Black Halo (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  Dr. Ambrose smiled, a soft laugh finding its way to me. “Well, I wish I could say that it’s nice to see you, but under these circumstances you can understand why I’d rather not.”

  He motioned to Graham to follow him and we entered a long hallway before finally turning into a small room with a standard hospital bed situated in the middle, a pale pink curtain pulled halfway around it. “You can put her there, young man.”

  Graham nodded and gently sat me on the edge of the bed. “I’m going to go wait outside, okay?”

  “Alright,” I replied and watched as he quickly walked out the door. “He doesn’t like hospitals too much,” I explained to Dr. Ambrose who maintained his smile.

  “I don’t know anyone who does like hospitals. Even I dread coming here when I know that so many never leave. But that doesn’t look like it’ll be the case with you, so let’s just see what’s wrong here, shall we?”

  He began to ask me the usual round of questions while he examined my face and my arm. He pressed against my side when I explained the pain I had experienced there upon standing up and clicked his tongue in disapproval as I croaked and shuddered at the pressure.

  “I’m going to need to get some x-rays done, but I think you fractured several ribs. They’ll need to be taped, which means no clubbing or extreme sports for a few weeks. I’m also going to have perform a reduction on your shoulder in order to get your arm back into its socket. We’ll do that following the x-ray just to be sure that nothing else is broken, alright?”

  I nodded. “How long do you think this is going to take?”

  He raised his arm and looked at his watch. “You’ll probably be going home in about two hours. Why? Got a hot date?”

  I shook my head and laughed. He frowned at that and shook his own head. “Pity. If I were your age, I’d be asking you out in a heartbeat. As it is, my wife would probably have my skin if I even dared look at another woman.”

  “I didn’t know you were married!”

  He smiled and held out his hand. The silver ring on his finger gleamed under the florescent lighting. “Almost ten years this June. She’s my balance; keeps me from getting too serious, and keeps me from losing all control. I don’t know where I’d be if not for Vanessa.”

  He opened a cabinet to the side of the bed and pulled out a gown and a blanket. “You’re going to have to change into this, but the blanket should help to keep you warm. I’ll go and inform your friend outside about what’s going on.”

  I thanked him and proceeded to undress after he left. I struggled to remove my clothes, the chill in the room striking once I had succeeded. In my underwear, and under the thin fabric of the hospital gown and stark white hospital blanket, I began to shiver.

  After a few minutes, a nurse walked in with several bands to wrap around my wrists. She left, only to return with a wheelchair.

  “I’m going to take you to x-ray to have your chest film done and then I’ll bring you right back here,” she told me with a cheerful smile. It seemed unnatural for someone to look so happy in a hospital and I forced a smile in return, which only seemed to make hers grow wider. I climbed into the wheelchair and watched as I was quickly wheeled out of the room and down hallway after hallway until we entered a room that smelled of bandages and bleach.

  “Do you think you can climb up on that bed by yourself?” the chipper nurse asked me and I nodded. Of course, as with all things, it’s easier said than done. Trying to keep the back of my gown closed while attempting to hop onto a table without the aid of my other arm proved to be quite difficult.

  “Frank, lower the table,” a voice called out. Almost immediately, the table began to sink before me until I was able to simply slide myself onto it.

  The nurse smiled as she began to fiddle around with several rectangles of thin metal boxes that bore strange markings on them. She slid them beneath the table that I was perched on and then turned to smile at me once more. “Alright, now I’m going to need you to lie down.”

  I did as I was told and followed her instructions; she left me alone to the buzzing and clicks of the machine that would take images of my chest and put them on film. It was over before I knew it and I was once again in the wheelchair being pushed towards my far off room.

  “Have you seen my friend around?” I asked her as I looked for Graham. “He wasn’t outside when we left and I don’t see him now.”

  “He probably went to the cafeteria to eat. It’s what most boyfriends and husbands do when they can’t do anything else.”

  “Oh, he’s not my boyfriend,” I explained quickly. “He’s my best friend.”

  “You have a male best friend?” Her tone clearly told me that the idea was foreign to her, and so I simply nodded. “Well, all the same, he’s probably eating.”

  I nodded, knowing that she was probably right. Graham’s solution to most things usually came in the form of something edible. I sighed and said nothing else as the nurse returned me to the exam room. I waited until she left before climbing atop of the bed. I pulled the blanket over my exposed legs and waited for Dr. Ambrose to return with the results from my x-ray.

  I must have drifted off to sleep because I was awoken by the gentle shaking of a cold hand on my good shoulder. I opened my eyes and stared into the doctor’s dark brown eyes. He smiled at me and his almost unnaturally white teeth sparkled.

  “I have your films back. It looks like you’ve got two cracked ribs and a classic anterior shoulder dislocation which will require me to perform a reduction on you to get that shoulder back into fighting form.”

  I smiled and nodded my head at the news, pulling myself into a sitting position. “So, what do we do now?”

  “Well, I’m going to be giving you a little bit of pain medication through an IV and then a nurse and I will be relocating your shoulder. Hopefully you won’t feel a thing.” He reached for my hand and began to take my pulse.

  The way he said hopefully caused a knot to form in my stomach. I didn’t like the idea of pain and was beginning to rationalize to myself how living with a dislocated shoulder wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. I looked at Dr. Ambrose’s face and watched as he concentrated on counting the beats beneath his cold fingers. His skin was incredibly smooth without a hint of a shadow.

  I smiled at the infinite care he must take in order to keep his wife from having to deal with the rough patches of facial hair. He was a fairly attractive man with his wide smile and dark brown eyes, his auburn hair shorn to curl just in the front, everything else neat and presentable.

  My gaze traveled down his smooth throat where it stopped. I stared and waited, each second passing by, fruitless.

  “Well, something seems to have made you nervous all of a sudden the way your pulse just kicked into high gear here. Are you afraid of a little pain? The needle isn’t that bad—it’s small and sharp, much more so than the ones used decades ago. And they’re much sharper than teeth. That’s a joke, by the way.”

  I tried to swallow down the bile that began to rise in my throat and I nodded stiffly, knowing that there was nothing that I could do to stop the blood from draining away from my face, leaving it pale and almost lifeless. Dr. Ambrose took one look at my face and he began to back away slowly. “Grace? Is there something wrong?”

  I pointed to his neck and nodded once more. His hand flew to the side and he turned around to look in the mirror. He sighed with relief and turned around to laugh at me. “I thought there was a third eye or something growing out of me. Don’t scare a man like that!”

  “You don’t have a third eye growing out of your neck. You don’t have anything going on with your neck. Not even a pulse.”

  His body went stiff and the dark brown of his eyes grew darker as his pupils widened. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I shook my head and pointed once more towards his neck. “You don’t have a pulse. I can see it.” I reached for his cold hand and pressed my own two fingers against his wrist. “I can feel it. Dr. Ambrose�
��you’re dead.”

  He pulled away from me and turned around, his hands gripping angrily to the sides of his head. I could see in the mirror that his face looked torn, his eyes wild with confusion and uncertainty.

  “Why aren’t you screaming? Running around and calling for help?” he whispered.

  “I have a lot of familiarity with dead things,” I managed to mutter.

  He turned around to face me, a rather peculiar smile on his face. “So you do. I forgot that you’re his mate.”

  “I’m no one’s mate.”

  His head cocked to the side at my response. “Has he chosen another then? Someone more suitable to his lifestyle and…erm—length of life?”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about him. What are you?”

  He smiled again, his teeth glistening unnaturally. “I should have thought that was plainly obvious, considering…”

  I shook my head. “Look, I might know far more than most human beings about what goes on in your world, but I don’t know everything. And what I do know is still very difficult to accept—not that I’m looking to be around it much longer to begin with—so if I don’t know what you are, could you at least humor me and come out with it so that I don’t continue sitting here looking like an idiot?”

  He laughed at me, and then took my hand. The chill of his skin was meant to be another clue but I kept drawing a blank. “He’s told you about my kind. I know this much already—I can see it in your eyes. Is it really that difficult to figure out? Do I not fit the image you have built in your mind? Was the last one you encountered so hideous?”

  “I don’t know what you are, so how can I have formed an image of your…kind?”

  His smile was unnerving as he began to stroke up and down my arm with a cold finger. I looked at his face, and then back at the hands that held my arm still, the fingers that trailed along my inner arm. I could hear my blood pumping in my veins—the very ones he was caressing with an adoring finger—my pulse drumming a nervous beat in my ears as slowly the dawning of recognition began to take hold. When I looked up into his eyes, the rich brown had been replaced with red rings around jade green irises. My heart nearly skidded to a halt. “You…you’re…you’re an erl…”

  He pressed a cold finger against my lips and smiled once more. “You don’t have to fear me, Grace.”

  I coughed at his reassurance. “That’s easy for you to say; the last one I met tried to eat me. That’s like a coyote telling a rabbit it’s got nothing to fear. I’m lunch to you!”

  He shook his head with an amused glint in his eye. “I’ve been ‘sober’ for many years now, and don’t plan on falling off of the…wagon anytime soon.”

  The way he spoke made me think that he had somehow confused our conversation with something else. But when a nurse walked in with a tray of labeled syringes, I realized he was changing the tone of the conversation to keep the unknowing nurse ignorant to the topic of discussion.

  “H-how long have you b-been…like this?” I asked him as the nurse began to wipe my arm with an alcohol swab.

  He looked at me and began to speak, but his words did not come out in English. Instead, to my surprise, they took on the lilting flow and bend of French. “It’s been nearly a hundred years. The first few days were like I was living a nightmare. I was an animal, but my mind was still…human. My body was so grotesque that I hid in the sewers and shadows until dark, and then I’d just roam the streets hating the people sleeping in their beds, oblivious to what I was, what had happened to me.

  “I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink, but I felt so hungry. I killed some drunken man without realizing it one night, hoping to steal the meat pie he’d had in his hand. He was still holding it when he died, and I ate it. I didn’t realize until I was full that I had eaten the man’s entire arm, along with the pie. I was horrified. I had killed someone over food, and now I wanted to kill again, because even though the pie had tasted wonderful to my empty stomach, his flesh tasted…better.

  “The guilt upon realizing this was so great, I felt like killing myself. And I tried. I tried to drown myself, I tried to burn myself, hang myself; nothing worked because you cannot kill what’s not living. It’s a startling thing, realizing that you’re dead. It’s also incredibly lonely.

  “I returned to my childhood home, where my mother was still living. I was so afraid that she would see what I had become and turn me away. I prayed so hard for her to recognize me, to know that I was her son, and when she opened her door and saw me, standing there in rags, my body shaking with the need to feed, she embraced me. ‘A mother knows her child,’ she said to me.”

  “But how?” I asked, confused. “How did she know it was you when you looked…when you looked the way you did?”

  “That’s the thing. I didn’t look like a monster anymore. I had changed into my old form, with my old face and body, simply by thinking about it. My mother never knew what I looked like beneath the false face. But she did notice that when I ate, I touched nothing but the meat she’d prepared. And she continued to notice when I would request she not cook it at all.

  “But the small pieces of pork or chicken weren’t enough to keep my hunger down. And when she came home one day from church earlier than expected, she found me…finishing off the remains of a man who’d come to the house begging for food. She should have been terrified. Instead, she wept for my soul.

  “Seeing her that way, seeing her refuse to reject me for the monster I was, it changed something inside of me. She had accepted me for what I had become, but she said that I could not continue to stay with her if I continued to kill innocent people. So, I promised her that I’d find some way to…fight the addiction.

  “It turns out that my decision to…quit came at just the right time. Methods on blood storage were just becoming popular, and with my training in the medical field, I was well suited for roles in blood procurement and storage. This method kept my promise to my mother and it, in conjunction with eating a lot of raw pork, kept me fed, although nothing compares to the fulfillment of human flesh.

  “Over time I’ve grown much more accustomed to the pre-packaged varieties that can be heated and cooled to temperatures of my choosing. Plus, I have an affinity for type B. It has the best flavor.”

  I tried my best to keep from gagging as he spoke of his meal preferences like he was reading off some macabre menu, but it was difficult to hide the disgust in my face and he noticed.

  “Oh, I’ve made you ill, haven’t I?”

  I nodded and looked at the nurse, who understandably assumed I was green because of the needles and what lay ahead for my arm.

  “I’m sorry, Grace. I haven’t been able to speak to anyone new about this in decades and I forget myself sometimes. I just thought that, well, considering who it is that you’re, um, well…who you were dating, I assumed that you’d be okay with me, with what I am.”

  I looked once more at the nurse, and seeing that she was oblivious to the nature of the discussion, finally responded to him with something more than just a nod or blank stare.

  “Dr. Ambrose, in a short period of time I’ve had my entire view of the world altered in some very disturbing ways. I’ve had several attempts made on my life; I’ve learned that things like you exist.

  “And I’ve learned that the people you trust the most are the very ones most likely to hurt you—although that’s a lesson I obviously had to learn twice—so if I don’t seem all too thrilled to actually find out that a monster is working in the hospital, don’t take it the wrong way. It’s just me adjusting to the really crappy news that no matter how hard I try, I’m never going to be normal.”

  He chuckled and nodded to the nurse who helped me to lie back. “Grace, let me tell you something. Normal is overrated an experience. Being just like everyone else, getting lost in the crowd is nothing to strive for. Especially when you’re as special as you are.”

  The snort left me before the grunt of pain.

  “There. All done.


  I looked at him with surprise. “All done what?”

  The bed raised and I was soon sitting up. “With your shoulder. I’ll put it into a sling and then you’ll be all set to go home.”

  “You fixed my shoulder? Already?” I was in disbelief.

  “As well as taped up your ribs. You’ll be feeling sore for a few days, but that’s what the ibuprofen is for.”

  I looked at him as though he had just spoken to me in another language. “You’re done?”

  He waited until the nurse left to retrieve my prescription before he turned to me, a serious look in his face. “Grace, do you think that your angels are the only ones with incredible speed? My kind are nowhere near as fast—we’re limited to what physics can allow—but we can do some things fairly quickly without you realizing. Like wrap a rib or two while rotating your arm around to relocate it into your shoulder.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  “Grace?”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  He smiled and I felt an eerie chill run down my spine when I took into his eyes once more. “I’m sorry, I’ve startled you haven’t I? I suppose all of this has been too much for one day.”

  I nodded and allowed him to help me off the bed, flinching slightly at the cold, clammy feel of his hands against my skin. “I’d like to get dressed now,” I told him, and began pulling at the hospital gown’s tabs as soon as he was gone.

  Unfortunately, I ran into some difficulty when it came time to put on my t-shirt. I stood there in the cold hospital room in my bra and jeans, staring at my shirt the same way a soldier would look at a minefield.

  “You’d think that the least challenging part of today would be putting on a t-shirt,” I grumbled to myself.

  As I pondered just how to put my shirt on without somehow re-dislocating my shoulder, I realized that the air in the room was growing warmer. I looked up at the air-conditioning vent, expecting the stream of cool air to have stopped, but I could feel it blowing, the air still chilly.

  “I thought it would be more comfortable for you.”