Next of Kin Read Free

regardless; it was an action as rote as the checklist on the hearses. When the phone rang I sighed in relief, took careful notes on where to pick up the new body, and left.
    Another drunk, homeless this time. They found his body next to an overpass, fifty feet or so from the nest of blankets that was probably his home. It was several degrees below freezing, and his body bore no signs of attack, so they ruled it another accidental death by exposure.
    His memory told another story.
    His name was Frank McClellan, and he grew up in California; we walked on the beaches as a child, barefoot and tan, but we had never liked our father and the memories of our screaming arguments burned like coals inside my skull. We’d left home at sixteen, traveling here and there around the country, reconnecting with our sister for a few years in our twenties before drifting away again. Eventually we’d fallen into drugs and prostitution, though we’d always been proud that we’d stayed away from theft and robbery. I felt his pride, and his loneliness, and the bone-aching chill that seemed to haunt him even in the summer, and then last night I watched a man approach us—his face nearly buried in a thick, black scarf—and gesture to the shadows with a wad of dollar bills. We followed him, knowing exactly what was wanted in the wordless transaction, and there in the darkness he killed us.
    The killer was one of the Gifted.
    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