The Devil's Only Friend (8 page)

The sound that came was a full gunshot, unsuppressed. That meant it wasn’t Potash, and that meant something had gone very wrong. Was it Kelly or Mary? I sat up straighter, staring across the street at the now-silent house. There was a small circle in the bedroom window, up on the second floor; I peered at it closer, almost certain that it was a bullet hole. I couldn’t tell for sure at that distance. I looked at the other windows, at the front door, at anything and everything hoping desperately to see some sign of what was going on. Our radio silence ended when the Withered was dead; they could call me then, like we’d called Kelly when we’d killed Cody French. I clutched my radio in my hand, my knuckles white, but it didn’t make a sound.

A curtain moved in the bedroom window—a sudden bulge, like it was being pressed against the glass from the inside. It moved to the side, then fell back to hang normally again. Was someone struggling, or was it just a current of air? I clutched my knife, wondering what to do.

I got out of the car and walked across the street.

The front yard was covered in snow, and a narrow path was shoveled along the walk. The steps to the porch were painted concrete, crusted with a scattered layer of rock salt. I put a hand to the door, wary, wondering if I should pull my knife out now, to be ready, or if it was better to wait until I was out of view of the street. Someone had to have heard the shot; surely the neighbors were watching me now. I pretended to knock, making no noise but trying to give the visual impression that I wasn’t a part of this, that I was just an innocent bystander. I waited, listening, and heard a low crash, like someone had broken a vase or a window somewhere deep in the house. I put my hand on the doorknob, turned it, and went inside.

The front door led into a narrow hallway papered in a floral pink. A hat rack and umbrella stand stood nearby, and beyond them I glimpsed a small living room that seemed almost Victorian: ornate wooden furniture upholstered with thick, embroidered cushions. The lamp on a small corner table was hung with fringe. The effect was classy but threadbare, the kind of furniture you might see in the home of a ninety-year-old woman. Mary, of course, was much older. I supposed she’d had this furniture since it was first made, over a century ago.

I heard another crash, maybe upstairs, and pulled the combat knife from my pocket. I stayed as silent as I could, not wanting to alert Mary to a third enemy in her house. I was not a trained fighter, so if I was going to have any meaningful effect on this situation, surprise would be a far more effective weapon than the knife ever could. I unsnapped the sheath and revealed the black blade, holding it in front of me in an upside-down grip, point toward the floor. Another crash, and a grunt. Definitely upstairs, and somehow recognizably feminine. Kelly, or Mary? Where was Potash? I tried the first step, found that it didn’t squeak, and slowly shifted my weight to the second, then the third. The ceiling thumped, somewhere to my right, like something heavy had fallen—heavy but soft; not a piece of furniture, but a body. I moved to the fourth step and, hearing the faintest trace of a creak as I started to place my weight on it, quickly picked up my foot to stop the sound. I tried the other side of the step, slowly and carefully, and when it stayed silent I moved to the next. The thump upstairs was followed by a scrape, then a pause, then a sudden flurry of footsteps. I moved to the sixth stair. The seventh. I was halfway up.

A window shattered above and behind me, loud and bright, and after a moment of shock I raced back down and threw open the front door, cursing myself for leaving an exit unguarded—if Mary had jumped out a front window she could run for safety, on the wrong side of the building for Diana to stop her. I saw a foot, sprawled in the snow, and stepped out for a better look. Kelly was facedown on the white lawn, her left side covered with blood, her head bent at an impossible angle. Her spine must have been snapped nearly in half, though whether it was from the fall or the fight itself I didn’t know. She hadn’t screamed, during or even before the fall.

Mary Gardner was more deadly than we’d ever imagined, and now the whole neighborhood knew we were here—and yet I froze, staring at Kelly’s twisted body like I was in a trance. Her broken shape in the snow was curled beautifully, like a flower, her arms splayed out like the tendrils of a dark black fern. Black and gray, with drops of bright red blood melting deep pink pockets in the snow. Her hair billowed around her head like she was a mermaid in a pale white sea, frozen in a moment of single, perfect beauty. I took a step toward it, then a few more. I was halfway down the stairs from the porch before the sound of another crash echoed down from upstairs. Potash was still up there, and the fight was still going. I took another step forward. How many times had I imagined Kelly dead, and now here she was, right in front of me. The Withered disintegrated when they died; I hadn’t touched a body in months. I reached out to it—and saw the knife in my hand.

A knife. Mary Gardner was still upstairs. I looked up at the window, then back at the door.

Then back at the body, still as a photograph.

Another crash. Mary was killing Potash—I didn’t know how, but the process sounded brutal. My only advantage was that she didn’t know I was there. This was what I needed—to work alone, without anyone knowing where or who I was. Even if the neighbors knew about Kelly, Mary didn’t know about me; someone might call the police, but I had a few minutes to salvage this kill. To do it myself. I gripped my knife tighter and slipped back inside, quietly locking the door behind me. I took the stairs faster this time, knowing which spots to avoid. The walls of the second floor hallway were covered in the same pink wallpaper as the first, though it was brighter here, where the sun hadn’t reached it to fade out the color. The crash had come from … there. That was almost certainly the room Kelly had fallen out of. The door was open, though I couldn’t see anything from my vantage point, and whatever was inside the room couldn’t see me. I listened and heard heavy, labored breathing.

“You’ve ruined everything,” said a woman’s voice. She had the hushed, clipped tones of a person barely controlling her fury. “Do you think I can stay here now? What am I supposed to say when the police come? That the man who attacked me had pneumonia so bad he couldn’t even walk? Who’s going to believe that?”

More labored breathing, and a loud crash, like someone had smashed a vase or a lamp. I crept closer to the door.

“People are going to ask questions,” said the woman, and I heard another crash. The gasping breather grunted, only to succumb to a fit of coughing so bad he might have been vomiting. I wondered how her sickness-shunting power worked—if she had some way of increasing the intensity. An ancient goddess of plagues, amping up a common cold until it destroyed a grown man’s lungs in minutes. “Some of the parents are already suspicious, they have been for years, and now you come in and add more fuel to the fire. ‘Nurse Gardner killed my daughter! She’s a vector of disease; she’s Typhoid Mary!’” Another crash. I stood by the edge of the door, my back pressed against the wall, the knife raised to my chest so I could strike out in a split second if I had to. Maybe I already had to; I couldn’t think clearly. I wanted to attack her, to stab her and twist the knife and feel her hot blood pumping out on my hand—but for that very reason I knew that I shouldn’t. There was a threshold here, and I didn’t dare to cross it. Potash grunted again, like he was trying to speak, but his voice was nothing but a broken wheeze, so painful it made me cringe just to hear it.

“I wanted to leave you for Rack,” said Mary. I heard a click of what could only be a gun, and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I gripped the knife tighter, screaming silently at myself to stay and go at the same time. “You deserve a death so much worse than I can—”

I swung around the doorjamb, saw Mary Gardner’s back as she stood over Potash’s body, and plunged my knife in with a strangled shout. It was exactly like I’d dreamed it: a sudden slowing as the blade met flesh, the metal sinking into the meat, glancing off a bone, jarring my hand like a thrill of pleasure. She stiffened and screamed, hanging for a moment in midair before her strength disappeared and she started to collapse. The weight of her body fought against my grip on the knife, but I grit my teeth and held my hand firm, and the body slid off with a slow, bloody slurp.

I’d killed her.

She landed in a lifeless heap, and I felt a sickening rush, like water flowing into a void. All that work, all that waiting, all that planning and dreaming and imagining what it would be like, and … that was it? My peripheral vision seemed to disappear, tunneling in on this one single body. I dropped to my knees, reaching out my left hand to touch her back, but shying away at the last moment. Her pale blue nurse’s shirt was slowly turning red as her blood spread across it. Should I roll her over? Should I see her face? Should I say something or do something or punch her or bite her or—

My breath became shallow, my heart hammered in my chest. How many times had I dreamed about stabbing someone? I used to dream about stabbing Brooke, or Marci, or even my mother; shameful, terrifying fantasies I’d tried for years to get free of, killing everyone who was close to me. I’d dreamed about killing my father so many times I’d lost count. And now I’d finally done it, knife and all, to this … nobody. And it meant nothing.

I felt a greater rage than I’d ever felt before.

My knife was in her back again, before I even knew how it got there, then I saw my arm raise and the blood drip from the knife and I screamed and drove it in a third time, piercing flesh and snapping bone, and again and again, up and down, my teeth clenched in a frenzy of stabbing and hacking until the body dissolved around my knife, the flesh turning black, the air filling with the acrid stench of burning grease, the body discorporating into ash and sludge and slime. It sunk into the carpet, a smoldering, shapeless blob—and still I stabbed it, until the knife stuck deep in the floor and the jolt knocked my hand away. I gasped for breath. Mary’s gun, lost under her body when she fell, became visible again as the sizzling ash sizzled away around it.

A grunt. I looked up at Potash, who was too weak to breathe, propped against the wall like a broken doll.

He’d seen everything.

5

I volunteered to embalm Kelly, but I don’t think they took the offer seriously. Instead we holed up in our office, waiting for the world to calm down.

“They got a photo of me,” I said, looking at my laptop.

“We’re lucky that’s all they got,” said Diana. She’d managed to slip out of her sniper’s nest unseen, since all the commotion was one street over. I hadn’t been so lucky, though she was right that I had been, all things considered, as lucky as we could have hoped for. Three different neighbors had seen Kelly’s body and called the police, who had arrived, guns drawn, almost fifteen minutes before Ostler managed to flash her FBI badge and smooth things over. Fifteen minutes wasn’t much—they hadn’t gotten me back to the station for fingerprints, they hadn’t had time to interrogate me, they hadn’t even found my name because we didn’t carry ID. But the neighbors had been watching. One of them had a cell phone, and a picture of the mysterious teenager sitting in the back of a cop car had been on Twitter within minutes.

That was last night. We’d barely dared to move since.

“Potash is stable,” said Nathan, setting down his phone. “Trujillo says they have him in protective custody at the hospital, no press allowed.”

Diana looked at me, than back at Nathan. “Is he breathing?”

“Not on his own; he’s on a machine. They think it’s some kind of pulmonary embolism, because of how fast it came on.”

“It’s pneumonia,” I said, remembering Mary’s words.

“We know what you think it is,” said Nathan, though his tone suggested more impatience than recognition. “Let’s let the doctors do the diagnosing for now, okay? She’s been killing people with this … whatever it is … for thousands of years. We’re lucky he’s still alive at all—and if he wasn’t, you’d be the one responsible.”

“Nathan,” snapped Diana, but he bulldozed past her warning with a snarl.

“You told us it was safe,” he continued. I laid my hands flat against the table, trying to stay calm, keeping my eyes fixed on the laptop screen without seeing anything on it. “You told us all she could do was make sick kids sicker, not kill a grown man’s lungs with a flick of her wrist! And she threw Kelly through the damn window, which you also conveniently forgot to mention she could do! And meanwhile you had the gall to sit outside in the car and let them face this thing alone—”

“Nathan!” said Diana again, in a voice that left no room for argument.

Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine. The counting wasn’t working.

They didn’t know I’d stabbed her.

“We have bigger problems to worry about,” said Diana. “Ostler’s bosses are going to be pissed, and who knows what fallout will come from that? We’re practically a joke as it is, and now we’ve lost an agent and caused a public scene. Ostler’s at the police station right now trying to convince them there are monsters under the bed, but we can’t afford to bring the cops in. Rumors are going to start, word is going to spread, and our entire operation is going to be raked by headquarters. I’ll be amazed if we don’t get recalled and fired.”

“That’s the best possible thing that could happen to us,” said Nathan. “Not only are the Withered fighting back now, but even the ones who don’t know we’re coming can still kill us with impunity. We need to get out of here yesterday.”

“Don’t worry about the FBI,” I said. “Worry about whoever else out there is watching.”

“The police are the only ones who know anything,” said Nathan. “They kept the press out of it completely.”

“The police found two people and one dead body,” I said, “sitting in the middle of an obvious fight scene, yet we all claim to be on the same team. If you don’t know what the sludge is, the person we claim to have killed doesn’t even exist. People are going to talk, even if it’s just the cops, and rumors are going to spread. Best-case scenario, they’ll think it’s a government cover-up, but worst case, someone puts it all together and figures out we killed a demon.”