43
I woke up nauseous. Light attacked my eyes when I opened them.
I heard Daphne saying, “He’s awake,” and two heads appeared. Daphne’s black curls pressed against Aurora’s blonde.
Aurora said, “He doesn’t look too hot.”
“He’s going to throw up,” Daphne replied, looking at Aurora. She was right. I felt my stomach churning, the acidic fluids burning their way up my esophagus. Aurora helped me turn to my side and I vomited into the bucket I was handed.
I tried to get comfortable. I blinked, my mind trying to piece the world together into a coherent image. Machines were beeping and humming around me, and I smelled the distinct scent of antiseptic and medication. My leg, set in a partial cast with screws sticking out of it, was elevated and suspended in a complicated-looking contraption above me. I lay with both legs facing the wall and my head facing the hallway.
As Aurora leaned over to cover me with the blanket, a lock of her hair caressed my forehead. “It’s just the effect of the morphine and anesthetics.” She tightened the blanket around me. “It’ll pass soon.” Only then did I notice the cuts around her eyes and the bandage on her forehead.
“Are you OK?” I whispered.
“Very minor head injury.” She wiped her forehead of invisible sweat. “I’m better off than the others.”
I glanced to the side. Daphne was sitting in a wheelchair, both her legs in plaster. Behind her was a row of beds, all occupied by people either in casts or hooked to an IV or a ventilator or some other beeping device.
“What happened to you?” My voice sounded rusty from disuse.
“My legs? A combination of a bad fall and a few stones that hit me, and your brother insisted they operate on both legs, which is how they found out they froze my veins in my left one.” Daphne placed her hand on the cast. “Matthew says the damage is reversible, so I’ll walk again.”
I turned my head and looked around the room. Beds to my right and to my left. A light pink curtain was suspended above me, folded.
Aurora looked at Daphne. “He’s about to ask about that guy. You know, what’s his face.”
Daphne’s face contorted with confusion. “What guy? You don’t mean the one who wouldn’t leave his bedside or stop hugging him?”
“I can’t believe I can’t remember his name.” Aurora snapped her fingers. “My head injury is probably worse than I thought. God, what’s his name, the one who wouldn’t leave, and slept on that horrible folding chair until the nurses physically kicked him out of the ward.”
Daphne’s smile widened. “The one who’s going to kill us both when he finds out Reed woke up when he wasn’t here.”
I laughed. “Where’s Lee?”
“In the staff dorms.” Daphne put her hand over mine. “Matthew made him sleep in a real bed for a change.” Her smile disappeared. “You feel anything?”
“Pain,” I replied, “mostly in my back, and a little in…”
“That’s not what I asked,” Daphne interrupted me. Her eyes were fixed on mine. “I can barely see things. It’s worse than when I was a kid. The change you made…” her voice trailed off.
“Barely,” I said. “I can feel your and Aurora’s presence. Nothing more.”
Aurora and Daphne exchanged glances. Aurora looked at me. “All the sorcerers who were at the rally are completely depleted. They say it’s going to take months until everyone’s powers regenerate. Lee was the only one who didn’t get depleted.”
Daphne nodded. “He held your pain until you were evacuated, and then put you in a daze for days. He wouldn’t leave your side.”
“And there aren’t enough normies around,” Aurora added. “And all those who were close to the battle were also depleted, so…”
“He’s depleted, and there isn’t any sorcery to replenish him in the center of the city,” Daphne concluded.
Someone approached me from behind. I felt only the angst of his presence. “There, I slept four hours.” It was Lee. He walked around the bed’s headrest and moved Daphne’s wheelchair, standing with his back to me. He was wearing jeans and a crinkled T-shirt. “So no more pestering me.”
I cleared my throat, barely, producing a strangled sound.
Lee turned to me.
“Good morning,” I said, doing my best to smile.
He froze, sat down on my bed and touched my face. I managed to decipher his expression. Sadness mixed with hope. He leaned in, his lips soft and dry, and I couldn’t lift my hand to draw him closer.
“No,” I whispered when he pulled away. It was too short.
His eyes were closed. He leaned back and opened them. Green with brown flecks. “Good morning,” he whispered.
“How is everyone?” That’s not what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t ask him to take off his clothes and come into bed when I couldn’t move.
“I’ll call Sherry,” Aurora said, “she demanded we update her once you woke. She’s already in the hospital so it won’t take her more than a few minutes to get here.” She took out her phone and dialed.
“And Matthew,” I said. “I need…”
Lee put his hand on mine. “Matthew’s in surgery. I’ll leave him a message.”
“I’m sure he’ll step out of surgery for me.” I sounded selfish. I wanted to see him and knew it would be important for him to see me.
Lee stroked my hair. “He’s operating on Blaze.”
I recoiled.
“A rock hit him and crushed his liver and spleen. He was among the first evacuated from the square. They operated on him straight away. Now that the operating rooms are less busy, they’re performing a second surgery on him.”
“And River?”
Lee sighed.
“Perforated lung,” Daphne said. “The Sons of Simeon’s airheads started blowing up lungs on our side. Luckily, our airheads caught on pretty quickly, so only five were severely injured.”
Sherry’s head appeared above me, pushing Lee out of the frame. “I was told Reed woke up.” Her face was swollen and bruised.
Red and purple blotches created an intricate, almost beautiful web across her face.
I smiled at her. “You’re alive.”
“So are you.” She beamed in return – a genuine, teeth-baring, eye-squinting smile. She looked gorgeous when she smiled like that.
Lee looked at her. He didn’t flinch when she approached him, considering his face from up close.
“How many hours?” She looked at him.
“Four.” He held up his fingers. “Like your boyfriend ordered. So you can’t send me back to sleep again.”
Sherry sighed, walked around my bed and sat on the other side. “He’s not my boyfriend. And he said you needed ten hours. The bare minimum to function is four.” She looked at me. “Your boyfriend’s crazy.”
“I know.” I reached out and took Lee’s hand.
“We were just giving him a damage report,” Daphne said. Aurora leaned against the wheelchair armrest. Only then did I notice the bandage enveloping her waist, peeking out from her hospital gown. Her forehead was dotted with beads of sweat and her inner elbow was stained with purple and blue patches, remnants of IVs.
“There’s not a single sorcerer who was in a two-kilometer radius of the square who has any sorcery left.” Sherry brushed her hair off her forehead, revealing another bruise. “All the normies living in a five-kilometer radius of the square are depleted.” She peered into my eyes. “You created a sorcery storm, casting a full circle in the middle of built-up area without officially declaring war; we suffered three fatalities, two of them were Sons of Simeon’s. There are dozens of severely wounded people. All the hospitals are crowded with sorcerers, even hospitals that aren’t equipped to treat them. You maneuvered cops, and it’s going to cost millions to renovate the square.” She looked at Lee. “You’re a bad influence on Reed.”
Lee smiled and stroked my hand.
Sherry looked at me. “The seers’ vision is completely blurred. No one knows what’s goi
ng to happen now.” She tilted her head slightly. “Mind explaining what you did exactly?”
“Reed’s Moronic Plan,” I said, trying to keep a serious face.
Sherry pursed her lips. “Sounds like a brilliant name.”
I tried moving. “I knew that if I was protected by a circle I wouldn’t be able to do anything, because the circle’s protection prevents the person it’s cast on from exercising sorcery.”
“Not completely,” Lee interrupted me. “I was still able to take away some of your pain.”
“We’d been intertwined for days before the rally,” I said. His hair fell back in his eyes. He needed a haircut. And a shave. “And it doesn’t matter. If you’d been outside the circle, I wouldn’t have had time to explain the plan to you, and they would’ve killed you.” I turned my gaze back to Sherry. “That was the whole point. Not to decide on the plan until right before I carried it out.”
“Doesn’t sound that moronic,” she replied.
“Wait until you hear it,” I said, and took a deep breath, the mattress pressing into my back.
“Let’s see what I can guess,” she said, shifting in her spot. “You needed to cast a full circle, and it had to be tight enough so that nothing could penetrate the elements.”
“It hurt like hell,” Daphne said quietly.
I looked at her. “I know.”
I shifted my gaze back to Sherry. “Lee was close beside me on one side, and the elementalists on the other. Even if they had aimed directly at us, the distortion from the elements combined with the smaller distortion created by the protective field around Lee would have deflected the bullet, or whatever they’d throw at us. That’s the thing. If we’d cast the protective circle on me or you, they could have penetrated it by striking whoever was left outside the circle. But this way, the elements protected both of us equally.”
Lee caressed my arm. “You think pretty quick for someone who doesn’t want to think at all.”
Sherry tucked her hair behind her ear, and it immediately bounced back. “I know what to say to every crook, victim or lawyer who steps into my station.” She bit her lip. “You saved my life, and I don’t know what to say. I have no idea how to thank you.”
In movies, the hero always has a brilliant line, a sophisticated way of making everyone feel good about themselves. People died, got wounded, burned, frozen, and all because of me. Everyone was going to be in pain for weeks, if not months. Some would be left disabled for the rest of their lives. I couldn’t come up with a witty one-liner.
“Oleander is dead,” Sherry said. Daphne pursed her lips.
“I know,” I replied.
Sherry drummed her fingers on my leg. “Ivy introduced him to Linden. That’s why Oleander only showed up for one meeting. Linden shared his vision with him. All they needed was that one meeting to convince him to help them bring on the future they wanted. He was at peace with that vision from the first time he was exposed to it. A damus up north just found that timeline, now that the Sons of Simeon’s damuses are no longer hiding it.”
That’s why Oleander had always felt so calm to me. He was using us all to get what he wanted, with no qualms or regrets. I looked at Daphne. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
She bit her lip. “It’s time I learned not to date damuses.”
“What about Ivy?”
Sherry glanced at Lee and then looked back at me. “Disappeared.”
“It was thanks to her that I understood what I had to do.” I looked at Daphne. “I think she was trying to give me a hint.”
Aurora leaned in. “What did she say?”
“She asked me to take care of myself.” I coughed. “She must have seen the edge.”
“I wish I was as optimistic as you,” Daphne said, shaking her head. “It makes more sense that she realized the words she had to say to get you to the square.”
I shrugged despite the pain. “Good advice is good advice, regardless of who gives it.” I looked at Sherry. “What do you think?”
“What’s important is the future,” Sherry looked at Aurora. “Right?”
Aurora cleaned her glasses. “And that Reed’s alive.”
“Agreed,” Lee said and smiled at me.
Sherry’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen and picked up. “One minute,” she said into her phone and turned back to me. “And now for something completely different. Filling in reports.”
Lee burst into laughter.
Sherry hugged me and got up. “Yes, commander?” she said into her phone as she began walking away.
Daphne cleared her throat. I looked at her.
“My turn,” she said. “Everyone else got to hug you. Now it’s my turn.”
Lee helped me turn to my side, and Aurora helped Daphne lean in. My hands barely made it around her back. She pressed her cheek against mine.
“I told you one day your beard would tickle me,” she whispered.
I held her tighter and buried my nose in her curls.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
You can’t write a book on your own. Parts of everyone you’ve ever met find their way into the pages, sometimes consciously, sometimes creeping in through invisible cracks, spotted only in hindsight. It was no accident that Aviel’s shower curtain found its way to Reed and Daphne’s shower, but his support and encouragement are part of what got me writing, and they are there, invisible, throughout the entire book.
In the list of invisible acknowledgments are Michael Gardos, my adoptive grandfather who asked me to write another book; Rami Shalhevet who wrote me that he wanted to read a full-length book of mine, and has edited short stories of mine for years; Ehud Maimon who put up with my agony and moaning for years and hasn’t stopped encouraging me, conducted research for every question I asked him, big or small, wrote terrorist movement announcements, edited my stories and never complained even once; Iris Bosco who supported and encouraged without fail; Daryl Gregory who spent an entire afternoon convincing me that I could write a book without ever having read a single word I wrote; Yael Furman who taught me about characterizing villains and building plots, and contributed invaluable comments when the book was merely two thousand directionless words; Rotem Baruchin who taught me how to write about relationships and conflicts and read an early version of the book, back when I thought it would be a short story; Daniella and Boaz Karni-Harel, Dorit Tamir, Nimrod Aizenberg, Sivan Kotek and the rest of the Zarchin bunch who provided weekly space to create; Edva Lotan and Adam Levin, who every time I said, “This is the final draft!” laughed and took another chore off my hands; and of course – my family, who for months put up with me missing meals, slinking off into another room in order to write, and cutting conversations short to frantically jot down meaningless words onto scraps of paper.
Luckily, there are also more visible acknowledgements. Eran Katz, a clinical psychologist who explained to me about empathy, psychopathy and everything in between; Rika Graziani Teicholtz who taught me about sorcery and contributed excellent comments about the book. Hila Benyovits-Hoffman who taught me about wicca and its connection to gender and feminism. Aviel Tochterman who initiated our writing group and created a respectful and supportive space to sit and write at least once a week, loved Reed and Lee as much I do, and left an indelible mark on my life; Itay Landsman who contributed Monty Python jokes; Roni Gelbfish who read the manuscript, made excellent comments, held my hand as I revised and supported me when I sent the book onwards; Ester Wine Yaron and Shlomi Ben Abu for their help in explaining police activity in Israel and shaping Sherry’s character; Maayan Eshkoli who came up with the Sons of Simeon’s name; Uriel (my dad!) for helping to design the gun of the customer in the bar; Aliza (my mom!) who taught me how mothers react when their children are in crisis; to the Tweeter dwellers who answered research questions at bizarre hours, in depth and at length to help me make my characters more real; and to Sophie, the owner of my local café, who made sure I was eating, drinking, and amped with enough coffee to sit and write in peace.
And to everyone else who supported, encouraged, commented, sent chocolates and pictures of cats and scolded me to get back to my writing, I extend to you my love and gratitude.
A special thanks is owed to Noa Menhaim, the perfect editor. Apart from everything I learned from her about writing, character development and scene characterization, motives and conflicts – her humor, optimism and empathy kept me sane. To quote Stephen King: “To write is human, to edit is divine.” He was right.
Another extremely special thanks is for Daniela Zamir, the translator who turned my sultry Israeli summer into cool, crisp English.
To Yoav, Barak and Keshet, who for years have been living with a spouse and mother who stares into space and scurries off to her computer even in the middle of a conversation, and drills them about the details of their day just to gather material for stories, testing scenes and dialogues on them and making their lives especially chaotic – I hope to be worthy of you.
Last but not least, I extend my gratitude to you, who have finished reading the book (or just started and immediately turned to the last page to see who I chose to thank) – thank you for the faith you placed in me when you picked up the book and decided to read it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEREN LANDSMAN is a mother, a writer, a medical doctor who specializes in Epidemiology and Public health, and a blogger. She is one of the founders of Mida’at, an NGO dedicated to promoting public health in Israel. She works in the Levinski clinic in Tel Aviv. She has won the Geffen Award three times, most recently for the short story collection Broken Skies.
ANGRY ROBOT
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
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Love is a battlefield
An Angry Robot paperback original, 2019
Copyright © Keren Landsman 2019
Cover by Francesca Corsini
Edited by Noa Menheim, Gemma Creffield and Christopher Slaney
The Heart of the Circle Page 38
