by Dan Wells
“Brooke said something about a Withered with no mouth: someone who couldn’t possibly eat our victims because he can’t eat anything. A Withered with no mouth is also likely to be obsessed with talking, which could explain why he’s been writing so many letters—because written words are the only way he can communicate.”
I heard more mumbling in the background and an expletive that must have come from Nathan.
“Potash?” I asked.
“Are you close?” he said.
“Maybe ten minutes.”
“And you’re sure about this?” he asked. “The puppet, the deception, the whole thing?”
“It all makes sense,” I said. “For the first time in the entire investigation we have a single theory that explains all our variables.”
“And the Withered with no mouth?”
“I can’t be sure until I see him,” I said, “but it fits. If you were a monster with no mouth, trying to hide from a bunch of monster hunters, what better way than by tricking them into chasing a fanged, hungry carnivore?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I believe you. Get here as fast as you can, because we’re going on high alert. Trujillo’s got a lot of notes about a mouthless Withered and it’s not good.”
“Which one is it?”
“His name is Rack,” said Potash. “Apparently he’s their king.”
15
“The key was in the third letter,” said Trujillo. “Nathan and I found the clue last night, but I didn’t realize the full significance until this morning. In the penultimate paragraph, talking about Potash, he says he knows everything.”
“Just to be clear,” I asked, “are we talking about the cannibal or Nathan?”
“Shut up,” said Nathan.
“Obviously we’re talking about the cannibal,” said Trujillo. “He’s always gone out of his way to show us how smart he is, but here’s the thing: he says he knows everything about us, but he never mentions Brooke.”
Of course he knows about Brooke, I thought. He’s knows all about me and where I came from, so he’d have to know about Brooke. Why wouldn’t he mention her in the list?
“Obviously if he knows everything, he knows about Brooke, right?” said Trujillo. “And given that his first letter was delivered in the regular mail, to this office, he obviously knows where to find us. There’s no way he could have all of that information and not know about Brooke. Which means Brooke is somehow different in his mind: she’s not one of us. Look at the structure of the letter: an introduction and then a paragraph for each member of our team—except there are six team members mentioned by name, and seven paragraphs.”
“The last paragraph doesn’t have a name,” said Nathan. “It’s got to be about Brooke—it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It could just be a conclusion,” I said.
“Possibly,” said Trujillo. “But it doesn’t act like a conclusion: we all read it as an extension of Potash’s paragraph, but that would make him the only member of the team to get two. It’s more likely, I think, that’s it’s a reference to the seventh member of our team. Let me read it to you.” He looked at his computer screen and read: “‘There are antelopes, and there are lions. And then there is something more. Think carefully about the company you keep.’” He looked up. “The Hunter has kept a very consistent pattern with his lion-and-antelope metaphor over all three letters: a lion is a killer, and an antelope is a victim. Him and us. Withered and human. But what does that last bit refer to? Something more? Couldn’t this be a reference to Brooke? The amalgamation of human and Withered together?”
“She’s not a Withered,” I said.
“But she’s not really human anymore either,” said Nathan. “We’re not trying to disrespect her, obviously, but be honest with yourself. She’s messed up.”
“Maybe she wasn’t in the letter because she didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “Did you think of that? This nasty little hit squad of rapists and murderers, and the one who suffers the most is the one who’s never actually hurt anyone?”
“How does this help us find The Hunter?” asked Ostler.
“We’re getting to that,” said Nathan. “And it’s a direct answer to John, too.”
“Brooke’s paragraph is different because she is different,” said Trujillo, “but also because The Hunter thinks of her differently. He doesn’t see her as an enemy—which implies that she’s a friend.”
“She’s not Nobody,” I said. “She’s Brooke Watson.”
“She has more of Nobody in her than Brooke,” said Trujillo. “This has been our concern ever since she first recognized Elijah—even before that, frankly, which is why I was brought on the team in the first place. If Brooke feels more kinship with the Withered than with us, she might start to help them.”
I wanted to break his skull. “She would never—”
“We searched her room,” said Nathan coldly. “Top to bottom. There was a rip in the bottom of the mattress: she was hiding letters.”
The room fell silent.
“That’s impossible,” said Diana.
“The one we found was written in crayon,” said Trujillo. “It’s the only writing instrument the nurses would give her, because they’re not sharp enough to hurt anyone. She ripped the letter out of my hands and ate it before we could learn any more, but one of the nurses confirmed that she’d been passing letters between Brooke and another man for a couple of weeks now.”
“I think you could have led with that,” snapped Ostler, suddenly angry. “How did this happen? Weren’t the nurses briefed on Brooke’s situation?”
“We’ve been keeping them in the dark about almost everything,” said Trujillo. “They knew Brooke was unstable, but they didn’t know why, and they certainly didn’t know she might be contacting a fugitive. In a regular mental institution this might have raised some red flags, but in an assisted-living center it’s a different situation. The nurses go out of their way to help the patients interact with people because most of them don’t get enough contact with the outside. It didn’t occur to the nurse that the letters might be bad.”
“It’s not true,” I said, though I didn’t feel it. He was right: Brooke was more Withered than human, mentally speaking. She was an emotional wreck. Think carefully about the company you keep.
“Did you get a description of the man?” asked Ostler. “Have we found him?”
“His name is Aldo Blankenship,” said Nathan. “He lives in The Corners, a block away from Pancho’s Pizza.”
* * *
I stared at Elijah. “Tell us everything you know about Rack.”
We were back in the interrogation room, where he’d been led by the restraining collar.
“Rack’s not your cannibal,” he said, rubbing his neck. “He doesn’t have a mouth.”
“So I hear,” I said. “Sit down and tell me about him.”
Elijah blew out a long, slow breath, and sat heavily in the chair across from me. We were the only two people in the room—I was the only one willing to be in a room with him—but the others were listening behind the glass. He looked at me intently.
“Rack is the king,” he said. “He’s the one who came up with this idea in the first place, who figured out how to make us Gifted. He is far more powerful, and far more dangerous, than any other Withered you’ve ever faced.”
“What kind of power?”
“Do you believe you have a soul?” he asked suddenly.
I didn’t know how to answer. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a soul: an eternal spirit or an inner animus or whatever you want to call it. A special thing that makes you you, the thing that goes up to heaven when you die, the thing that gives you conscious thought instead of animal instinct. Some people say it weighs twenty-one grams, some people say it doesn’t exist. Whatever you think it is: do you have one?”
My family wasn’t especially religious, but we had a funeral chapel in our home, and I’d heard more sermons about the afterlife than most k
ids have heard sermons. They said the soul left the body when it died, and that made a kind of sense to me because I’d seen Marci after she died, and she wasn’t there. Her body was, but Marci wasn’t. Was that just a superstition? I don’t know. Probably. But I wanted to believe that some part of Marci was still somewhere, because otherwise what was I in love with? A cadaver? I guess there are a lot of people who wouldn’t be surprised by that at all.
I shook my head. “Are you asking about souls in general, or mine specifically? Because those are going to be two very different answers.”
“I only ask because it’s a word we use,” said Elijah. “I don’t know if it’s the right word, or what ‘right’ even means. But the Withered’s souls are broken and corrupted—not just metaphorically, but physically.”
“You’re not just talking about their sense of wonder.”
“I’m talking about the black sludge,” said Elijah, and I looked at him closely. He nodded. “I know you know it, because you saw it dripping out my chest that night in the mortuary. You’ve killed Withered before, so you’ve seen what happens: the body decomposes into a kind of dark muck. Charred grease and gristle. We call that soulstuff.”
“Brooke’s used that word before,” I said. “What is it?”
“Some say it’s our souls, which are too corrupted to go to heaven, so they just stay behind and destroy the body. Some say it’s our bodies themselves, breaking free from the physical form that confines us, which is why some of us can use it to change shape or move around.”
“That’s how Nobody worked,” I said. “Or I guess you knew her as Hulla—she didn’t have a body of her own, just a big blob of ashy grease.”
“I remember her,” said Elijah, “though not much. She worked with Forman, I think.”
I nodded. “Our best guess on the sludge was that it’s what happened to the body when whatever power that keeps you alive isn’t … keeping you alive anymore. That you’d been around so long your body was just a pile of grease that looked like a human, and as soon as the energy or whatever disappeared—the thing behind that human disguise—the real body fell apart.”
“Maybe,” said Elijah. “I don’t know enough to say that’s not true, but I can tell you for sure that it’s not the only truth. It has a power of its own, like you saw with Nobody. Some Withered can use it for other things. Rack is one of them.”
“What can he do?” I asked again. “We need to know, so we can kill him.”
“Rack has a normal human body,” said Elijah, “all except for one part.” He traced a line around his upper chest and lower face, and I remembered Brooke saying something similar. “He has a hole here, where his heart should be, and up through his neck and into his head—there’s no jaw, no mouth, no nose, just a hole. It’s full of soulstuff, and that’s how he kills people: the darkness reaches out, like a tendril, and it goes right down your throat and tears out your heart.”
“He eats hearts?” I asked.
“He doesn’t eat them,” said Elijah, “he uses them. His body needs a heart just as much as yours does, but when we made our pact with the darkness he gave his up. He lives by stealing new ones.”
“And you say he takes the hearts through the throat?” I asked. “He doesn’t go just straight through the chest?”
“I suppose he could do it either way,” said Elijah, “but I’ve only ever seen him use the victim’s mouth and throat. It’s … actually much more disturbing that way.”
“And much easier to hide,” I said, and glanced at the mirror behind me, knowing the team was watching and listening. “If he has to sustain himself by eating hearts, there will still be corpses around town that we haven’t identified as his victims. We might not have identified them as victims at all—most bodies don’t get autopsies, so a mysterious death with no external sign of violence would probably just get rubber-stamped as a stroke or a heart attack. Someone would find the body, the coroner would take a look, and then it’s on to the funeral.” I looked over my shoulder. “Somebody talk to Rhonda Hess and see if she has any unexplained deaths over the last few weeks.”
“You think Rack is here?” asked Elijah. “In Fort Bruce?”
I nodded. “We think he’s hiding his own kills and using a skull puppet to create a fake Withered cannibal, to keep us busy hunting for the wrong guy.”
“If Rack was killing people in town I’d know,” said Elijah. “I get all my memories from dead bodies, and I don’t remember being killed by him.”
“There are five mortuaries in Fort Bruce,” I said. “Do you each cover a specific area?”
“Not geographically, but yes. Kind of. For random bodies like you’re talking about, there are guidelines as to which mortuary handles which cases.”
I looked over my shoulder again. “Ask Hess what those rules are, and focus on bodies that were assigned to other mortuaries.” I looked back at Elijah. “If he’s hiding from us, it makes sense that he’s hiding from you, too.”
“But why?” asked Elijah. “He couldn’t have known I’d end up working with you.”
“But he never contacted you,” I said. “Gidri was trying to recruit you, but Rack didn’t bother—from what you’ve told us he didn’t bother trying to recruit Gidri, either. He just let them wage their war and attract all our attention, and meanwhile he worked in the background planning this attack.”
“So what is he planning?” asked Elijah. “He wouldn’t go to all this trouble just to fool you for no reason.”
“I assume he’s planning to kill us,” I said. “That’s what I’d be doing in his place. But we think we’ve found him, through another connection, and we’re taking the fight to him. That’s why we need to know everything we can about how he works.”
“He’ll kill you,” said Elijah.
I didn’t flinch. “Tell us how.”
“By being smarter than you,” said Elijah. “His powers are one thing—don’t get close, don’t let him attack you in person, and definitely wear some kind of face mask to keep him out of your mouth. Ripping hearts out isn’t the only thing his soulstuff can do, but it’s a big one.”
“What else can it do?”
“He can talk with it,” said Elijah. “He leaves a bit of soulstuff behind when he goes for the heart—it’s the conservation of mass, he can’t absorb new flesh without expelling something else. Or I guess he could, but he’d be enormous. He leaves a bit of soulstuff behind in the corpse, and then he can animate it—not the whole body, but the mouth and lungs. The part his soul has touched. It’s the only way he can speak out loud.”
“I remember Brooke saying something about that, too,” I said. “She gave us more than I realized.” Had I been ignoring her, just like the rest of the team ignored me?
No wonder she’d started looking to the Withered for friends.
“Who is Brooke?” asked Elijah. “You’ve mentioned her three times now, but I’ve never heard of her before. She’s the friend of a friend, I assume?”
“She has all of Nobody’s memories,” I said.
“That sounds like a story I need to hear sometime.”
“Later,” I said. “We don’t know how long it will be before he kills again, or before he tries to contact her again and realizes we’ve discovered him. If you can tell us how to kill him, we can go in and do it now, in force, before he has a chance to reach whatever end game he’s been building toward.”
“That’s what you tried with Gidri in the mortuary,” said Elijah. “You lost two men, and at least two more are injured.”
“Isn’t that worth it to kill someone like Rack?”
He paused, saying nothing as he looked at me. I tried to read what he was thinking, and found him more humanlike in his facial expressions than I expected—certainly more human than Potash. His brow was furrowed, his eyes slightly squinted, his mouth grim and flat. He was concerned. He probably thought we were all going to die. How he would react to that concern, though, I couldn’t guess.
“Let me
come with you,” he said.
“We still don’t trust you.”
“I’ve done nothing but help,” he said. “I haven’t attacked anyone, I haven’t done anything alarming, I’ve answered all of your questions.” He leaned forward. “I’m more human than any thousand other people you could ask—put together. I want this shadow war over, and I want your side to win. What will it take to prove that to you?”
“Tell us how to kill Rack.”
“You can’t,” said Elijah. “He regenerates too quickly. He’s faster, stronger, and smarter than any other Withered. I’ve known him for ten thousand years and he’s never lost. Even if you overwhelm him, he’ll just retreat and keep killing and come up with another plan. You’re too close now to let that happen, so bring me on your raid. Get me close enough and I can drain his memory—even if he attacks me first, even if he knocks me down and breaks my bones and reaches in to steal my heart, I’ll be touching him, and that’s all it takes. I can empty his mind and stop him.”
I stared at him. Was his description of Rack’s abilities accurate? Would his plan to get around them work? It all seemed to make sense, but it was so hard to trust him. I wanted to trust him—I felt a … kinship to Elijah that I’d felt with barely a handful of people in my entire life. It had scared me before, because he was a Withered, and it still scared me, but …
But the rest of my team were humans, and they’d done worse things than Elijah had ever even tried. I couldn’t define my morality the same way anymore. There was too much gray area. But how could I judge him without knowing him? I needed time to get inside his head, time I didn’t have.
Or maybe I only needed one more question. “What about his thoughts?” I asked. “Drain his mind into yours and for all intents and purposes you’ll be him. What’s to stop him from continuing his plans in another body?”
“I’m easier to kill than he is,” said Elijah simply. “If his mind takes over, kill me.”
I looked at the mirror again. “I trust him,” I said. “Let’s move.”
16
We moved silently through The Corners, under cover of darkness. Elijah had warned us that Rack would see us coming—that his senses were just as superhuman as his strength—but still we tried to be quiet, if for no other reason than to keep the neighbors asleep and unaware. They had no idea of the combat we were about to engage in: the final battle with the king of the demons. The less they knew the better.
