Second. If a Withered didn’t steal bodies or shape shift at all, that meant they still had their original bodies from ten thousand years ago. Rack had had his, and Assu, and one named Yashodh. And they had all looked distinctly nonwhite. The old valley they sometimes talked about was probably in the Middle East somewhere; Nathan had theorized it might be in Turkey.
I put the SUV in gear and pulled back onto the street.
If Rain was a shape-shifter she’d be impossible to detect, but if she was either other body type, both of them pointed to Jasmyn. A young girl or a Middle Eastern girl. Why hadn’t Jasmyn wanted to talk about her past? Because she was a demon queen? And why had Margo taken her in with no prior knowledge or references of any kind? Was Jasmyn controlling her mind?
Rain had attacked me literally the first day I appeared in town. How had she known I was here? I can believe that Rain would know who I was, especially if she’d been working with Rack, but I’d only met a handful of people that day. It had to be one of them.
I didn’t want it to be Jasmyn, but it’s like I told the agents: my job wasn’t to find the pieces I wanted, it was to find the pieces that were there and then figure out how they fit. And if the puzzle came together into a portrait I didn’t like, well, there wasn’t anything I could do about that. I didn’t get to pick my own reality. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have picked this one if I did.
The lights at the mortuary were on. I pulled up to the curb and got out, walking slowly to the front door with my backpack over my shoulder. It sang a little song as I passed the motion sensor, and then Harold stepped out of the door.
“No one’s allowed in,” he said. His voice was hollow, like he was an empty shell dressed up as a person.
He was already a thrall. Did I dare to get any closer? If she just turned me into a thrall as well, then everything I’d worked for would end—I wouldn’t be dead, but I’d never get to make my own choices ever again, and that seemed even worse. My body would be doing whatever the Dark Lady wanted, with my mind just watching, helpless and trapped.
Just like Brooke when Nobody had taken her over.
“I’m here to see Jasmyn,” I said. I couldn’t run away anymore, and I couldn’t let anyone else lose their lives to these monsters. “It’s me, Harold. You can let me in.”
“She doesn’t want you here,” said Harold.
I took a step closer. “Does she know it’s me? Maybe she told you not to let anyone else in, but I’m okay. She knows me. You know me.”
“I’ll ask her,” he said, and then he just stood there, staring at me dumbly. I waited for several seconds before venturing to ask:
“Are you going to go—”
“She says no,” said Harold. “She says she knows it’s you, and that your name is John Cleaver, and that she’s always known it was you, ever since you got here.”
“Okay,” I said. I licked my lips, trying to think. She hadn’t taken over my mind yet, so maybe I could keep him—or her—talking. “Did she say why?”
“She doesn’t have to say why,” said Harold. “She’s the Dark Lady. She’s the beginning and the end.”
“And if I come inside anyway?”
“Then I’ll kill you.”
“But you don’t want to,” I said. “Just like the others didn’t want to. They tried to fight it, but they’re not as strong as you are, Harold, you can fi—”
“Of course I want to,” he said. “It’s all I want in the world.”
I stared at him, and then I felt my shoulders sink as the truth set it. Because of course.
“You want what she wants because you’re not new,” I said. “She’s been controlling you for twenty years, and there’s nothing of your own will left.”
His answer was so soft I almost didn’t hear it: “Twenty-five.”
“Because Jasmyn’s here,” I said, “but she’s not the Dark Lady.”
“Of course not.”
I nodded. “Margo is.”
“The light that shaped the world,” he said. “The mother of darkness.”
Of course it was Margo. The absolute authority that the others only orbited.
I couldn’t give up yet.
“What is she doing?” I asked.
“Talking.”
“To who?”
“To Jasmyn,” he said. “And Carol. And Shelley Jones.”
So Jasmyn wasn’t a thrall, then. They were talking. But what did Margo have to say to Jasmyn at 3:30 in the morning? And to Carol and Shelley? I didn’t know why Jasmyn was there, but I could guess about the other two: they were the survivors, left behind after the deaths of their only companions. Rain hadn’t been killing lonely people, she’d been making other people lonelier. Sadder. She was destroying the only things that kept them going, and replacing them with pain.
Pain that she could take away.
“She’s doing the ritual, isn’t she?” I asked. “She’s going to make more Withered.”
“They are Blessed.”
“Then take me in there,” I said. “Take me in to the ritual.” I took a deep breath, and said it as firmly as I could:
“I want to be a Withered, too.”
CHAPTER 16
Harold stood still, his shoulders slumped, his face inert. After a moment he turned toward the door. “Come inside.” He opened the door, and I followed him in.
Margo was in her office—not the fancy one, but the backroom office where things got done. Her desk was full but tidy, with papers and folders laid neatly in boxes marked IN and OUT. She sat behind the desk, looking weary but powerful; the face of a woman ready to make impossible choices. Around her, the office was full of people crowded in among the bookshelves and filing cabinets and boxes of old papers stacked high against the wall. Carol and Shelley in their seats, tired and disheveled; Jasmyn leaning against a bookcase; Mr. Connor, the accountant, standing at solemn attention.
I looked at Mr. Connor, made a handful of quick deductions, then looked at Margo. “I assume he’s the body displayer?”
“You were always smarter than I gave you credit for,” said Margo. “You found me by accident, but you still found me. Because you put yourself in the right place to have the accident you needed.”
“Thanks.”
She gave me a weary look. “I assume you’re not here for the ritual.”
“What ritual?” asked Jasmyn.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m mostly just here to figure out how to kill you.”
Margo looked at me a moment, then a sly smile crept into the edges of her mouth. “Good luck.”
“So what’s your thing?” I asked Mr. Connor, looking away from Margo and brightening my voice. “You gave up … I don’t know, sculpting? Can you give up a skill? Abandon all sculpting, and then you can only sculpt when you kill a person to do it? You have to admit, that’s the dumbest godlike power I think I’ve ever heard.”
“Wait,” said Jasmyn, “you know about this? You know what they are?”
“To my ongoing personal sadness, yes,” I said. “How much do you know?”
“I know that Margo has no abdomen,” said Jasmyn, and the look in her eyes made it clear that she was still reeling from the shock. “Have you … seen it?”
I thought about Rack, whose chest and neck and lower face were completely gone, replaced by a roiling cauldron of ashy black soulstuff. “No,” I said. “Though I’ve seen things like it.” If Margo had a similar deformity—something that obviously marked her as supernatural—it made sense that she’d start this particular meeting by showing it off. Jasmyn and the two older women were shocked, but at least they knew this was horribly, inescapably real.
Margo answered my question: “Mr. Connor gave up his imagination.”
I gave him an appraising glance. “How did that help you?”
“I can’t think of anything new,” he said, “but I can remember existing facts with perfect clarity and manipulate them as necessary.”
“You sound like an android,” I sa
id.
“If that helps you,” said Mr. Connor.
“Mr. Connor can’t think of anything new on his own,” said Margo, and her voice was tired and heavy as she said it. “But he can draw inspiration from other people.”
I thought about Agent Murray’s body, arranged so carefully it seemed like a work of art. “By killing them,” I said.
“Inspiration is a physical substance,” said Mr. Connor. “Extracting it is an invasive process.”
“That’s why I like the word ‘draw,’” said Margo. “It sounds like he’s just being inspired instead of … pressing it out, like oil from an olive.”
“That is not an exact metaphor—” said Mr. Connor, but Margo cut him off.
“I didn’t want him to kill that agent,” she said.
Jasmyn and the older women gasped. “You killed someone?” demanded Jasmyn.
“I figured as much,” I said, keeping my eyes focused on Margo. The longer I kept her talking, the more opportunity I had to come up with a plan. “You left Simon Watts there to cover for him, but there were too many loose ends.”
“I told you you were clever.”
“I prefer ‘terrifyingly good at what I do,’” I said. “Though I guess the guy who said that is a mindless thrall now.”
“I call them children,” said Margo.
I shook my head. “You can call them cockatiels if you want, but they’re still mindless thralls.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone—”
I scoffed. “That’d be a lot easier to believe if you hadn’t told one of your cockatiels to drown me in a canal.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she said again, “but sometimes I have to. Sometimes we all have to. Life isn’t easy—”
“That’s the worst excuse for murder I’ve ever heard.”
“Will you let me finish a damn thought?” she snapped. “I’m not doing this because I want my life easy; life is work, and work is hard. And sometimes our decisions are hard. But when the alternative is extinction, you make those hard decisions, and you live with them because the alternative is never living with anything, ever again.”
I watched her for a moment, slightly overawed by the power in her voice. Then I spoke again, more softly this time. “That’s a much better excuse. But I’m still not sold on the war you’re trying to start.”
“I don’t want a war.”
“Then why are you gathering an army?”
“You call Mr. Connor an army?”
“You and Mr. Connor and Assu and who knows how many others—”
“There’s only three of us left.”
I was struck dumb again, not by her voice, but by the terrifying finality of the words that voice had spoken. Only three left.
“You really are dying,” I said. “You really are going extinct.”
“You can cheer if you want,” she said, throwing her hand out to the side. “You talk about my army, but you started the war, and you’ve killed and killed and now there’s only three of us left in the whole wide world. Three of the grandest and most glorious beings that ever walked the earth, standing around in an old desert town full of rednecks and hippies, meeting at night so we don’t get lynched, hiding our names and our faces so we don’t get stalked and studied and put down like animals. And then the greatest killer our kind has ever known—and it’s a kid, of all things, barely out of training wheels—shows up at my front door and asks me for a job, and I know my time has come. My number’s been called. You killed us all, John. The hunter is home from the hill.”
Three left, and one of them already gone. Two to go. This is what I’d been working for my entire life.
“Your name is John?” asked Jasmyn.
“She just told you I’m a serial killer,” I said, though I didn’t take my eyes off of Margo. “And you focus on my name?”
“John Cleaver?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“I looked that name up after you said it before. You knew that FBI agent—” she stopped suddenly, and her face went pale. “Oh no!” She looked at Mr. Connor. “Is that the agent you killed?”
“I killed his companion,” said Mr. Connor.
Jasmyn’s eyes filled with tears, glistening in the harsh fluorescent light. “That doesn’t make it better.”
“But you saw it,” said Mr. Connor, and he fixed me with a cold, analytical stare. “You saw the muse.”
I thought about the displayed, mutilated body again and tried to keep my voice even. “That’s a creepy thing to call a corpse.”
His eyes seemed to pierce me. “What did it say to you?”
“I…” An empty circle. An empty everything. “It said that if we keep fighting, we’ll kill each other forever.”
Mr. Connor tilted his head to the side. “All death is forever.”
“I mean the killing itself will go on forever,” I said. “I kill you, Margo kills me, Jasmyn kills Margo, Harold kills Jasmyn, and on and on and on forever.” I shook my head. “Except it’s not forever, because then you’ll be gone. There’s only two of you left!” I was practically shaking as I spoke. “Don’t you see what this means? We can finally end it!”
“I saw the muse too,” said Margo. “I didn’t want him to do it, but he did it, and before I posted Watts there to guard it, I looked at it long and hard, because I needed the inspiration as much as anybody. Sometimes I think his muses only tell us what we want to hear, but I needed to hear something. And it told me the time had come.”
“For the ritual,” I said.
Margo nodded. “We don’t end this your way, we end it mine. We don’t kill, we create—more lives, more Blessed, more glories upon the earth. Not an empty circle but a full one.”
“Don’t do this to them,” I said.
“Do what?” asked Jasmyn.
“Save you,” said Margo. “Take away your pain and put power in its place.”
“She wants to make you a monster,” I said.
“I want to make you my child,” said Margo.
Jasmyn stared at her, then looked at me, then looked back at Margo. “I don’t understand.”
Margo leaned forward, resting her forearms on the desk. “Mr. Connor and I are ten thousand years old, give or take. And we’re not some kind of alien creatures, we’re human beings, just like you. Or we were. We found a way to be something more.”
“And less,” I said.
“More powerful,” said Margo. “Less weak. More brave and less scared. More resilient to pain and damage and heartache, and less liable to—”
“Less human,” I said.
“We’ve been queens and kings and gods and goddesses,” said Margo. “We’ve been emperors and pharaohs, and we’ve been dreams and idols. And all you have to do is give something away, something dark and awful that you don’t want, and you give it away of your own free will, and then you become a god.”
“They’ll never do it,” I said. “Maybe ten thousand years ago, but not today.”
“People haven’t changed,” said Margo. “The world’s changed, but the people in it are the same as they ever were: they’re sad, they’re alone, they’re scared. What do you never want to be again, honey? Hungry? Vulnerable? Hurt? You were betrayed by your own father—give that up. You were lost and broken and alone—give that up. I can’t say exactly what you’ll get in return, but you’ll get something, and it will change you forever.”
“Not all change is good,” I said.
The room felt hushed, like the waves had receded out into the ocean, and we sat there waiting for them all to come back. It was Jasmyn who broke the silence.
“Giving things up never helped me before,” she said. She paused again, thinking. “I gave up my will when I let other people make choices I didn’t like. I gave up my hope, and then I gave up my home and my family and my future. But not one of those was a good decision, and I had to fight to get them back.”
“You gave up good things and held on to so many bad ones,” said Margo
. “What about guilt? I know you feel guilty, even though it wasn’t your fault. So give up your guilt.”
“And then what?” I asked, and looked at Jasmyn. “You haven’t seen the Withered like I have.”
“Blessed,” said Margo.
“Withered,” I insisted. “Cursed and Withered and all dried up, like weeds in the sun. You give up your guilt and then what? You’re not complete anymore. We need guilt the same way we need pain—because it reminds us what happened, and it helps us not to do it again. Lose your guilt and you’ll forgive your family, and you’ll go home and be right back in the same situation without any way to protect yourself. Guilt is our emotional immune system.”
“John mythologizes guilt,” said Margo, “because it’s the only way to justify how much of it he’s carrying.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“And it doesn’t mean I am, either,” said Margo. “Maybe guilt works for you, and I’m glad that it does, but Jasmyn’s different.”
“Jasmyn’s smarter,” I said. “She knows it won’t help to give anything up. She already said she never gave up anything.”
“Jasmyn’s sitting right here,” said Jasmyn, “and she can speak for herself.” She paused a moment, then shook her head. “Can your ritual take away hate? My therapist taught me to hold on tight to my hope and my future and, yes, even my guilt, or at least part of it, because it helps keep me safe, just like John said. But she always told me to let my hate go.” She closed her eyes. “I used to hate my father, and I used to hate my mother for letting him hurt me, and I used to hate my family and my church and my whole neighborhood for looking the other way, and for taking his side, and for calling me the bad one. A temptress or a liar or a troublemaker or a whore. And I used to hate myself, because I believed them. But I let go of it all.” She opened her eyes and looked at Margo. “Can I give up my hate?”