Margo nodded, earnest and intense. “Of course you can, honey.”
“Of course I can,” said Jasmyn, and her face became grim. “And I already did. I don’t need to be a monster to do it.”
“Yes,” I said, clenching my hand into a fist and then pointing a finger solidly at Margo. “You see? I told you she wouldn’t do it.”
“You’re failing to consider all the benefits,” said Mr. Connor. “Weigh the costs against the gains: give up your hate, or whatever you decide to part with, and you’ll receive not just power, but immortality. I am ten thousand years old. I’ve read more books that you’ve ever known existed; I’ve talked to more people, seen more places, eaten more food, and lived more lives that you can possibly comprehend. I’ve watched the sun rise over the most distant reaches of the globe, and set again behind cityscapes so bright and alive they replaced the stars. And all you have to do to get that is to give up something you’re not even using anyway.”
“You’ve seen those things,” I said, “but did you enjoy them?”
“I lost my imagination,” said Mr. Connor, “not my pleasure or my peace.”
“But when you saw them,” I said, “when you saw the oceans and the mountains and the sky—did you think about what was beyond them?”
“I know what is beyond them.”
“No daydreams,” I said. “No ambitions. You’ve seen the most glorious sights in the world and they’ve never inspired you.”
“I make my own inspiration.”
“And the world is darker because of it,” I said. “You’ve seen a million clouds, but you’ve never seen a dragon in any of them.”
“We’re not talking about pictures in the clouds,” said Margo. “We’re talking about power and immortality.”
“I don’t want them,” said Jasmyn.
“I do,” said a frail, old voice. I looked over and saw Shelley Jones, quiet and forgotten in her chair, her walker in front of her like a cold metal cage. Her hands sat folded primly in her lap, shaking slightly from an age-induced tremor. “My Crabtree is dead,” she said. “And my baby boy died when he was three years old. I could never have any more after that. Everyone I came from is gone, and no one is coming from me, and all I’m leaving to the world is a ramshackle house in an old junkyard, and no one will ever live there again. Even if they do, they won’t remember me. All I have left of life is the fact that I haven’t died yet—I’m like a scrub oak, growing from the side of a red-rock cliff, perched where I have no business, twisted and stunted and fighting for every drop of water I can get. I’m not dead, but that’s not the same thing as being alive.” She closed her rheumy eyes and tears crept down her face, and she raised her trembling hands a few inches off her lap. “Can you take away my pain? It hurts to walk and sit and stand and lay down. It hurts to move my hands and hold a fork and swallow and breathe. Can you take that all away from me?”
“Of course I can,” said Margo softly. “That’s why I brought you here.”
“But it can’t be real,” said Shelley. “I know it can’t be real because it’s impossible to be real, and this is all a joke, and I don’t know why you’re telling it, but any minute now you’re going to stop and tell me I have to feel this pain forever.”
“It’s not a joke,” said Margo. She straightened in her chair and then lifted the bottom of her long shirt, exposing her belly—but there was no belly there: her abdomen was a wide, dark cavity, like a cave of obsidian and tar, and pulsing inside of it was the greasy black ash of soulstuff. The heat of it seemed to fill the room. “I can do it,” said Margo. “I can take away everything you never wanted to be.”
Shelley kept her eyes closed, and her voice was a violent whisper. “Then let’s do it.”
CHAPTER 17
“Don’t do it,” I pleaded. “You don’t know what you’ll become.”
“Whole again,” said Mr. Connor.
“But what else?” I asked. “Mr. Connor can’t imagine it, but I can. Give up your pain and you might become a living sensor for it—I knew a Withered who couldn’t feel his own emotions, but he could feel everyone else’s and it broke him. Give up your pain and that rest home you live in will become a never-ending nightmare of shared affliction.”
“You can’t know that for certain,” said Mr. Connor, “or I would I know it.”
“No we can’t,” I said. “It might be worse. Maybe you’ll lose all physical sensation completely, pain and pleasure and taste and touch. Maybe you’ll be driven mad by the simple impossible desire to eat a strawberry just one more time. Maybe you’ll have to kill people to absorb their ability to feel, just for a few minutes, like Mr. Connor does with inspiration. Or maybe you won’t lose your pain completely and automatically—maybe all you’ll gain is the power to shunt that pain off onto other people, making them miserable so you don’t have to be. Is that what you want? For other people to suffer the way you have?”
“It never ends,” said Shelley, tears forming in her eyes. “Even with pills. This way it would—even if only for a moment.”
“But you’d do that to people?” asked Jasmyn. “You’d really give them all your pain like that, and your aches and soreness and torment and anguish?”
“I could find people willing to take it,” said Shelley. “How many nurses and doctors and well-meaning neighbors have told me over the years that they’d gladly suffer in my place if they could? I always thought they were just saying that to be polite.” Her face grew hard. “If they were just lying, to hell with them.”
I growled in frustration. “Think about what you’re saying!”
“No,” Jasmyn said, and looked at Margo. “Think about what she’s saying. What she’s doing. Did you orchestrate this whole thing?”
“No,” said Margo.
“Did you drown Shelley’s husband?” asked Jasmyn. “You needed someone sad and hurt and desperate enough to become a monster, and now you have one.”
“Honey—” said Margo.
“Did you kill Kathy?” Jasmyn shouted. She stared at Margo, and her eyes welled up with tears. “Did you hurt me, too? If you can make anyone do anything you want, did you make my father—”
“No,” said Margo. “Never.”
“Prove it,” growled Jasmyn.
“I’m trying to help,” said Margo. “You think I have to go to all this trouble to find people in pain? Or people willing to sacrifice humanity for power? I can find those people anywhere—I can go out on the streets right now and find a dozen before dawn. I didn’t set you up and ruin your life as a part of some evil master plan, just like I didn’t warp Shelley’s joints and bones, and just like I didn’t kill my own friend Kathy. I called you here because you’re hurt and I can help you.”
“Prove it,” said Jasmyn again.
Margo stared at her, then whispered a name into the dark. “Cal Dexter, 2013.” She watched Jasmyn, then spoke again. “Leslie Tyler, 2006. Kendra Blaylock, 1999. Luis Palomeque, 1997. Do you want me to go on?”
“People you’ve killed?” I asked.
“People she’s saved,” said Jasmyn. “I know some of them—I met Cal over Christmas, and I think Leslie, too. They’re all people she’s taken in and given shelter and a job and gotten back on their feet. Just like you and me.”
“Mind control?” I asked.
“I didn’t control you,” said Margo. “Didn’t control Jasmyn.”
“But you did control Harold,” I said. “And Simon Watts, and who knows how many others. Maybe you saved these people, and that’s great, but you tried to kill me.”
“I thought I had to,” said Margo.
“And Kathy?” I demanded. “And Crabtree? You drowned them, too, no matter what you told Jasmyn just now.”
“I said you were smart,” said Margo, and she shot me a glance from the side of her eye. “That doesn’t mean you’ve figured out everything.”
Did she … did she not kill them? But then who did? I stood still as a stone, watching her carefully, trying t
o see what I’d missed. The Dark Lady tried to drown me, and Margo was the Dark Lady. Margo was Rain.
But that didn’t mean all the drownings were her.
Three of us left, she’d said, but Assu was already dead. There was another one out there. Rain had sent Watts to kill me for the same reason she’d sent him to the motel: to cover for someone.
“Props on that one,” I said, shaking my head. “You got me.”
Rain nodded.
“Who’s the other one?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“My joints are on fire,” said Shelley. “Let’s get on with this.”
“But why?” Jasmyn asked, stopping Shelley with her hand and looking intently at Rain. “If you’re some kind of ancient monster, why did you help me? Why help any of us?”
“Because you needed help,” said Rain.
“I told her not to,” said Mr. Connor.
“Did you control people’s minds to do it?” asked Jasmyn. “When I got my partial tuition refunded, was that you messing with the college clerk? When I … found my new apartment—was that you, too?”
“Tuition, yes,” said Rain. “Apartment, no. I can’t do everything for you, or it doesn’t work.”
“What doesn’t work?” demanded Jasmyn. “You said you weren’t grooming me for this ritual you keep talking about, so then what were you doing?”
Rain didn’t answer.
“She was raising you,” I said.
Jasmyn frowned. “Huh?”
“She called the thralls her children,” I said, “but I think we’re the real ones: the ‘wayward ducklings’ she keeps taking in. The others are servants, but we’re her children. Or at least she wanted us to be.” I looked at Rain. “What did you give up? You can control minds and you can make Withered, and I could never figure out the opposite of that. You didn’t give up your own mind to control others, and you didn’t give up your own control as far as I can tell. But that’s the key, isn’t it? You keep taking people under your wing; helping them out. That’s what you gave up.”
“Children,” said Rain. She looked into the distance, like she was looking straight into the past, and her thoughts traveled so far back her voice almost seemed to echo across an invisible chasm. “Rack gave up his heart, and Hulla her body, and Kanta his identity. Pta his inspiration. Yashodh his love. I gave up my children.”
Jasmyn’s face contorted in horror. “Actual children?”
“I was pregnant,” said Rain. “Barely more than a month or two—we weren’t quite as precise in those days, of course. And it all came down to that: that’s where it all started. Everyone else could give up something they hated about themselves, but I had to give something I loved or the ritual wouldn’t work, so I lost my child and every child I could ever have, ever again. And not just the biological ones, the emotional ones. I can never have a legacy. I can never have someone who needs me. Cal came to the Christmas party, but he won’t come again this year. He has to move on because that’s how it works. You’ll do the same.”
“You found me in a rape-crisis group,” said Jasmyn.
“Seemed like a good place to find someone who needed me,” said Rain. “And you did for a while, but then you moved away. Pretty soon you’ll get another job, and then I’ll never see you again.”
“That’s not supernatural,” I said. “That’s life. People move on. People end up alone. Shelley doesn’t have any children, either.”
“I didn’t say that being barren has made me a monster,” said Rain, “or being alone, or being unneeded, or anything else. It’s the other way around. Being a monster is what made me alone.” She shifted in her chair and raised her shirt again, and that deep black pit yawned out of her belly. “I can’t have children, but I can have pale, hollow copies of them. Thralls, if you want to call them that, and Blessed. I can’t create life, but I can change it. I can save Shelley right now from the pain that is destroying her life, and then I can save Carol, and then I can save Jasmyn and even you, John. I can do it.” She was practically pleading now. “We can make the world better.”
“It never makes the world better,” I said. “You save one life and destroy countless more. You saved Nobody from the imperfect body that she hated, but her imperfections were still there. Her self-doubt, her jealousy, her lack of confidence and satisfaction. You solved a symptom but not the cause, and then she killed a hundred thousand girls trying to find the happiness you couldn’t give her.”
“I was foolish,” said Rain. “I know better now how to take away the right thing.”
“My pain isn’t a symptom,” said Shelley. “Take it away and I’ll be me again, whole and normal and perfect.”
“You’ll be the kind of person who makes a deal with the devil to get what she wants,” I said. “There’s nothing perfect about it.”
“I won’t kill anyone,” Shelley insisted.
“Of course you will,” I told her. “They all do. I don’t know how the process works but that’s a part of it, right down to the core, because every other Withered has killed people, every time, in every case—even the ones who didn’t want to. They’re parasites on the world who can never get what they need without taking it from us.”
“Just like every human being,” said Mr. Connor.
“With one difference,” I said. “Humans can stop.”
We all stared at each other, watching and thinking, and then Shelley raised herself in agony to her feet. “Enough talk,” she said. “Let’s get on with it. She’s the one with the power here—she doesn’t have to listen to you if she doesn’t want to.”
No, I thought. She doesn’t.
And yet she had.
I looked at Rain, and Rain looked at me, and I tried to imagine her as she used to be, back in the ancient valley where all of this had started—a young woman, soon to be a mother, happy and healthy and eager to help everyone around her. So willing to help that she’d damned herself to ten thousand years of loss and pain and regret trying to make other people happy. And then I thought about my own mother, who’d done the same for me for sixteen years—a tiny fraction of some lives, but the entirety of mine.
What did Rain see when she looked at me?
She watched me with ancient eyes, staring and thinking. Eventually she shook her head, lowering her shirt back over the mass of soulstuff.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry, Shelley, I truly am. But John’s right. I can’t pretend I’m making the world better by putting more Withered in it.”
“I’ll be benevolent,” said Shelley. “I’ll use my power for good.”
“We all said that in the beginning,” said Rain. “But beginnings don’t last forever.”
Shelley clutched the handles of her walker and her mouth moved, trying for an argument or even a word, but nothing came. She began to cry, and lowered herself in misery to her chair.
I watched Rain, and when my backpack began singing—all three songs at once, loud and cacophonous and shocking—I closed my eyes and shook my head.
“Well, crap,” I said.
“What?” asked Jasmyn. “What does that mean? Do you have three cell phones?”
“They’re motion sensors,” I said. “The FBI is here, and with all their reinforcements. We’re surrounded.”
“Why crap, then?” asked Jasmyn, rising to her feet. “They can save us, right? They know you’re the good guy and those two are the bad guys, and they can take them away or … whatever they do, and we’re going to be okay. Right? Why crap?”
“Because you were right,” I said. “The other day, when that guy burned to death and we thought it was a murder, you said everyone is worth saving. And it sucks, but you were right.”
“Why does that suck?”
I opened my eyes and looked at Rain. She looked back, but didn’t speak.
“Because everyone means everyone,” I said. “And now we have to save the queen of demons.”
CHAPTER 18
“I need to think,” said Mr.
Connor.
“No you don’t,” I said quickly, stepping toward him in the cramped office. “We’re trying to save you two, and I know how you think, so there’s no thinking allowed, okay? The last thing that strike team is going to want to see when they get in here is one of our bodies tastefully redecorated on the floor here.”
“They’ll shoot us,” said Carol.
“They’ll be a lot less likely to if you’re lying down,” I said. The backpack kept singing: all three tones, over and over. I zipped it open and started turning them off. “Lying down might be a good idea for all of us, actually.” I clicked off the last doorbell ringer. “Everybody down, face on the floor, hands above your head.”
“You can’t save us,” said Rain.
“Don’t fight me on this,” I said, but Harold reached over and turned off the lights. “Stop that—we need to be open and welcoming and harmless,” I said. “Turning off the lights in this situation is deceptive and threatening.”
“I can feel their minds,” said Margo. “Your friend, too—Sam Harris. They know we’re here but they don’t know where. I’m going to—”
“No,” I said again, as firmly as I could this time. “No mind control. You don’t understand this: I’m going to save you, or at least I’m going to try very hard, but I can’t do that if you take over even one of their minds. You have to be worth saving.”
“I need to think,” said Mr. Connor again.
“If you’re going to be good, you have to be good,” I said. “That’s more than just not murdering anyone—it’s no more manipulation, no more stripping people of their own free will. You can’t be parasites anymore, you have to be equals.”
“This is ridiculous,” snarled Rain. “You think they’re going to talk to us peacefully?”
“If we’re peaceful first.”
“You think we can just change who we are?”
“I did,” I said. “My brain was broken, or is broken, and I don’t know why or how or if it was my father or my mortuary or my DNA or what, but I want to kill people.”