“Abso-damn-lutely!” shouted Derek, wagging his finger at me before taking another swig from his can. “You’re not an a-hole, you’re just trying to get lucky. You were hoping to tap this chick right here in the theater, while your friggin’ dog watches, and now you can’t because we’re all up in your love nest.” He threw the second beer can and opened a third.
“What’ll you give us if we leave?” asked Paul.
Derek looked at Brooke’s body. “What’ll you give us?”
“I think it’s time for you to go,” said Marci.
“Oh man,” said Derek. “She wants it too. Can’t wait to be alone. Maybe we’ll hang around and listen.”
“Or watch,” said Paul.
Corey was simply smiling, saying nothing.
I could feel my anger growing as they talked, incensed at the way they looked at the Marci, the way they leered and suggested and filled the air with filth. I wanted to hurt them, to make them scream in pain and terror, but then suddenly all my anger was gone, replaced by a cold, clinical calm. I had killed several Withered in the past few years, but only one human. I’d dreamed about it my whole life, or at least since the first time I made the connection between death and the dead. We don’t always think about that connection, as obvious as it sounds, because death is so common in movies and games and stuff, and so sterilized, but it’s like meat: there comes a time when you realize that bacon, for example, is literally the sliced up flesh of a living thing, an animal that used to walk around and do things and enjoy things, and now it’s dead and you cut it into pieces. The body in the casket at your grandfather’s funeral used to be your grandfather, not because of magic but because he died, because something—maybe old age or cancer or a car wreck or a murderer—killed him. I’m fascinated by that moment, that act of turning a live body into a dead one, and eight months ago I got to do it, and it was … nothing and everything all at once. Disappointing and amazing. Not what I thought it would be, but I couldn’t wait to try again. They say your first time having sex is the same way, but I can’t imagine it would have that level of intensity. People have sex all the time, but killing is … rare. Beautiful, in a way, and I know how that sounds, but think about it. It’s like alchemy, a magic transmutation—not just of physical matter but of something ethereal. A spirit or a soul, turned from … something, into something else. I didn’t know what that something was, but I wanted to. I lay awake some nights, most nights really, thinking about it, about how to do it, about how to slow down and do it right, and now here I had three people practically begging for it. What would it be like to shove my knife into Derek’s chest? To cut out Paul’s heart? To peel back Corey’s skin and watch the muscles move underneath it, stretching and contracting and glistening in the starlight—
“Pay attention when I’m talking to you,” said Derek, and I focused my eyes and saw him right in my face, so close I could feel the flecks of spit when he shouted. “There’s three of us and one of you,” he said. His voice came at me through a cloud of beer and halitosis. “How you gonna stop us from taking whatever we want from your little girl here?”
Which one should I start on? I bent down and pulled out my knife, and all three of them backed up in a rush.
I felt a hand on my arm, and looked down to see Brooke’s fingers, travel stained and fragile. “You’re not Potash,” she said. Or was it Marci? Or was it one of the others? The thought made me angry, not being able to tell the difference, and I took a step forward, longing to finish the kill.
“He’s friggin’ nuts,” said Derek.
Brooke’s finger’s tightened on my arm, and I heard her whisper: “You’re not trained.”
Corey’s eyes were wide. “Trained?”
That’s what she’d meant about Potash—not that I wasn’t a killer, but that I wasn’t a trained fighter. This was Potash’s knife and he could have handled three teenage jerks without even breaking a sweat, but I couldn’t. I had no combat training, no hope for a direct confrontation. My style was slow and methodical: to wait, to find a weakness, and then to exploit it with no warning and no chance for a counterattack. I couldn’t win this fight with a knife, and if I used a gun it wouldn’t … I felt my cold rage fading. A gun wouldn’t have the same satisfaction, the visceral thrill that I needed this to have. I felt my emotions receding, backing out of the calm, passing down through the anger, returning to normal. I wasn’t going to hurt them. She had said exactly what I needed, in exactly the way that worked—not protesting, not appealing to rightness or honor, but a simple, pragmatic statement of ability.
“Thank you,” I said. I looked up at the three. “You can go now.”