn’t criticizing me.
He was trying to protect me.
“I know what this is,” I said. I knew better than anyone. Turning away from him, I stared up at the sky, all too aware of the fact that he was staring at me.
“Briggs shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said finally. “This place will ruin you.”
“Did it ruin Lia?” I asked. “Or Sloane?”
“They’re not profilers.”
“Did this place ruin you?”
Dean didn’t pause, not even for a second. “There was nothing to ruin.”
I swam over to the edge, right next to him. “You don’t know me,” I said, pulling myself out of the water. “I’m not scared of this place. I’m not afraid to learn how to think like a killer, and I am not afraid of you”
I wasn’t even sure why I’d added on those last six words, but they were the ones that made his eyes flash. I was halfway to the house when I heard him stand up. I heard him walk across the grass to the tiny, shacklike pool house. I heard him throw a switch.
Suddenly, the yard wasn’t dark anymore. It took me a moment to realize where the light was coming from. The pool was glowing. There was no other word for it. It looked like someone had splattered glow-in-the-dark paint across the edge. There was a drop of fluorescent color here, a drop there. Long streaks of it. Blobs. Four parallel smears across the tile on the side of the pool.
I glanced at Dean.
“Black light,” he said, as if that were all the explanation I’d need.
I couldn’t help myself. I moved closer. I squatted to get a better look. And that was when I saw the glow-in-the-dark outline of a body at the bottom of the pool.
“Her name was Amanda,” Dean said.
I realized then what the smears and streaks of paint on the concrete and the side of the pool were supposed to be.
Blood.
The color had fooled me, even though the pattern was all too familiar.
“She was stabbed three times.” Dean wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t even look at the pool. “She cracked her head on the cement when she slipped in her own blood. And then he wrapped her fingers around her throat. He forced her upper body over the side of the pool.”
I could see it happening, see the killer standing over a girl’s body. She would have kicked. She would have clawed at his hands, tried to use the side of the pool for leverage.
“He held her under.” Dean knelt next to the pool and demonstrated, acting out the motion. “He drowned her. And then he set her free.” He let go of his imaginary prey and sent her off toward the center of the pool.
“This is a crime scene,” I said finally. “One of the fake crime scenes that they use to test us, like the sets in the basement.”
Dean stared out at the center of the pool, where the victim’s body would have been. “It’s not fake,” he said finally. “It really happened. It just didn’t happen here.”
I reached out to touch Dean’s shoulder. He shrugged off my touch, turning to face me, his body close to mine. “Everything about this place—the house, the yard, the pool—was constructed with one thing in mind.”
“Full immersion,” I said, holding his gaze. “Like those schools where they only speak French.”
Dean jerked his head toward the pool. “This isn’t a language people should want to learn.”
Normal people—that was what Dean meant. But I wasn’t normal. I was a Natural. And this mock crime scene wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen.
I turned to walk back to the house. I heard Dean walk across the lawn. I heard him flip the switch. And when I glanced back over my shoulder, the pool was just a pool. The yard was just a yard. And the outline of the body was gone.