The Devil's Only Friend (2 page)

I looked away from Nathan and back at our surveillance photos, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand. The “chick” Nathan thought was crazy was Mary Gardner, and he kind of had a point, though that didn’t make me hate him any less. I deflected my hatred into what I hoped was playful teasing.

“Sensitivity training,” I reminded him. As government employees we had a lot of sensitivity training, and it had become one of our go-to punchlines for any kind of joke, insult, or banter. I liked having running gags like this because they made it easier for me to know what the others would find funny and what they’d find off-putting. I couldn’t always tell on my own.

“Sorry,” said Nathan, “this ‘woman’ is crazy.” The cadence of his voice was off, in a pattern I’d come to recognize as frustrated sarcasm. I suppressed a smile, knowing I’d gotten to him.

“That’s not what he meant,” said Kelly, and her voice had a fair bit of frustration in it as well. “He means that you shouldn’t use ‘crazy’ as an epithet, since John has a mental-health issue too.”

Kelly Ishida would be much harder to kill. She’d trained as a cop and worked homicide for six years, according to her file, so she knew how to handle herself. Her file also said that she was twenty-nine years old, but if I’d seen her on the street I would have sworn she was twenty-two. Twenty-three at the oldest. She was about my height, Japanese-American, with long black hair and dark eyes. I also knew that she slept very lightly and kept a gun on her nightstand, neither of which is a sign of a particularly healthy psyche; I assumed it had something to do with the incident that caused her to leave the police force and join our team, but I didn’t know for sure yet. The exact details were redacted from her file, but whatever it was had left her with a lot of trust issues. Not as many as she thought, though; she still had me pick up her coffee almost every day. When the time came—if the time came—I could poison her virtually at will.

“Us crazy people have to stick together,” I said, still studying the surveillance photos. I had seen something in one of them, and after another moment of thought I slid it across the table to Kelly; trust issues or not, she was an excellent detective. The photo was mostly identical to all our other photos of Mary Gardner—a nurse’s uniform, a sweater, and a blue hospital face mask—but this one had a key difference. I tapped an odd shadow in the center. “Look at this bulge by her waist.”

Kelly took the photo, examining it closely. “Sweaters do this sometimes, so it’s hard to be sure what’s under there. You think it’s a gun?”

“It’s not a hip,” I said, “unless she has very weird hips.”

“Sensitivity training,” said Diana, and I suppressed another smile. Diana Lucas was the only other person on the team who ever joined in my jokes. Not only would killing her be physically hard—she was former military and as tough as a brick—but I’d regret it afterward. We weren’t friends, per se, but we got along, united in our shared annoyance with Nathan, if nothing else. Nathan always told her they had to stick together, as the only black people on the team, and I think that annoyed her more than anything else. She’d even punched him once. I sincerely hoped I never had to kill Diana.

I looked back at Kelly. “Compare that photo to this one,” I said, sliding another image across the table. “This is an older shot, from a few weeks ago, so she’s wearing different clothes and we’re seeing it from a different angle. The bulge is still there. It’s too consistent to be a random fold in a sweater.”

“Maybe,” said Kelly. She pulled out magnifying glass—a real live magnifying glass, like an old-timey detective. It was one of Kelly’s quirks. I kept waiting for her to pull out a pipe and a Sherlock Holmes hat. “Could be a gun,” she said, studying the photo intently. “Do we have any other shots of that side?”

“What’s the big deal about a gun?” asked Nathan, watching as I sifted through the photos. “She’s some kind of supernatural monster anyway, right? Seems like a gun should be the least of our problems.”

“Sensitivity training,” I said.

“Oh, come on, what now?” asked Nathan, his voice even more frustrated than before. “We’re not allowed to call the monsters monsters anymore? Are we worried about offending them?”

“I was actually warning myself that time,” I said, finding another photo and passing it over to Kelly. “I’m about to call you an idiot, and I was saving everyone else the trouble of pointing it out.”

“Hey—” said Nathan, but I cut him off.

“You’re an idiot,” I said. “But to be fair you’re also new, so maybe you haven’t done all the reading yet.”

“I’ve done more reading than anyone in this building,” said Nathan. “Or did you forget that I’m literally a doctor of library science?”

Diana rolled her eyes—we couldn’t forget Nathan’s credentials because he shoved them in our faces every chance he got.

“I’ll let you know if any science libraries start bleeding,” I said. “Between now and then, apply your research with a little common sense. I assume you read the report on my second contact with a Withered?”

“Of course I did,” said Nathan. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. If this woman can turn her hands into claws or whatever, a gun seems like the least of our worries.”

I nodded. “So if she has supernatural weapons that make a gun redundant, why does she carry a gun?”

“Not every Withered has claws,” said Diana, explaining the line of reasoning more patiently than I was. “Some of them—like the second one John ran into, named Clark Forman—have no apparent means of defense at all, and no superhuman powers beyond whatever basic … whatever … that makes them a Withered in the first place. Forman carried a gun specifically because he
didn’t
have any claws. If our information is correct, Mary Gardner drains the health of others to keep herself healthy, which is why she works as a nurse. Nothing about that profile suggests that she has a form of supernatural defense, and if she carries a gun, that only serves to support this analysis.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” said Nathan. “I’d never thought of it that way.”

I nodded. “That’s because you’re an idiot.”

“Seriously,” said Nathan, slapping the table, “why do we even put up with this kid? What are you, sixteen?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen years old and mouthy as hell, and we just have to sit here and take it because you’re some kind of superpsycho?” He looked at Diana. “Is this out of respect for his abilities as a sociopathic murderer, or because we’re all afraid he’s going to snap and kill us?”

Nathan was older than I was by a good ten years; much younger than his credentials would suggest, though, because he, like most of the rest of the team, was a bit of a prodigy in his area of expertise. According to his file he had two masters and two doctoral degrees, most of them related to one form of research or another. He knew more about Mediterranean history than anybody I knew, which was especially impressive since one of the people I knew was Brooke/Nobody, who’d lived there for literally centuries. I knew this about Nathan because of his file, but also because he told us constantly, just like he always told us how he’d climbed his way out of the ghetto in Philadelphia, paying his own way through school and earning his first Ph.D. from Harvard before the age of twenty. He had accomplished a lot, and I respected that; what bugged me is that he knew so much about everything, and all he seemed to talk about was himself. How could I not antagonize him for that?

“He’s just staring at me,” said Nathan.

“He does that,” said Diana. “You don’t get used to it.” As much as I admired Diana, I was always secretly proud that I could unnerve her like that. She’d trained in the USAF Security Forces, one of the only armed services in America that trained women as snipers, and she had been their rising star. She’d been on the team since before I joined, so I wasn’t sure of the circumstances; the exact details were redacted from her file, just like Kelly’s. To be fair, so were mine—the team knew I’d killed three Withered, and they knew my mom had died in the final attack, but they didn’t know how. And they didn’t know anything about Marci.

I realized I was gripping the table edge so tightly my fingertips were turning white from the pressure. I couldn’t let myself think about Marci anymore. I counted my number pattern, a mental exercise that helped me calm down: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four.
Deep breath, in and out.

“This is definitely a gun,” said Kelly, still hunched over the photos. “That’s a good catch, John. I’ll call the others.”

“What does that tell us for sure, though?” asked Nathan. “She works late hours in a bad part of town; maybe she wants to be able to defend herself without morphing into a monster every time.”

“That’s entirely possible,” said Kelly. “On the other hand, our records say nothing about a concealed weapons permit, and yet she’s wearing one in a hospital. That’s two laws she’s breaking, which seems a little unnecessary for standard self-defense. We’ve had her under surveillance for weeks and we didn’t know anything about this gun until now. That means she really, really wants one, and she really, really doesn’t want anyone to know she has it, and those two together seem like a pretty good sign that something weird is going on.”

“That’s a lot of reallys,” I said.

“Sensitivity training,” said Nathan. I raised my eyebrow and he scowled. “Everyone else got to say it.”

The door to the conference room opened without a knock, and Linda Ostler stepped in: the woman who’d organized our team and the de facto leader of the US government’s secret war against the supernatural. Her file listed her as fifty-three, which made her older than even Trujillo, and she had the force of will to back that age up with an aura of hard-won experience and authority. Kelly stood up immediately; some remnant of her training as a cop, I assumed.

“Agent Ostler,” said Kelly, “I was just about to call you—we’ve found something new in the Gardner case—”

“Thank you, Ms. Ishida, but I’m afraid it will have to wait. Agent Potash called, and we’re moving on Cody French.”

“Now?” asked Diana.

“Immediately,” said Ostler. “Potash is observing him, and we have reason to believe that our window of opportunity is about to open. If John’s analysis is correct, we have about three hours to kill him before that window closes again, possibly for weeks.”

“Everybody suit up, then,” said Diana, already walking to the door. “I’ll meet you at the car in ten.” She brushed past Ostler and disappeared down the hall.

Kelly looked at me. “Are you ready for this?”

“I’m jumping for joy.”

“Do you need me for anything?” asked Nathan. “I’m not a field agent, but I’ve been training in firearms and I—”

“Guns won’t help on this one,” said Kelly. “Diana won’t even be much use, unless it goes wrong, at which point having extra people there will only makes things harder.” She looked at me. “This one’s all John and Potash.”

“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.