Over Your Dead Body Read Online Free PDF Page B

careful,” I said, watching the dark shape slowly come into focus as we walked closer. “Yashodh can control minds, and we don’t know how to kill him yet—we’re going to have to find some way of staying close to him long enough to figure him out without getting brainwashed, and that’s not going to be easy.”
    “What was the old trick you used to use?” asked Brooke. “When we had the whole team?”
    The first year Brooke and I were on the road we’d been in the employment of the FBI and we’d managed to kill eight Withered before they’d starting fighting back. That whole team was dead now, except for the two of us, but we’d learned a lot before the end. One of the simplest tricks was the speed-bump test: most of the Withered had incredible regeneration powers, but not all, so step two, after we’d found one, was to find a way to hit them with truck. If they regenerated we buckled down for a long game of cat and mouse, figuring out exactly how to kill them and then planning the perfect way to do it. I was really good at that part. If the truck worked, though, then it was over—the Withered was dead, and we moved on to the next one.
    “I don’t know if we can arrange a speed-bump test,” I said. “At least not one we can get away with afterward. Potash was a military-trained assassin; I’m just a creepy kid with a knife.”
    “And a gun,” said Brooke.
    “And a gun,” I said. She knew where it was in my pack, but I always kept the bullets hidden. A gun wasn’t a great thing to have handy during one of her suicidal mood swings.
    “Hello, travelers!” One of the people at the stand was waving to us, and we waved back. I think I’d been expecting them to be dressed in white robes or something, but instead they looked like they’d stepped out of a western movie: homemade dresses of colorful gingham, linen shirts, hats they must have purchased from a store somewhere. They weren’t dour, they weren’t otherworldly, they were just … people. They greeted us with smiles, and I slowed my pace for the last several yards, trying to gauge the danger. Boy Dog walked straight to the shady triangle by the wall of the food stand and plopped down, panting in exhaustion. One of the cultists picked up a ceramic plate of zucchini, dumped them into a box of yellow squash, and set the empty plate in front of Boy Dog, filling it with water from a plastic jug. Boy Dog eagerly lapped it up.
    “You’re a long way out from the city,” said a woman.
    I nodded, shielding my eyes from the sun. “Yep. Haven’t been able to hitch a ride all morning.”
    “Where were you headed?” asked a man.
    “Here,” said Brooke. She was never very good at deception.
    “We were looking for the Spirit of Light,” I said, trying to spin Brooke’s up-front confession into the same cover story I’d given the clerk. “My sister was down here a few months ago,” I said. “We thought maybe she’d joined your commune.”
    The woman tilted her head. “Sister Kara, maybe?”
    “Her name is Lauren,” said Brooke, before I had a chance to say yes. I bit my tongue, wondering how I could talk to them without her spoiling all my lies, but the man laughed.
    “We all get new names when we join with the Light,” he said. “I don’t remember Sister Kara’s old name, but she joined us two months ago, so it might be her.”
    “She won’t want to leave with you,” said the woman. “Sister Kara is happy here—we all are.” Her face softened and she peered into my face with concern. “You don’t look happy at all.”
    “He never does,” said Brooke, and looked at me with an expression almost identical to the woman’s. “He’s happy sometimes, though. More often than you think.”
    “How can you tell?” the woman asked.
    Brooke nodded sagely. “The dog’s still alive.”
    It disturbed me how close Brooke seemed to the cultists—how eerily her attitude of cheerful innocence matched their vibe of brainwashed emptiness.