“So he can find us all at once?” Elijah shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“Just far enough that we can lie low,” I said, walking in. Brooke and Nathan followed. “Just the next town over, that’s all we ask.” I was about to tell him that we trusted him, that I wasn’t like the others in the police station who’d been to afraid even to talk to him, but Elijah’s next words shocked me.
“I don’t trust you,” he said.
“You don’t trust us?” asked Nathan.
“Why should I?” asked Elijah, looking up again from his work. “You hit me with a truck.”
“I’m sorry,” said Brooke.
“Look,” I said, but Elijah shook his head and stormed toward me; Nathan cringed and stepped back a few steps.
“No,” said Elijah, “you look. I left the Withered years ago—millennia ago. I don’t like them, I don’t like their methods, I don’t like the way they think they can do anything they want to anybody just because they’re stronger. They used to be gods and they think they still are. Humans are their playthings. And then when I finally got back in the fight and I picked a side because you—you, of all people—convinced me that it was worth it, it turns out you think exactly the same way. We’re your playthings, and you can play god with our lives. I thought you were different.”
“I told you we were right,” I said. “I never told you we were different.”
“Maybe you should have,” said Elijah. He glared at me a moment longer, and the age behind his eyes seemed suddenly overwhelming, ten thousand years of weariness. I didn’t have an answer, and he turned back to his work. “I’m leaving,” he said again. “You can find your own way out.”
He pulled the gas-pump nozzle out of the car and turned to put it back on its hook, when suddenly a loud crack split the air and Elijah dropped to the floor. I stumbled back, my ears ringing from the sound, and looked at Nathan. He didn’t even have his gun out—his empty hands were clamped tightly over his ears, his face locked in a grimace. Brooke looked like she was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything. I looked back at Elijah, struggling to get up, but he was hit by two more shots. I could barely even think from the shock—could barely process what was happening—but Brooke grabbed my arm and pulled me past Elijah to the end of the car, yanking me down into cover. I peeked around the edge of the hood in time to see a dark shape hurtling in through the garage door, a man streaked with dirt and blood. Elijah groaned, regenerating too slowly; the intruder raised his arm and a long, sharp machete flashed brightly in the light. He swung once and took off Elijah’s head.
It was Potash.
I staggered to my feet. “You killed him!”
“That was the point,” growled Potash.
“He was on our side!” I shouted. “He wasn’t even that—he was on a better side. We’re the ones who betrayed him!”
“He was a Withered,” said Potash. “We’ve danced around too long, trying to understand them, to ally with them, and what has it gotten us? The whole team’s dead, and I’m done dancing. It’s time we kill who needs to be killed, and finish this once and for all.”
“He didn’t need to be killed,” I said, dropping to my knees beside the body. Elijah was good—he was better than we were. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
Elijah’s body collapsed, turning to ash and grease before my eyes. Soulstuff, he called it. Too corrupt to do anything but rot. In seconds his body was a bubbling pool of gritty black tar.
I felt the knife in my pocket.
“You were right,” I said, climbing slowly to my feet. I looked at Potash, covered with cuts and scrapes, his chest heaving from exertion, his ruptured cannula held to his nose with one hand. He had killed one of the only good people I knew. I said it again. “You were right.” I pulled out my knife. “It’s time to kill whoever needs to be killed.”
18
“Everybody calm down,” said Nathan.
Potash looked at me, leaning slightly back, as if reconsidering me. “What do you think you’re going to do?”
I looked at him closely, my hand tight around the knife. “Why are you doing this, Potash?”
“I think I just explained myself pretty well.”
“Why are you on this team?” I demanded. “What brought you here? Who are you? No one knows anything about you: not your background, not your motives, not your outlook on life. Why are you doing this? What are you doing that you don’t have to do?”
“I’m not just a killer you can analyze, John.”
“But you could be,” I said. “In another situation, in another place, if you’d gone down a less official path and I’d gone down a better one, I might be tracking you right now as the worst serial killer in history. You kill people—why? You live apart from the world, even more than I do—why?”
“Because someone needs to do it.”