Do it.
And then she opened her eyes. And instead of staring past him or around him or through him, Nix’s target stared directly at him. She saw him. And she screamed.
Claire felt, rather than heard, herself screaming. Now that her eyes were open, she couldn’t close them. She couldn’t look away—not from the gun pointed directly at her heart and not from the boy holding it.
His eyes were blue, so light that she wondered if they glowed in the dark. His hair was jet-black and long, and all up and down one arm, there were tattoos—black lines that slashed across his arm, each crossing the one before it in an uneven X.
There was a thin white line across his neck, and even from a distance, she could see a crescent scar on the left side of his jaw.
His cheekbones were sharp, his mouth soft.
He was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen, and he was going to kill her.
I’m still screaming, Claire realized. I’m not moving. I’m just screaming.
None of this made sense—not the way she’d known he was there, not the gun he had trained on her chest, not the fact that he hadn’t pulled the trigger, and not the disconcerting truth that she still hadn’t jumped out of the way.
How can someone want me dead if no one knows I’m alive?
As far as questions went, it was a good one, though perhaps not the very most relevant at that exact moment.
I’m still screaming. I’m screaming, and there’s no one to hear me. No Mom. No Dad. No Mrs. Milligan and her three little Yorkies. This boy is going to kill me, and she just walked right by.
Claire could almost understand her neighbor’s not hearing her screams. She was inside, Mrs. Milligan was not. And she didn’t expect the woman to turn back and look at the house, or to see her distress, or to even realize that a girl named Claire lived at number 116. But how could Mrs. Milligan not see her killer?
He was standing there, in broad daylight, with a gun. Danger rolled off his body in waves. Each muscle, each mark, each scar screamed for attention.
Claire couldn’t take her eyes off him.
Her fascination couldn’t have lasted longer than a second, or two at most, but to Claire, it felt like an eternity. A single unit of forever spent screaming and staring, staring and screaming.
And then, his finger bearing down on the trigger, the boy lifted his eyes from her chest to her chin. From her chin to her mouth. From her mouth to her nose, and then, finally, to her eyes.
If she’d felt his stare on her skin before, she felt it inside now. There was no metaphor to describe it, no natural disaster big enough to do justice to the unbearable pressure and tumultuous power crashing into and through and around her insides. This wasn’t an earthquake. This wasn’t a tsunami.
This was no hurricane.
It was everything—every single thing that had ever existed, every feeling she’d ever felt, every Situation, every wallow, every dream.
His gaze bathed her in warmth until she thought she would be sick from exposure, and—convinced it was the last thing she would ever do—she looked back at him. His eyes on hers. Hers on his.
The world exploded. And for a moment, a single moment, as that deafening, all-encompassing roar filled her ears, Claire Ryan thought she’d been shot.
Situation: What if the only boy who’d ever really looked at you was dead set on seeing you … dead?
No blood. There’s no blood. He shot me … I heard it. I heard something, and God knows I felt it.
With a start, Claire realized that there was no wound, no small, round hole through which everything she’d once been could leak out and onto the floor. Not believing what her body was telling her, Claire worked to pull her eyes away from his, and the moment she did, the spell was broken.
She fell to the floor and rolled as far away from the window as she could get. Her breath caught in her throat, and her hands—skeptical of what her brain was telling them—began to search her chest frantically for a wound that did not exist, from a bullet that had never been fired.
I felt it. I heard it. I …
“I have to call the police.” Claire was not—contrary to what the past forty-five seconds might have led someone to believe—entirely without common sense. She had to get out of the room. Away from the windows. She had to call the police.
Even if she didn’t want to.
Even if they never caught him. Even if her would-be killer was already gone and never planned to come back. Even if the dumbest, most instinctual part of her wanted nothing more than to climb back to the window and look out.
To see if he was still there.
To look at him.
And to feel him, looking at her.
I’m sick in the head. I’m sick, I need help, and I am calling the police.
As she followed through with her promise, crawling toward the phone and dialing 911, Claire felt the last of the pinpricks, the fireworks, the everything leaving her body. For the first time since she’d walked to the window, she felt the safety of anonymity, the calm of being utterly and entirely alone. Of being Claire.
He’s gone.
It made no sense, but she was certain. She knew what she’d felt when the boy was there, and she knew that it was utterly, entirely, unarguably gone.
She missed it.
Oh, God, Claire thought, as she stuttered out her name and address and emergency to the operator. Someone just tried to kill me, and I’m sad that he left. He wants me dead, and I want to see him again.
Need to see him again.
Okay, that’s it. I’m officially crazy.
It was, without question, a new low—even for Claire.
4
It was an aberration. It was an error. It won’t happen again.
That was what Nix told himself, over and over again, as he bided his time in the days after his failed attempt on the Null’s life. He couldn’t risk going back to the girl’s house to finish the job—not immediately. Not with the police crawling all over the place that first day.
Not with the girl’s parents at her beck and call, flanking her every move for the three days since. Why the Null had decided to use her unnatural charisma to lure her mother and father home, Nix wasn’t entirely sure.
Maybe the threat of her own death was worth suffering the presence of the people who loved her.
Maybe she was planning on using them as human shields: living, breathing bulletproof vests that meant no more to her than the furniture.
Or maybe it just made her feel powerful to know that she could pull them back to her whenever she wanted, like puppets on a string, even though deep down, most parents knew that there was something wrong with their Null. Even as children, Nulls’ hugs were empty. They were unmoved when Mommy accidentally sliced open her finger. Instead of reaching for the Band-Aids, they leaned forward to get a better look.
No compassion.
No empathy.
Defective. The 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. That they 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. Nob
odies 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 keep them 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’t wait 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 perceptive to the point of being prescient. They identified Nulls. They safeguarded The Society and its institute. They unraveled the mysteries of the universe, one data point at a time.
The Sensors were the ones who’d trained him.
The world has an energy to it. Everyone and everything—people, objects, animals, plants … even rocks and dirt and molecules of air—they’re all made up of energy. And when they interact with each other, they leave their marks on the world, and it is through that exchange of energy that all happenings happen. That love blossoms. That connections are made.
Do you know why we call you Nix, child?
He hadn’t. Not at the age of three. But by four, he’d learned.
It’s because you’re nothing. You have no energy. You leave no trail. As far as the world is concerned, you don’t exist. And you never will.
The Society had raised him.
The Society had trained him.
The Society had given him a purpose—or as much of one as a Nobody could have. When they told him to kill, he killed, and in the days, weeks, months in between, he molded himself into a better killer: quicker, faster, more untouchable. He let Society scientists poke and prod him so that his deficiencies might be fully understood, so that those working for the greater good might squeeze every last drop of data out of his flesh, his bones, the abilities he had that real people didn’t.
And even though it did Nix no good, even though his emotions had and could have no effect on Ione or the Sensors or the many scientists who’d used him as a lab rat, he hated them for it.
Empty hatred, because he didn’t count.
Claire is mine.
The thought was savage, feral in a way that usually had him tearing at his own flesh, desperate to feel something that mattered. Something he could count on. Something that wouldn’t cease to exist, just because no one cared that it was there.
Claire was his.
These Sensors were out of their league. They thought that because they knew about energy, because they could sense it, that made them less vulnerable to the kind of monsters The Society was created to combat. They thought that knowing what this girl was gave them the advantage.
But they were wrong.
If Claire had seen a Nobody coming, she’d catch the Sensors before any of them could lay so much as a finger on her. They could try to pick her off from a nearby roof, but unlike Nix, Sensors could be tracked, noticed, seen. If they killed her, they’d be caught. The Society was as ancient as the Knights Templar and twice as secretive. They didn’t take the risk of exposure lightly.
Less than shadow. Less than air. That’s what you have to be to kill my Claire.
Nix smiled at the rhyme in his mind. The Sensors couldn’t kill this Null.
She was his.
So he’d take care of her.
Claire watched the yolk slide out of the egg, broken and dripping. Trying not to burn herself, she bent over the skillet and began to pluck the bits of shell out of the sizzling mess on the stove.
This is why I don’t normally cook.
That and the fact that normally she didn’t have anyone to cook for. In the three days since the police had called her parents home, Claire had made breakfast every morning.
Eventually, they’d eat it. Sit down at the table across from her, say her name, and eat her eggs. Eventually, Claire and her mother and her father would have a real family breakfast, like countless TV families before them.
But not today.
Absentmindedly, Claire’s mother brushed past her. Reached into the cabinet directly over Claire’s head. Pulled out a box of cereal.
“I … ummm … I made eggs?” Claire didn’t mean for the words to come out as a question, but they did.
“Hmmm?” Her mother’s response wasn’t a word so much as a sound, but it was something.
“I made eggs. For you. And Dad.”
And me, Claire added silently, but she didn’t get that far out loud.
“Oh.” Her mother didn’t put down the cereal box. “That’s nice of you, but really, cereal is fine. And you should be out, doing things.”
Out.
As in elsewhere. Bothering someone else. Claire’s hand slipped and she burned its edge but didn’t bother running it under cold water. Instead, she just sucked a breath in around clenched teeth and turned off the stove. The eggs were only half cooked, but she wasn’t really hungry anymore.
“Maybe I don’t want to go out.”
Claire’s mother wrinkled her forehead in the manner of someone mulling over a crossword or trying to remember her exact relation to a second cousin twice removed.
“Claire?”
Claire perked up—slightly. Mouths were opening, words were being exchanged, and if she could think of the right thing to say, the absolute right thing, then maybe—
“Remember what the police officers said?”
The question stopped Claire’s maybe dead in its tracks. Losing her developing smile, she poured the remainder of the egg mess down the drain and hit the garbage disposal, drowning out all other sounds.
Remember wha
t the police officers said?
Claire remembered exactly what the police officers had said.
There was no one there. There was a witness on your street during this so-called attack, and she saw and heard nothing.
Are you sure you screamed?
Are you sure you’re not just making this up?
And then later, to her parents, Does your daughter have an overactive imagination?
And that was all it had taken for her parents and the police to collectively decide that Claire spent too much time reading and not enough time around kids her own age. They’d patted her on the head and spoken to each other and generally ignored everything she’d told them until it became perfectly clear that of all the people involved in this case, she mattered the least.
Her parents weren’t pleased that they’d cut their vacation short, but they weren’t angry with her. They didn’t scold. They just held her hand and said “uh-huh” when she talked and then looked at their watches, as if time passed more slowly when Claire was involved.
They ate cereal for breakfast, while Claire’s eggs died a slow, painful death in the drain.
Moving mechanically, Claire flipped the garbage disposal off before responding to her mother’s question. “I remember what the police officers said, Mom. And I’m telling you—I didn’t make it up.”
“Of course not. No one is saying you did. Your father and I just think that you need to get back on the horse.”
Her mother was a fan of empty metaphors.
“You know, get back out there, do the things you love.”
Claire was tempted to point out that her mother had no idea what those things were, that if her parents had bothered to check in or—perish the thought—spend some actual time at home with their daughter, they might have seen the beautiful boy with the shining silver gun.
And, okay, maybe it did sound ridiculous, but they were her parents. They should have known her well enough to know that she wouldn’t imagine something like this.
But they didn’t know her. At all. And as much as she wanted to, Claire couldn’t find it in herself to hate them for it, or to point out their shortcomings, because it wasn’t as if they tried to ignore her. On the rare occasion her parents were home, they both actually tried quite hard to relate to her.