Next of Kin (3 page)

I don’t know if I arranged my next meeting with Rosie or not. I didn’t actively try to find her, but I didn’t try to avoid her, either. I knew where she lived, and where she worked, and where she shopped; I knew all her friends and her relatives. These things and more were the cold remnants of a life that wasn’t mine, but that didn’t make them any less prominent in my memory. I could have gone to her gym, but I didn’t; I could have followed her on her runs through the park, but I didn’t. I’m not a stalker. But we shopped at the same grocery store, and I didn’t change this habit, and sooner or later, perhaps inevitably, we met again.

She spoke to me this time, in the pallid light of the bright fluorescent bulbs. “Hi.”

I looked up, not surprised or resigned or scared or sad but somehow all of them at once. I tried to hide it. “Hi.”

“Are you all right?” she asked. She was always so concerned about people. “I saw you in here last month.”

“I remember.”

“You looked . . .” She paused. “I don’t know, like maybe you needed help. Is there . . . anything wrong?”

Everything and nothing, I thought. I smiled, but only faintly, for I knew that everything I was doing was wrong. “That’s very kind of you,” I said. “I’m fine, though.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to pry, and I know it’s none of my business, but . . .” She hesitated. “Well, I just lost someone very dear to me, and when I saw your face, I thought . . . well, I guess I thought I recognized something.”

I clenched my teeth, biting down on the joy that threatened to burst up through my chest—that she knew me, that she remembered me—but I knew that couldn’t be true, and I waited for the next words that tumbled out in a helpless rush.

“I thought I recognized a little of myself,” she said, “of my grief, I guess you could say, and I thought maybe here was somebody else going through the same kind of pain I was going through, and maybe he had someone to share it with and maybe he didn’t, and I’m certainly not a poster child for quality grief management, but at least I have someone to talk to, I have my sisters and my parents and my in-laws, and maybe I’m completely off base with this and I’m seeing things that aren’t there, and you’re probably wondering who this psycho is that’s trying to dump all this angst on you right here in the produce section, and I’m sorry to even bother you—”

“I lost someone too,” I said softly. Not just Rosie, but a hundred thousand more. “I’m okay, though,” I said. “I’m not . . . whatever.”

“Are you sure?” asked Rosie. She could never stop herself from helping any sick neighbor or broken-winged bird that crossed our path, and I felt a sharp pang of guilt that I had somehow arranged this, that I had known her foibles and attracted her on purpose, even subconsciously.

I nodded. “I’m fine.”

She looked at me a moment, and I wondered if I had made it through another encounter without ruining my greatest love’s life, and if that meant she was going to leave me now, again, and I cursed myself for wondering which would be worse. Better to ruin my own life a thousand times than to hurt her any more than my death already had. But I didn’t move, and I didn’t speak, and then she did: “Who did you lose?”

“My wife.”

“I’m so sorry.” She put a hand on my arm, and I felt myself die all over again. I held myself still, as long as I could, but it was too much, and I pulled away. She looked at me with renewed pain in her eyes. “Do you have other family? Someone to talk to?”

“I get by,” I told her, but it wasn’t a real answer, and she knew it. She thought for a moment, pursing her lips in that way she does, so familiar I could wrap myself in the gesture like a warm, soft coat.

“I’m in a counseling group,” she said. “Like a group therapy thing, but not as hippy-dippy as that probably sounds.” She dug in her purse for a card while she spoke but found nothing and finally wrote the address on a scrap of an old receipt. “If you need to talk to someone, about anything, we’d love to have you. Everyone there is so nice, and I think it might—well, I know it’s helped me. It’s still helping me.” She held out the paper. “Please come.”

I had rules to follow. Traditions that had kept me safe, along with all the people I loved.
The lives you take are not yours to live. The people you miss aren’t yours to miss. Don’t talk to them, don’t tell them the truth, don’t tell them anything. Remember them because you have to, but no more. Don’t follow them, don’t hurt them, don’t drag them into the hell of your own impossible life.
But there was a killer in town, now—a Gifted, a Cursed, a Withered. I wanted to protect the woman I remembered as my wife.

I had followed these rules for thousands of years, but I would break them all for Rosie.

I took the address. “Thanks. I might.”

“Meshara.”

I looked up from my puzzle book to see a man standing in the doorway to my small office in the morgue’s garage and two more men behind him in the hall. The word they used was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time; one of the many things I’d learned and forgotten in my vast, patchwork life.

“I assume that’s a name?” I asked.

“Typical,” said the man, walking in and sitting down in the other chair. He was improbably handsome, but pulsing with feral power, like a hyena disguised as a god; the kind of killer that could easily bring down a healthy antelope but chose instead to tear the sick ones to pieces. He grinned, showing off his teeth as if to complete the metaphor in my head. “Understandable, though, isn’t it? I think the phrase is: You’ve forgotten more than the rest of us have ever learned.”

“All of us but Hulla,” said one of the other men. He was taller and broader, with a web of scars across his face that sparked a distant, unformed memory. The third man was whip-thin and silent.

The Gifted had come for me.

“Hulla doesn’t even go by that name anymore,” said the first man, leaning back in his chair. “Calls herself ‘Nobody.’ Can you believe it?”

“
Called
,” said the second man.

I sighed and closed my book. “Not all of us like those old names,” I said. “Elijah’s good enough for me.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

“I can’t even remember who I was back then,” I said softly. “I certainly can’t remember my name.”

“Meshara,” he said again. “And I’m Gidri, and this is Ihsan and—”

“You know I really don’t have any interest in your little . . . Gifted club, or whatever it is.” I shrugged, not really sure what else to say. “I said as much to the last one, whatever his name was, when he came here a few years ago. Forman, I think? Nothing’s changed since then. If anything, it’s changed in the other direction, and I’m less likely to join you now than I was.”

“Kanta,” said Gidri, “or Forman, as you insist on calling him, is dead.”

I straightened, feeling the import of his words like a blow to the head. “He is?” I looked at the tall man—Ihsan, Gidri had called him. “And you said . . . Hulla, as well?”

“And Mkhai,” said Gidri. “And Jadi. And, as of last week, Agarin.”

“Agarin was . . .” I tried to remember, struggling against the void in my mind. “She was a healer.”

“In name only,” said Gidri, “and not for centuries. Most recently she worked as a nurse, right here in your own city.” He grinned again, flashing his yellow teeth. “If you’ve picked up any infant bodies from the hospital, you’ve seen her work.”

I shook my head, sickened by the thought. “I had no idea.”

“That’s the whole point,” said Gidri. “She was lying low, just like you are, just like all of us are, but that’s not working anymore. They’re fighting back now.”

“Who is?”

“The humans.” Gidri said the word with a wicked blend of disgust and excitement, the way one might refer to a dogfight. A creature worth nothing but scorn had surprised him with its competence, and he was practically giddy at the violent implications. He sat up straight in his chair, leaning forward with tightly coiled strength. “They’ve hated us as long as they’ve known about us, or at least as long as they haven’t been worshipping us, but now they’re fighting back—not just one, here and there like they used to, but organized. A concerted effort of extermination.”

“Kanta organized you first,” I said. “He attracted too much attention.”

“If it wasn’t for Kanta, we wouldn’t even have known they were hunting us,” said Gidri. “How long have you been alone? How long since any of us had any goals at all beyond our basest instincts to hide and survive? For all we know they’ve killed dozens more—there are still so many Gifted we haven’t even found yet.”

“Well, you’ve found me, and I’m alive,” I said firmly, reopening my Sudoku book. I glanced nervously at the third man, whose name I hadn’t heard and who had thus far remained silent. He stared back, unmoving, and I looked at my book uncomfortably. “Go back and tell the others I’m fine, and while you’re at it, tell them to leave me alone.”

“You’re one of us.”

“In name only,” I said, echoing their description of Agarin. “I’ve always been closer to the humans than to you, even since the beginning.” I looked up. “You keep yourselves apart from them, but I can’t. I know them too well—I’ve been them more than I’ve been myself.” I shook my head firmly. “I wouldn’t join Kanta, and I won’t join you.”

“They are hunting us,” Gidri hissed. “Do you love them enough to lie down and let them kill you?”

“I . . .” I started and stopped, unsure what to say. “The more you kill, the more they’ll see of us, and the more they see, the more they’ll hate us. You’re starting a war that can only end one way.”

“With godhood!” he shouted, slamming his fist on the desk. He lowered his voice and hissed through clenched teeth. “They used to worship us, Meshara—they used to worship you. The god of wisdom, the god of beginnings, the god of dreams. They chanted your name in the darkness, dancing naked around the first fires of the ancient world, and now you’re here, hiding and tired and worthless, as scared of living as you are of dying.”

“Maybe it’s time for us to die,” I said, though my voice was weak. I didn’t want to, but his description gave me pause. What was I really living for? After thousands of years and the reigns of kings and the rise and fall of civilizations—why was I still here, when I had no plans beyond the next dose of memory? If my only ambition was the absence of death, was that really a life?

I remembered the hopes and goals and dreams of a numberless host of humans. I remembered nothing of my own. I hadn’t wanted anything for as long as I could remember . . . until Rosie.

“War is coming,” said Gidri, “whether you want it or not, and with it comes death: yours, or theirs.”

“You’re talking about the end of the world,” I said.

“Now you understand,” said Gidri. “Either we die, or we reclaim our place as gods.”

Ihsan’s voice was deep and ominous. “Guess which one we’re choosing.”

The third man, sharp-faced and sinister, merely watched me from the corner.

“Who’s there?” asked Merrill.

“It’s me, Elijah. I’m your friend.”

“I have friends?” He unlocked the door, and his face was etched with worry. “Come in here, where they can’t hear you.”

I stepped inside, wondering what new paranoia was worming its way through his brain.

He closed the door quietly, locking it behind him with fumbling fingers. “Do you know where my house is?”

I gestured around at his room. “This is your home, Merrill.”

“This place?” He looked at me with wide eyes. “I don’t live here. I live in a house! I need to get back there, or the neighbors’ll start complaining.”

“There’s nothing for anyone to complain about.”

“Have you seen the snow out there?” He shuffled to the window, pulling open a gap in the slats of the blinds. “I need to get home and shovel the walks, and these people won’t let me.”

“Your son is shoveling the walks,” I assured him, though it wasn’t true. His family had sold his old house to help pay for Merrill’s care—augmented secretly by my own payments. It was the least I could do. But I’d learned over the years that any talk of selling his house worried him, even more than not knowing where his house was; there was a link somewhere, buried in his mind, that tied him to the
idea
of his home more strongly than to the home itself. It was the work, I think, not the bricks or the mortar, but the effort he’d put into maintaining them. As long as he thought someone was taking care of it, he’d eventually forget about the whole thing. Until another snowstorm brought the memory gasping to the surface.