“You don’t know what you mean,” said Nathan, and I had no response because he was right. I’d wanted Potash dead—when he killed Elijah I wanted him dead more than anything in the world—but now that I’d seen it happen I couldn’t bear it. I knew that sometimes people had to die; I’d had that realization before. But I knew now that I had no idea how to make all the other decisions that come with it: who had to die, and when, and how. Humans and demons were categories that made sense to me, or at least they used to. Now nothing did.
Nathan nodded, prodding the corpse with his foot. “I was lucky you were distracting him—there’s no way I could have taken him if he was paying attention to me. A quick shot in the back of the head was my only chance and I had to take it.”
“No you didn’t,” I said. “He was … on our side.”
“Don’t be naive,” said Nathan. “He was on our team but he was never on our side. Maybe Ostler’s or Diana’s side, but not yours, and definitely not mine. We’ve gone our own way, and whether we abandoned them or they abandoned us, it’s all the same in the end.”
“They didn’t abandon us,” I said, “they died.”
“You left them long before that,” said Nathan. “Or are we pretending you weren’t sending e-mails to Rack?”
I looked up suddenly, focusing on his face. How did he know that? Nobody knew that but me and Rack. And since I didn’t tell him …
“You were talking to him, too,” I said.
“Of course.”
I nodded. “You’re the one who told Rack all those secrets, aren’t you? Who better to dig up our buried pasts than the doctor of library science? All of it was public information, except yours, and we couldn’t figure out who had told him because no one knew it. No one but you.”
“I didn’t really want any of you to know, either,” said Nathan, “but I figured you’d be dead soon anyway.”
“So you just turned on us,” I said, “just like that.”
“Just like that,” said Nathan.
“Why?”
“You aren’t smart enough to figure that out on your own?” asked Nathan. “John Wayne Cleaver, the great psychological mastermind?”
I nodded, trying to think—not just about his motives, but about our situation. What was Nathan planning? How could we get out of it? Was he keeping us alive just to gloat, or did he have something else in mind? He didn’t want to kill us, or he could have done that an hour ago. That meant he was waiting for something—for Rack? Was he handing us over to Rack?
“All Rack’s letters were addressed to me,” I said. “He wants to talk to me.”
“He’ll be here soon,” said Nathan. “I sent him a text on the bus.”
Then we didn’t have much time. “He wants to talk to me, but he offered something different to you.”
“We don’t want to be here if Rack’s coming,” said Brooke. She’d come up behind me and gripped my arm tightly. I couldn’t help but have a quick flashback to Potash and what had happened when Nathan came up behind him, but I pushed it from my mind. Brooke wasn’t there to kill me.
I looked around the room, trying to see what we had to work with. The white plastic tank in the back of the truck just held water, now that I saw the label up close. That wouldn’t help us. The garage door was still open—should we run? Would that solve anything, or just postpone it? Our only real weapon against Rack was Elijah, and he was dead now; Nathan had tried so hard to keep us away from here because he knew Elijah was Rack’s only weakness.
But no. He had other weaknesses, too. He needed hearts, for one thing. His body was strong and fast and regenerated at a ridiculous rate, but it was still a human body, and it still functioned the way a normal human body functioned. It couldn’t function without a heart. He had other weaknesses too: he didn’t have a mouth or a nose, so he couldn’t taste or smell. I could use that. More than that, though, maybe more than anything, was Rack’s biggest weakness of all—his one glaring blind spot.
He’d never lost. So he didn’t think he could.
I studied the garage carefully: the fuel pump, the tool bench, the water pump on the white plastic tank. The knife in my hand. I could do this, but I didn’t have much time. And I needed one more piece of information.
“You joined Rack because he offered you something big,” I said, not looking at Nathan but circling away from him, looking at the water pump. How long was the hose? How big was the nozzle? “You’d done the research on us, so you already knew we were a pack of degenerates: killers, gangsters, psychos. A former rapist. I assume Trujillo is dead, by the way?”
“I killed him right before you called,” said Nathan. “We timed it to coincide with the attack on your strike team.”
I nodded. “And you were fine with that attack because we had no moral high ground. Compared to people like Cody French and Mary Gardner, our team was equivalent at best, and compared to Elijah Sexton we were monsters.” I read the label on the water pump: sixty psi at the lowest setting. It was high, but it could work. I circled past Nathan, stooping down to study the floor.