The woman with the gun ignored her, keeping the gun trained tightly on my chest. “Protocol says we kill him no matter what—”
“Protocol can wait,” said the boy, and looked at me with renewed interest, the way one would look at an insect pinned to a board. “These aren’t the first people you’ve drained without killing.”
I felt a wave of shame, the deep, dark secret of a life I’d ruined, and I choked out an answer through my raw, ragged throat. “I never wanted to kill.” My voice was scratched and painful, but I forced the words out. “I thought I could . . . sustain myself without hurting anyone, but it was all wrong. I never meant to hurt him.”
“Who?” asked the woman.
“Merrill Evans,” said the boy, and I felt again the horrible sadness of that night, desperate and barely sentient, when I’d searched for a mind and found only my friend, and I couldn’t bear to kill him, so I’d tried what I’d thought was a mercy, and instead I’d damned him to a living hell. I sank to my knees, wishing I could forget, but this wrenching shame was the one thing I could never allow myself to lose. If I forgot what I’d done to Merrill, I might do it again to someone else.
“I have a shot,” said the woman.
“Wait,” said the boy, and turned to Rosie. “We’re with a special branch of the FBI, and we’re here to rescue you. We have an ambulance outside.” He gestured at the woman with the gun. “Will you go with my friend, here?”
“Will you tell me what’s going on?” asked Rosie.
“Outside,” said the boy, and after a moment’s hesitation Rosie stepped around me and took the woman’s hand, moving toward the hall but then stopping in the doorway. The woman tugged on her arm, but Rosie paused to look at me one final time. She opened her mouth to speak, but then turned and left without a word. Another connection severed, another loved one gone forever.
The last little piece of my heart broke, and I looked back at the boy with the dead eyes.
“How did you know about us?” I asked.
“We have what you might call an informant.”
“Another Withered?”
“Friend of a friend.”
I nodded, watching the pieces slowly fit together, but there was still so much I didn’t understand. “Who are you?”
“My name’s John Cleaver,” said the boy, and his dead eyes lit up with the hollow outlines of a smile. “Professional psychopath.”
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
“The war I assume Gidri warned you about is real,” said John. He gestured at the carnage in the room. “I take it you didn’t like his offer, so I’d like you to hear mine.”
I remembered a starless night on an ancient mountain, and another offer that had doomed us all. Ten thousand years of loss and pain.
But I remembered Rosie, too. Our first kiss. A hundred thousand loves from a hundred thousand lives. I could hide, or I could give those lives meaning.
I closed my eyes, and dreamed of death.