The Devil's Only Friend (12 page)

“You want to back off and regroup?” asked Nathan. “I second that idea wholeheartedly.”

“So do I,” I said. I was responsible for too many deaths already—all the people I couldn’t save, the friends I’d endangered. Nathan accused me of getting Kelly killed, and as much as I hated to admit it, he was right. I’d rushed us in to Mary Gardner without knowing all the details, and now Kelly was dead and Potash was in the hospital. It had been a risk worth taking, but it should have been my risk, not theirs. “We’re killing too many Withered, and too fast, and of course they’re fighting back. We organized, so they had to organize to keep up. This war is our fault.”

“They’ve been killing all along,” said Ostler, piercing me with her eyes. “Whoever ate Applebaum would have eaten somebody else in some other town, whether we were hunting Withered or not. Don’t get soft on me just because the bodies are piling up in one place.”

“He’s not saying we stop,” said Nathan. “He’s saying we should pull back and find a new plan.”

“That’s not what John’s saying at all,” said Ostler, still staring at me, and I knew she’d guessed exactly what I was planning. “He wants to run away and do this on his own: no team, no rules, just John Cleaver stalking and killing like the good old days.”

Not completely alone
, I thought.
I’m not leaving without Brooke.

“Forget what John wants,” said Nathan, “he’s crazy. But this
is
a war, and we’re on the front lines in a dangerously exposed position. Two of our team got taken out by a nurse, for crying out loud, and that was before the terrifying, mind-control cannibal showed up. We need to run away, straight back to headquarters, and figure out a new way to fight these things because this way is suicide.”

“Don’t get soft on me,” Ostler repeated, her voice as hard as steel. “What did you think you were getting into? I told you the truth when I offered you the job. I told you exactly what we were up against and what we’d be doing, and you knew the risks. You knew there were monsters, and that we were throwing ourselves directly in their path, and if you didn’t think that would put you in this kind of danger, you’re not as smart as I took you for. Of course this is a war, and of course we started it, and of course people are dying. But we’re winning, and they’re scared. If they could hurt you, Mr. Gentry, they would, and it would be your body on this slab, and—”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” asked Nathan.

“Only if you’re clever enough to see it,” snapped Ostler. “If we’re in so much danger, why is Stephen Applebaum dead and not us? Why have the only times they’ve hurt us been lucky hits in an attack
we
initiated? Either they don’t know who we are, or they can’t reach us, and either way, we still have the upper hand. We can do this, but not if we back off.”

“I’m willing to keep going,” said Trujillo, “but how? Even if the Withered’s plan is just to wait for us to come to them, how is that not an incredibly good plan? Mary Gardner was ambushed by a special forces assassin and she still put him in the hospital. We don’t have a new Potash to spend on every Withered that comes along.”

“The attack on Mary Gardner was reckless,” said Ostler, and I felt a pang of guilt—and another pang of anger. “We thought we knew how she worked, and we were spooked by the revelation that we were being hunted. Taking her out quickly was smart, but we weren’t thinking clearly, and we weren’t ready. I take full responsibility for that.”

“So that’s the plan?” asked Nathan. “Just keep doing the same thing we always do?”

“But do it better,” said Ostler.

I could do it better alone. No one to help me, but also no one to attract attention and get in the way. But with my photo on the Internet, could I ever truly sneak up on a Withered again? My methods were simple: make friends, find their weakness, and kill them. How could I make friends in secret if they all knew my face?

“Dr. Trujillo,” said Ostler, “I want you to talk to Brooke and see what you can get out of her: tell her about the corpse, about the three men, anything that might help her to remember something new.”

“I can embalm the victim,” I offered.

Ostler looked confused. “Why would we need you to embalm the victim?”

It was a long shot anyway. “Then I’ll talk to Brooke,” I said. “She knows me, and I know what to ask about.”

“Trujillo is the expert,” said Ostler.

“Trujillo is also the only one left with police contacts,” I said. “He’s investigated serial killers before, and someone he’s worked with is bound to know something about an unsolved cannibalism case.”

“You don’t make the assignments,” said Ostler.

“Brooke doesn’t even like him,” I said. “She’ll talk to me.”

Ostler thought a moment before nodding. “Take Nathan with you.”

“She won’t like him either.”

“Hey,” said Nathan.

“Half of what Brooke talks about happened thousands of years ago,” said Ostler. “Nathan can interpret that data better than you can.

“I’ve kept notes on everything Brooke’s said so far,” said Trujillo. “They’re not transferred to my computer yet, but—”

“I prefer paper anyway,” I said quickly, trying to think of a way to avoid a partnership with Nathan; the thought of him asking Brooke questions made my hands shake with anger. I pressed them into fists and hid them behind my back.

“My notes are all back in the office,” said Trujillo. “You’re welcome to any of it.”

“I’ll continue to work with the hospital,” said Ostler, “and coordinate with the rest of you as necessary. Dr. Pearl found a steroid treatment that seems to be helping Potash a lot, but don’t expect him to bail you out of trouble any time soon. You’re all armed?” Nathan, Diana, and Trujillo each patted a concealed gun; I held up my knife. Ostler raised her eyebrow at it. “You don’t want a gun?”

“He’s not comfortable with them,” said Diana.

“Too easy to hit the wrong target,” I said.
And not nearly personal enough when you hit a target you really want to kill.

7

“Four of them,” said Brooke, sitting on her bed in the dementia ward. She was more lucid today than she had been in a while, and we were making as much use of that clarity as we could. She looked at me with worried eyes, but I watched as her expression shifted into a sly smile. Even lucid, there was a lot of Nobody mixed in with Brooke. “Four Cursed in one place is dangerous.”

“Do you mean the Withered?” asked Nathan. “Or is this a new group?”

“They are Withered
and
they are Cursed,” said Brooke. Her voice changed abruptly, sounding almost like a different person’s—small and weak and scared. “They used to call themselves the Gifted, and some of them still do, but Nobody never did. Sometimes Nobody did. Only when Kanta was around to hear it. He still believed in the old days, but not me; I hated them all.”

She was shifting in and out of memories, sometimes speaking as Brooke, and sometimes speaking as Nobody. I felt a tight pain in the center of my chest, listening to her, fearing again—for the thousandth time—that Nobody wasn’t really dead, that some part of her survived in Brooke’s bloodstream, talking through her and controlling her. Worse than the fear was the guilt, knowing that I was responsible for what had happened to her, and all I wanted was to make that feeling go away. I wanted to make everything go away, to take Brooke and take myself and just disappear somewhere—as if solitude could miraculously cure us both. I didn’t because I couldn’t. There were demons here, and I was the only one who could stop them, and every day I wasted was another day someone else could end up like Brooke. I pushed away my fear and my guilt and locked them up tight, where no one could ever know they were there, and I looked at Brooke with cold, emotionless eyes. If she thought she was Nobody, that was good; we needed Nobody’s memories. I told myself it was true. I glanced at Nathan and let Brooke speak.

“Kanta wanted to unite us all,” Brooke continued, “to bring us all together like a club or a secret society. Club’s not the right word: cabal. He said we were stronger together, and I guess that’s turning out to be true.” She pointed at the photos I’d brought of Applebaum’s chewed-up corpse, turned face down on the little bedside table because she didn’t want to look at them.

“Did Kanta unite them?” I asked. I knew the Withered stayed in touch now and then, which was why Mr. Crowley had caused so much concern when he’d stopped communicating completely. But it had always been a loose group, and the idea that they were actually organized was frightening—it implied focus and direction, and direction implied movement, even if it was only metaphorical. What were they moving toward, and why?

“He only united some,” said Brooke, and she folded herself into a haggard ball, drawing her knees up to her chin and hugging them tight with her thin, bony arms. “The ones who thought like he did. Rack was the worst.”

“Rack,” I said quickly, catching onto a memory. “Mary Gardner said something about Rack.”

“Mary Gardner?”

“Agarin,” said Nathan, using Mary’s Withered name.

“Agarin said something about Rack when she was standing over Agent Potash,” I said. “She said she’d wanted to leave him for Rack, but she didn’t have time so she’d have to kill him herself.”

“You don’t want to be killed by Rack,” Brooke whispered.

“I don’t want to be killed by anyone,” I said, looking through Trujillo’s page of Withered identities. “Who is Rack?”

“The king,” said Brooke.

I glanced at Nathan again. “Rack’s not in Trujillo’s notes. Have you ever come across the name before?”

“It might be a title,” said Nathan. “It’s not similar to any names like Meshara or Hulla, but it’s awfully similar to ‘rex’ and a dozen other words like it. Most Indo-European languages have a word for ‘king’ that’s at least partly related to ‘rack.’”

“You have it backwards,” said Brooke, more confident now. I wasn’t sure if Nobody or Brooke was the more confident personality. “Rack didn’t get his name from their titles; they got their titles from his name.”

Nathan stared at her a moment, then frowned and made a note. “That is a very disturbing thing to think about.”

“Are you saying that Rack is so old,” I asked, “and so influential, that our word for ‘king’ is just his name?”

“Not our word,” said Nathan, “just … a lot of people’s words. The strange part is that Sumerian isn’t an Indo-European language, so that relationship isn’t as strong as I’d like. But the name Kanta is Hindi, which is obviously Indo-European, which suggests that the different Withered might have come from a single point and then spread out. But it would have to be an incredibly long time ago—”

“How long?” I asked.

“To predate Indo-European language?” asked Nathan. He whistled, looking at the ceiling as he calculated. “I’d guess early Neolithic era, maybe even before. Ten thousand years at least, and possibly more.”

“They say they used to be gods,” I said. “With these abilities, at the dawn of human civilization, how could they not be?” I looked at Brooke. “Was Nobody that old?”

“I was a goddess,” she said, staring at the window. “The goddess of beauty and love, and women would come from all over the world to see me—though of course the world was smaller in those days. Just a valley.”

Nathan looked queasy. “I’m not comfortable with the idea that an ancient god ate a man’s leg behind a cheap motel.”

“Rack didn’t eat him,” said Brooke, suddenly very serious. “Rack doesn’t eat legs. He doesn’t even have a mouth.”

I leaned forward. “What do you mean he doesn’t have a mouth?”

She pressed her lips tightly together, then covered the bottom half of her face with her hand. “No mouth,” she mumbled, barely intelligible through her fingers. “No nose, either. Just eyes and soul.”

“A soul?”

“Black tar,” she said. “Ash and grease.” She put one hand on the bridge of her nose, and the other at the base of her sternum, sectioning off about twelve inches of her body. “He doesn’t have a face because he doesn’t need a face. The dead speak for him, and his soul takes whatever it wants.”

“The dead speak for him?” asked Nathan, but I focused on the latter statement.

“What does he want?” I asked. We had to know what he was missing to figure out what he had.

She emphasized the hand on her chest, as if showing how much of her rib cage was above it. “He doesn’t have a heart.”

I sat silently for a moment, trying to imagine what such a person would look like. Eventually I just shrugged and made some notes in one of Trujillo’s heavy binders. “Mary—I mean, Agarin—said she didn’t have time to wait for Rack. That means he’s probably not here yet, which is the only good news we’ve heard in weeks.”

“But he’s coming,” said Nathan.

“One monster at a time,” I said. “First we have our cannibal; let’s deal with him before we have to deal with him and Rack together.”

“We’re so dead,” said Nathan, shaking his head.

“Think back,” I said, catching Brooke with my eyes. “Think deep back into all those memories, into everything you know about the Withered, or the Cursed, or whatever you want to call them. Which one eats people?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to know,” I said, and held up the picture again. She shied away from it, scared or disgusted or both, but I kept it up where she’d be forced to see it when she stopped averting her eyes.
I’m so sorry, Brooke.
“Look at the picture again, Nobody.” I hoped the other name would shock her deeper into the Withered’s memories, forcing her to remember more. “What does it remind you of? Where have you seen this before?”

“You’re freaking her out,” said Nathan.

“She’s half demon,” I said, trying to feel as cold as I could, “I’m not showing her anything she hasn’t seen before.”

“Just … knock it off,” he said, and pushed the photo facedown on the table. “Let’s go through the names instead. What can you tell us about Meshara?”

“He remembers,” said Brooke.

“You’ve told us that before,” said Nathan. “What does it mean? Can he read people’s minds—maybe remember other people’s memories?”