*
With Kelly dead and Ostler running ragged trying to keep our story quiet—and with Potash too sick to speak—nobody remembered the stipulation that I should never be alone. That night after work I found an old jacket and a ball cap in the building’s lost and found, and waited inside the rear service door for the most blue-collar person I could find. A custodian left around six, bundled up tight against the cold, and I fell in step beside him, chatting idly about the weather, feigning friendliness so that anyone who happened to be watching would miss the mysterious boy from an unexplained murder and see only a pair of working-class Joes. I didn’t know who might be watching—Meshara or the other demons, or maybe someone completely unexpected—but that gave me all the more reason to hide. I rode the bus home, sitting in the back on a hard plastic seat, staring out the window at the dirty black snow lining the sides of the roads. I didn’t like being alone, any more than I really liked anything. But I preferred it. It was simpler.
Boy Dog was waiting for me when I got home, wagging his tail in the biggest display of energy I’d ever seen from him. Potash and I had gone shopping that morning before work—had it really only been one day?—and left a large plate of dry food and a bowl of water on the floor of the kitchen. Both dishes were overturned now, mixed and scattered across the floor, and I could smell the powerful scent of hound-dog urine in every corner of the room. But he was only marking his territory: there were no major puddles, and no droppings, so I told him he was a good boy and took him outside to do his business. Cody French, monster or not, had trained his dog well.
I took Boy Dog back inside and cleaned up the mess on the kitchen floor, sopping up the soggy chunks of kibble with an old towel. I poured him another dish of water and another pile of food, then sat in the lone chair in the living room, staring at the blank TV. I didn’t turn it on.
I’d stabbed a woman to death.
Obviously she wasn’t a woman, not really, but she had been when I’d stabbed her. She had the shape, and the hair, and the voice, and the ribs my knife passed through were human ribs, stretching wide beneath her skin to give a human form to her back. I’d been present for the deaths of several people, but I’d only ever killed two of them. Now the number was three. Most law-enforcement agencies used three as the benchmark for serial-killer activity: one kill was a murder, two was a coincidence, but three was a sign of habitual behavior. Kill three people in a row and you were a spree killer; kill them over time, with a period in the middle to cool off, lie low, and decide to kill again, and you were a serial killer. I’d tried to kill Brooke, back when she was Nobody. She would have been my third. Now it was Typhoid Mary Gardner, the nurse who slaughtered children and then comforted their parents.
I’d seen her house. She’d had the same TV I did. I stared at the black screen, a flat stretch of nothing turned slightly gray by the light of the kitchen behind me. I could almost see myself in it, a vague outline not quite human shaped; the chair made me look bigger than I was, wide and hunchbacked and menacing.