“Apparently they thought so,” said Nobody. “We just have to figure out why.”
“Great,” I said. I rubbed my face and eyes, still on edge from last night and this morning, and everything bad that could possibly happen all happening at once. I needed to burn something, or break something, or scream, or cry, or jump up and down. I felt like a soda can that’d been shaken and shaken, relentlessly, for hours. The pressure was building and building and had nowhere to go. I had to let it out somehow.
Except I had to keep it under control, especially now that Mills was here, or the FBI would lock me up and take Brooke away forever.
I stood up to walk around. “Okay then, let’s figure this out. Why does he do it?”
“Kill?” asked Nobody. “Burn things? Read your mind? You’ve got to be more specific.”
“Why does he…” I shook my head. “Let’s go back to basics. What does he do that he doesn’t have to do?”
“You always ask that.”
“Because it’s always important,” I said. “You want to get in somebody’s head, you figure out what he’s choosing to do.”
“That’s why I love you,” said Nobody. “You always know exactly what to do.”
“You don’t love me,” I said. “You’re a fragmented memory trapped in a broken mind.”
“Is that all Marci is, too?”
I clenched my hands into fists. “Don’t talk about her.”
“Or what, you’ll hurt me?”
I gritted my teeth, hating every second of this conversation. “No.”
“Then stop making idle threats,” she said. “It’s the sign of a weak mind. Now start solving this problem.”
“Attina is choosing to murder people that we talk to,” I said. “In exactly the ways I want to do it.”
“And he’s lighting fires you want to light, too,” said Nobody.
“Everything he’s done…” I said. “No, wait. It’s not everything.” I looked over at her. “I didn’t want to kill Jessica.”
“Are you sure? You want to kill a lot of people.”
“I didn’t think anything bad about Jessica,” I said. “Officer Glassman, sure, but he’s not the one that got killed.”
Nobody sat up straighter in her bed, as much as her wrist restraints would allow. “What if he was the target, and she just got caught in the crossfire?”
“So we’re looking at a Withered who can fail,” I said, nodding. This was finally getting us somewhere. “Attina attacks teenagers because he can’t take down a full adult.”
“Maybe he’s small,” said Nobody.
I shook my head. “Officer Glassman said he was bigfoot,” I said. “So he’s either lying to make himself look better, or Attina’s somehow huge and weak at the same time.”
“Maybe he has a weakness that isn’t physical,” said Nobody. “Maybe he’s … I don’t know, afraid of people, or afraid of authority. Or he’s afraid of loud noises—did Glassman get any shots off with his weapon?”
“No guns were fired,” I said, remembering the sounds of the attack. “Just three screams. I … don’t know why.”
“Maybe he can incapacitate his victims,” said Nobody, “which is how he was able to kill Derek so quietly.”
I shook my head again. “Corey wasn’t incapacitated, just surprised. In fact, all three victims were killed in completely different ways—and if the methods aren’t consistent, they aren’t important. He kills however he can, in whatever method gets the job done. Or, I suppose, whatever methods he gleans from my head. But the point is, we shouldn’t be looking at how he kills, we should be looking at how he chooses who to kill. Why go after people I’ve thought about hurting?”
“To help you?” asked Nobody. “This is a demon who didn’t do anything for decades, at least, and then started killing almost immediately when we showed up in town. You have a very attractive mind, with a strong sense of purpose, and maybe that got his attention. Look at me: I threw away everything I had to be with you—I changed everything I did—”
“You didn’t change anything,” I said. “Your obsession with me was just one more link in a very old chain. You saw something you wanted and you tried to take it, just like you did with Marci and Brooke and all the others. This is different.”
“Don’t brush me off like that,” Nobody growled.
“You’re not real,” I said, pointing at her harshly. “I’ll tiptoe around the other personalities but not you. You’re horrible. And you’re in wrist restraints so you couldn’t kill yourself if you tried.”
“I can break this body, though,” she threatened. “No matter how they try to bind it.”
I stared at her a moment, furious at what she’d done to Brooke, at what she was threatening to do, almost daring her to try something but knowing that anything she did, or that I did to her, would only hurt Brooke worse. Finally I turned away. “We need to talk to Officer Glassman.”