“Then why are you going?” asked Nathan.
She turned back to him, her gaze icy. “I’m going because, unlike you, I am a field agent, and I’ve actually finished my firearms training, and I know exactly how the plan is supposed to go down. We may need you in the future, Mr. Gentry, but until then we need you to stay here.” He fell silent, and I followed Kelly and Ostler into the hall.
“He’s actually ‘Dr.’ Gentry,” I said, “and it’s very rude of you to forget his title. Do you know how hard he had to work for that? He pulled himself out of the ghetto in Philadelphia—”
“Dr. Gentry is a good model of where you could be in a few years, John,” said Agent Ostler. “Put your natural intelligence to good use and get a real degree or two.”
“And annoy everyone around me.”
“You already annoy everyone around you,” said Ostler. “At least Nathan doesn’t do it on purpose.”
I had a plan to kill Ostler, too. I looked forward to it with relish.
*
I lived in a small apartment two doors down from a demon named Cody French. Becoming his neighbor had been my idea: we’d come to Fort Bruce to study him, after all, trying to find a way to kill him, and what better way than by interacting with him directly? That was what I’d brought to the team, more than anything else: not so much my expertise as my approach. The US government had been peripherally aware of the demons for decades, just as many other nations over the years had been. But knowing about them and hunting them were two different things. Whatever the Withered were, they were supernatural, and that made them hard to predict, hard to track, and hard to kill. How could you plan for something that had the power to do or even be something completely unexpected? Ostler had inherited an investigation team with a long history of fleeting glimpses and near misses, and meanwhile I’d killed three of the things, all on my own. There wasn’t any real trick to it—I planned their deaths the same way I planned my teammates’. Spend time with them, figure out their weak spots, and then push on those weak spots until they die. I make friends with them, and then I kill them.
Being my friend is not, statistically speaking, very safe.
We knew about Cody French the same way we knew about all the other Withered: Brooke told us. Brooke was a childhood friend of mine, the girl next door, and I’d had something of a crush on her for years. I say “something” because sociopaths don’t have crushes the way normal people do. Looking back, through the lens of counseling, I can say more accurately that I had an obsessive fixation on the idea of Brooke, an idea that had very little to do with Brooke herself. I’d wanted what Brooke represented—some Platonic ideal of innocence and beauty—not because I wanted to share it but because I wanted to possess it. Not exactly the basis for a stable relationship. She, as it turns out, had a much more normal attraction to me—I almost said “healthy” in that sentence, but that’s kind of laughable, isn’t it? She’d thought I was nice and asked me out a couple of times, and ended up chained to a chair in a madman’s kitchen. She was eventually possessed by a suicidal demon named Nobody. With any hope of a normal life destroyed, she’d joined Ostler’s team the same time I did. I don’t know what her parents thought she was doing, but I bet they imagined it as a lot more glamorous and heroic than it was.
But even a statement like “she joined the team” wasn’t really accurate. I joined the team; Brooke was more of a tool that the team used. She wanted to be more when she was lucid, but honestly, she had several thousand years of suicidal, homicidal, everything-o-cidal monster memories trapped inside of her head. Most days she could barely dress herself.
I told you it’s not safe to be my friend.