Branded

by Ana J. Phoenix

  “Maybe you should go back to sleep.”

  Asher shook his head. The smart thing to do would be to come up with escape plans. If he was anything like José, he would find a way out of this… But he wasn’t. He could barely string two thoughts together before his mind strayed to dark places and things got difficult and his breathing sped up. “I’m a mess,” he concluded for himself. “An absolute fucking mess.”

  “Are you going to need help getting to sleep?”

  Asher looked at Greeny. He had two options. He could either stay up all night and plot his escape, or he could let Greeny put him to sleep and escape his thoughts entirely.

  “Yeah,” he said eventually. “Yeah, I think I do.”

  A cool cup was pressed to his lips. “Drink this.”

  Asher did.

  ***

  In a different corner of a different world, a teenage girl by the name of Sofia was sitting in a hospital chair, flipping through a magazine, occasionally glancing at the clock. Over the past months she had grown accustomed to the regular beeping of the machine that let everyone know her brother's heart was still beating, even though he wasn't waking up.

  Some people had started to doubt that he would open his eyes again, but Sofia knew he would, because her brother wasn't the type to give up. And so she would pop in every other day, whenever she could make time, and wait for that moment.

  The doctors had said it was unlikely any of her words were getting through, but she still told him everything that was going on in their lives, how she thought their mom was going to go crazy.

  Today though, there was nothing much to tell, and so she only made the random comment about how lately, fashion was going down the drain and he could count himself lucky that he was blind.

  It was a visit like any other, but when she got up and went for the door, something unexpected happened. The monotonous beep - beep - beep of the machine turned into just one long beeeeeep that bore into her mind. That wasn't a good thing. That shouldn't be happening.

  She rushed to her brother’s bedside, jabbed the red call button repeatedly, jumped into the hallway to call for help and found herself pushed out of the way as a team of doctors and nurses raced into the room.

  "What's going on?" she asked, but nobody paid attention to her. They were talking among themselves in medical jargon she didn't understand. She couldn't even see what they were doing because there were too many people blocking her view.

  The seconds dragged on until she was sure the beeping sound was going to haunt her dreams forever. And then it stopped and she thought her own heart stopped as well in the one moment it took for the machine to start again. Beep - beep - beep.

  Sofia had never been more relieved to hear that stupid sound. She ran back into the room, ignoring the medical staff.

  “José!” she called out and the nurses were nice enough to make space for her by the bed, though at this point she might have shoved them. She found her brother’s hand and grabbed it as if he was going to disappear if she didn't hold on. Her breathing stopped short when his hand moved. It hadn't moved in six months.

  “José?” she tried again. He turned his face to her side. “Ohmygod,” she whispered.

  And then he spoke. “Where’s Asher?”

  She threw herself onto his chest and cried, not caring that she didn’t understand what he was talking about, because he was talking.

  “You’re awake!” she cried. Everything would be alright now.

  Epilogue

  To say that José had been confused when he’d woken up in a hospital, with someone crying her eyes out over his chest, would have been an understatement. It had taken him several minutes to figure out that he was, somehow, not dead. That he was back in the real world and that the hysterical person being led out of the room was his little sister.

  It hadn’t made a lot of sense. For a while, he even doubted whether his experience in the other world had been real. Until his mother, after giving him a hug that he thought would crush his lungs, asked him about the tattoos and he had to make up a lie.

  Over the course of the next days he found that he’d been in a coma for six weeks. The doctors couldn’t say why.

  Six weeks… That number didn’t seem right, but maybe time passed differently here. Sometimes it felt like he’d been gone for years. Sometimes it felt like no time at all.

  His mind still caught halfway between here and there, he couldn't wait for his family to give him some space to breathe. Happy as he was to be with them again, there was something he had to do before he could go back to his life. So his first question for the nurses was about any other long-time coma-patients on the station.

  Under the ruse of wanting to give hope to the family, he managed to get the room number of one that had come in about a week after him. The next day, his sister helped him find his way there.

  “Tell me what you see,” he told her when they entered.

  “Room’s pretty boring,” Sofia said. “Looks a lot like yours, with the machines and stuff. Just not as many flowers and cards. Actually, just one card and no flowers.” She stepped farther into the room as José nodded. The typical hospital stench was too strong for there to be any flowers in this room.

  “You wanna know what the card says? Geez, it’s a Christmas card. How long’s that been here?”

  “Don’t read—”

  “It’s addressed to someone called ‘Ash’, guess that’s his name then. He’s sort of cute, you know. Pretty.”

  José's stomach dropped at hearing those words. He'd been right then. He'd found Asher. The first thing he felt was exhilaration, but the irony of their fates hit him just as fast. If dying was the only way to get home, he hadn't saved Asher. He'd just left him on his own.

  Sofia kept talking. “The card’s from his dad, saying happy birthday. Dates back to November. Kinda sad, isn’t it? That’s all that’s here.”

  “I sort of expected something like that.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, I… met him on a journey.”

  “What sort of—”

  “Could you just wait outside for a minute?”

  Sofia fell silent for a moment. “Alright, I guess,” she said then, walking past José to the door. “I’ll be outside.”

  Once she was gone, José stepped up to the bed and leaned over the person lying in it. His hand found Asher's face and his fingertips confirmed for him that he'd found his little idiot.

  Stroking a lock of hair back from his forehead, he placed a kiss on his skin. He knew he couldn't get through to Asher, knew his mind was trapped somewhere else, but in this moment, José needed to believe he could reach him. He wanted to tell Asher how to get home, how sorry he was for leaving without him.

  Asher remained still, oblivious to his presence, and only the monotonous beeping of the machine cut through the silence of the room.

  “Sorry,” José whispered, then he leaned back and took a deep breath.

  At least, he'd thought to bring cigarettes. He put a pack on the night table where Asher would notice it when he woke up. He'd said he wanted to smoke when he got back.

  “Hurry up, okay? If there's any other way… I really hope you find it.” Dying definitely didn’t count to José’s favorite experiences ever. He ruffled his hand through Asher's hair, and then he left.

  ***

  The doctors annoyed the hell out of Asher when he woke up from his death experience. “How many fingers am I holding up?” Seriously? Fuck you. He actually said that. He said: “Fuck you.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.

  The next time he woke up, there wasn’t as much of a commotion in his room.

  Okay… He looked around the room. What’s going on?

  Obviously, he wasn’t dead. He was in a hospital, and he wasn’t in pain. His scales were gone.

  On his bedside table, he spotted a card that said Happy Birthday. What? It had been his birthday in November. Only then it wasn’t because…

  Oh.


  He was back. Home. A little laugh escaped him before he could stop himself. Fuck that.

  His gaze fell on the pack of cigarettes that someone had conveniently left lying around. They were his favorites, too. Finder’s keepers.

  A scribble on the bottom of the pack caught his eyes before he opened it. José. Asher nearly dropped the cigarettes. There was an address. José’s address. Asher stared at it.

  Blind Guy had been alive all this time. Asher’s insides curled in on themselves. Life had played a joke on him. Any minute now, someone would jump into the room holding a large sign saying, ‘You just got OWNED,’ or some such shit.

  Blind Guy had been in this hospital, in this room, leaving this note for him, living his happy little life while Asher had mourned his death.

  He should be happy Blind Guy was okay. That’s what he’d wanted, wasn’t it?

  It was good that Blind Guy was alive. But Asher was done. He hadn’t died to start everything over again, to make the same mistake twice. He’d been miserable because he’d let Blind Guy get too close. And he didn’t need Blind Guy in this world. He didn’t.

  Still, he took the cigarettes with him when he left the hospital.

  ***

  About a week later he sat leaning against the back wall of a bar, his cell phone flipped open in his hand. He’d thrown away the pack of cigarettes two days ago. But he still remembered everything that had been written on it. He’d stared at it so often. Fingers hovering over the keys of his phone, he started typing in the number.

  Just once.

  Just once he needed to make sure it was really Blind Guy, that he was really okay. And then he could move on. Then the nightmares would stop. God, he needed them to stop. He needed to be normal again. To be able to go into a bar and pick up some stranger and actually enjoy himself.

  He pushed the call button, listened to the phone connect. It was ringing on the other end of the line now, somewhere in this city. Asher knew the exact address. He’d walked by the building twice, completely coincidentally, but hadn’t seen Blind Guy.

  Someone picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  José. Asher swallowed. There was no mistaking that voice. He heard it almost every night in his dreams—whispering orders into his ear, or telling him how he wasn’t worthless. As if Asher needed someone to tell him that.

  “Anybody there?”

  Asher opened his mouth, but it was hard, so damn hard, to figure out what he wanted to say. It was a battle between 'fuck you' and 'fuck me.'

  The back door of the bar opened before Asher could speak.

  “Asher?” someone called his name. The dude he’d come here with. “Whatcha doing there?”

  Feeling caught, Asher flipped the phone shut, ending the call. He turned around. “Be right there,” he said. “Don’t fucking hurry me.”

  “Right, right.” His companion shot him one skeptic look, then vanished back into the bar. Asher watched him go. He hated what that guy did to his nails, but for the time being, he would do.

  He put his phone back into his pocket and chided himself for being pathetic. He had his old life back. And somehow, he would find a way to shut up the voice saying he'd outgrown it.

  Thank you so much for reading Branded. I plan to have the sequel, Burned, published in Winter. Check out my website at http://anajphoenix.com or find me on Facebook to catch updates and sneak previews!

  Other Things I’ve Written

  Lab Rat’s Love

  In Memory of Us

  The Alpha and His Ace (available for free)

  Coming Soon

  Burned