Nobody (4 page)

This in mind, Nix studied his prey dispassionately, wondering what twist of fate had brought her to the window. Did she sense the danger? Had she killed enough on her own to recognize the taste of death in the air? Did she know that after today, she’d never kill again?

The gun in Nix’s hands was heavy and cold. His finger
slipped easily over the trigger—too easily, and he checked the silencer. It was an unnecessary precaution, but one he took nonetheless. He’d been watching her—this girl in the window—for too long. He’d allowed himself to become distracted by the shadow of her body.

I’ve never killed someone my age before. Not a girl
.

It didn’t matter. If this Null was Code Omega, she was a plague, and he was the only cure. Nulls were manipulative. They played with the emotions and hopes and dreams of others, without ever feeling any empathy or real emotions of their own. They were empty shells that mocked what it meant to be human. They were incapable of thinking of anyone or anything else, and sooner or later, they always killed.

Less than shadow. Less than air
.

Nix held tight to the cover of his own invisibility. He couldn’t think about this girl as a girl, and he couldn’t think about her as a monster. He couldn’t afford to think about anything, couldn’t allow himself the luxury of personhood if he didn’t want to get caught.

He needed to stay in the fade.

The world might never know how dangerous this girl was, but once the deed was done, they’d know that she was murdered. They’d wonder who would do such a horrible thing. They would never know why it had to be done.

They would never thank him.

You are nothing. You are nobody. You will never matter
to anyone, and the only way you can make a difference in this world is to kill
.

A woman pranced past him, walking three dogs on two leashes. The third dog ran unleashed, and it was the one that paused, for an instant, in front of him. And then it shook its head, sneezed, and ran on. Nix lifted his arm. He aimed his gun just under the edge of his mark’s white bathing suit, which lay lightly on her skin, held on by a hand behind her back.

He saw the suit as it would be—coated in blood.

Nix moved to squeeze, picturing the bullet entering her chest, the heart underneath her sun-kissed skin stilling.

The trigger pressed back against his finger.

Do it
.

And then she opened her eyes. And instead of staring past him or around him or through him, Nix’s target stared directly at him. She saw him. And she screamed.

Claire felt, rather than heard, herself screaming. Now that her eyes were open, she couldn’t close them. She couldn’t look away—not from the gun pointed directly at her heart and not from the boy holding it.

His eyes were blue, so light that she wondered if they glowed in the dark. His hair was jet-black and long, and all up and down one arm, there were tattoos—black lines
that slashed across his arm, each crossing the one before it in an uneven X.

There was a thin white line across his neck, and even from a distance, she could see a crescent scar on the left side of his jaw.

His cheekbones were sharp, his mouth soft.

He was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen, and he was going to kill her.

I’m still screaming
, Claire realized.
I’m not moving. I’m just screaming
.

None of this made sense—not the way she’d known he was there, not the gun he had trained on her chest, not the fact that he hadn’t pulled the trigger, and not the disconcerting truth that she still hadn’t jumped out of the way.

How can someone want me dead if no one knows I’m alive?

As far as questions went, it was a good one, though perhaps not the very most relevant at that exact moment.

I’m still screaming. I’m screaming, and there’s no one to hear me. No Mom. No Dad. No Mrs. Milligan and her three little Yorkies. This boy is going to kill me, and she just walked right by
.

Claire could almost understand her neighbor’s not hearing her screams. She was inside, Mrs. Milligan was not. And she didn’t expect the woman to turn back and look at the house, or to see her distress, or to even realize that a girl named Claire lived at number 116. But how could Mrs. Milligan not see her killer?

He was standing there, in broad daylight, with a gun. Danger rolled off his body in waves. Each muscle, each mark, each scar screamed for attention.

Claire couldn’t take her eyes off him.

Her fascination couldn’t have lasted longer than a second, or two at most, but to Claire, it felt like an eternity. A single unit of
forever
spent screaming and staring, staring and screaming.

And then, his finger bearing down on the trigger, the boy lifted his eyes from her chest to her chin. From her chin to her mouth. From her mouth to her nose, and then, finally, to her eyes.

If she’d felt his stare on her skin before, she felt it inside now. There was no metaphor to describe it, no natural disaster big enough to do justice to the unbearable pressure and tumultuous power crashing into and through and around her insides. This wasn’t an earthquake. This wasn’t a tsunami.

This was no hurricane.

It was
everything
—every single thing that had ever existed, every feeling she’d ever felt, every Situation, every wallow, every dream.

His gaze bathed her in warmth until she thought she would be sick from exposure, and—convinced it was the last thing she would ever do—she looked back at him. His eyes on hers. Hers on his.

The world exploded. And for a moment, a single
moment, as that deafening, all-encompassing roar filled her ears, Claire Ryan thought she’d been shot.

Situation: What if the only boy who’d ever really looked at you was dead set on seeing you … dead?

No blood. There’s no blood. He shot me … I heard it. I heard
something,
and God knows I felt it
.

With a start, Claire realized that there was no wound, no small, round hole through which everything she’d once been could leak out and onto the floor. Not believing what her body was telling her, Claire worked to pull her eyes away from his, and the moment she did, the spell was broken.

She fell to the floor and rolled as far away from the window as she could get. Her breath caught in her throat, and her hands—skeptical of what her brain was telling them—began to search her chest frantically for a wound that did not exist, from a bullet that had never been fired.

I felt it. I heard it. I …

“I have to call the police.” Claire was not—contrary to what the past forty-five seconds might have led someone to believe—entirely without common sense. She had to get out of the room. Away from the windows. She had to call the police.

Even if she didn’t want to.

Even if they never caught him. Even if her would-be killer was already gone and never planned to come back. Even if the dumbest, most instinctual part of her wanted
nothing more than to climb back to the window and look out.

To see if he was still there.

To look at him.

And to feel him, looking at her.

I’m sick in the head. I’m sick, I need help, and I
am
calling the police
.

As she followed through with her promise, crawling toward the phone and dialing 911, Claire felt the last of the pinpricks, the fireworks, the
everything
leaving her body. For the first time since she’d walked to the window, she felt the safety of anonymity, the calm of being utterly and entirely alone. Of being Claire.

He’s gone
.

It made no sense, but she was certain. She knew what she’d felt when the boy was there, and she knew that it was utterly, entirely, unarguably gone.

She missed it.

Oh, God
, Claire thought, as she stuttered out her name and address and emergency to the operator.
Someone just tried to kill me, and I’m sad that he left. He wants me dead, and I want to see him again
.

Need to see him again
.

Okay, that’s it. I’m officially crazy
.

It was, without question, a new low—even for Claire.

It was an aberration. It was an error. It won’t happen again
.

That was what Nix told himself, over and over again, as he bided his time in the days after his failed attempt on the Null’s life. He couldn’t risk going back to the girl’s house to finish the job—not immediately. Not with the police crawling all over the place that first day.

Not with the girl’s parents at her beck and call, flanking her every move for the three days since. Why the Null had decided to use her unnatural charisma to lure her mother and father home, Nix wasn’t entirely sure.

Maybe the threat of her own death was worth suffering the presence of the people who loved her.

Maybe she was planning on using them as human shields: living, breathing bulletproof vests that meant no more to her than the furniture.

Or maybe it just made her feel powerful to know that she could pull them back to her whenever she wanted, like puppets on a string, even though deep down, most parents knew that there was something wrong with their Null. Even as children, Nulls’ hugs were empty. They were unmoved when Mommy accidentally sliced open her finger. Instead of reaching for the Band-Aids, they leaned forward to get a better look.

No compassion.

No empathy.

Defective. The ying to his twisted yang, a Nobody’s polar opposite in every way.
I should have killed her
.

He was going to kill her. Only …

She’d seen him. She’d
noticed
him. And even after she’d started screaming, she hadn’t pulled the attention of the woman with the dogs. She could have, if she’d wanted to. Nulls commanded attention—and adoration—as much as Nobodies repelled it. But this Null hadn’t fought back.

She’d just stood there, staring at him. Not over his shoulder. Not through him. Directly at him.

And, God, it felt like someone had poured Icy Hot over his entire body. Like being hooked up to an electric chair.

It. Wasn’t. Real
.

Nix had always known that Nulls were dangerous. That
they could make you feel and do things that you didn’t want to do. But until this particular Null had caught him, none of his marks had ever had the chance to use their powers on him.

None of them had ever seen him coming.

As potent as Nix’s ability to fade was with Normals, it was ten times more powerful with Nulls. Nobodies walked through the world unnoticed, and Nulls saw only what they wanted to see. Nix couldn’t affect anyone else, and this girl—this
Null
—couldn’t be affected by the plights of others. He should have been able to walk up to her with a whirring chainsaw without meriting more than a second of her attention.

He should have killed her.

She should be dead
. Nix found the thought unsettling. He’d never failed to carry out an assignment before, and he told himself that was why she kept him up at night. Why he hadn’t faded completely since their eyes had met for the first time. Why he’d opened her file and read her name over and over again, even though she wouldn’t have one for long.

Claire.

Claire Ryan.

The girl he was going to kill.
Number Twelve
. Today.

Nix picked up the gun and then set it back down. He was an excellent shot. He could hit targets. He could shoot marks. He could put bullets into hearts and keep
them from pumping, and into skulls, just between the eyes.

But killing that way wasn’t what he’d been trained for.

It wasn’t what she deserved.

No,
Claire
deserved something a little more personal. She’d used her powers to make him feel like something, to make him feel worthy and noticeable, and then she’d taken it all away the moment he had realized that she was pretending. That if her life hadn’t been at stake, she wouldn’t have feigned noticing him at all. She’d used her unnatural aptitude for manipulation on him.

So he was going to use his abilities—all of them—on her.

She wouldn’t see him coming. She wouldn’t know what hit her, but when his needle pierced her arm, when she felt that tiny little prick and then
nothing
—then she’d know who and what he was.

She’d know that Nobody had killed her, and he’d leave her body on the sidewalk, for the police to puzzle over—
natural causes
, they’d say—and her parents to sob over with equal measures anguish and relief.

“Today, Claire,” Nix said softly. He talked to himself so seldom that the sound of his voice had him looking over his shoulder to make sure that no one else had heard.

Not that anyone would pay it much attention if they had.

For the past three days, he’d stayed close, biding his time. He’d watched her. He’d waited. But now he couldn’t
wait anymore. The day before, he’d seen people near Claire’s house. He wasn’t close enough to get an ID on any of them, but he could tell from the way they moved, from the unmarked van they drove, that The Society had sent a cleanup team. Nix’s superiors only had one Nobody, but they had many soldiers.