I stood in the doorway and watched her build her pyre.
I never had to think about killing the first ones. They were monsters, and I was defending myself and my family and town. Now I was defending this town, doing something no one else could do, in a way no one else could do it, and it was good. It was the right thing to do—the Withered had to die. I knew that, in the same way I knew that stalking was unacceptable, that hurting animals was evil, that killing humans was wrong. That is to say: I knew it was true but I didn’t feel it. I wanted to kill and slice and maim, but this was a cheat. A voluntary death. Tricking Attina into killing herself was … cruel, in a way. I didn’t do this to be cruel. I looked at that frail old demon, trapped for years in a life it couldn’t even recognize as its own, and I felt something I’d never felt before.
I felt pity.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“I don’t want to, either,” said Beth, stopping immediately. She turned to look at me, holding the axe in her hands. Lighter fluid dripped from her hair and her dress, running down her arms and cascading off her elbows in tiny rivulets.
Five people dead and who knew how many more if I didn’t stop her now. She’d held down Brielle and forced drain cleaner down her throat, choking her and burning her and eating her from the inside—not because she wanted to, not because she had to, but because she couldn’t control herself. Because she was the worst of humanity given form. But she was also the best of it. She’d lived for so long here, never hurting a fly, making soup for her neighbors and organizing neighborhood watches. She could be good when the world was good around her. Did she really deserve to die just because I had come and ruined paradise?
But no paradise lasts forever. What would she do tomorrow, when a hundred national guardsmen showed up? They wanted to protect the town, so she’d protect it. They wanted to kill a bad guy, so she’d kill … I didn’t know who. Someone. Unless I killed her now.
The demon king Rack had told me how the Withered began. Human beings, lost in antiquity, had given up their most hated traits to gain unimaginable power. Nobody had hated her body, so she gave it up forever; she gained the ability to take whatever body she wanted, but she’d lost that essential humanity that made it worthwhile. Forman had given up his emotions—why? He must have felt something terrible, guilt or loss or shame, and never wanted to feel it again. Attina had given up her own will, her own choices, I suppose because she’d made too many bad ones and didn’t want the responsibility anymore. She didn’t want the pain of choosing wrong. But choices still get made, whether you’re the one making them or not, and all she had become was a slave.
I had to choose for her. I hated the choice more than I’d ever hated anything, but I had to make it.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said, and summoned all my will. “But I’m going to.”
“We’re going to,” she echoed. Tears rolled down her face, and I wondered how much she really knew, or felt, or understood about what was happening. She couldn’t make her own decisions, but was she aware of them? Was there something inside of her, like Marci inside of Brooke, that looked out and watched her body act, and cried and screamed and begged it to stop?
“We’re going to kill ourselves,” she sobbed. “And then we can start again.” She raised the axe, turned toward the furnace, and shattered the valve on the gas line.
“Start again?” I repeated. That was something Brooke had said—a holdover from Nobody’s old behavior. Possess a girl, live her life, and when you found a better one you kill yourself and take it. Start again. I looked behind me, but Brooke wasn’t there. She was still upstairs.
With the rifle.
I screamed and ran as Beth lit a match, and the basement leapt into horrible, glorious, fiery life.
25
“A,” said Brooke. “American Shipping.”
The pickup jostled us, rolling across the blacktop of an old, flat highway. The wind seemed to speak as it whistled past us, half-formed words rippling past in invisible whorls. We were getting close to the end of our ride, and billboards were starting to appear. I saw a sign for a plumbing company and pointed it out. “B.”
“Good for you!” she said, laughing and clapping her hands. They were still bandaged from the fire; I’d washed her burns as best I could, and stolen an old T-shirt off a clothesline to cover the wounds. She smiled at me. “I knew you’d like this game.”
I looked at her, remembering those laughing lips wrapped around the barrel of a hunting rifle, those clapping hands trying to reach the trigger. I’d saved her just in time. And years too late. I saw a C on a road sign, but instead of pointing it out I distracted her by pointing the other direction.