The Devil's Only Friend (18 page)

“John, come back!” shouted Ostler, but I ignored her and sprinted to the mortuary, shouting into the radio: “Don’t hurt Elijah!” I’d been right about him: he was good. He wasn’t working with Gidri and he hadn’t kidnapped Rose. She was defending him. The only way the other Withered could have already fallen was if Elijah himself had attacked them.

He was good.

“Officer down,” said a man on the radio. “Repeat, officer d—no, two down!”

So there was at least one Withered still up. I had to go carefully. I ran past Team Three, ignoring their warning as I dashed through the door. The hallway inside was a chaos of light and dark, and far at the end I could see Potash and a group of police locked in combat with what looked like a thick, spiny rosebush. Halfway down the hall was a bright doorway, yellow light spilling out into the corridor, so that’s where I ran.

It was Elijah’s office and it was devastated. Furniture was smashed and overturned and blood and ash covered the floor. Elijah stood in the far corner, his chest sliced open; blood and soulstuff spilled out in thick rivulets, greasy and black. Behind him was Rose Chapman, covered with cuts and bruises, staring out in wide-eyed terror, and against the opposite wall stood Diana, her rifle trained on them both. Between them on the floor lay three bodies: the first I recognized as Jacob Carl, Elijah’s counterpart on the day shift; he sprawled against the wall with his eyes wide open and his head twisted nearly backwards. Beside him was the tallest of the Withered, completely inert, and closest to me lay Gidri—young and handsome and still as the grave. I stepped toward him, feeling the familiar rush at the sight of a corpse—but no. His chest was moving. He was alive. I looked at the other Withered and saw the same. They didn’t have any visible wounds. I stooped over Gidri to examine him closer. How had this happened?

But of course there was only one answer.

“You drained them?” I asked. Elijah moved his mouth but no sound came out; the slash across his chest must have damaged his voice.

“He can only drain dead bodies,” said Diana.

“Obviously not,” I said. I touched Gidri’s throat, feeling his pulse. “If they were dead they’d turn to ash. That means he incapacitated them, and draining their minds is the only weapon he has.” It looked like he’d drained so much of their memories they couldn’t even think anymore, couldn’t even stand. They were infants—worse than infants. They were hollow shells.

“What are you talking about?” asked Rose.

Potash appeared in the door behind me, covered in blood and grease and splinters. His machete dangled from his fingers; he didn’t try to speak but simply gasped for breath. Beyond him the police were calling for medics, and I knew they’d won their fight. That shouldn’t have happened—we should have all been dead. But Elijah had turned on his own kind, and turned their four-monster army into a lone, desperate runner, and suddenly the odds were in our favor. We’d won because of Elijah.

Diana seemed to be thinking the same thing, but it hadn’t convinced her. “Protocol says we kill him anyway—”

“Protocol can wait,” I said, and I looked at Elijah. If he could drain the living, why didn’t he? What was stopping him from draining my memories, or Diana’s, or Rose’s? He could drop us in seconds, and we’d never even remember that he’d gotten away. But instead he stood there and watched me, and his face didn’t show fear or determination or anything else I would have expected in a battle scene. The corners of his mouth turned down, his brow wrinkled over his eyes. He was sad.

We’d thought he was forced to use dead memories because no one would ever take them if they could take living ones instead. We’d had him completely backwards—he could take living memories just fine, but he chose not to. What were we missing? What made a living man’s memories so much worse than a dead one’s? Why should he be so sad about a living man with no—

And then everything made sense.

“These aren’t the first people you’ve drained without killing,” I said.

His face, already sad, collapsed into a despair so deep it seemed to draw me down with it. “I never want to kill,” he said. His voice sounded ragged and raw, as if the gash in his chest were only half healed inside. “I thought I could … sustain myself without hurting anyone, but it was all wrong. I never meant to hurt him.”

“Who?” asked Diana.

“Merrill Evans,” I said, and Elijah closed his eyes. How had it happened, I wondered? Some night, twenty years ago, when Elijah’s mind was fading and he was desperate for more memories to fill it. The only sustenance he really needed, but not a body anywhere to take it from. Perhaps he’d gotten sloppy? Perhaps he’d let it go too long? And then he was stranded, without a mind to call his own, and there was Merrill Evans. “It isn’t really Alzheimer’s,” he’d told me that day in the lobby. Elijah had broken a man’s mind, and that knowledge hurt him more than any death ever could, because he’d done it himself.

I didn’t know how a lot of things felt, but I knew what it felt like to fail someone.

Elijah sank to his knees.

“I have a shot,” said Diana.

“Wait,” I said fiercely. Elijah couldn’t die here—not like this. I looked at Rose. “We’re with a special branch of the FBI and we’re here to rescue you. We have an ambulance outside.” I pointed at Diana. “Will you go with my friend, here?”

“Will you tell me what’s going on?” asked Rose.

I nodded. “Outside.” She hesitated, probably still in shock from the last few hours. But after a moment, she stepped around Elijah and took Diana’s hand. She led Rose out, casting me a glance halfway between hope and fear, and then they disappeared into the hall.

“How did you know about us?” asked Elijah. His voice was better now; he was healing quickly.

I wanted to trust him but I was still too cautious to tell him everything right up front. “We have what you might call an informant.”

“Another Withered?”

Close enough.
“Friend of a friend.”

He nodded, as if this made some kind of satisfying sense. “Who are you?”

“My name’s John Cleaver,” I said. I realized that this was the first time I’d introduced myself to a Withered—the first time, maybe, that any official overture had been made between the groups. I wanted to add more circumstance to the occasion but I didn’t have any authority or even a title … and then a sudden whim took me and I couldn’t help the small smile that crept into the corner of my mouth. “Professional psychopath.”

He studied me a moment before speaking. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

“The war I assume Gidri warned you about is real,” I said. I pointed at the carnage in the room, at the blood and ash and destruction. “I take it you didn’t like his offer, so I’d like you to hear mine.”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t want to kill them.”

“You didn’t kill these.”

“Just wait.” He paused, and I wondered what he was thinking about. “They’re my brothers,” he said at last. “Not literally, but … we’re the same.”

“Don’t insult yourself,” I said.

His silence stretched out, broken only by Potash’s labored breathing in the background. After what felt like ages, Elijah spoke again, and his voice was soft and distant.

“We had such dreams, you know. Back in the beginning. I don’t even remember it all now, it was so long ago, but I remember the excitement—the thrill and the power, the dreams of immortality. We were going to rule the world. I guess we did, for a while.” He swept his hand across the cramped, bloody room. “Now look at us.”

“They’re organizing,” I said. “Counting these two and the one in the hall, we’ve stopped five in this city alone, and that’s set them back, but there are others. You know that better than I do. They’re out there and they’re killing, and we need to stop them. You don’t even have to do it yourself, just tell us what you know.” I looked at Gidri and his comatose companion. “Which one was the cannibal?”

“Cannibal?”

“One of them was sending us notes,” I said, “pinned to his half-eaten victims.”

“Neither of them eats people,” said Elijah, and pointed at the Withered in turn. “Gidri steals youth, and Ihsan steals skin. They’ve always gotten along.”

I frowned, fearing the worst but not daring to say it yet. “The thorny guy in the hall?”

“I don’t think he eats at all,” said Elijah.

Potash’s voice was a ragged whisper. “Looks like we’re not done with this town yet.”

10

“I don’t remember everything,” said Elijah.

“Great,” said Nathan. “Two inside sources and they’re both broken.”

“Quiet,” said Ostler.

Nathan shrugged. “He can’t hear me.”

We were sitting in the police station, watching Elijah through a one-way mirror. He was alone in the interrogation room, manacled hand and foot and chained to a hook in the floor. Volunteer or not, he hadn’t earned anyone’s trust yet.

The cameras and voice recorders had all been disabled at Ostler’s request. Nothing we said would be recorded. She thumbed the button for the microphone and asked him our first question: “Tell us about Rose Chapman.”

“She’s a … mistake,” said Elijah. “I do my best to avoid any contact with the people in my memories, but this is a small city. I saw her first by accident, and it was…” He closed his eyes. “It was so hard. That’s no excuse, but you have to understand. I have every memory of her that her husband ever had. I couldn’t help but love her. I should have stayed away but when Gidri showed up, I knew the city was about to get more dangerous and I convinced myself I had to protect her. I saw her again, on purpose this time, and Gidri figured it out.”

“The grief-counseling session,” said Ostler.

Elijah nodded. “He wanted me to join their war, and when I said no he looked for leverage to convince me. He followed me to the session, saw my connection to Rose, and took her.”

“Rose’s story to the police corroborates that,” said Diana.

Ostler hit the microphone button again. “Thank you, Mr. Sexton. Or should we call you Meshara?”

He looked up in surprise, but after a moment he sagged back down in his chair. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you know that name. Who’s your informer?”

“Just tell us about yourself,” said Ostler.

Elijah sighed and nodded. “They call me Meshara, though I don’t think it’s my original name. I think we’re older than that. My memory fades without a constant source of new ones and over the years I’ve missed too many times, lost too much of what I used to be. A lot of that, I admit, was on purpose. I’ve done a lot of things I was happy to forget.”

Detective Scott had joined us to listen, his opinion of our wild boogeyman stories somewhat altered by the man-shaped tree who’d injured four of his men before dissolving into sludge. Two were in critical condition but none had died. Yet.

“It started, I think, in a city,” said Elijah. “We were all from the same city mostly, though there were a few from other places around the valley. Rack and Ren were the ones who brought it to us, but I don’t remember where they came up with it—and when I say ‘it,’ I don’t mean an object, I mean the idea. Eternal life. We could become so much more than we were. We could be gods.”

“They’re human?” asked Diana.

“Or at least they started that way,” said Ostler.

Nathan was taking notes at a furious pace, his fingers clacking on the keyboard of his notebook computer.

Potash’s oxygen tank beeped. It reminded me of Darth Vader.

Elijah started tracing something on the table, and I craned my neck to see. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to it, just a nervous tic. “There was a ritual, I guess,” he said. “I don’t remember the details, but I suppose that’s to be expected. We had to give something up—something deep, some part of ourselves that defined who we were. It was a way of giving up our humanity, I guess, so we could move on to something bigger, but that might be my own opinion on it, after the fact. It’s hard to separate my original motives from the ten thousand years I’ve had to reconsider it. Giving it up was a freedom, Rack said—the only thing we were losing were the limits that held us back. I guess I believed him because why else would I choose to give up my memory?”

His face darkened. “I’ve wondered, a lot, what horrible thing I must have gone through to make me think that forgetting everything would be a release. I was just a dumb kid I guess—probably a city elder, honestly, if you think about the life expectancy we must have had back then. But still, a kid in comparison. Ten thousand years is a long time to look back on one decision. It didn’t take me long to replace whatever I’d been trying to forget with a thousand new experiences every bit as terrible. A lot of them worse. The human race is truly, truly evil.” He paused. “And unimaginably good.”

I watched him as he spoke, trying to read his face. Trying to see in him some element of Crowley, or Nobody, or Mary Gardner. Who were they, really? Back in the beginning, if there was one, who had they been?

“I don’t remember where that city was,” said Elijah. “There was a mountain nearby, though I know that doesn’t help much. I went east, I think, but eventually I went everywhere. I’ve lived all over the world. I live here now because it’s quiet, and because I have a steady source of memories I can use without hurting anyone.” He went suddenly quiet. “Except…” He paused again, as if warring with himself over how to say the next thing, or whether he should say it at all. I wondered what he was struggling to confess—we already knew about Merrill Evans—but when he finally spoke again it was a question. “Is Rosie okay?”

Ostler looked at Trujillo, then leaned forward and pushed a button. “She’s fine.”

Elijah’s face looked pained. “Does she … know? About me?”

“No, she doesn’t,” said Ostler. “She’s talked to the police and to a trauma counselor, and now she’s safe at home.”

“Thank you for that.” He leaned back in his chair, his head down. He looked deflated, as if all the life had gone out of him.

“Ask about The Hunter,” I said.

Ostler pushed the button again. “Can you tell us about the cannibal?”

“I don’t know anything,” said Elijah.

“You have the photos in front of you,” said Ostler. “Does any of it look familiar?”