Cody French was a hard man to hurt: he had the reflexes of a wild animal, a mind that never relaxed, and the combat training of a man who’d spent thousands of years trying to find something to do with his time. On top of that he had a shocking level of regeneration, having passed our “speed-bump test” with flying colors. That test was more or less what it sounded like: the second step of every hunt we went on, after we’d picked up some basic information about who the target was and how they worked, was to hit them with a car. If that took care of them, easy peasy; if not, we dug in for the long haul and tried to find a way around their supernatural healing. Our second week in Fort Bruce, Potash had run a red light in a diesel trailer and broadsided Cody French’s car while the Withered was on his way to work. The car was totaled and the inside was covered with blood, but Cody had been essentially unharmed when they pulled him from the wreck—he’d healed before the bystanders had even been able to reach him. So we needed something more personalized, and we spent a long time studying him from afar, looking for a weakness. And then Cody asked his neighbor, the quiet, unassuming John Cleaver, to watch his dog for a few hours.
Just hours? That dog spent all day alone sometimes, so what could a few hours possibly matter? Sure, he had a girl there, but he had girls all the time. Why was this time different? Turned out that girl landed in county lockup a few days later, raving and delusional, though with no signs of outward abuse. That’s the kind of thing that sets off all our alarm bells. Animals made me nervous in general, and under any other circumstance I would never have even touched his dog—I’d hurt some animals very badly as a child and I had rules to keep myself away from any similar temptations—but this was my in, so I’d smiled and nodded and said yes, and Cody had introduced me to his basset hound, named Boy Dog—and no, I have no idea why anyone would choose such a stupid name. Cody only laughed when I asked him. I petted Boy Dog as calmly as I could, played the friendly neighbor, and stepped into the life of a damaged monster. Over the course of the next month or so I’d figured it out: When Cody French’s life got too bad, when he just couldn’t stand being awake anymore and all he wanted was a rest, he’d pick up a girl—usually a hooker, someone desperate and already a little shady—and take them back to his apartment and pour everything he had into them. Not his memories, but his awareness. The part of his brain that could never turn off, that could never stop or slow down for even a second, he dumped into someone else. Then he slept, and she went mad.
“The dog’s with another neighbor,” said Potash. “How close are you?”
“Five minutes at the most,” said Kelly, “unless you want us to die in a car accident on our way there.”
“The dog’s not part of the plan anyway,” I said. “Better to have it somewhere else, so I’m free to move around.”
Potash’s voice crackled on the radio. “This girl looks younger than you are.”
“Probably a runaway,” said Kelly. “Someone who won’t go to the cops, and who doesn’t have anyone taking care of her. Twenty bucks says she’s already got a drug problem, so her hallucinations won’t look out of place if anyone looks too deep at her case.”
Diana spoke up from the back seat. “If we take him out fast, can we save her?”
The car was silent.
“I don’t know,” I said at last. “I don’t know exactly how he works. Killing him might end the transfer early, or it might make it permanent.”
“So then we’re damning her with the same curse he has?” asked Diana. “What good does that do?”
“She can’t transfer it to anyone else,” I said, “and she can’t live forever.”
“Better to just kill her in the same hit,” said Potash.
“Absolutely not,” said Kelly. “Better to take her into custody and observe her—maybe she’ll be fine.”
“She won’t be,” I said.
“And you don’t care about her?” asked Diana.
I stared out the windows, the world flying by as Kelly sped through the city, and clenched my hands in a fist while I recited my number sequence: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. Dr. Trujillo would be so proud. I took a deep breath and thought about Diana’s question again, more calmly this time. I turned her words back on her: “What good would caring do?”
“This entire thing is your plan,” said Diana. “You couldn’t find any way of hurting him without also destroying an innocent girl?”
“It’s not like I’m happy about it—”
“But you’re not sad about it either,” said Diana. “We’re about to straight up ruin someone’s life, all in the interest of killing someone else, and you don’t care the least, tiny bit about either one of them.”
“What good would that do?” I asked again. This was my plan, like she said, and I’d thought it through from every possible angle. Caring about the target could get us all killed, and going in soft to avoid collateral damage could be just as dangerous. “He can recover from damage faster than we can deal it,” I said, “which means we have to deal a hard, precise blow that he can’t recover from. That means cutting his head off, and that means we have to get him while he’s incapacitated, and that means we have to wait until after he starts the transfer. It’s the only time he can’t defend himself. We have to do this, and we have to do it this way, and I could spend my energy being sad about that or I could spend it making sure it works, and that we get him, and that after this one last girl he never hurts anyone else again.”
Diana growled. “Normal people don’t just turn off their human nature every time it gets inconvenient—”
“Sucks to be them, then,” I said.
“We don’t need to argue about this right now,” said Kelly. “Sometimes you have to turn off your empathy to get the job done—I learned it in the force, you learned it in the military, John learned it … I shudder to think where John learned it. Let’s just get the job done.”