“They got a photo of me,” I said, looking at my laptop.
“We’re lucky that’s all they got,” said Diana. She’d managed to slip out of her sniper’s nest unseen, since all the commotion was one street over. I hadn’t been so lucky, though she was right that I had been, all things considered, as lucky as we could have hoped for. Three different neighbors had seen Kelly’s body and called the police, who had arrived, guns drawn, almost fifteen minutes before Ostler managed to flash her FBI badge and smooth things over. Fifteen minutes wasn’t much—they hadn’t gotten me back to the station for fingerprints, they hadn’t had time to interrogate me, they hadn’t even found my name because we didn’t carry ID. But the neighbors had been watching. One of them had a cell phone, and a picture of the mysterious teenager sitting in the back of a cop car had been on Twitter within minutes.
That was last night. We’d barely dared to move since.
“Potash is stable,” said Nathan, setting down his phone. “Trujillo says they have him in protective custody at the hospital, no press allowed.”
Diana looked at me, than back at Nathan. “Is he breathing?”
“Not on his own; he’s on a machine. They think it’s some kind of pulmonary embolism, because of how fast it came on.”
“It’s pneumonia,” I said, remembering Mary’s words.
“We know what you think it is,” said Nathan, though his tone suggested more impatience than recognition. “Let’s let the doctors do the diagnosing for now, okay? She’s been killing people with this … whatever it is … for thousands of years. We’re lucky he’s still alive at all—and if he wasn’t, you’d be the one responsible.”
“Nathan,” snapped Diana, but he bulldozed past her warning with a snarl.
“You told us it was safe,” he continued. I laid my hands flat against the table, trying to stay calm, keeping my eyes fixed on the laptop screen without seeing anything on it. “You told us all she could do was make sick kids sicker, not kill a grown man’s lungs with a flick of her wrist! And she threw Kelly through the damn window, which you also conveniently forgot to mention she could do! And meanwhile you had the gall to sit outside in the car and let them face this thing alone—”
“Nathan!” said Diana again, in a voice that left no room for argument.
Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine. The counting wasn’t working.
They didn’t know I’d stabbed her.
“We have bigger problems to worry about,” said Diana. “Ostler’s bosses are going to be pissed, and who knows what fallout will come from that? We’re practically a joke as it is, and now we’ve lost an agent and caused a public scene. Ostler’s at the police station right now trying to convince them there are monsters under the bed, but we can’t afford to bring the cops in. Rumors are going to start, word is going to spread, and our entire operation is going to be raked by headquarters. I’ll be amazed if we don’t get recalled and fired.”
“That’s the best possible thing that could happen to us,” said Nathan. “Not only are the Withered fighting back now, but even the ones who don’t know we’re coming can still kill us with impunity. We need to get out of here yesterday.”
“Don’t worry about the FBI,” I said. “Worry about whoever else out there is watching.”
“The police are the only ones who know anything,” said Nathan. “They kept the press out of it completely.”
“The police found two people and one dead body,” I said, “sitting in the middle of an obvious fight scene, yet we all claim to be on the same team. If you don’t know what the sludge is, the person we claim to have killed doesn’t even exist. People are going to talk, even if it’s just the cops, and rumors are going to spread. Best-case scenario, they’ll think it’s a government cover-up, but worst case, someone puts it all together and figures out we killed a demon.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Nathan. “Nobody else even believes these things are real.”
“Somebody does,” I said. “Somewhere out there, somebody suspects, and this is only going to confirm it. There’ve been too many news stories, too many unanswered questions, and those pile up—they’ll wonder about the sludge, they’ll wonder about me, maybe they’ll put the two together and get even more curious. I’ve been publicly involved with missing bodies and mysterious sludge three times before, you know.” I pointed at the computer screen. “And now my picture’s on the Internet.”