We were wrong.
I looked around the street; our car had hit a tree just a block from Ingrid’s house, and the street was full of people and other cars, all on their way home from the town meeting, all of them frozen in shock. I jogged a few steps in the direction the monster had gone, still reeling from the accident, and saw that people in that direction were still screaming and shying away from something I couldn’t see. The monster was still there, it was just … invisible, somehow, to people who were too far away from it. I sprinted after it as fast as I could, desperate to catch up, but the town was small, and I reached the end of it in just a few blocks. The monster was gone. With no people left to see it, I had no way to track it.
And I had no idea how to find it because everything I’d thought I knew about it was wrong.
Jessica’s death had seemed so different from the others, and I’d been certain that Officer Glassman was lying about the “bigfoot,” and yet here it was. There was no supernatural gas leak, there was an actual monster with actual claws. Glassman’s apparent lie was in fact the only useful testimony we’d gotten the entire time. And now he was dead.
I turned and walked slowly back into the center of town, my mind racing through the facts, trying madly to reorganize them into something I could use. Why had it taken Brooke? Why had it run from me? Did it think she was still Nobody and want to talk? Did it know I was hunting it and want to get away? But why not just kill me? Unless it really couldn’t. That had been our first theory with Jessica and Glassman—that the monster had come for him and killed her as collateral damage when he fought back. Maybe his death two days later was the work of the same monster coming back to finish the job—and maybe that’s why it had used poison, since the physical attack had failed the first time. But who would want to kill Glassman? If the stories about him were true, there might be plenty of people in town who wanted to kill him … but why would a Withered want to kill him? What did it gain? Especially since most of the rumors about him were apparently just rumors. He visited his sister all the time, and no one had ever tried to kill him before. What had changed?
The answer was obvious: Jessica had changed. Six years ago she’d been eight, now she was a pubescent fourteen. And while she wasn’t the only fourteen-year-old in Dillon, she was the only one he’d leered at. The only one he’d confronted directly. The only one with an older sister who swore to kill him.
Brielle had a motive for both attacks and had threatened to carry them out. Was it her? If she’d attacked Glassman and ended up killing her own sister accidentally, it would make her even more likely to come after him a second time, and screw the collateral damage like Glassman’s innocent sister. It made sense. Brielle’s boyfriend, Paul, was the only one of the group who hadn’t been killed, so that strengthened the theory a little more. She’d had an alibi for yesterday’s attack, but if she was a Withered who could change shape and turn invisible, who knew what else she could do? She was my best lead, and I had to follow it.
I was still a few blocks from Mills’s car. A group of people were gathered around it, but at that distance I could barely even count them, let alone see what they were doing. Was he dead? Injured? Had they called an ambulance? I turned sharply to the side, taking another street. This would be easier without him looking over my shoulder. I could do it my way. I stopped the first person I passed on the sidewalk, a middle-aged woman who was clutching her hands to her chest as she walked quickly toward her home, her eyes wide and darting around for danger.
“Excuse me,” I said. I kept my voice calm and nonthreatening. “Do you know where the Butler family lives?” Brielle wouldn’t be there if she was the monster, but her family would, and I had to find out what they knew if I had any chance of killing this Withered.
“They’re 30, um, 32 Willow.”
“Thank you.”
She kept walking, and I hurried on my path. We only had about thirty minutes left before Officer Davis started his lockdown. If I was going to do anything with the information I hoped to collect, I had to work fast. Willow Street was just a few blocks over, on the far side of Main, and I found number 32 just a couple of blocks later. It was a single-story home with a narrow front but stretching back into a long yard. The street was empty, the doors were closed, and the curtains were drawn. No one would see what I was about to do.