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.”