Nobody Read Online Free PDF Page A

ying to his twisted yang, a Nobody’s polar opposite in every way.
I should have killed her
.
    He was going to kill her. Only …
    She’d seen him. She’d
noticed
him. And even after she’d started screaming, she hadn’t pulled the attention of the woman with the dogs. She could have, if she’d wanted to. Nulls commanded attention—and adoration—as much as Nobodies repelled it. But this Null hadn’t fought back.
    She’d just stood there, staring at him. Not over his shoulder. Not through him. Directly at him.
    And, God, it felt like someone had poured Icy Hot over his entire body. Like being hooked up to an electric chair.
    It. Wasn’t. Real
.
    Nix had always known that Nulls were dangerous. Thatthey could make you feel and do things that you didn’t want to do. But until this particular Null had caught him, none of his marks had ever had the chance to use their powers on him.
    None of them had ever seen him coming.
    As potent as Nix’s ability to fade was with Normals, it was ten times more powerful with Nulls. Nobodies walked through the world unnoticed, and Nulls saw only what they wanted to see. Nix couldn’t affect anyone else, and this girl—this
Null
—couldn’t be affected by the plights of others. He should have been able to walk up to her with a whirring chainsaw without meriting more than a second of her attention.
    He should have killed her.
    She should be dead
. Nix found the thought unsettling. He’d never failed to carry out an assignment before, and he told himself that was why she kept him up at night. Why he hadn’t faded completely since their eyes had met for the first time. Why he’d opened her file and read her name over and over again, even though she wouldn’t have one for long.
    Claire.
    Claire Ryan.
    The girl he was going to kill.
Number Twelve
. Today.
    Nix picked up the gun and then set it back down. He was an excellent shot. He could hit targets. He could shoot marks. He could put bullets into hearts and keepthem from pumping, and into skulls, just between the eyes.
    But killing that way wasn’t what he’d been trained for.
    It wasn’t what she deserved.
    No,
Claire
deserved something a little more personal. She’d used her powers to make him feel like something, to make him feel worthy and noticeable, and then she’d taken it all away the moment he had realized that she was pretending. That if her life hadn’t been at stake, she wouldn’t have feigned noticing him at all. She’d used her unnatural aptitude for manipulation on him.
    So he was going to use his abilities—all of them—on her.
    She wouldn’t see him coming. She wouldn’t know what hit her, but when his needle pierced her arm, when she felt that tiny little prick and then
nothing
—then she’d know who and what he was.
    She’d know that Nobody had killed her, and he’d leave her body on the sidewalk, for the police to puzzle over—
natural causes
, they’d say—and her parents to sob over with equal measures anguish and relief.
    “Today, Claire,” Nix said softly. He talked to himself so seldom that the sound of his voice had him looking over his shoulder to make sure that no one else had heard.
    Not that anyone would pay it much attention if they had.
    For the past three days, he’d stayed close, biding his time. He’d watched her. He’d waited. But now he couldn’twait anymore. The day before, he’d seen people near Claire’s house. He wasn’t close enough to get an ID on any of them, but he could tell from the way they moved, from the unmarked van they drove, that The Society had sent a cleanup team. Nix’s superiors only had one Nobody, but they had many soldiers.
    Sight. Smell. Taste. Sound. Feel
.
    When Sensors were too old or too young for active duty, they worked on their own, scouting for The Society in zones, looking for aberrations in the world’s pattern. But when they were in their prime, Sensors worked in groups of five, one for each of the senses. Together, they were