by Lisa Hughey
“Me?” Angelina asked softly.
That sounded like a lot of responsibility. She didn’t need any more responsibilities. She had too many already.
And yet, they were placing a lot of trust in her ability to heal. That trust was a balm to her soul. She knew trust was a fragile emotion. The possibility of a chance to make a difference blossomed within her, luring her toward acceptance of all the responsibility that went with the job.
“You will have no problems.” Nora smiled gently. “I recognize your healing glow.”
“A glow?”
“Yes.” Nora commented. “It is very apparent that you enjoy extreme good health and satisfaction.”
A heat spread through Angelina, but she very carefully didn’t look at Rafe. They could not afford for either Michael or Nora to suspect that her healthy glow had to do with his sensual attention.
“You need to go back to the human realm and find out everything you can about these Nephilim.” Michael had taken a dagger from an ornately forged scabbard. He tipped the blade end over end. “And control the spread of the virus. The last thing we need is a pandemic.”
“Fine,” Rafe agreed. “But we should leave Angelina out of it.”
“No. Didn’t you just tell us she is a healer of extraordinary power?” Nora denied his request. “She must be a part of the process. We need everyone from all Spheres in pursuit.”
“Respectfully, I don’t believe that is a good idea.”
His words stabbed her confidence, deflating the anticipation to be a part of something bigger than herself.
“Why?” Nora and Michael said in unison.
“She is newly transitioned. Not even fully comfortable or able to control her gift,” Rafe argued.
“That’s why you need to be there with her.” Michael flipped the blade and caught the ornate hilt after two rotations through the air. “You will be there to protect her and learn what you can.”
Rafe opened his mouth to protest again.
“Your objections are noted.” Michael pulled the Designated Ruler card. “But overruled.”
So they wanted her with Rafe. Fine but she had precious children to protect. Slowly she turned to Madame Throne.
“So you will keep my family safe.” Angelina’s voice shook with worry. “My sister, my daughter and my son.”
Nora’s gaze was rife with sympathy and understanding. “Consider it done.”
She turned to Rafe. “Let’s go kick that virus’s ass.” Sorry, Brandt.
THIRTY-ONE
They had set up camp on a remote farm twenty miles outside of the town. Before he went to jail, Uri sent word to the barkeep to let people know they could come for a check up. As a result, Angelina and Rafe had been busy all day long. In order to keep word of the virus from spreading and causing panic, only the two of them were assigned to the small village.
Their hostess, Greta, seemed to know Rafe but there was a sadness that surrounded her like a cloud.
The makeshift tent was sweltering. Angelina brushed a wisp of hair away from her face. Sweat shimmered over her skin.
They’d developed a system to check each villager by sampling their blood. Angelina posed as a nurse and held their hand while Rafe took the blood sample. The action gave Angelina the chance to work on perfecting the skill of diagnosing without actually healing.
So far, while many were infected, the infection was not life threatening. The cases they’d seen were all curable through modern medicine. A bottle of prescription strength medicine similar to Tamiflu would eradicate the virus. She had taken to heart Rafe’s admonishment that she couldn’t heal everyone. The patients were told to come back if their condition worsened.
They were still striving to identify patient zero, the patient who had first become sick from the virus. But at least they had identified the virus as a mutation of the H7N1 infection, a strain of bird flu that had never before been identified in humans.
Many of the patients had the mark of the Nephilim on their bodies. But not all. Angelina wondered if there was a connection between the people infected and the Nephilim. The relatively small village certainly had a high percentage of the hybrid angel/humans.
“Have a care.” As the older woman eased down from the inoculation chair, Angelina patted her on the shoulder gently.
“Dziękujemy.” The woman gripped Angelina’s hands with surprising strength for all the frailty of her bones.
The virus seemed to run in families. They needed to examine the blood samples to look for commonality among the sick. In this particular town, the locals had all been here for hundreds of years. Their bloodlines were mingled from centuries of intermarriage.
Angelina asked, “Are any others in your family sick?”
The old woman shook her head, the movement a lumbering side-to-side sway. “Martwe.”
Dead? Angelina’s heart constricted. “Where?”
“Požar.” The old woman mumbled, tears sheened her pale blue eyes.
“They all perished in the fire. All sick. All dead,” Rafe said softly.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.” Angelina clasped the woman’s hands, arthritic knuckles gnarled and red, and gently squeezed. The knobby, twisted fingers reminded her of her Grammy, the loss a physical ache in her chest. “Will you be okay?”
“Tak.” The old woman shuffled towards the tent opening. She turned, the watery light streamed through the wide slit, her pale blue eyes ageless and wise. “Thank you.”
Angelina blinked back tears after the old woman was gone. At least they’d been able to help everyone today.
Rafe frowned at her. “We should stop for the day.”
“One more.” Angelina swayed on her feet. “Just one more.”
“You can barely stand.”
“I haven’t even healed anyone.” She shook her head and the world swirled around her. “Whoops. Head rush.”
He put a steadying hand under her elbow. “Sit.”
Angelina glanced around the temporary canvas tent. The conditions were less than ideal. In addition to the blood-drawing chair, they had a file cabinet, two refrigerators, a TV-dinner tray table and a cot in the corner.
One refrigerator was stocked with precautionary doses of the prescription-strength prophylactic. The other contained blood samples taken from the steady stream of villagers who had visited.
“Have you noticed any commonality between them?” Angelina leaned her forehead against the cool metal file cabinet where they kept the very rudimentary records.
“There’s something in their blood stream. The virus attaches to a specific strand of DNA.” He gestured to the microscope on the tray table. “The virus is definitely a genetic mutation. Until I can do more research I’m not exactly sure what it is.”
Most of the people they had seen were in the beginning stages of the illness. A few hadn’t even had any symptoms.
A shaking hand pushed open the canvas door to the tent. A haggard young woman, barely out of her teens, staggered inside and a little girl trailed behind her. The pair stumbled to a halt. The woman’s face was pale, sweat sheened her gray skin, and her eyes were sunken in. Her lips trembled.
The little girl smiled shyly at Angelina as she held onto her mother’s hand. She peered around the folds of her mother’s skirt, her thumb in her mouth and her fingers curled around the arm of a very well-loved fabric doll.
The mother patted the girl’s head tremulously, then nudged her toward the chair. In a near whisper, she begged them to look at her daughter.
Angelina glanced at Rafe. The daughter seemed fine.
The mother was very ill.
Rafe spoke to her in perfect Polish. “We’ll look at your daughter but then we’d like to look at you.”
“Daughter.” The young woman lifted the girl onto the stool. She staggered under the healthy weight of the little girl, and her arms shook with exertion. As if the effort strained something inside, the woman barked a cough, then struggled to hold in the sound.
Ange
lina and Rafe made short work of the daughter. They needed to get to the mother. The darling little girl with the skinny arms, gamin face and a brush of dirt across her cheek clutched the doll and shook her head violently at the needle in Rafe’s hand.
Angelina wasn’t crazy about needles. She’d made Rafe take the blood samples. As she clasped the little girl’s hand, she brushed a stray lock of hair from the girl’s face and took a quick peek at her blood and found...nothing wrong. She was healthy.
The mother coughed again.
Tension coiled low in Angelina’s belly as she realized that she might be called upon to heal this woman. All day she’d played at the healing process, held their hands and worked to control the flow of Vis viva but hadn’t used her power.
But this woman was sick. With a capital S.
“She’s fine,” Angelina said softly to the mother. “Good.”
As if she’d been held up by an invisible string, the mother folded in on herself and collapsed in a macabre mimicry of the little girl’s rag doll. Rafe caught the woman before she hit the dirt floor and carried her gently to the cot in the corner.
The girl cried out, “Mama.” And ran for the bed.
Rafe plucked the little girl up from a dead run and tucked her head into his neck. She squirmed to get down but he held her fast. “You need to see how bad it is,” he murmured to Angelina.
Rafe called for Greta. She appeared almost instantly in the doorway to the tent. As if she’d been waiting just outside. The elder woman’s gaze shot to the bed, her face blanched.
Angelina knelt next to the woman, and assessed her gaunt features, the lines of strain around her mouth and eyes. Even unconscious, she looked very, very ill.
“Over the heart.” Rafe tried to hand the girl off to Greta, but she wiggled and kicked. “There’s no time to waste.”
Angelina hesitated. What if she couldn’t heal her?
“Do it,” Rafe commanded, his attention split between Angelina, Greta, and the little girl who didn’t want to leave her mother. Rafe struggled with the girl but his attention was on Angelina. “Do it.”
Angelina placed her palm over the erratic, thready beat of the young woman’s heart. Sensation rushed through her, swallowed her, suffocated her as the sickly miasma of the virus overwhelmed the woman’s blood and Angelina. The virus crawled and doubled as Angelina watched in horrified fascination. Cells split, and split, and split.
Dimly she heard Greta leave, begging for news as soon as Rafe knew anything.
“What do I do?” Angelina cried.
Angelina’s body folded into a kneel, rooted to the ground, frozen in rictus as the virus mutated and grew. White blood cells disappeared. Weakness invaded her legs and her arms. Staying upright was suddenly too much. She slumped awkwardly against the metal frame of the cot. Her hands were still glued to the heart nadis of the mother.
Energy pulsed in a slow, somnolent beat.
Angelina’s body grew sluggish and heavy, her thoughts blurry and insubstantial. She was supposed to do something. But what, eluded her grasp.
The virus started to overtake her. She struggled against the lethargy that stole through her veins, the urge to lie down and surrender, the lassitude a living presence within her. A small cough forced its way through her lungs, through her constricted throat.
Before when she’d healed, she had zoomed through the bloodstream to find the source of the problem and visualize how to fix it. But this time, the virus crushed her, each division of cells crowded, cramped, squeezed until breath became difficult.
She tried to breathe in but there was no room, no room in her blood, no room in her lungs, but for short bursts of breath.
“Angelina. Open your eyes.” Someone yanked her hand hard, and pulled her away from the woman’s body.
Angelina lay on her side wheezing, desperate for more oxygen. She breathed in tandem with the young woman next to her.
“Breathe.” Rafe’s command was harsh in the still air of the tent. His fingers curled around her hand, placing her palm over the frantic staccato of his heart.
As Angelina’s breath slowed, she could hear the shorter and shorter pants of the woman on the cot. She tried to open her eyes, but nothing on her body cooperated. Sweat poured down her face. The air in the small tent suddenly viscous and frightening, as if she waded through the humid air with chains around her ankles. The sharp cool metal of the bed frame cut into her cheek, but she couldn’t move.
The woman’s breaths grew shorter and shorter. As if with every inhalation, Angelina stole the air the sick woman was trying to breathe.
She needed to put her hand back on the woman’s chest. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t make her body obey the commands her brain tried to send. Finally as Rafe poured his healing energy back into her, Angelina was able to pry open her eyelids.
The rattle of the woman’s breath stopped abruptly, sharp and tragic.
She had failed. The woman was gone.
A sharp wail pierced the canvas walls of the somber, silent tent. The little girl outside cried for her mother. The devastating sound of fear echoed around Angelina, throbbed inside like a physical ache. A sweeping sense of failure roared through her.
She had failed. The poor little girl was left without a mother.
The euphoria of her first healing had been heady. This failure battered her like a fist. The sense of responsibility was crushing. God, she couldn’t do this. What had she been thinking to agree to this. She couldn’t take on the weight of one more responsibility. She was spread too thin as it was. How could he ask her to be responsible for the lives of more people?
Angelina shut down. She shut out the sounds of the little girl’s sobbing. Shut out the terrible wailing in her own head. She knew what it was like to grow up without a mother. And she had just condemned this girl to a similar fate.
THIRTY-TWO
Rafe shoved the panic away.
He needed to focus on the logical tasks at hand rather than on the terrifying moment when he’d realized the virus was overtaking Angelina. His panic had been like fire whipping through him as if infused with oxygen. When she hadn’t been able to obey his command, for just an instant, his heart had stopped.
He couldn’t bear a world without her in it.
Concentrate on the job at hand. Concentrate on the details of the virus. And not the pistoning beat of his own heart.
He needed a sample of the woman’s blood before they gave her to the undertaker. The virus had attacked her system viciously, at a much faster rate than any of the other patients. He’d been able to see the rate of mutation when he connected with Angelina for those few moments.
He needed to find the cure so that nothing like what just happened to Angelina could ever happen again. There was something odd about the virus and its effect on the humans.
“I can’t do this,” she repeated again.
Suddenly Angelina’s words penetrated.
“Do what?” He drew the blood from the woman quickly. They didn’t have much time. If only he could figure out what about this mutation was different. It was almost as if the reason stared him in the face.
Angelina hunched in the middle of the tent, her arms wrapped around her stomach. Her caramel hair fell around her face in curly tendrils from the dense humidity. Her cotton shirt was wrinkled and stained from the hard day’s work. What stopped him was her defeated posture.
“How could I have let her die?” Her words were stark in the twilight.
“The virus acted very aggressively against her body.” Rafe needed to get back in the lab to compare her blood and the other samples under the microscope and the data on prior occurrences of the virus. He really needed microscope time to compare the samples. The answer was there, somehow just out of reach.
With the blow of wind, shadows writhed on the darkening canvas walls. “Doesn’t matter. I let her die.”
They really didn’t have time to talk about this now. They had to get the woman to the morgue before
the cadaver bugs began to feast. And he wasn’t ready to discuss the fact that he’d almost lost her.
“Snap out of it,” Rafe said with sympathy. With compassion.
As if the heavens were crying, a rumble of thunder groaned from the sky, and the clouds opened up. Rain pounded down with a ferocity as if the skies wept for the sorrow of the child and of Angelina. The noise became so loud, the deluge drowned out any hope of conversation. Ozone scented the air.
Rafe knew they would have to talk about what just happened. But not yet. Angelina swayed as if the slightest puff of air would have her horizontal and unconscious. She needed rest. She glanced around the tent blankly, as if her brain searched for what she needed to do. But he noticed she avoided the cot in the corner where death hovered.
“I failed,” she said almost inaudibly. “Failed.”
He needed her focus to shift from the dead to the living. Get her to think about something else. It was working for him. Sort of. “Angelina. I need you to go talk to Greta about the little girl. Hold her, comfort her. We need to find out where she will go, who else has responsibility for the child.” At least the little girl was healthy. “And we need to know if anyone else in their household is sick.”
He needed her to focus on something and someone else. Otherwise, she would continue to mourn the woman and what she considered her own failure. But she didn’t move, just stood there.
“Greta,” Rafe called to Stas’s widow. She had been married to Stas as long as the man had been a healer. Rafe needed her assistance and her family’s silence to carry out this makeshift clinic.
Greta peered into the shadowed recesses of the tent, the girl finally asleep on her shoulder. “Tak?”
“We need to find the girl’s family,” Rafe said.
“There is no need.” Lines grooved deeply around Greta’s mouth and eyes.
“Why?”
“She is my granddaughter.”
Before she could say more, the doorway to the tent ripped open. Stas’s son, Tomasz, crashed inside, water poured down his face. His hair, clothes, and shoes were soaked. His face whitened in a rush as he saw the corpse of his wife. He ran to the cot and fell to his knees as if his body could no longer support him.
