“He’s fine,” I told him.
Elijah started to protest. “He’ll…” He stopped himself, and sighed. “I guess he won’t miss me. But I miss him. I owe him. I’m the one who put him in that living tomb—the least I can do is say hi once in a while.”
“Doctor Trujillo checks on him every day,” I said. “I can ask him to stop by and chat for a bit too, if it would make you feel better.”
“When he’s visiting your ‘friend of a friend’?” asked Elijah. We still hadn’t told him about Brooke, but his recent memory was whip sharp at the moment, thanks to the effect of the two Withered minds he’d drained, and he could remember our first conversation with startling clarity. I nodded.
“He spends most of his time there,” I said. “Visiting Merrill might actually be a relief.”
“It should be me,” said Elijah, and I could see the determination in his face: nostrils slightly flared, his mouth a grim line. “I’m the one who did it, I should be the one who pays for it.”
I thought about Brooke, completely alone in her medical cell, and nodded. “I know how you feel.”
“No you don’t,” he insisted. “Your mind isn’t a sieve—when you do something wrong you try to forget it, because if you don’t it will stay in your dreams forever. I don’t have that luxury.”
A broken mirror, covered with blood. “Haunted dreams are a luxury?”
“Nature’s way of making sure you don’t make the same mistake twice,” said Elijah. “I visit Merrill because what I did to him was horrible and I have to remember that—I can’t ever stop remembering that—because if I do I might hurt somebody else the same way.”
“He won’t live forever,” I said. “You have to stop sooner or later.”
His gaze grew even more intense. “Then you understand why I have to hang on to him as long as I can. How many times in my ten thousand years do you think I’ve drained a living mind, forgotten about it, and tried it again? How many times have I left someone a hollow shell? How many times have I rediscovered the horror that I’m capable of?”
A burning car and an ear-splitting scream.
“The one day I didn’t wake up to horror,” I said. “The one day I woke up without thinking about Marci—without remembering her face, without dreams of her dead body still fogging up my eyes—that was the worst day of my entire life, even worse than the day she died, because I walked to the refrigerator and saw that little fish magnet she used to have, the one I asked her mother for before I left town, and then everything Marci had ever done or said or been came rushing back and I knew that I had failed her. All I had to do was think about her, the easiest thing in the world, and I hadn’t. For twenty whole minutes.”
I stopped talking abruptly, as if I’d only just noticed the fact that I was talking at all, and wanted to hide it. I didn’t know why I’d told him that. My therapy sessions with Dr. Trujillo—which we hadn’t had in a while, to my great delight—had taught me that sharing my feelings was important, not because it accomplished anything or achieved any great purpose, but because the sharing itself was important. Maybe that’s why I told him. Maybe I just needed to say it out loud.
Or maybe I wanted to know if he was like me. Maybe I just wanted to see some recognition, for once in my life, that I wasn’t completely alone. If I had to get that from a demon, then … that sounds about normal for me.
“It gets easier,” he said. “Losing people.”
“I guess you do that a lot.”
“Millions of times,” he said. “But it’s never the millions that get to you. It’s the ones. That one person you can’t ever be without, and then you are.”
“People like Rose Chapman?” I asked.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and nodded. “People like Rose. I built my whole life around two things, you know: taking new memories and avoiding everyone in them. It’s not the easiest life to maintain. Mistakes like Rose—like meeting her in the supermarket, talking to her again, going out of my big stupid way to see her again—they happen. This one ended poorly, but they can be so much worse. Rose can go on her way now and imagine that I’m some creepy weirdo she got mixed up with for a week or two, that got a little obsessed and put her life in danger, but I can live with that. Because she can move on from that. Her memories of me—of the Billy Chapman part of me that cares about her—those are undamaged. She can remember Billy Chapman, without any of this baggage, for the rest of her life.”