Over Your Dead Body Read Online Free Page B

riddled with holes, but it was also the only tool we had to find and hunt the Withered. She clenched her teeth. “You don’t know him like I do.”
    “So tell me about him.”
    “I already told you everything I know.”
    “You can’t have it both ways,” I said. “Do you know him or not?”
    “He hates himself,” said Brooke, “even more than I do.” I glanced at her; I’d known her long enough to see the real meaning behind that statement.
    I corrected her softly. “You mean ‘more than Nobody hates herself,’” I said.
    “I am Nobody,” said Brooke. Or, I suppose, said Nobody.
    I shrugged and zipped up the second backpack; she didn’t show any warning signs of another depressive attack, so it wasn’t worth arguing.
    “Each of the Withered gave something up,” said Nobody, and her eyes got that faraway look they sometimes had when she talked about the distant past. Nearly ten thousand years ago, if the FBI’s researcher had guessed right. “I gave up my body,” she continued, “because it was horrible and I hated it. Yashodh gave up himself.”
    “But what does that mean?” I asked. “We’ve been tossing that around for a year now, trying to figure out what he can do. Nobody gave up her body and gained the ability to take the bodies of others. Can Yashodh take the ‘selves’ of others? What does that even mean? It might explain the cult, if he’s somehow subsuming their individuality into some kind of collective, but why? What does he possibly gain from doing that?”
    “He’s weak,” said Nobody, her voice dripping with disdain. “He’s lucky to get anything, let alone something he wants.”
    “He’s a ten-thousand-year-old monster,” I said, “one who can probably mind control people. The more we look into him, the more I think he can get anything he wants.”
    “Then why is he here in two-bit Crapville?” asked Nobody. “Everyone loves him, and he can have everything, and he doesn’t even have to kill people, and all he does is sit here picking his nose—”
    “Wait,” I said, standing up in a rush. “That’s new—you’ve talked about Yashodh for a year and this is the first time you’ve said he doesn’t have to kill people.”
    “That’s new?” Her eyes went wide and she looked down at herself as if expecting to see something different. Almost immediately she shook her head and closed her eyes, squinting them shut as she thought. “Something new … think…” She clenched her teeth with the effort. “He doesn’t kill people … he doesn’t have to kill people.…”
    “Do they worship him?” I asked. If he’d set himself up as a messiah figure in a backcountry cult, maybe it was the worship itself that sustained him. “You said everyone loves him, right? Is that a means to an end, or is that the end itself?”
    “That would make sense,” said Nobody, rubbing her fingers together as she spoke, staring at the wall.
    “But is it true?”
    “I don’t know,” she growled, “I’m trying to think.” She focused on the wall like it was a portal to the past. “Come on, brain, spit it out. He doesn’t need to kill people. Maybe he doesn’t want to kill people. Maybe he can’t kill people.”
    “He gave up himself,” I said, trying to keep her thoughts focused; brainstorming new ideas wouldn’t help us, we needed to dig deeper into the handful of truths we already had.
    “He gave himself up,” said Brooke. “Everybody loves him … because he gave himself up. He saved them.”
    This sounded wrong. “From what?”
    “From sin,” said Brooke, looking up at me. “He died for our sins.”
    I shook my head. “How many of your personalities are Christian?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Lots. I’m just talking about Jesus now, aren’t I?”
    “Yashodh is not the messiah,” I said, “but he needs to convince people that he is. For … something.”
    “So he can be happy,” said Brooke.
    “That’s it?”
    She looked at me with a