How much longer did we have? A minute? An hour? All this work would be for nothing if Rack appeared while the hoses were still attached. I let go of the pump-to-artery seal, hoping it would keep working on its own, and when it didn’t immediately explode I dug through Nathan’s pockets for his phone, hoping to find Rack’s text conversation. The phone was locked, and I didn’t know the code. I tried a few random patterns, then gave up and threw the phone in frustration. I instead used my time cleaning up, putting away the extra tools while the hose steadily pumped gas into Nathan’s body.
A chemical embalming could take several minutes, but I didn’t need the whole body filled, just the heart. How long was that? I thought again about leaving—just hopping into Elijah’s car and driving away—but I couldn’t do it. Killing was a choice, like Potash said, and I had made a choice to kill Rack. He couldn’t be allowed to continue. Ten thousand years of terror would end tonight, and if I had to die to make it happen … I looked up at Brooke, blond hair limp and stringy against her skull, her frail body lost in the folds of that giant coat. She watched the darkness intently, and I watched her. Should I tell her to leave? Was her life in any less danger out there than in here? I might have to die to kill Rack, but she could get away. I owed her that much.
It was the least I could do.
“You should go,” I said.
“Go where?”
“Anywhere,” I said. “Away.”
“But I love you.”
“No, you don’t—”
“I know you don’t love me,” she said, and though I couldn’t see her face I could hear the emotion in her voice, choked and cracking. She was crying. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”
I watched her a moment longer, but said nothing.
A full embalming used about a gallon of fluid for every fifty pounds of body. Nathan was what, two hundred pounds? Two twenty? I tried to calculate the flow of volume at sixty psi, wondering if I could even do it in my head, when Brooke stiffened suddenly.
“John.…”
Rack was coming. I unlocked the vise grips and yanked the pump free of the artery, trailing gas across the floor as I ran to the tank and shut it all down. I threw the hose up into the bed of the truck, hiding it, and ran back to Nathan, spreading his blood around the neck wound, pulling out the screwdriver, doing everything I could to make it look like his throat had been slashed in a fight. It looked too clinical, and I slashed at it again with my knife, feeling only an echo of the fury that had made me want to stab him before. Really, all that was left now was fear. Brooke backed up slowly, taking my hand when she reached me, and we backed up together to the end of the garage. I held up my knife like a cross, as if I was trying to ward off a vampire. It made me feel stupid, but lowering it made me feel vulnerable, so I kept it up. Better stupid than terrified.
Rack walked slowly around the corner of the garage door, a monstrous giant nearly seven feet tall. He wore a long black coat, stained past his knees with blood, and a thick black scarf around his neck and face. Only his eyes were visible over the top, gleaming in the light of our lone yellow bulb. He stopped before the corpses and watched us.
This is what it all came down to. Had I read him right? Did I understand the way he worked and thought and acted? He’d never lost, not in ten thousand years—he was so confident in his own strength that he’d never suspect a trap of mine could work. He’d told Nathan to hold me here because he wanted to talk, and that meant he’d use one of the bodies to speak to me. Come on, I thought, do it. Take Nathan’s heart.
The room reeked of gasoline. Would he really be done in by something as simple as the lack of a nose?
He unwrapped his scarf and opened his coat, and I saw again the black pit in the place of his heart. He watched me in hideous silence as thick tendrils of his charred black soul reached out and down—
—toward Potash.
The sludge clutched at Potash’s face, surging into his mouth, shredding his insides. I stepped back, too shocked to think clearly. What could I do? I only had one plan. I’d considered every variable and I was wrong. Potash’s body flopped and wriggled, and then his throat bulged out, and then his mouth was forced open impossibly wide and his slick red heart emerged from between the teeth, wrapped in black tentacles of ash. Rack raised the heart up, pulling it into the mass of sludge in his chest, and with a ghostly gasp Potash began to speak.
“You have given me more enjoyment than I expected,” said the dead voice. “I haven’t felt this thrill from a hunt in a thousand years or more.”
I had to summon all my courage to speak. “That’s it?” I asked. “You keep me alive this long, and tease at some big final climax, and all you’re going to do is hunt me down and kill me?” Why hadn’t he taken Nathan’s heart? Had I read him that wrong? Was he trying to send some other message than I expected, or did he simply not care which voice he used?
The Withered stood still as dark stone, watching me, while the soft, dead words whispered out of Potash’s throat: “I don’t want to kill you, John. I want you to join me.”