It was no surprise the police hadn’t seen anything, for this Gifted had been careful to leave no trace. Frank hadn’t recognized the dark, slick tendril reaching out from the folds of the man’s scarf, but I did. It was like a twig of withered soul, black as the pit of Hell, and it reached through Frank’s mouth and down his throat to pierce his heart. If someone got suspicious enough to do an autopsy—and somehow convinced the state that a nameless drifter was worth the money—they’d find his inner organs sliced or ground or pureed, maybe even missing completely. I knew the method as surely as I knew my own, the knowledge coming not from Frank’s memory but from my own. There were too many holes in it to recall the details—too many thousands of lifetimes to ever have hope of keeping them sorted. I didn’t know who this Gifted was, but I knew what he did, and I knew how. And I was deeply, unfathomably terrified.
I pondered on Frank’s killer for the rest of the night and all the next day, too agitated to sleep. There weren’t supposed to be any other Gifted in this area—I had chosen my home based on solitude as well as sustenance. The more I thought about it, the more I focused my newly heightened thoughts on the image of the killer, the more certain I became that Billy Chapman had seen the same man right before he died. He’d fallen on the ice, already unconscious by the time the monster took him, but he had seen him first, in the darkened streets and in the bar before that. This was not a pair of random deaths, and it was not an errant killer passing through. There was a monster stalking our shadows, gaining in power and boldness, and the deepest dungeons of my rat-gnawed mind cried out in horror at his coming.
I thought about going to the police, but what would that accomplish? I couldn’t tell them what was happening without looking crazy, and I couldn’t tell them how I knew about it without looking crazy and dangerous. I’d lose my job at the very least and face stiff fines and charges at the worst, possibly even ending up in jail. Either way, I’d lose access to the memories I needed to fuel my mind. In prison, I’d have to kill or lose my memory completely, a harrowing experience that could last decades and risk exposing my secrets to the world. If I lost my job, I’d have to leave town, and who knows how long it would be before I could find another ready source of memories.
Besides, I couldn’t risk leaving, because that would mean leaving the killer alone with Rosie. I loved her more—
—Billy loved her more—
—I didn’t know how to think. I hadn’t seen the people I remembered, up close and in person, in years. In centuries, maybe. I had grown complacent, letting my careful measures grow lax; now I’d seen Rosie, and I couldn’t leave her. I loved her as much as Billy ever had, for all his love was mine now, but now that I’d seen her, I loved her too, myself, whatever shreds of me remained inside the scattered library of my brain. Leaving her alone—with a killer on the loose—was unthinkable.
Protecting her, I knew, would be just as bad.
Part Five
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—”