Over Your Dead Body by Dan Wells Read Free Book Online

again, watching us, until at last he nodded. “I have a private room. We can talk in there.”
    He led us through the house, past a sitting room full of a dozen or so cultists singing quietly to themselves. They beamed when they saw him, whispering his name in a sibilant chorus: “Christopher Christopher Christopher Christopher.” He slowed and gestured to them but didn’t stop, leading us up the stairs to a small office with an old kitchen table for a desk. The wooden chairs were mismatched, and the carpet was a spiral pattern woven from old scraps and rags. He closed the door behind us and sat with a heavy sigh.
    “I knew it was only a matter of time,” he said. “It was bad enough before Fort Bruce, but after…” He shook his head. “It’s a horrible thing, to look at a massacre like that and not be able to tell who won.”
    “Twenty-three humans dead,” I said.
    “And not a word from Rack since,” said Yashodh. “If that was a victory for the Withered, their recruitment efforts would have stepped up, not down.”
    “Did he come to you?” asked Nobody.
    “Not yet,” said Yashodh. “But I have friends who’ve sent me word of his plans. Though even them I haven’t heard from lately.”
    “Nashuja,” I said, venturing a guess. Nashuja we had killed last month, she was a grizzled woman who made her living as a long-haul trucker. She picked up hitchhikers and killed them in empty rest stops, cracking open their bones and sucking out the marrow, crying for the mothers who would never see their children again.
    Yashodh shook his head. “Dag,” he said. We had killed Dag four months earlier. “I haven’t heard from Nashuja in … hundreds of years at least. I didn’t know she kept in contact with anyone.”
    “Kanta found her a few years ago,” said Nobody. “I worked with him before he died.”
    “Kanta was on Rack’s side,” said Yashodh, and his voice sounded tired. “He wanted to get us all together, like the old days—the god emperors come back at last.” He gestured around his office. “This is where we are today. This is what we are. Not gods anymore, just…” He shook his head. “They want to recruit me? They want this for their kingdom? Forty-six walking coma patients, smart enough to pull weeds and sew a few shirts and…” he gestured in the air, searching for words, “… wave at each other in the room downstairs? I’d be useless in a war.”
    Yashodh hates himself , I thought. It wasn’t much of a weakness, but it was a start.
    “Rack’s plan is what put us here in the first place,” said Nobody. “We’d been fine for millennia, hidden and surviving, and then he tried to get back into power and the humans noticed us. They fought back. Rack killed twenty-three of them in Fort Bruce, but they killed five of us, and we can’t survive those odds. We have to go back into hiding.”
    “So why are you here?” asked Yashodh. “You can go anywhere and be anyone, but I’m always me. I always have a cult. I can’t survive anywhere else, or any way else. They’ll find me, Rack or the humans or both. And if you’re with me they’ll find you, too.”
    Interesting . He’d said, “I’m always me.” Did that mean he couldn’t change his shape the way so many Withered could? The FBI suspected that the Withered’s ancient origins were in neolithic Turkey; what I had seen as a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance could easily be Turkish. Was this really the same body Yashodh had had for ten thousand years? What else did that suggest about him? I needed him to keep talking about himself, hoping it could suggest something useful about the way his powers worked. I thought of a new tactic and started talking.
    “Strength in numbers,” I said. “Rack’s plan failed because he started poking the bear, causing trouble and getting noticed. But if we stay quiet, if we stay low, then we can survive in the shadows and help defend each other from Rack’s recruiters. Whatever powers