Killer Instinct

The five teenagers start playing music and dancing. They live together in a house in Quantico, Virginia. Lia urges Cassie and the others to join her on the dance floor. When Lia starts dancing with Michael, Cassie realizes that she is trying to get a rise out of Dean, who is very protective of Lia. Cassie is torn due to her conflicting feelings for both Michael and Dean, but she defuses the tension with playful banter.

Cassie and her friends are now playing poker with Oreos instead of chips. Due to her friends’ respective skills—Michael can read emotions, Lia is a human lie detector, and Dean is a profiler—Cassie is unable to tell whether they are bluffing and is certain that she is about to lose. Sloane, a gifted statistician, is winning by a large margin. When Cassie runs out of Oreos, Lia suggests a game of strip poker instead. However, when they reveal their hands, Cassie unexpectedly wins; she had not looked at her cards beforehand so that her facial expressions would not betray her. The game is interrupted when a strict-looking woman, who introduces herself as Special Agent Veronica Sterling, comes in and orders the teenagers to put their clothes back on.

Special Agent Sterling was sent to replace Lacey Locke, the Naturals’ former mentor who was revealed to be a serial killer and Cassie’s aunt in The Naturals. Sterling is the daughter of FBI Director Sterling and has been reassigned to assess the Naturals program and supervise the five teenagers. Cassie carefully observes the young woman as she talks to the group. When Sterling directly asks for her opinion, Cassie correctly guesses that Sterling is a profiler. Nevertheless, Sterling warns Cassie that she is only a child and should not consider herself a real FBI agent.

After Cassie goes to bed, she reflects on the information she picked up about Sterling. Sterling seems to know Dean, which indicates that she was part of the team that investigated his father, a notorious serial killer, before Dean joined the Naturals program. Cassie realizes that Sterling’s relationship with Special Agent Briggs, their other supervisor and trainer, must be strained. Eventually, Cassie lets herself be distracted by Sloane, her roommate, so she can finally go to sleep.

This chapter is narrated in the second person, from the point of view of an unnamed killer. They are stalking their victim, a young woman, and hiding in her car while rehearsing their plan to murder her. When she enters the vehicle, the killer knocks her unconscious.

The next morning, Cassie goes down to the kitchen for breakfast, where Judd, the agent in charge of taking care of the house, greets her. They are soon joined by Agent Sterling, and Cassie notes that she and Judd know each other well. To Cassie’s dismay, Sterling tells her that the five teenagers must get their education back on track and that Dean, Lia, and Sloane are currently taking practice GEDs in the living room. Briggs then returns from his now-completed mission, having successfully rescued the abducted child. Cassie picks up on some tension between Sterling and Briggs, who tells her to join the others in the living room while he and Sterling talk. There, Cassie tells her friends about what she learned, correctly deducing that Briggs and Sterling were the agents who took down Dean’s father. Dean adds that Briggs and Sterling were married at the time.

Dean’s explanation accounts for Briggs and Sterling’s tense relationship, so Cassie wonders why the latter was chosen to evaluate the Naturals program and work with Briggs again. Michael then joins the group and announces that Briggs has been assigned a new case. When Sterling and Briggs arrive, Sterling tells the teenagers that they can continue their work on cold cases once they have completed their practice exams. In the meantime, she and Briggs will investigate a new case, which the Naturals are not allowed to hear about. 

However, Briggs lets slip that reporters are already on that case, so the teenagers turn on the news once they are alone. They learn that a young woman’s body, gruesomely tortured, was found on the front lawn of the president of Colonial University in Virginia. A criminology professor who studies serial killers has been named a person of interest. While watching the footage, Dean has a strong emotional reaction and seems to dissociate for a moment. He explains that the murder bears a strong resemblance to his father’s modus operandi.

A brief passage explores the killer’s inner thoughts as they celebrate the media frenzy and begin planning another murder.

Back in the living room, Cassie points out how odd it is that a killer is now emulating Dean’s father’s MO after Locke reenacted Cassie’s mother’s murder only a few weeks earlier (in The Naturals). Lia gets angry, arguing that Cassie is making things all about herself, and storms out. Cassie, Michael, and Sloane then discuss the reasons why people may become gifted at reading emotions and motivations. Sloane points out that it often stems from exposure to violence, abuse, and other traumatic experiences.

Cassie goes to the library to read FBI interviews of Daniel Redding, Dean’s father, in the hopes of better understanding what Dean is going through. She only has time to read a short excerpt before Lia finds her there and discourages her from reading the interviews. She claims that learning more about Redding will only mess with Cassie’s head and that Dean does not like people intruding in his private life.

After dinner, Cassie finds Dean in the garage, where he is hitting a punching bag in an effort to distract himself. Cassie interrupts him and starts talking about Locke, who wanted Cassie to become a killer like her. She comments that, to understand the killers they are hunting, they need to “have a little bit of the monster in [them too]” (72). She then takes care of Dean’s split knuckles, and Dean confesses that his father occasionally made him watch what he did to his victims.

The next day, Sloane shows Cassie the model of the crime scene that she recreated in the basement. The house’s basement is equipped with sets used for practice, so Sloane recreated the scene from the video footage almost exactly. By observing it, Cassie realizes that the killer did not stage the victim’s body directly on the lawn. Instead, he must have hung her on the hood of the car in an uphill area covered by trees and then let the car slide down the hill. Cassie and Sloane are interrupted by Sterling, who orders them to stay off the case.

Michael later assures Cassie that Sterling does not have the power to shut down the Naturals program and tells her that Sterling does not appear to hate Cassie as much as the young girl thinks she does. Judd then comes into the room, asking to have a private conversation with Cassie. He tells her that he trusts Sterling’s judgment and warns her that having the teenagers work on active cases is dangerous; it could lead to the FBI abusing their young assets. Before he leaves, Judd also lets slip that Sterling has only ever failed to solve one case.

A brief paragraph shows that the unnamed murderer is biding their time and preparing to kill again.