by Anela Deen
Chapter 37
Emergency responders and police cars arrived to the mill, heralded by a cascade of flashing red and blue. The empty parking lot became suddenly very noisy and very full. Within minutes, they packed Nick onto a gurney and rushed him off to the hospital. They didn’t let me ride with him.
“Someone needs to call his parents,” I said this aloud to no one in particular. I didn’t feel right. My ears were ringing and I had trouble comprehending the questions the police asked me. I seemed to forget what was said as soon as someone said it. It wasn’t until a blanket was draped over my shoulders and I was led into the back of a warm ambulance that I realized I was shaking.
“Shock,” one of the paramedics murmured to a cop I hadn’t noticed standing nearby. Had he been talking to me? They instructed me to lay down on the already loaded stretcher. Then there were more blankets, an IV stuck into my hand, and my throbbing knee packed in ice. Throughout all of it, Alice remained by my side, a constant, reassuring presence. Everything began to slowly spin. The pain in my leg receded, but every few minutes, I felt a tug in my chest and my heart gave a bruised thump.
“Something hurts,” I told Alice, rubbing at the spot.
“He’s complaining of chest pain,” someone said. “What’s his EKG?”
Alice kneeled at my side. “It will fade.”
I was still shaking. My breathing wouldn’t settle down. “I should’ve done better. I made everything worse.”
“Who’s he talking to?”
“EKG checks out but his blood pressure readings are coming in high. Let’s give him a light sedative.”
One of the paramedics bent over the hand with the IV. Almost immediately, I had trouble keeping my eyes open. I fought the warm pull of sleep. The miserable certainty that Alice would be gone when I woke lodged itself under my collarbone. I didn’t want her to leave even if she was mad at me for the mess I’d made. I didn’t want to be alone.
“Will you stay?” I whispered. “Stay with me.”
Her sharp blue gaze gentled. She nodded.
When I opened my eyes next, I lay in a quiet room. A hospital room, I realized, noting the white walls and the bedside monitors. It was dark but for the shredded glow of streetlights coming through the blinds.
“Your family was here.” Alice stood in a nest of shadows beside the window, visible only by the slight gloss of her dark hair. “You were admitted after visiting hours and still sedated. They left you a note to say they’ll be back as soon as they’re allowed. They brought the clothes you’re wearing.”
I found that I wore one of my plain white t-shirts and my favorite pair of grey fleece sweatpants. A jagged feeling surged up inside me. The wrongness of this. Of sitting here, comfortable and cared for and safe when…
“Is it still night?” I sat up on the half-inclined bed. The IV in my arm was gone. A blood pressure cuff circled my bicep and my knee had been heavily wrapped in bandages that kept my leg stiff.
“Almost five in the morning. You slept on after the sedative left your system.”
I gazed at her. “And you stayed.”
“Yes.”
“Are you able to—Do you have to go? Your schedule and all?”
“My tasks are well in hand. I can remain a while longer.”
I wanted to hug her. The sight of her kept the shattered parts of me from crumbling away. Maybe she’d only stayed because of how pitiful I must’ve looked, but I didn’t care. I had dreamt of fire, of pleas and screams that held the sound of my name. But Alice had stayed as she’d promised. She filled the dark room in a way that pushed the nightmares back.
“Did you see Nick?” I asked.
“He will live. Your doctors monitor him on another floor but his injuries will leave him in time.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
“It was not his time,” she shrugged. “He awoke before you and spoke with your law enforcement. All has been explained, or at least what little he witnessed after you arrived to the mill. I recommend you create a believable story for how the rest came to pass. Perhaps something along the lines of…they turned on each other?”
I’d have to lie. Of course. The perfect cherry to top this manure sundae. Not that there existed another option. Telling the truth would only land me in a different sort of hospital.
“They also found you with the box that started all this trouble,” she added. “It does not appear anyone suspects you of being part of the plot, however—”
“I’ll come up with some explanation.”
The feverish desire to get out of this room tightened suddenly around my chest. I stripped off the blood pressure cuff and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Every muscle in my back and shoulders barked in response.
Alice moved closer. “Your vehicle is not here if you’re thinking of leaving.”
“I just,” the neck of my t-shirt felt like a tourniquet, “I need some air.”
Alice watched me a moment. She pointed to a wall closet. “Dress. Your boots and coat are here.”
I hobbled over to them without argument. When I’d pulled them on, she said softly, “Follow me.”
Chapter 38
Trailing behind her reminded me a lot of the day we’d met when she’d led me through a graveyard. She seemed to know exactly where to go and how to avoid being seen by the staff going about their rounds. We entered a stairwell. Up and up until we went until we reached the top floor. Sweat coated my skin, my injured knee hot with pain.
Alice passed through the heavy door on the final landing without looking back. It creaked open with a metallic screech when I gave it a push. Blustery November air greeted me, bitter edged and damp. It felt good against my face and the steel cord cinching around my lungs loosened.
Dimly lit with safety lights interspersed along the waist-high steel fencing, the roof was a long, rectangular space. At the far end, a large burgundy cross had been painted into the khaki stone with an “H” at its center. To one side of where I stood, a rock garden occupied the area with a short trail leading to a wrought iron bench angled toward a view of the city. Alice stood beside it, facing away. If there existed a posture that said “We need to talk” she was owning it at the moment.
I made my way to her along the curving trail. “How’d you know the layout of this place so well?”
“All hospitals are familiar ground for me.”
“Right.” At some point I would stop asking her dumb questions.
We stood silently together when I reached her, watching the dark skyline and the twinkle of city lights below.
She tipped her chin at the view. “What do you see?”
I gave a weary laugh. “The horizon exercise. Still?”
“You haven’t completed the task.”
“It’s not dawn or dusk right now.”
“That was an unimportant element. I selected those times because the living seem to derive inspiration from the time of day and the array of colors.” She glanced at me wryly. “Aesthetics do not appear to have a similar effect on you.”
“We can’t all be poets.”
“Then tell me simply. What do you see?”
I sighed tiredly. “I don’t know, Alice. Is there really an answer to this?”
“There is your answer, Sam. That is all I seek.”
I stared at the darkness, at the deep shades of night, and the blind trust breathing within the walls of all those houses. Their certainty that tomorrow would come. Their hope of what it would bring, and their fear. For a moment, the shadows became both the ending and the beginning. An eternal cusp.
I shut my eyes to it. “I see accomplishment and defeat, all mixed together. I see promise. Impossibility. I see…I feel...”
“What do you feel?”
The sore tug returned to my chest, a loose thread pulling taut. I pressed a hand to it.
“You know, I read about a Russian saint from 800 or 900 AD. Saint Olga of Kiev. She was the regent of Kievan Rus’. Af
ter Drevlians killed her husband, their Prince Mal sent twenty of his best men to convince her to marry him so he could rule over her territory. She had them buried alive.” I felt Alice’s regard rest on me. “The kicker is that she sent word accepting his proposal, inviting him to a feast.”
“Sam.”
“When he came with the rest of the Drevlians, she got them drunk, locked them inside the hall, and set the place on fire.” I laughed, though it came out as a shuddering wheeze. “The church venerated her for her work to spread Christianity, but I’ll bet her mentor was more than a little peeved with that behavior.”
“Sam, I am not angry with you.”
All my laughter evaporated. “You’re not?”
“No. I am disappointed.”
Solid punch to the chest. “You warned me and I didn’t listen. I’m sorry.”
She seemed to read the impact of her words. Her eyes grew kind. “Not you, Sam. I am disappointed that events unfolded the way they did. I am disappointed in the girl and how she failed herself. And you.”
Another direct hit, even if she hadn’t intended it that way. A failure. Yes, that description was apt for what happened.
“Do you ever wonder,” I asked, “whether evil could be wiped out if we treasured each other the way we should?”
“Could love end suffering?” Alice considered. “There are many parts to that question. You are perhaps better suited to answer it than I.”
“Maggie did terrible things, but…” My hands clenched into fists. “It shouldn’t have ended that way for her.”
“You are not at fault. She was given her chance.”
“Was she? After the world had let her down so many times, were her actions really her own?”
“Yes.” She answered with such conviction, she surprised me into silence. “You forget, I was once in her place.” Alice had rebuffed me every time I’d asked about her mortal life. I waited with suspended breath while her gaze stared into memory. “So long ago, yet I see the moment I lost my soul as clearly as ever. I was just a girl when my mother instructed me to ask my father for the head of John the Baptist. I thought it was a game. I thought all of life was a game then.”
I listed forward as if she’d truly hit me this time. John the Baptist. That explained Sebastian’s remark about her history with saints. The name of this biblical woman bobbed to the surface of my mind.
Salome.
I recalled a particularly grisly oil painting depicted of a beautiful girl, dressed in decadence, holding the saint’s decapitated head on a silver plate. Her mouth suggested a smile but she allowed only a sidelong look at her prize and her eyes seemed distant and alone.
Alice turned fully toward me. “Understand, Sam, I lived a long life on Earth. I had privilege and power and I used both without regret. Maggie, too, made choices to harm others, knowingly and intentionally.” She exhaled, almost a sigh. “As you said, we are who we decide to be.”
“That was—I was angry when I said that. Life is way more complex than a bumper sticker phrase. Someone who’s done the things she did, they aren’t in their right mind. Other circumstances, another life, and she’d have been a completely different person with a whole other fate.”
“Sam—”
“How can she be condemned for the lot she was dealt, the one he gave her?” I punched a fist at the sky. “It’s not right! Where’s this fabled mercy I keep hearing about, huh? What about his part of the blame for the life that twisted her into a killer?”
“You speak of the illnesses of the mind and body.”
“Yes!”
“The soul does not suffer from them.”
I blinked, equally confused by the calm of her voice as I was by what she said. “I don’t understand.”
“The life that twisted her, the one that led to her brutality—these are elements of the living mind, of the imbalances that pain and trauma weave into the flesh. The soul does not carry these into the afterlife. It is not affected by them in that way.”
She held my gaze, waiting, it seemed, for me to grasp the concept. I tried to gather my shaken thoughts enough to hear what she was saying.
“You mean the soul isn’t affected by the life it just lived? That can’t be true.”
“It is not so clear-cut, no. She would have mourned the pain she went through, still loved those she had loved, but the instability that brought her to murder, that is shed in death.”
It hit me then. “She never felt remorse for the people she’d hurt.”
Alice nodded. “She reveled in it still. Her darkness came from within. That is what truly condemned her.”
“Bu there’s good in her too. I saw it. She didn’t have to help me. She could’ve said no.”
“It wasn’t enough to save her.”
“She was counting on me, Alice.” My voice broke. “It’s my fault. I failed her.”
“No, Sam.”
The tug at my chest came again, a dull thud that wouldn’t go away. I grasped a fistful of my shirt, pressing my knuckles into my breastbone hard enough to bruise.
“What is this?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Alice said. “Your body is whole. What you feel is something else.”
The knowledge rained down on me like broken glass. “It’s Maggie, isn’t it?”
“She’s praying to you. That is why you feel it.”
I sank onto the bench. “Please no.”
“Eventually, she will stop.”
“When she gives up.”
“Yes.”
I was drowning. I couldn’t see the surface. My throat ached, my lungs on fire. I bowed my head, fighting back the sobs rising in my chest. Tears spilled onto my cheeks anyway. A sickening flash of the men as they died in the paper mill pierced my thoughts. Maggie had done that. She’d done it while I’d pleaded with her to stop. Alice was right. We could only control our own actions, no one else’s. I’d done all I could. It still hurt.
“Alice,” I choked. “I don’t know what I’m doing. How am I supposed to figure out what my purpose is, let alone succeed in it, if I can’t even do this right?”
“You are learning. Give yourself time.”
“If you hadn’t shown up, I would’ve traded my soul to Sebastian and—”
“You will never do that again.” Alice’s voice sliced through my words. She sat beside me. “Swear it to me, Samuel Ruiz Alvarez de Molina. Swear you will never again consider bargaining with the Enemy for your immortal soul.”
Her eyes blazed like blue fire, as they had when she’d silenced me at the paper mill, but this time I saw the fear hidden behind the rage. Fear for me and for what she saw as her own failure to protect me.
“I won’t do it again. I swear.”
She gave me a hard look that said she didn’t believe it. “I would gladly send to the flames a thousand souls with a glimmer of goodness if it meant you would not be lost to them. Do you understand me?”
I didn’t, but said yes all the same.
“You cannot save those who would do nothing to save themselves, those who would feed you poison and call it friendship. What happened was not your fault.”
“Alice…” I tried to avoid her gaze. She didn’t let me.
“They will pull at you, those in agony and despair. You must not let them pull you into the darkness with them.”
“But I’m the one they’ll look to. I’m supposed to know how to help them.”
“And you will, but not if you hand victory to evil,” she said, and searched my eyes. “Promise me again.”
“I promise.”
She seemed satisfied with my oath this time, though a haunted emotion still touched her face.
“I made mistakes too,” she said. “It was wrong to have discouraged you. Regardless of the outcome, you were right to try. It is your calling to help others. I only…”
“Only what?”
“I did not wish to see you hurt. As your mentor, I know it will be part of your path, but…I find it difficult
to watch. Your sadness becomes mine.”
It opened something in me to hear her say that, to see the raw honesty in her eyes and to realize she felt my misery as strongly as she would her own. The hard ball of anguish lodged at the base of my throat eased.
Still, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “I’m not sure I deserve how nice you’re being, especially after the stupid things I said about your redemption. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“I know.” Her expression softened. “You deserve many things, Sam, none of them sorrow.”
She lifted a hand, uncertain fingers drifting close to my cheek. I didn’t pull away. I understood suddenly what her words had opened in me, the understanding like the hammer strike that reveals a vein of gold running through ordinary ground. Precious and unexpected.
Alice cared.
Her touch neared my skin, close enough to feel her chill. Suave idiot that I was, I shivered. She blinked, noted how close her hand had come to my skin, and jerked it away. In an instant, she vanished and reappeared several paces away.
“You are well enough now. I must return to my duties.” She clasped her hands tightly together, looking down at them as if they’d betrayed her.
I stood. “Alice, wait.”
“There’s no need to view the sunrise or sunset any longer. The task is complete.”
That surprised me. “I passed?”
“It was not a test, but rather something that required your true consideration. Knowing this answer will help you as you move forward.”
She wouldn’t look at me. I wanted to tell her it was okay, that I wouldn’t have minded her chilly touch, even if it pulled the air from my lungs. She often did that to me without ever coming near. The truth, in this case, was not my friend. Telling her would only make things worse. As the silence lengthened, I groped for a way to move us away from this painful awkwardness.
“So, you’re saying I could’ve saved myself weeks of hassle if I would’ve just waxed philosophical from the start?”
She smirked at that and glanced my way. Sarcasm to the rescue.
“Take some rest, Locksmith, and try not to travel in blizzard conditions anymore.” She paused, and added, “At least, not until I have solved the puzzle of your absence from my docket.”
