The Book Eaters(25)
Devon hesitated. He was right, but the problem was that none of this stuff with joining the Ravenscars or getting ensnared in their internal feuds fit in with her carefully laid plans. She couldn’t explain that to Cai, though, because she hadn’t told him the full truth of what was going on. For his own protection.
She looked back at the other woman. “Can you give us a moment?”
“Why not. I could do with a cigarette anyway.” Hester rose and ghosted past them in a shuffle of fabric, stepping through the front door to the stairwell just outside.
When she was gone, Devon got up and stalked from the kitchenette to the living room, sitting heavily on the coffee table in front of Cai.
“I do want their cure for you. But it’s complicated.” Much more complicated than he knew, she thought tiredly. “This situation we’d be walking into sounds like a right mess. We have to be careful.”
Cai pressed Mute on the remote control, silencing his film. “I don’t keep all the memories, you know. Or if I do, I can’t always summon them up. But sometimes…” His mouth twisted. “Sometimes I’ll wake up thinking about Mary, decide I should visit her grave, and then remember that I can’t because she’s not my wife and I never married. She was just the electrician’s wife. Do you remember him? Fifth person you brought me.”
Actors engaged in a silent mock-battle on the television screen and Devon sat frozen, fingers knotted together. He’d never talked about his eating before. Not like this.
“I’ve been married fifteen times and signed eight divorce papers,” Cai said, with the unflinching directness of a five-year-old. “I have been four different kinds of religious and not religious at all. I’ve almost died twice and passed twenty-two driving tests. I remember going to war and killing a civilian by accident. Her blood ruined my uniform.” He wrinkled that snub nose in absentminded distaste. “I remember the sound a woman makes when you hurt her for the first time. I remember hurting you, through his eyes. I remember the sounds you made.”
Devon touched her throat, and said nothing. She dared not look at him, in case she saw the echo of her ex-husband in his face.
“I remember those things even though I haven’t done them. I suffer those sins without committing them—that’s how the vicar would say it. I am not those people and I’m also not me. I can’t ever be me, I’m too full of other lives.” Cai turned the remote over and over in his hands. “Twenty-five times you’ve asked Are you a good person? You asked them, not me, but now I’m all of those people and the question is mine, twenty-five times over.”
“Cai…” She had lost control, and this conversation had sailed off in wild directions without her.
“I’m not finished,” he said. “The answer is no, I’m not a good person. I can’t ever be, even if I eat good people, and especially not if I eat bad ones. The only thing I am is an actual monster. You won’t call me that but it’s what I am.”
“That isn’t true. Don’t think that.”
“Isn’t it? Every person I’ve ever consumed thought I was a monster, in their final moments. They were afraid of me.”
“Everyone is a monster to somebody.” Devon didn’t have to think for this answer; she’d prepared it long ago, in readiness. “But you are not, and never will be, a monster to me.”
The worst and best lie she’d ever told him.
“I’m glad,” he said, “but it doesn’t change how I feel. I’m tired, Dev. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to hurt people. Not when there’s a cure, right there, and we can have it. Does it matter what Killock is asking right now? We’ll figure it out. You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
Devon said nothing, only sat next to him with an arm out.
Reluctantly, he let her fold him into a hug. He’d been so clingy as a baby; these days, Cai liked his space. Tough and independent, like her. Also damaged like her. Her heart hurt. The things she had done to him. The things they’d done to each other.
He nestled into her shoulder, a gesture so incredibly rare that her heart melted a little. “If I can’t get Redemption, I don’t want to keep going on like this. I don’t want to keep going on at all.”
“It won’t come to that,” she said, alarmed. “We’ll get you more Redemption.”
“I know,” he said, and she squeezed him tighter.
Devon disliked messy confusion, and this was far less neat than her plan of grabbing drugs from the Ravenscars in exchange for cash, and then disappearing to another country. But in the end, did it alter so much? As long as she got to where the Redemption was kept, there were ways she could make this work. Regardless of whatever was going on with Killock Ravenscar or his strange siblings.
Someday very soon, she would have to tell her son the truth about her plans, and who she kept contact with—and in turn, the truth about what she had done during the first eight months of their escape. There was that hole in his memory, and the implant scar on his abdomen that she’d so far explained away as a birthmark.
The thought made her slightly sick. So many secrets. Perhaps—
“Hello?” Hester stuck her head around the door, cigarette trapped between her fingers. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think we’re about to have company.”