The hose jumped, and Nathans’s body lurched at the sudden influx of pressure. I ran to him, holding the bloody artery in my fingers, trying to add more pressure to the seal. Gas leaked out onto my hands, but only a little; most of it seemed to be going inside. If I’d done it right the gasoline would run through his system, filling the blood vessels and pushing out the blood. Filling the heart with poison. I held my breath, staring at the neck, never taking my eyes away from the hole I’d cut in the artery. Gas was flowing in one end …
… and very slowly, in bigger and bigger drops, blood was coming out the other.
Soon the blood was flowing freely from the artery, and I did my best to angle it so it flowed down the drain. I looked at the open door, but still saw nothing.
“I’ll go watch,” said Brooke, wrapping Trujillo’s old coat tightly around her as she walked to the edge of the garage.
How much longer did we have? A minute? An hour? All this work would be for nothing if Rack appeared while the hoses were still attached. I let go of the pump-to-artery seal, hoping it would keep working on its own, and when it didn’t immediately explode I dug through Nathan’s pockets for his phone, hoping to find Rack’s text conversation. The phone was locked, and I didn’t know the code. I tried a few random patterns, then gave up and threw the phone in frustration. I instead used my time cleaning up, putting away the extra tools while the hose steadily pumped gas into Nathan’s body.
A chemical embalming could take several minutes, but I didn’t need the whole body filled, just the heart. How long was that? I thought again about leaving—just hopping into Elijah’s car and driving away—but I couldn’t do it. Killing was a choice, like Potash said, and I had made a choice to kill Rack. He couldn’t be allowed to continue. Ten thousand years of terror would end tonight, and if I had to die to make it happen … I looked up at Brooke, blond hair limp and stringy against her skull, her frail body lost in the folds of that giant coat. She watched the darkness intently, and I watched her. Should I tell her to leave? Was her life in any less danger out there than in here? I might have to die to kill Rack, but she could get away. I owed her that much.
It was the least I could do.
“You should go,” I said.
“Go where?”
“Anywhere,” I said. “Away.”
“But I love you.”
“No, you don’t—”
“I know you don’t love me,” she said, and though I couldn’t see her face I could hear the emotion in her voice, choked and cracking. She was crying. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
I watched her a moment longer, but said nothing.
A full embalming used about a gallon of fluid for every fifty pounds of body. Nathan was what, two hundred pounds? Two twenty? I tried to calculate the flow of volume at sixty psi, wondering if I could even do it in my head, when Brooke stiffened suddenly.
“John.…”
Rack was coming. I unlocked the vise grips and yanked the pump free of the artery, trailing gas across the floor as I ran to the tank and shut it all down. I threw the hose up into the bed of the truck, hiding it, and ran back to Nathan, spreading his blood around the neck wound, pulling out the screwdriver, doing everything I could to make it look like his throat had been slashed in a fight. It looked too clinical, and I slashed at it again with my knife, feeling only an echo of the fury that had made me want to stab him before. Really, all that was left now was fear. Brooke backed up slowly, taking my hand when she reached me, and we backed up together to the end of the garage. I held up my knife like a cross, as if I was trying to ward off a vampire. It made me feel stupid, but lowering it made me feel vulnerable, so I kept it up. Better stupid than terrified.
Rack walked slowly around the corner of the garage door, a monstrous giant nearly seven feet tall. He wore a long black coat, stained past his knees with blood, and a thick black scarf around his neck and face. Only his eyes were visible over the top, gleaming in the light of our lone yellow bulb. He stopped before the corpses and watched us.
This is what it all came down to. Had I read him right? Did I understand the way he worked and thought and acted? He’d never lost, not in ten thousand years—he was so confident in his own strength that he’d never suspect a trap of mine could work. He’d told Nathan to hold me here because he wanted to talk, and that meant he’d use one of the bodies to speak to me. Come on, I thought, do it. Take Nathan’s heart.
The room reeked of gasoline. Would he really be done in by something as simple as the lack of a nose?
He unwrapped his scarf and opened his coat, and I saw again the black pit in the place of his heart. He watched me in hideous silence as thick tendrils of his charred black soul reached out and down—
—toward Potash.
The sludge clutched at Potash’s face, surging into his mouth, shredding his insides. I stepped back, too shocked to think clearly. What could I do? I only had one plan. I’d considered every variable and I was wrong. Potash’s body flopped and wriggled, and then his throat bulged out, and then his mouth was forced open impossibly wide and his slick red heart emerged from between the teeth, wrapped in black tentacles of ash. Rack raised the heart up, pulling it into the mass of sludge in his chest, and with a ghostly gasp Potash began to speak.
“You have given me more enjoyment than I expected,” said the dead voice. “I haven’t felt this thrill from a hunt in a thousand years or more.”
I had to summon all my courage to speak. “That’s it?” I asked. “You keep me alive this long, and tease at some big final climax, and all you’re going to do is hunt me down and kill me?” Why hadn’t he taken Nathan’s heart? Had I read him that wrong? Was he trying to send some other message than I expected, or did he simply not care which voice he used?
The Withered stood still as dark stone, watching me, while the soft, dead words whispered out of Potash’s throat: “I don’t want to kill you, John. I want you to join me.”
He wasn’t here to gloat. He was here to recruit me.
That’s what all of this had been about, all the letters and the messages and the hints and temptations. He didn’t just want me to kill, he wanted me to kill for him. I embalmed the wrong body because I completely misread his intentions: he wouldn’t use the voice I hated for a recruitment speech. I gestured at Nathan’s body, my careful trap completely untouched. “You want another Nathan Gentry?” I asked. “Another human thrall?”
“I’ve had my fill of human thralls,” said Potash’s head. “These puppets are of limited use in the coming war.”
“What else is there?” I asked. “You want a … partner? I told you before, I’m not like you.”
“But you could be,” he said. The ghostly whisper filled the room. “We can perform another ritual.”
“No…,” said Brooke.
“The time is coming,” said Rack. “The conditions are right. What would you give up to become Gifted?”
20
I stared at him in shock. “You’re going to make more Withered?”
“Gifted,” said Potash’s voice. The ashy soulstuff in Rack’s chest shifted and bubbled as he watched me. “The ones you call Withered were weak. They allowed themselves to grow soft, or tired, or sloppy. I can teach you how to stay strong.”
“So I can kill homeless people in a Midwest backwater?” I asked. “Is that the glory you’re offering me?”
Brooke’s grip tightened on my arm. “Don’t make him mad.”
Potash’s voice laughed: a dry, empty chuckle. “You think you could do better?”
I realized with a start that I did think so. I’d seen so many Withered wasting their lives in dead-end towns, hiding or coping or merely surviving, pointless and lost and alone. All that power, and this was all they could think of to do with it. I had nothing—all weakness and no strength—and I’d still managed to kill four of them. I’d maneuvered myself onto a government strike force. Give me some actual power and I wouldn’t let it rot in a one-bedroom apartm
ent. I ignored the talking head and looked at Rack, looked right into his eyes. “You used to be gods, and now look at you. You’re damn right I could do more with your ‘gifts’ than you have.”
The head laughed again. “This is why I chose you. You can see the possibilities in a way most others can’t.”
“But I’m not like you,” I said again, though it felt different this time. Was my life really any different from theirs? I had the same kind of apartment Cody French had lived in. I even had the same dog. I mocked them for their empty lives, moving from one kill to the next with no higher ambition, but how was my life any better? At least they were acting. I was only reacting: traveling where they traveled, living where they lived. I was letting them dictate the course of my life, as much a puppet as Nathan, or Potash’s lifeless head. That most of them didn’t even know they were controlling me only made it worse.
“You say you aren’t like us,” said the voice. “You aren’t like them, either. You never have been. The freak in the shadows, the killer in a little boy’s body. Do you really want to spend your life like that? Never peaceful, never happy—”
“I’ve been happy,” I said fiercely.
“Once,” said the voice. Rack stared down like a monolith. “Once, for a few weeks, long ago. But she’s dead now, isn’t she?”
“Don’t you dare talk about—”
“Marci Jensen was everything you’d ever wanted,” said Potash’s voice. Rack’s head nodded. “Yes, I know all about her. I’ve done my research—I’ve e-mailed at length with your aunt and your sister. Lovely people. I have been following you almost as long as Nobody, watching your methods, waiting to see how you’d react to each new thing. You have a cold-blooded calmness no Gifted could ever match; a precision, a gift for making death. The war is coming now, relentless and inevitable, and you will be its greatest soldier. I want you on our side.”
“So you talk about Marci?”
“Marci was the personal connection you’d never thought you could make,” he said, “filling your life with a joy you’d never experienced from any other person. But she’s gone now. You’re emptier than you ever were before. She gave you a heart, but all it does is break.”
“And this is your sales pitch?” I asked. My voice was louder than I intended, harried and desperate. These were the feelings I tried to keep hidden, because I didn’t know what else to do with them. They were too raw, too loaded with guilt and anger and bottomless despair.
“It’s okay,” said Brooke, but I yanked my arm harshly from her grip.
“No, it’s not! You’re just a crazy, stupid—” I stopped myself before I said any more, knowing I was only making it worse. I screwed my eyes shut, trying to think of something, of anything that wasn’t Marci, and when Potash’s dead voice started to speak again I roared back in a rage. “Is this your big plan, Rack? To tell me how much my life sucks so I may as well become a monster? I am already a monster, and nothing you say can change that: your threats won’t work because I have nothing left to lose. Your stupid little hints about my aunt and my sister mean nothing to me, because I am already so profoundly alone that there is nothing you can do to make it worse. You want to threaten them? You can drink their hearts and cry all night in their voices and it won’t mean a thing to me because the only thing that ever mattered is already gone. I let her die because I wasn’t smart enough to save her. I watched my mom burn to death because I wasn’t good enough to keep her alive. So if my broken heart was your big trump card, and now I’m supposed to realize my life is hell and throw in my lot with yours, you can forget it. My life’s been hell for as long as I can remember, and there is nothing left that you can take away from me.”
Potash’s voice rattled through his throat like dry leaves across a grave. “I can take away your pain.”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Brooke.
“We became the Gifted by giving something up,” said Rack’s dead puppet. “The worthless human weaknesses that held us back. Your heart is broken? I got rid of mine ten thousand years ago. You don’t want to be sad anymore? I can cut your sadness out like a tumor.”
“It doesn’t work,” said Brooke. “Nobody gave away her body because she hated it, and Rack gave her the power to take any body she wanted. She hated them all, John, because her body was never the problem. Your heart was never the problem. You can’t just get rid of pain: you have to deal with it.”
“You just have to give up the right thing,” said the voice.
I’d seen so many Withered, all of them trying to run from their problems, all of them trapped in the same unbreakable cycle. Mary Gardner could cure herself of any disease, but only if she stayed in the hospital, constantly getting sick. Elijah Sexton could forget every bad experience he ever had, every loss, every pain, every death, but that only made him repeat them, over and over. His only choices were to dwell on his mistakes, like a wound he could never let heal, or to make those same mistakes again.
I pointed at the smear of ash that was all that remained of Elijah. “You want me to give up my memory of Marci? Of everyone I’ve ever lost? I’ve seen how that works and I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Your memories only hurt because you care about them,” he said. “What if you didn’t have to care?”
And there it was.
If anything could make me turn my back on the world, it was that. For years I’d used sociopathy as a shield, as an excuse not to care about anything, not to be hurt by anything, not to love something so much that it destroyed me when it was gone. I needed it because my father was gone, and now my mother and the rest of my family. My friends. The rest of the team. Marci. If I said yes and he made me a monster, gave me some kind of devastating power that ruined the world around me, it would still be worth it because I wouldn’t care. The pain would roll off. The unwinnable bargain would corrupt me, destroy me, turn me into a Withered even worse than the ones I’d faced, but I wouldn’t care. An unholy anesthetic to hide the pain of a heart I didn’t know how to use.
I would be dead and alive at the same time. A walking corpse in an endless, unbreakable peace.
I felt myself crying.
“Don’t do it,” Brooke whispered.
“You don’t know,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Yes, I do.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her, thin and pale as death, lost in the folds of her coat and the thick black pillars of her oversize boots. I could snap her like a twig. How much pain was in that tiny body? How much loss? My heart had been broken once; how many heartbreaks were buried in her mind?
“Bring her with you,” said Potash’s voice. Rack stepped closer. “A link between the past and the future we’ll create.”
I looked down at Potash’s body, a bloody, crumpled heap on the floor. His mouth moved faintly, but his eyes were open and dead as glass. What had those eyes seen in that basement? He’d followed Rack down into the darkness, and said the things he’d seen would haunt him until he died. That hadn’t turned out to be very long.
What had he seen? What was so terrible that the most vicious killer I knew could be haunted by it?
A broken mirror and a bathroom covered with blood. The most horrific thing I’d ever seen. If I said yes, those horrors would never haunt me again.
What choice would Potash make, if Rack had offered this to him? “Choosing was the hardest part,” he’d told me. Killing was easy, choosing was hard. The power to kill meant nothing if you didn’t know where to apply it. Sometimes Potash made the wrong choices and good men like Elijah died. But Potash chose anyway, because somebody had to, and all the guilt and the pain and the darkness stayed on him, and no one else would ever have to face it. Elijah had made the same decision, living with the pain he’d caused Merrill Evans to make sure it never happened to anyone else.
I couldn’t make that choice if I didn’t care. I couldn’t make any choices at all. And if the right choices hurt the most, then fine. I’d hurt
the most. But it would be me.
I closed my eyes and said goodbye to peace.
“Are you ready?” asked the corpse. “We have people to meet.”
“I need something first,” I said, and stooped down to search Potash’s pockets. The weapon I needed was on his shin: a small leg holster, holding a slim, two-shot handgun. I pulled it out and stood up.
“You won’t need that puny human weapon,” said the voice, but I shook my head.
“We’re not actually going with you. Sorry if I gave you the wrong idea.”
The dead voice laughed again. “You can’t possibly hope to use that gun against me—”
I shot Potash in the face, shattering his mouth and jaw with both bullets, boom boom! The voice disappeared. “Not really,” I said. “I’m just sick of your evil-villain monologue.” I looked Rack straight in the eyes. “If you’re going to kill us, shut up and kill us.”
Brooke grabbed my arm again, trying to put herself in front of me, as if her frail body could shield me from the demon king’s wrath. I pushed her gently, stepping up next to her, and we faced the Withered side by side. He stepped toward us, looming like the shadow of death.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Were you not done talking?”
Rack flew into a rage, smashing the cars and the tools and the entire garage in a frenzy of destruction—hands and feet and charred black tendrils lashing out in a primal fury. He paused to look at me, then smashed another window and threw Potash’s body at the wall in a burst of terrifying strength. He paused, his chest heaving, the soulstuff swirling like a hurricane of tar, and I gripped Brooke’s hand tightly as he stalked back toward us.
“It’ll be okay,” said Brooke. “I’m ready to die with you.”
I shook my head, trying to sound braver than I felt. “Not yet.”
Rack stopped, his eyes seeming to burn with an inner fire, and then he stooped and swallowed Nathan’s heart.
I locked eyes with him, and never looked away.