Gifts of the Blood

by Vicki Keire

“Yes,” he said just as wearily. “And I think you just made a mistake. I’m going to have to take him from you sooner or later. He’s dying, slowly and painfully. You have only prolonged his pain.”

  “Ethan. Everyone is dying. Even me.” I felt halfway there already.

  His blue green eyes were so solemn. “But I’m not.”

  We stared at each other, the truth laid bare between us as starkly as possible, backlit by harsh red emergency lights and the mist of frozen breath. Mine. Ethan didn’t breathe. He wasn’t mortal.

  The truth sucked and clawed what little warmth I had left in my body, leaving jagged rips for the chill winter wind to fill. I was shivering, some dimly observant part of me noticed, and I couldn’t stop. Nor did I care.

  “I’m riding to the hospital with my brother,” I told him after what felt like an eternity. A lot of things felt like they took forever, like the amount of time I spent with Ethan and Logan on that car hood. In reality, they’d gone by rather quickly. Funny, what the mind latches onto in a crisis. “And then I’m not sure it’s a good idea to be around each other.” I sounded flat, uncaring, like I was ordering supplies at work.

  Blue green pools dimmed and closed. “Caspia.” My name was a labored whisper. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  Pain, raw and unexpected, rushed outward toward every extremity in my body so that I burned like a frostbite victim. Blue green pools had become a tidal storm; fists of stone clenched and unclenched against the effort of reaching, of touching. I shied away, scooting backwards. “I’m terrified, Ethan,” I admitted in a whisper, “that one day I’ll hate you for taking my brother. No matter what the reason, no matter how good. One day, I’ll hate you.” My voice cracked on a sob. I backed away from him where he stood looking at me like a piece of his own personal apocalypse. “And then I’ll be dead, and you’ll be alone. Like Asheroth. Like the rest of the mad, lost Nephilim. I can’t do that. To either of us.”

  I barely made it to the ambulance as it left, carrying my brother to Whitfield Central Hospital. I had never felt more alone in my life.

  I didn’t look back.

  ***

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as politely as I could. I even tried a little smile, but I could tell my face wasn’t going to cooperate so I stopped. I gathered what dignity I had left and sat as straight as I could. That wasn’t easy, in a bloody shredded skirt with one half of my heart hooked up to life support and the other half having just been told to get lost forever. “I don’t understand. You must be mistaken. Logan would have told me.”

  Dr. Ensforth had the grace to look uncomfortable. He flipped some papers for a moment and pretended to study them. In reality, I think he was just preparing himself for a hysterical patient. I didn’t blame him, really. If ever there was a patient due for a good fit of hysteria, it was me. I still wore Ethan’s leather jacket, but the rest of me was a shredded mess of silver satin and blood. “Well,” Dr. Ensforth said at last. “Perhaps Mr. Chastain had someone else he discussed these matters with? Someone outside the family?”

  I let an edge of destruction creep into my voice. Not quite a promise of it, but the sure knowledge of someone who’d spent the night in its intimate embrace. “No. I’ll repeat myself. Logan would have told me.” I tried another smile and wiped my face bare when Dr. Ensforth looked even more alarmed than before. “So there must be some mistake.”

  He let the clipboard rest lightly on his crossed knee, assessing me. He seemed to come to a decision. “Very well. See for yourself.” He placed the clipboard on top of a thick file and passed me the whole mess. “Your brother’s instructions are very clear. In the event that his vital signs fall below certain benchmarks, whatever the cause, we are to cease and desist all artificial efforts to sustain and prolong his life, as defined by the parameters listed within. It’s all right there. I’ll be happy to clarify any of the terminology if you wish.”

  I flipped through the file absently. I had trouble reading it. My eyes had filled with tears as soon as they’d fallen on the clipboard Dr. Ensforth passed me. Only two things stood out, really, but they were the important things: the words “Do Not Resuscitate” and my brother’s loopy scrawl of a signature.

  Oh God. Logan. Why?

  It took me some time to realize I was repeating the question out loud, over and over, and crying, until Dr. Ensforth handed me a box of tissues and another thick file. “It didn’t occur to me until a moment ago,” he said uncertainly, as if I was a time bomb that might go off at any moment. He frowned at another thick file and handed it, too, to me. “Did you know the specifics of your brother’s last test results?”

  “Well, yes. What he told me.” I scrubbed my face with scratchy hospital grade tissues. “I always went with Logan for his appointments. But he didn’t want me to go with him to this last one. I…” I clenched my fists briefly. It had been the day after I’d met Ethan. I forced my brain to create language even though it didn’t want to. “I was under a lot of strain. He wanted me to go to class and have an easy day. I tried to come, but he wouldn’t let me.” There. I took a deep breath. I hadn’t even had to say his name. Ethan. It would get easier, with time. I pretended to scratch my nose and wiped away two traitorous tears.

  Dr. Ensforth nodded absently. “What do you know about his diagnosis?”

  “Stage two liver cancer. He kept me updated about his treatment. He didn’t like me to go with him for the chemotherapy, but I went anyway, a lot of the time. I kept his pills organized and made sure he took them on time. Except for that once, I never missed an oncologist’s visit.” I finished scrubbing my face and tossed the handful of tissues in the wastebasket. I missed. “Why do you ask?”

  Dr. Ensforth indicated the file. “I thought it odd that you didn’t come to his last appointment. Most patients insist on having their family with them when a terminal diagnosis comes through, but Logan said you had school or something.”

  My fingers froze in the process of opening the file. “Terminal?" I repeated dully. Suddenly, the DNR order made a sick kind of sense.

  Dr. Ensforth continued to study me. “You truly didn’t know?”

  Fingers still frozen over the file, I just stared. My mind felt wiped blank. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Something in my face must have convinced him I truly didn’t know. He plucked the file from my hand and laid it on the hospital room nightstand. “Is there anyone I can call for you?” he asked, his voice husky with a new rough sympathy. “A relative? A close friend?”

  If I winced on the word “relative,” the word “close friend” was like a hot poker through my side. “All our relatives are dead,” I told him in a monotone. My brother’s cancer was terminal and he’d lied to me about it. “I just told my… someone important…that I never want to see him again.”

  Dr. Ensforth stood motionless in the hospital room doorway. After a minute, he whipped out a little pad and began writing furiously. “Miss Chastain, I’m going to send someone down to talk to you. I’m going to write you a prescription for some anxiety medication. Temporarily, of course, until we can arrange something long term.” I wondered if he meant therapy or commitment. I couldn’t bring myself to care about either option just then. “In the meantime, I’ll make sure this stays a private room, although it’s technically a double. I want you to stay right here in this room with your brother and try to get some sleep. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in a hoarse whisper. Logan looked like a science fiction monster, with tubes and machines that beeped and pulsed and a mask stretched across his face. Soon, those machines would be gone. Soon, Logan himself would be gone, leaving me alone. Alone without even Ethan.

  Making a mistake. Prolonging his pain. Ethan had been right. Would he come for him again? Would I see him this time?

  I barely heard the thick snick of heavy hospital doors closing. I sat, cross-legged, and watched over my brother before he began to die. Again.

  Chapter Sixteen:

  D.
N.R.

  I hate the color white and the tickling burn of chemicals in the back of my

  throat.

  What time is it? Where are my clothes? Why am I wearing scrubs?

  There are exactly fifty-six white tiles in the wall above my brother’s hospital bed.

  Who are these people, these strangers who come in and out? Why can’t they leave me alone with him? I just want to hold his hand. For just a minute longer. I’m his sister. What if he’s lost? Or scared?

  Look. Look at his hands. Piano player’s hands, my mother called them.

  Mother.

  His hands are so cold.

  No, I will not leave.

  Get that needle away from me!

  Ow! That fucking hurt!

  Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need those machines. Strong, he’s… I’ll just… hold his hand, and lay my head down here… with his heart for a pillow…

  …it’ll be fine, Logan… you’ll see…

  …be here…

  ...when you...

  …wake.

  Chapter Seventeen:

  Not a Miracle

  I stared at the dead vines that wrapped themselves around the statue more stubbornly than any lover. Even in cold and neglect, they clung tenaciously to their post, snaking around the Virgin Mary statue as if they were the only things holding her together.

  Perhaps they were.

  Memory told me they were roses. I didn’t come to the hospital often, but one of my few vivid memories of the place involved looking down into this wild bit of garden, startled at the rich orange-red hue of flowers that had been indifferently tended, at best. Those roses had been one of the universe’s unexpected kindnesses to me, long ago when I badly needed one. Until I’d thrown myself against the glass of my mother’s hospital room window, desperate for a glimpse of anything that wasn’t death, I hadn’t known that particular hue of brilliant orange-red existed. I was still in high school and my mother had been the last of my parents to die. Throughout the entire numbing ordeal, they were the only splash of color I remembered. Ever since, I had tried without success to recapture a color so brilliant it was almost tactile: the downy velvet thickness of a thousand sunsets distilled into one, waiting in a ragged little garden like a present just for me.

  Now the last living member of my blood lay dying by slow, painful inches two floors above me and there was nothing in the ragged garden to indicate it still lived, let alone would bloom in the summer. Nothing but the fact that I had seen it happen before and I knew this particular garden was especially tenacious.

  I guess it was all a matter of faith.

  As the chill wind slithered over me, finding every possible opening in my jacket and every inch of exposed skin, I exchanged my box of brightly colored pastels for a stick of graphite. I had little faith and no imagination today. I would draw only what was in front of me. It was a good policy; I’d adopted it with a lot of things in my life lately. One thing at a time. No looking farther ahead than I had to.

  I rubbed my forearms for warmth and tried to count how long I’d been here, in the hospital, spending almost every waking moment at Logan’s side. I didn’t know. It had been awhile. Long enough to make long-term arrangements with school and work. Long enough to ask Mr. Mason to care for Abigail for a while.

  But not long enough to forget an absent pair of blue green eyes and steadying warm hands, rough as stone.

  Ethan.

  I snapped my focus back to the drawing taking shape under my hands. The vines looked dead, and the statue looked crumbling and a bit moldy in places. I knew better, though. The vines weren’t dead. They were just heavy sleepers. It wasn’t my best drawing, but I had to stay in practice. Dr. Christian alone, of all my professors, demanded bi-weekly make-up work or threatened to drop me from his class. All my other teachers just told me to check in with them when things “calmed down a bit,” as one of them said tactfully. Although Amberlyn joined me in cursing Dr. Christian and all his ancestors, to be truthful, I was grateful for the distractions his weekly workload forced on me. And today, I welcomed any delaying tactic that would keep me from returning to room 213.

  A room where my brother, stubborn as ever, had not yet decided to die. Even though they’d removed all so-called artificial forms of life-support, Logan continued to breathe. His heart continued to beat. His brain even registered activity, but not enough, his doctors hastily assured me, to qualify as lucid thought.

  Concentrate, Caspia, I ordered myself, staring at the broken, twisted vines with new ferocity. Severe heavy curves for the outline of the stems, touched with a series of straight feathery lines for the broken edges. Or would crosshatching with a pencil be better? How much detail did I want?

  I felt my phone vibrate against my hip, buried deep in my jeans pocket. I fell back against the brick courtyard wall, letting my head bang against the hard surface just enough to sting. Everyone who cared about me knew where I was and knew I wasn’t exactly in a talkative mood. But I’d managed to drop my graphite somewhere in the scraggly grass, and my sketchbook hung loosely from one hand, so I flung it down on the rough concrete bench with a loud expletive and dug my phone out anyway.

  Amberlyn, of course. She’d texted. “Done w/ hmwk at CB. Want company/ coffee? Amelie sez hi.”

  Of course I didn’t want company. But Amberlyn was the least evil of all possible company, and if she came bearing caffeine, so much the better. I didn’t know when or how, and I really didn’t care, but some part of me had already begun to forgive her.

  She was pretty much the closest thing to family I had left.

  And I hadn’t forgotten the two of them kissing, my best friend and my brother, tan skin on pale, sunshine on snow, the night of the accident. The circumstances were radically different, but we’d both lost the men we loved that night. Or had started to love. Or something.

  Hell and damnation, I couldn’t even get it straight in my head. Maybe I was just totally unlovable. Ethan was gone, and I had better get used to a long life of rocking chairs and my new life’s companion, Abigail the cat. My thumbs tapped out a quick reply, smearing charcoal dust across my keypad. Right before I could hit “send,” an arm clad in blood red leather snaked out and snatched my phone away.

  A chillingly familiar voice warned, “Don’t. You’re in more trouble than you know already. Don’t involve an innocent. Especially her.”

  I froze. I couldn’t help it. His was the last voice I ever expected to hear again. I would literally have staggered under the barrage of fear, shock, and panic had I not been so stunned. But somehow, I shoved all those emotions down. I could sort them out later; my worst nightmare was here now. I threw myself against the courtyard wall and brought both hands up in front of me, palms out, in the universal gesture of “stay the hell away.”

  I hoped it made me look helpless, like a frightened girl cowering against a wall trying to ward off someone more powerful. In reality, I was reaching for the place inside that let me pull shadows when I was really upset. I was also wracking my brain for every single thing Ethan had ever told me about the Fallen, the Nephilim, and Asheroth.

  Especially the part about how he was Dark and insane but not necessarily evil. At least, I hoped that was what Ethan had said. I fervently hoped I remembered the not evil part correctly. Because it was definitely Asheroth who stood across from me now, his diamond-bright eyes wide as a surprised child’s. He held his palms out in mimicry or mockery of mine. Black haired, white skinned, mad Asheroth held my cell phone in his hand in the courtyard two floors down from where my brother lay dying and did something tremendously wrong and utterly insane.

  He tilted his head and smiled at me, humming tunelessly while he rocked back and forth on his heels. The smile came out wrong and kind of creepy, like a child playing with lipstick for the first time who thinks he’s made himself pretty but instead looks like some kind of demented clown. I did exactly what I would do for such a child: I smiled back, but I could feel my mouth trembling as I did
it, like a squirming insect just waiting for escape. My teeth locked together against my will and I ground out, “Asheroth. What are you doing here?” Cold marched up my spine. Shadows flickered in lines across my forearms. Experimentally, I spread my fingers wide and flexed them; shadows arced between them like opaque slashes through air. A desperate kind of despair joined the cold marching up my spine when that happened. I didn’t want to be able to pull shadows from the Dark Realms. I didn’t want to have to. Ethan was supposed to be here, to guard my brother from creatures like Asheroth, so that I didn’t have to. I made my smile fiercer to hide the weakness and fear I felt inside.

  Ethan wasn’t here, and Asheroth was. I was all Logan had, and I would be damned if I’d let that psychopath have my brother’s soul without a fight.

  Maybe literally damned.

  The wind blasted through the little courtyard, much colder than I remembered, carrying a few drops of ice-cold rain with it. I hugged myself without thinking, for comfort or warmth or both, and as I did it, thick dark slashes of shadows so black they looked like ink stains followed my hands like tracers.

  It’s ok, I tried to tell myself. Don’t panic. You have armor and shadows. You can fight.

  Asheroth’s terrible smile slipped when he saw the shadows. “You’ve been playing with shadows and fire. Very naughty. It certainly complicates things.” He struggled to pin his awful smile back in place. “You don’t trust me,” he said at last. I didn’t bother to respond to this less than intelligent observation. His sparkling white eyes narrowed. “So I brought you a present.” He reached into his jacket pocket, digging inside as if it were both bottomless and very cluttered. Carefully, as if performing a seldom-rehearsed magic trick, he produced a rather crushed and battered flower. Except for its color, it had seen better days.