Ostler thought I was the next victim, but I knew I wasn’t. The letters were addressed to me—he wanted me to kill. I had a copy of both letters now, and pulled them out to read again. They weren’t written to the team as a whole, but directly to me. The key was in the middle of the second one: “I imagine your superiors would be displeased with the manner of its delivery. Until such time as you no longer care what they think, we must find another way of communicating.” It was one thing to ask for a corpse as a message; it was another thing completely to suggest that the only thing stopping me from doing it was the approval of my “superiors.” He was implying, or perhaps suggesting, that without Ostler and the others keeping me reined in, I’d be out there killing, just like him. Was that true? I’d managed to get by for sixteen years without any of them controlling me and I’d never killed anyone. Except the Withered, of course. If I didn’t have the team, would I be out there killing Withered? Of course I would. Nobody else’s Marci would ever have to die if I could do something to stop it. Technically, I was killing the Withered even with the team, but I was sick of having them around and I knew I could work better without them. What had the team gotten me so far? A bunch of running around, my picture on the Internet, and almost zero new info about the cannibal or Elijah or anyone else. It was nice to have access to the forensic files now that I didn’t have my own mortuary to examine the bodies, but frankly I’d have been a whole lot happier with the mortuary. I found myself envying Elijah, and not for the first time. He was alone, and he had the dead to keep him company. It was the best of both worlds.
“Until such time as you no longer care what they think.” Did I care what they thought? They didn’t care what I thought. I had to fight just to make myself heard in our meetings; I was the child prodigy, brought in as a specialist, but they never let me do anything. Not the way I wanted to do it. I worked by getting to know the Withered, by slipping in the back door of their lives and listening while they talked. That’s what I’d done with Cody French and Mary Gardner, but we couldn’t do it now. I’d met Elijah once, but I’d never found a way to speak to him again; the few times he’d come back to Whiteflower I’d been out on other assignments, coffee runs, stakeouts of empty buildings, and stupid things that anyone else could have done—but I was the kid so why not send me? And forget about getting to know The Hunter. Gidri and his mystery companions had an uncanny knack of giving the slip to police surveillance, and we had no idea where any of them were. It was hard to disguise yourself as the boy next door when you didn’t know what door to be next to.
Brooke had lived next door to me. I’d watched her through her window at night, watched her sleep. Now she was trapped in that room, and I was trapped out here, and I just wanted to—
One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one.
“Until such time as you no longer care what they think, we must find another way of communicating.” It was a message for me, I was sure of it. So why not send one back? I couldn’t kill someone, obviously, but I could do a letter to the editor. What would I even say? “Hi, this is John, tell me about yourself.” I was hunting him, not dating him. And, of course, as soon as I put a letter in the paper the others would know it—the protocol was laid out right there in his note: the headline and the code phrase and everything. I couldn’t talk to The Hunter without Ostler and Nathan and everybody else freaking out. I was hemmed in. They wouldn’t let me work, they wouldn’t let me talk, they wouldn’t let me do anything. I crumpled the letter in my fist, only to growl at the sheer uselessness of such a gesture.
The fire was mewling, even more piteously than Boy Dog. A fire was a thing of chaos, the ultimate expression of life and freedom, and in this tiny metal box it had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to eat but the little I gave it. It made me sick to look at it, so anemic and wasted, and I used another plank of wood to lever it out, dumping it on the ground to watch as the flames hissed against the snow and sputtered and died, too disorganized to maintain their heat. I kicked a pile of snow over the blackened patches of wood and then suddenly I was stomping on them, jumping up and down, screaming in a wordless rage at the sheer wrongness of the entire world. It didn’t work, it didn’t make sense, it didn’t do anything the way it was supposed to. The way I wanted it to. Boy Dog waddled out of his table cave and howled, with me or at me I couldn’t tell, and I jumped and growled and stomped on the boards, but they didn’t have anything to break against, and after a while I collapsed onto a snowy bench, exhausted. I didn’t know if the tears in my eyes were from sadness or the bitter cold.
I had a heart now, but I didn’t know how to use it.
Boy Dog barked a few more times, his hidden stores of energy not yet spent, and then shuffled toward me and put his head on my leg. I put my hands on my head, like I was being arrested, too worried that if I touched the dog I’d try to hurt it, to break it like I hadn’t been able to break the wood. I closed my eyes and the tears came faster.
I needed to talk to Brooke. She couldn’t help me and I couldn’t help her but she was all I had, the only hint of the life I used to know. I stood up as gently as I could, dislodging Boy Dog as gingerly as possible, and fished in my pocket for my phone. I’d turned it off when I’d slipped away from Potash—he was supposed to stay with me like before, my babysitter again now that he’d gotten out of the hospital. But he’d been in a meeting with Ostler so I’d slipped away, with nothing but a text message to let them know I hadn’t been kidnapped. I saw The Hunter’s letters on the ground, trampled in the ash and snow. I picked them up and wadded them into a ball, waiting while the phone booted up. There was no sense leaving any evidence that I was the one who’d been here.
My phone chirped hysterically when it connected to the network, and I glowered at the thought of how many angry messages I was sure to have. I scrolled through the list—thirteen texts and twenty-one calls. They must really be pissed. I started dialing Trujillo’s number, to tell him I was coming in to Whiteflower, when suddenly my phone rang. It was Diana.
“Hello?”
“Dammit, John, where the hell have you been?”
“Secret dance lessons,” I said, “what’s going on?”