The Devil's Only Friend by Dan Wells Page B

testing my cover story or trying to establish his own? “Friend of a friend,” I said. A noncommittal answer, but with a hint that I wasn’t here for a relative. I was leaving the door open for him to take the conversation somewhere deeper.
    He nodded. “I suppose you could say the same for me.”
    Was that a reference to Merrill or to me? Or to someone else on the team? I didn’t dare say more until I knew where he was steering the conversation. I kept quiet, looking back at the wall, waiting for him for to continue.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    His other questions had been odd; this one threw me completely for a loop. Was I okay? What kind of question was that? He was a demon, and I was a demon hunter, and we’d come here to kill each other, and … was I okay? It didn’t make any sense at all. I looked at him again, trying to decipher his intentions. Was asking about my feelings a part of some strange game he was playing? Was it a prelude to whatever his powers were—was his curiosity, or his concern, or my feelings themselves, a way for him to sustain himself by killing me? Maybe he didn’t need to kill me at all; Cody French only drove his victims insane, and Clark Forman, technically speaking, didn’t need to harm anyone at all. He’d felt other people’s emotions, but he hadn’t needed to hurt them in the process, and he killed only because he enjoyed it. Are you okay?… Maybe he fed on suffering somehow? Was that why he’d been visiting an Alzheimer’s patient for twenty years?
    Merrill was the key. If we wanted to solve the puzzle of Elijah Sexton, we needed to know how Merrill fit into it. I glanced over his shoulder at the restroom door. “Who’s your friend?”
    His eyes widened slightly, giving every indication of innocent surprise at my question. “Just some guy,” he said. “I met him about twenty years ago, right before the Alzheimer’s. It’s not really Alzheimer’s, actually, but it’s close enough. He was a good man and I liked him.”
    “And now you still visit him.”
    “It’s the least I can do.”
    Twenty years. We’d wondered it before, but it had always seemed too good to be true: was his presence here merely a coincidence? Had we just happened to put Brooke into the one medical center an oblivious Withered visited once a week? Was it really possible he knew nothing about us at all?
    Twenty years. The only other Withered I’d seen with that kind of long-term loyalty to anything had been Mr. Crowley, my next-door neighbor, who’d settled down and stopped killing completely for nearly forty years. The mental association surprised me, triggering a sense of familiarity with the man, and I fended off the sudden flare of emotion with a joke. He’d said it was the least he could do, so I responded reflexively: “I’m sure you could do a lot less if you put your mind to it.”
    He laughed softly, but the humor never reached his eyes. “You’d be surprised how little of my mind there is,” he said, shaking his head. “Another few years and I’ll end up like Merrill, more than likely. Just a … hollow man. An organic machine, going through the motions.”
    “So is it worth it?” I hadn’t intended to say it, or even to think it, but it came out too fast to stop.
    “Is what worth it?”
    “Coming here,” I said. His words had hit so close to home, and I thought about Brooke upstairs, too lost to even remember me. I thought about Marci and my mom, and wished I could lose those memories as easily as Brooke did. “Caring about someone who doesn’t care about you,” I said. “Who couldn’t care about you if he tried. Making connections with people who are only going to disappear.”
    Elijah shook his head and looked down at his lap. He was carrying Merrill’s coat over his arm and seemed to stare it, or at nothing, for a long time. I sat quietly, embarrassed by my outburst, wondering what he would say in response. I waited for his answer.
    And waited.
    It