Free The Devil's Only Friend by Dan Wells Page B

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