“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.”
Part Six
“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.”