by Dan Wells
“Don’t make me come after you,” said the tall cop. I sighed and took four large steps backward; they swore and followed me into the snow, until all four of us were behind the wall. “Listen, you little—”
“Thank you for getting out of the street,” I said. “Are you ready to stop acting like children?”
“Excuse me?” asked the short cop. “What are you, fifteen?”
“The men you saw breaking into the mortuary are very dangerous,” I explained again. “We’re not covering anything up, we’re not trying to get away with anything, we’re not even trying to piss you off, as much as I’d love to. We’re following monsters, and you were about to go in after them, and I didn’t want you to get killed.” Saying this out loud to a stranger felt deeply wrong, like I had just confessed to an intimate secret. These were my monsters, my demons, and talking about them out loud like this made me feel naked and hurt. They didn’t deserve to hear about them. The demons were mine alone.
The short cop sighed, then glanced at the wall a moment before looking back at me. “What it’s going to take to get the real story out of you?”
“What’s it going to take to make you believe us?” asked Diana. “And don’t say ‘seeing a monster in action,’ because there’s no wood to knock, and I assure you that is the last thing you want your town to see.”
“Follow them,” I said. “We don’t have the numbers to keep eyes on everyone we need to keep eyes on, so let’s split it: we watch Elijah Sexton, you follow these three.”
The tall cop raised his eyebrow. “Are you joking?”
“I stopped you from confronting them,” I said. “Following is different.”
“You don’t give us orders,” said the tall cop.
“You want to know what we’re doing,” I said simply. “If you think they’re drug dealers, follow them and see for yourself. Follow them, study them, do whatever you think is smart, but remember that approaching them isn’t smart. Don’t try to get in their way or you will die. I don’t want to mince words on this, okay? They can and will kill you, and we can’t stop them yet.”
“Yet?”
“We need more information,” I said. “Give me enough of that and I can kill anybody.”
The cops looked at me with obvious suspicion, but Diana froze us all with a whispered word.
“Quiet.”
I heard footsteps on the other side of the wall and the sound of car doors; they were talking, which was a reassuring sign they hadn’t heard us. I tried to listen to what they were saying but I couldn’t make it out. The car doors closed, the engine revved to life, and we crouched low against the wall as the car pulled out into the road. It drove away in the opposite direction from us, so we never saw it and they didn’t see us.
“I got the plate when they pulled up,” said the short cop, standing and flashing a small black notebook. “Let’s go run it and see what we get.”
“You’ll let us know?” asked Diana.
“Maybe,” said the short cop, and the corner of his lip curled up. “Wouldn’t want to interfere with your investigation.”
They walked back to their car, and Diana and I stepped back onto the sidewalk, stomping our feet to shake off the snow. “We need Kelly,” she said, watching them go. “She could talk to these guys; I feel like I don’t even speak their language.”
“At least they listen to you,” I said. “Do I really look fifteen?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. The cops drove off, and we started walking back to our car. “They don’t take me any more seriously than they take you. They didn’t listen to a word until you insulted them.”
We reached the car, and Diana drummed her fingers on the roof before getting in. Her voice was lower now, more solemn, as the full reality of the situation slowly settled in our minds. “Four Withered.”
“We don’t know that,” I said, though I suspected it was true. “Maybe he’s hired some human thugs.”
“That’s only slightly less frightening,” said Diana. “Even three human thugs outnumber us by two thugs. I can’t defend everyone at once.”
“Then let’s hope the cops turn out to be more helpful than they look.”
“I thought you didn’t like relying on people.”
“I hate it,” I said. But I don’t mind using them. I stared at the street for a moment, then opened my door. “I got a dog.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
I got in the car without speaking.
Diana sighed. “Hurt it and I’ll kill you myself,” she said. She climbed in her side and turned on the car, cranking the heater to full; it blasted us with cold air as the engine slowly warmed up. “Obviously we tell the others about this, but then what?”
“We talk to the Withered,” I said, looking back at the mortuary.
Diana paused, one finger poised over her cell phone. “You told the cops that getting involved would get them killed.”
“Them, yes,” I said. “Tomorrow afternoon, I need to meet Elijah Sexton.”
6
I had planned to meet Elijah on the street, arranging an “accidental” encounter in a place we knew he’d be, and trying to start up a conversation—I could be the kid down the street, or the paper boy, or any number of innocuous cover stories. As it turned out, I didn’t need any of them.
“He’s here,” said Trujillo. We were on the phone, and I hated phones; it was impossible to know what anyone was feeling without seeing their face. He sounded … excited? Scared? I could never tell.
“What do you mean ‘here?’” I asked, walking to the office window and looking out; Whiteflower was just across the street, seeming as peaceful and quiet as ever. Nathan heard my question and stood up, coming closer to hear better. “Is he on your floor? In your room?”
“He’s downstairs,” said Trujillo. “I told the front desk to call if he ever came in again.”
“We need more people,” said Nathan. “If we had him under surveillance like we’re supposed to he couldn’t sneak up on us like this.”
“He’s here to see Merrill,” said Trujillo, apparently overhearing Nathan’s angry protest. “As far as I know, that’s all.”
“It probably is,” I said. “Or that might be a ruse to get past the front desk. Get in Brooke’s room and lock it, just in case; I’ll come over and try to figure something out.”
“Where’s Diana?” asked Trujillo. “We need backup.”
“She’s with Ostler,” I said. “I don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Why are we alone?” Nathan demanded, for the fourth time that morning. “The one place the Withered know where to find us, and they leave the two scholars and the kid alone without a single trained fighter—we’re dead—we’re—”
“I’m coming over,” I said, and hung up the phone. “Nathan, stop whining and call Ostler.”
“Don’t talk to me that way—”
“Stay here and lock the door behind me.” I grabbed my coat—the knife safe in the pocket—and walked into the hall, pressing the button for the elevator. No one jumped out when the door opened; I rode to the ground floor, and no one was waiting to eviscerate me when I got out. I crossed the street slowly, trying to scan the area without looking like that’s what I was doing; I didn’t see anything suspicious, but I didn’t even know what I was looking for.
This was always the hardest part about hunting for a Withered: we never knew what they could do. The empty street might hold an invisible killer; the old lady on the corner might be a demon in disguise; the woman at the front desk, who I saw every day, might have been replaced by a shape shifter overnight. We had no way of knowing.
I stood in the lobby, trying to think. I still didn’t have a plan. Should I go upstairs and confront him? Should I wait here and catch him on the way out? I didn’t even know how to approach him when I saw him. Most of the Withered I’d dealt with didn’t even know I was hunting them until it was too late. Meshara already knew everything.
>
The lobby had a few people in it, mostly residents, a handful of visitors. I sat down in a chair near the wall and tried to think. What could I do?
A moment later my plans became meaningless: I heard a small ding from the elevator and watched as Elijah Sexton and Merrill Evans stepped out. I looked away, watching them from the corner of my eye. Was he looking at me? How would he react when he saw me? If he’d seen me already, he was playing it incredibly cool.
Merrill spoke first, his voice sounding frailer than I expected. “Does this place have a restroom?” He was seventy-something, but fairly healthy looking for his age. Maybe the Alzheimer’s sapped his will and energy—or maybe Meshara did. Elijah pointed toward a door in the wall, and Merrill shuffled over to it. Elijah wandered across the room and sat across from me—not quickly, or with any clear purpose of confronting me; he simply sat and looked around. Was this it? What was he going to say? I kept my eyes on the wall, keeping him in the edge of my peripheral vision.
“Here for a grandparent?” he asked. Without looking at his face, I couldn’t tell what kind of tone he was taking—was it sarcasm? Feigned curiosity? Either way, it seemed he had decided to maintain the facade of innocence. Maybe he didn’t know we’d identified him yet?
I turned to face him, studying his features up close: dark eyes, set deep in his face, with faint dark lines below them. He hadn’t slept well. He looked to be in his late forties, I guessed—about the age Forman had been. I searched his face for some sign of deception, but saw only a flat mouth, clear eyes, slightly tilted head. Just a face.
I decided to play along for now, wondering where he was going with the conversation. Was I here to see an old person? Technically yes, since Elijah was older than anyone in the building. “Kind of.”
“Kind of a grandfather,” he asked, “or kind of a grandmother?”
That was an odd question—if he knew who I was, why probe into an obvious lie? Was he testing my cover story or trying to establish his own? “Friend of a friend,” I said. A noncommittal answer, but with a hint that I wasn’t here for a relative. I was leaving the door open for him to take the conversation somewhere deeper.
He nodded. “I suppose you could say the same for me.”
Was that a reference to Merrill or to me? Or to someone else on the team? I didn’t dare say more until I knew where he was steering the conversation. I kept quiet, looking back at the wall, waiting for him for to continue.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
His other questions had been odd; this one threw me completely for a loop. Was I okay? What kind of question was that? He was a demon, and I was a demon hunter, and we’d come here to kill each other, and … was I okay? It didn’t make any sense at all. I looked at him again, trying to decipher his intentions. Was asking about my feelings a part of some strange game he was playing? Was it a prelude to whatever his powers were—was his curiosity, or his concern, or my feelings themselves, a way for him to sustain himself by killing me? Maybe he didn’t need to kill me at all; Cody French only drove his victims insane, and Clark Forman, technically speaking, didn’t need to harm anyone at all. He’d felt other people’s emotions, but he hadn’t needed to hurt them in the process, and he killed only because he enjoyed it. Are you okay?… Maybe he fed on suffering somehow? Was that why he’d been visiting an Alzheimer’s patient for twenty years?
Merrill was the key. If we wanted to solve the puzzle of Elijah Sexton, we needed to know how Merrill fit into it. I glanced over his shoulder at the restroom door. “Who’s your friend?”
His eyes widened slightly, giving every indication of innocent surprise at my question. “Just some guy,” he said. “I met him about twenty years ago, right before the Alzheimer’s. It’s not really Alzheimer’s, actually, but it’s close enough. He was a good man and I liked him.”
“And now you still visit him.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
Twenty years. We’d wondered it before, but it had always seemed too good to be true: was his presence here merely a coincidence? Had we just happened to put Brooke into the one medical center an oblivious Withered visited once a week? Was it really possible he knew nothing about us at all?
Twenty years. The only other Withered I’d seen with that kind of long-term loyalty to anything had been Mr. Crowley, my next-door neighbor, who’d settled down and stopped killing completely for nearly forty years. The mental association surprised me, triggering a sense of familiarity with the man, and I fended off the sudden flare of emotion with a joke. He’d said it was the least he could do, so I responded reflexively: “I’m sure you could do a lot less if you put your mind to it.”
He laughed softly, but the humor never reached his eyes. “You’d be surprised how little of my mind there is,” he said, shaking his head. “Another few years and I’ll end up like Merrill, more than likely. Just a … hollow man. An organic machine, going through the motions.”
“So is it worth it?” I hadn’t intended to say it, or even to think it, but it came out too fast to stop.
“Is what worth it?”
“Coming here,” I said. His words had hit so close to home, and I thought about Brooke upstairs, too lost to even remember me. I thought about Marci and my mom, and wished I could lose those memories as easily as Brooke did. “Caring about someone who doesn’t care about you,” I said. “Who couldn’t care about you if he tried. Making connections with people who are only going to disappear.”
Elijah shook his head and looked down at his lap. He was carrying Merrill’s coat over his arm and seemed to stare it, or at nothing, for a long time. I sat quietly, embarrassed by my outburst, wondering what he would say in response. I waited for his answer.
And waited.
It seemed like ages later when Merrill emerged from the restroom. The sound seemed to rouse Elijah from whatever reverie had taken him and he stood and turned to greet the old man.
“All set?”
“Well look who’s here,” said Merrill, as if he didn’t remember that Elijah had been waiting for him.
Elijah offered him his coat. “You still want to go for a walk?”
“I can’t go for a walk, have you seen the snow outside?”
“There’s certainly a lot of it.”
They chatted for a minute about the snow and who shoveled it, and then walked back toward the elevator, their reason for coming down here either abandoned or completely forgotten.
That, or Elijah’s sole purpose had been to see me, and now he was done. Walking in here this morning, that would have been the only explanation I’d have believed, but after the conversation we’d just had.… I am a very experienced liar and I can tell when other people are saying something that doesn’t fit. Nothing Elijah Sexton said made any sense to me, but it had made sense to him. It fit for him.
I pulled out my phone and walked outside into the cold. Agent Ostler answered on the second ring.
“Hello, John.”
“Elijah Sexton isn’t hunting us.”
“You’re sure?”
“Not a hundred percent,” I said, “but probably ninety-nine. I just talked to him and I’d swear he had no idea who I was. I think he visits Merrill Evans because they’re genuinely just friends.”
“Would you bet your life on it?”
I hesitated, not because of the question itself, but the way she phrased it. This was more than just asking me if I was certain. She was worried about something, and I knew Ostler well enough to know that she was never worried by abstract concepts. Something new had happened.
I walked toward the street. “What’s wrong?”
“Get Nathan and Trujillo,” she said, “and come to the police station. There’s been another killing.”
A dozen questions flooded my mind, but I focused on the one that concerned me most. “That would leave Brooke alone.”
“She’s in the secure wing of a dementia facility, surrounded by trained personnel.”
“Medical personnel,
” I said, stopping on a windswept corner of the intersection. “If the Withered come for her, they’ll be no help at all.”
Ostler let out a long, slow breath. “After what I’ve seen today, none of us would be any help. If you swear Elijah’s not hunting us—”
“You asked if I’d bet my life on it,” I said. “Betting Brooke’s is different.”
“I’m asking you to examine a corpse,” said Ostler. “Cut the pretense and get down here; you’re wasting time.”
She hung up, and I stood on the corner, staring at the flurries of fallen snow the wind picked up and swirled across the asphalt. I didn’t want to leave Brooke, but Ostler was right. The chance to examine a body was something I’d been waiting for ever since I’d joined this team. I could complain and argue and stall as long I wanted, but eventually I’d go. I wanted to stay away on purpose, obstinately, for that reason alone, but I couldn’t. My feet were already crossing the street, as far beyond my control as Brooke’s hand, writing invisible notes to no one on her bedspread.
* * *
“His name is Stephen Applebaum,” said Ostler, “and somebody must have really been mad at him.” Our whole team, minus Potash, was gathered in a pale-blue room in the morgue, looking down at a metal table containing a man-shaped thing under a sheet. The police had stepped out, giving us a moment of privacy. The once-sterile sheet was caked here and there with dark brown bloodstains. It was all I could do not to reach out and touch one. “Forty-two years old, Caucasian male, found in the Dumpster behind the Riverwalk Motel. They offer both nightly and hourly rates, so you know it’s classy. His clothing was with him, though most of it wasn’t on him at the time.”
“Sexual assault?” asked Trujillo.
“Nothing that simple,” said Ostler, and she grabbed the edge of the sheet. “We think the clothing was removed because it made it easier to do this.” She pulled back the sheet and the others gasped. I leaned forward, fascinated by the carnage. The body was pocked with holes—not stab wounds, but shallow gashes, a couple of inches wide and some of them up to two inches deep. They were mostly bloodless, as was typical for a body already cleaned and examined by a forensics team, so instead of red the wounds were brown and purple. Bruises and rotting meat. They covered the corpse like nightmare polka dots.