I still had the knife. The police had taken it, but it was covered with ash, not blood, and they’d had no grounds to protest when Ostler had ordered them to return it. It was back in its sheath now, wiped carefully clean, sitting in my coat pocket. I hadn’t taken the coat off yet. I thought about the knife now, wondering if I should get it out to look at it, to clean the last bits of sludge from the blade. To hold it. I wondered if I should hide it, though I couldn’t think of any reason why. I didn’t know what to do with the knife, or myself, because I didn’t know how I felt about killing Mary. Should I be elated? Relieved? Nathan had said that we couldn’t possibly feel relieved at her death, because we’d lost Kelly in the process, but those seemed like completely separate things to me. We could feel bad that we lost Kelly, and glad that we’d stopped Mary, all at the same time. Couldn’t we? Did it have to be either/or?
I was avoiding the issue. The knife was just a knife, and her body was ash, and it didn’t matter what happened to any of it. What mattered was how I had done it. One stab to kill her was justified—it was “good,” in the way that our morality shifted to cover the spectrum of attack and defense. She was going to kill Potash, so I stopped her. But I hadn’t stopped myself. I’d stabbed her a dozen times or more after that, maybe two dozen, and there was nothing justified about any of those. I wasn’t stabbing that corpse to defend myself or protect a friend or even to avenge the other victims. I wasn’t even stabbing because I wanted to, though that would be bad enough. I was stabbing that body because I couldn’t stop myself from stabbing it. I’d lost control. In all my years of thinking and struggling and following rules, in all my study of demons and Withered and their untold millennia of terror, nothing scared me as much as this. I’d lost control.
Boy Dog waddled past me and flopped down on the floor, panting from the exertion. The knife was in my pocket. I didn’t dare to pet him or touch him or even think about him. I lifted my legs and braced my feet on the seat in front of me, out of reach, where the dog couldn’t lean against them, and I sat in a fetal position, staring at my dark reflection in the TV screen.
I didn’t move for almost thirteen hours.
*
Potash was diagnosed with something called cryptogenic organizing pneumonitis, which his doctors defined as “His lungs don’t work right, but hell if we know why.” I’m paraphrasing. Whatever Mary gave him—a virus, a bacteria, or maybe even a fungus—got into his lungs in such high volume that it started rebuilding them, and if he’d gotten to the hospital even a few hours later he probably would have died. The lead pulmonologist, a man named Dr. Pearl, joked that the disease seemed almost supernatural, but none of us ever laughed, and he eventually stopped making jokes.
I kept the knife with me everywhere, but I never took it out of its sheath.
With Mary dead we focused all our attention on Meshara, though without Kelly and Potash to help there wasn’t nearly enough attention to go around. The police gave us access to their files, which was helpful but actually created more work, not less. They set up a few surveillance details as well, but seemed far more interested in watching us. They didn’t trust us, and without Kelly to act as liaison, the relationship was strained. Trujillo redoubled his efforts with Brooke, trying everything he could think of to help control her memories and recall more details about Meshara, but it wasn’t going well; Nathan said that Trujillo, on the rare nights he slept in their apartment instead of the office, was wracked with nightmares.
“It must be awful to listen to that stuff day in and day out,” Nathan confided in me. “She’s got a head full of the sickest, darkest stuff you can possibly imagine.”
“Then why,” I asked, “do you feel sorry for the guy forcing her to remember it?”
He didn’t have a good response to that, but at least he started leaving me alone. His job kept him in the office and the library, looking into every little tidbit Brooke dropped about the Withered, so I didn’t see much of him anyway. Diana and I were assigned to follow Meshara in his human identity of Elijah Sexton, who turned out to be a hearse driver for one of the larger mortuaries in the city. I immediately assumed that his “power,” whatever it was, required access to the recently dead, but I couldn’t know why until we learned more. I could investigate better alone, but Ostler insisted we stay together, so Diana never left my side.