Sister Debbie looked at the sludge, then all around the room. “Where is Christopher?”
“He left,” I said. I pulled the magazine clear of the gun, popped the extra bullet out of the chamber, and put them all away. I’d have to find a new hiding place now that Nobody had seen this one. “Who’s in charge here when he’s gone?”
“He’s never gone,” said Sister Debbie.
“But if he steps out for a bit,” I said. “Like, if he goes into town for the day? Who’s in charge?”
“He’s always in charge,” said Sister Debbie. “Always and everywhere, over everything there is. I love him so much.” She smiled. “Isn’t it great to be alive?”
“You’re asking the wrong people,” I said, pulling Nobody to her feet. “It’s time for us to go.”
We picked up our packs and left the house. No one followed us. We left the farm and followed the road until we could no longer see to walk, then curled up together against the trunk of a tree, my arm around Brooke’s shoulders.
“I didn’t like that,” she whispered.
“Neither did I.” I wanted to like it. Killing was an important thing to do; killing was necessary. Killing demons made the world a better place, and the actual act of killing, well … I knew I wasn’t supposed to enjoy it, but I did. Usually. The sharp thrill of it, of watching a living person turn into a dead one. I’d grown up in a mortuary, surrounded by my parents’ work, more at home with the dead than the living, but Withered didn’t turn into dead bodies, they just melted into ash. Everything I wanted, except none of it at all.
I wanted to light a fire.
Had it really been that easy? Was Yashodh really gone forever? All he’d wanted was for someone to love him because he couldn’t love himself. Ten thousand years staving off death one whispered adulation at a time, only to end here. Shot in his own home by a stranger he thought was a friend.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” said Brooke.
“Only a few left,” I said.
“There will always be a few more left.”
“Attina,” I said. “And then … whoever’s chasing us.”
“The FBI is chasing us,” said Brooke. “Please don’t kill them.”
“Of course I’m not going to kill them,” I said. “I’ve never killed a human.” Well, never a good one.
“But you want to,” she said.
“That’s how you know I’ll never do it.”
She started crying again. “Is this all there is? Dirt on old roads, secret pockets full of bullets…”
“I want to give you a real life—”
“Because I can’t handle this one,” she said, and all the alarms in my head went off.
“You were a superstar back there,” I told her, trying to feed her self-worth. “That could have taken us weeks, maybe months to figure out, but you got him talking in five minutes. In two. I never would have just told him who we were—you’re brilliant, Brooke.”
She growled her answer through clenched teeth. “My name is Nobody.”
“You are brilliant,” I said again. “You said you’d protect me and you did. Partners to the end. I could never do this alone.”
“Do you think that’s going to make me happy?” she asked. She wrenched away from me, and I could see her silhouette in the starlight, sitting in the dirt a foot away. “I just told you that I hate this, that I never want to do it again, that I don’t want to be a killer and watch anybody die, human or demon or anything else, not a bird or a bug or germ in my blood, and all you can think of to tell me is how good I am at it, how responsible I am for all the blood on all our hands—”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, “and you know it. You know how good this is. You saw those people, without … without a brain between them, and you know that if Yashodh had lived he’d have done it to more of them, that he’d already done it to tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people, a giant parade of brainwashed nobodies stretching back to the beginning of time, and it ended tonight.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be f— What does funny have to do with it?”
“You called them brainwashed Nobodies,” said Brooke. “I am not brainwashed.”
“I wasn’t talking about you—”
“Then don’t use my name!” she shouted. She stood up, and I rose with her, terrified of what she might do. There were no trucks to jump in front of on this empty road, but the area might hold a dozen other ways to kill yourself. “I am Nobody!” she screamed. “It’s my name and my job and my entire wasted life! I can’t be you, John, I can’t just … turn off my heart whenever it hurts.”
“Neither can I.”
“Then why don’t you love me?”