“They persuaded Nick, and he grew up more afraid of them than the boogeyman under his bed.”
“Thanks,” I said again. “We’ll be careful.” I took a step toward the door, but I still didn’t know where to find them. I looked outside, but still no Brooke. I turned back to the clerk. “How about a roadside stand? A lot of these places sell cheese or vegetables or whatever—does Spirit of Light? Maybe I could ask there, see if anyone knows my sister?”
“Head out on State Road 27,” said the clerk. “Plenty of folks buy produce from them—it’s safe enough. You don’t have a car, though, right?”
“Just the bus.”
“Bus don’t run that way, but you can try hitching.”
I tried to look serious, eager to convince him we were as normal as could be. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“You’re heading out to the most dangerous part of Baker there is. Someone kidnaps you on the way there, it’ll be a kindness.”
I thanked him and left, trudging toward our room. It was good to have information, but most of it made me uneasy. Where were the deaths? Was Yashodh using some kind of mind control? Most of the Withered were too dangerous to confront head on; we had to lurk in the fringes, learning everything we could until we found a weakness we could exploit. This Withered sounded like he might be too dangerous to even meet.
I paused in front of our door, thinking. What if we just left? He wasn’t killing anybody, apparently. We didn’t have to kill him. Maybe we shouldn’t. But I couldn’t shake the sound of the clerk’s voice as he warned us away, too scared to—
The door opened, and Brooke started in surprise to find me standing silently in front of it. “Sranje! ?ta radi? ovdje?”
“English,” I said softly.
She stared at me, confused, and then tilted her head to the side as her surprise turned to curiosity. “What language was I speaking?”
I stepped past her into the room and closed the door carefully behind me. “No idea. Something you’ve used before, I think, but I didn’t recognize the words.”
She walked back and sat on the bed. “I asked what you were doing there. Guarding me?”
I starting gathering our few belongings, repacking them in our backpacks. “No, just lost in thought and standing in a weird place. Tell me about Yashodh again.” The Withered assumed human identities, but they had their own names. Nobody, the demon who’d taken Brooke, had been called Hulla. The Lord High Light-Bright, as the clerk called him, was named Yashodh.
Brooke shook her head. “You know I don’t like talking about Yashodh.”
“Well, we’re going to meet him at some point, so we need to get over that.” I zipped one pack closed and collected some discarded socks for the other one. Today was my last clean pair; we’d need to do laundry soon. “You knew this day was coming. We’ve done all the other Withered we can find, so it’s time to do Yashodh.”
“We haven’t done Attina.”
“This is on our way to Attina,” I said. “We do it now, or we do it six months from now.”
“I know,” said Brooke, falling back on the bed, “I just … I don’t know. Maybe I can remember some others.” Her memory was riddled with holes, but it was also the only tool we had to find and hunt the Withered. She clenched her teeth. “You don’t know him like I do.”
“So tell me about him.”
“I already told you everything I know.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” I said. “Do you know him or not?”
“He hates himself,” said Brooke, “even more than I do.” I glanced at her; I’d known her long enough to see the real meaning behind that statement.
I corrected her softly. “You mean ‘more than Nobody hates herself,’” I said.
“I am Nobody,” said Brooke. Or, I suppose, said Nobody.
I shrugged and zipped up the second backpack; she didn’t show any warning signs of another depressive attack, so it wasn’t worth arguing.
“Each of the Withered gave something up,” said Nobody, and her eyes got that faraway look they sometimes had when she talked about the distant past. Nearly ten thousand years ago, if the FBI’s researcher had guessed right. “I gave up my body,” she continued, “because it was horrible and I hated it. Yashodh gave up himself.”
“But what does that mean?” I asked. “We’ve been tossing that around for a year now, trying to figure out what he can do. Nobody gave up her body and gained the ability to take the bodies of others. Can Yashodh take the ‘selves’ of others? What does that even mean? It might explain the cult, if he’s somehow subsuming their individuality into some kind of collective, but why? What does he possibly gain from doing that?”
“He’s weak,” said Nobody, her voice dripping with disdain. “He’s lucky to get anything, let alone something he wants.”