Blood Like Poison

by M. Leighton

  As he looked up at me, I could see that the blackness of it even invaded the whites of his eyes. But still, when he looked at me with those liquid brown orbs, my heart melted.

  Bo coughed and drops of inky blood spewed from his mouth, dotting his face like paint spatter.

  I couldn’t speak past the lump in my throat. Even if I could’ve, my chest was so tight, I doubted air could flow in and out.

  Bo was dying and my heart was breaking over and over again. As I watched him, each jagged piece splintered into tinier pieces until I felt like there was nothing left in my chest but sand.

  “I know who did it,” he breathed feebly.

  Tears fell from my cheeks in a steady stream, washing Bo’s face clean, one drop at a time. With trembling fingers, I lifted my hand to wipe at his mouth and chin, tenderly ridding it of all evidence of the price he’d paid for knowledge, for revenge, for justice.

  “Tell Lucius ‘Heather’,” he wheezed, gasping for enough air to fill his deteriorating lungs.

  I felt the sob bubble up in my throat before it erupted, spilling out in one syllable. “Bo,” I cried.

  Though he was obviously fighting for his breath, he inhaled as deeply as he could and spoke.

  “I’ve never loved anyone more.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, praying that this was all a dream, that when I opened them again, I’d be in my bedroom and Bo would be beside me. Alive.

  “Bo, please,” I wept.

  “Thank you,” he panted.

  My eyes opened at the touch of his cool fingers to my lips and then his arm fell back to his chest with a hollow thud.

  “Bo!” I shook his shoulder, but he didn’t move. “Bo!” I tapped my fingers against his cheek, but still got no response.

  I looked into his face, the face that had haunted my dreams, the face that was etched onto my heart. I searched his dark eyes, but they were empty. They stared blankly past me, looking into a world that I couldn’t see.

  “Bo, don’t go,” I cried. “Please don’t leave me.”

  As I watched, his form began to fade. As his body’s last efforts to fight metabolized the remainder of the blood, I lost sight of him. Though I could still feel the ever-cooling shape beneath my hands, I could no longer see Bo. He disappeared right before my eyes.

  “Bo!” I wailed, the last bits of my heart exploding in a spray of emotional shrapnel that left me dead and lifeless inside.

  The crunch of metal drew my attention away from Bo and I remembered that my friends were stranded down the road, at the mercy of Trinity. But I didn’t want to leave Bo. Not yet. I couldn’t bear to let him go.

  More noises reached my ears, the sounds of struggling, scuffling. What if there was still time to help them? How could I not at least try?

  Guilt, sharp and poignant, seared my soul. I was so torn. I wanted nothing more to stay with Bo, but deep down, I knew that the only right thing to do was to help the living. They still had a chance for happiness, even if I did not.

  I leapt to my feet and ran as fast as my stiff muscles would carry me. As I reached the car, I saw that the doors had been ripped off, the windshield was broken and the hood was up, the radiator steaming and hissing in the dying glow of the headlights.

  I heard a faint rustling and I saw a flash of red in the forest. I raced forward to Savannah. She was jerking spasmodically where she lay at the base of a tree. There was a dark stain on the bark, blood that ran down to where she was crumpled on the ground. The right side of her face was covered in it and her hair was wet with it.

  “Savannah?”

  There was no response; she just continued to twitch. She was making a gurgling sound in the back of her throat that made me nauseous. Whatever Trinity had done to her, I knew Savannah was in trouble.

  Pulling my cell phone from my pocket, I dialed 911. When I’d reported the accident to the operator and hung up, I cradled Savannah’s head in my lap and listened for sounds of Trinity or Devon. After a few minutes, when still I had not heard the sounds of other people, I realized that I was alone in the night. It was absolutely silent but for the suffering of Savannah and the tick of the car’s engine where it was slowly dying on the road behind me.

  ********

  Three numb days later, I lay in my bed, reliving the nightmare of the previous seventy-some hours.

  After the ambulances had come and one of them had taken Savannah away, one of the responding policemen attempted to question me as an EMT checked me out. To his questions, I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Another officer tried to get through to me, but the pain I was feeling was too consuming to allow my brain enough function to manufacture a believable story, so still I said nothing.

  I heard the word “catatonic” bandied about in hushed whispers, probably because all I could manage during the entire ordeal were bouts of staring off into the distance alternating with crying jags where I sobbed so violently my ribs ached.

  On the ride home, that’s what I did the most of—cry. After that, for hours and hours each day and all through every sleepless night, I cried. I mourned a loss so great, I wasn’t sure I could survive it, didn’t think I wanted to. I prayed many times for death, not wanting to see another sunrise and face another day without Bo in it. But each day, despite my pleas for relief, dawn came and I got up and went about pretending it was business as usual, that I was whole and human. Only I wasn’t. Even now, I’m not sure what I am. Half dead. Half human. Nothing complete, and I never would be again.

  Late the night Bo died, I ventured to see Lucius, to carry out Bo’s last wishes and deliver the message “Heather.” When Lucius answered the door, I knew by the look on his face that he knew, that I need not explain that Bo was gone. Whether it was the gaping hole in my heart that gave it away, or something less subtle like my puffy red eyes and absolute silence, I don’t know. But he knew.

  After I gave him the message, I turned and left. I could tell he wanted to talk, to help me, to comfort me, but I had no interest in anything but the grief that was tearing me apart. There would be no solace, no relief for me. Though my physical life continued, my inner life had been extinguished. It had disappeared with Bo.

  Besides, I had to conserve what little spark I had left in me. There was one more stop I had to make before I could collapse in the blessed peace and solitude of my bedroom—Bo’s house.

  Barely able to get the words out, I told Denise what had happened as best I could. Her grief seemed nearly a match of my own, but where I had the regret of not having had enough time with Bo, she seemed to have an ocean of regrets of another sort. Though I was curious about them, I was glad that she didn’t want to talk about it. I doubted I could’ve listened. It was all I could do to be in the house, where I smelled Bo as if he still lived there, as if he still lived anywhere. As if he still lived at all.

  She sent word to me that she was having a small service for him on Sunday, and by small I mean only me and Denise. Since no body was recovered, Bo was officially listed as a missing person, but we knew better. That’s why the memorial was so small. Devon had disappeared and no one else knew the truth, no one conscious anyway.

  I wasn’t sure what Savannah knew, what she’d seen. She’d suffered brain damage when Trinity had thrown her into a tree and she had slipped into coma only hours after she’d been rescued. It was with her in mind that I took a lantern to the river to join Denise Bowman in remembering her son, the love of my life.

  Even now, as I lay in my bed with the cloak of midnight all around me and the night singing right outside my open window, I can’t imagine enduring anything more gut-wrenchingly painful than that service by the water.

  The sun was setting across the river, its orangey glow reflected in every ripple of the water, a silent tribute to the memory of the dying day. It seemed apropos; we’d come in memory of the dead, too.

  I could hear the creak and groan of the trees as they swayed in the wind, and just below that, there was the soft whisper of th
e leaves rustling, their gilded tips fluttering and twisting on the breeze.

  From the road, I could see Denise standing at the water’s edge, her back to me. Before I descended the bank, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The tangy scent of citrus filled my nostrils and my thoughts went immediately to Bo, as they always did.

  When I opened my eyes and looked around, searching the dappled woods for him, my heart squeezed painfully with the realization that my mind was just playing tricks on me. Bo was nowhere around. He was gone.

  Denise had asked an old family friend, a minister, to come and say a few words, to give Bo a ceremony even if no one else knew of it. When he was finished, Denise opened a jar and spread some sort of ashy substance across the water. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it wasn’t Bo. The chalky mist that drifted down river was just a symbol of him, carried quietly away by the wind.

  I put my arm around Denise’s shoulders, each of us drawing what little comfort could be had from each other’s grief. She squeezed my hand and thanked me with her bloodshot eyes. And then she walked away with the minister, leaving me alone on the bank, staring into the water.

  My legs held strong until I heard their engines start and then I collapsed, my knees sinking into the mud at the river’s edge. Digging the lighter I’d brought from my pocket, I lit the lantern and set it onto the water and gave it a little push.

  I watched Bo’s lantern drift steadily down stream, away from me. The further it got from my view, the harder I cried. I closed my eyes once more, drawing in the scent of Bo that still clung to the heavy air, breathing him in.

  How long I stayed like that, I have no idea. The constant ache in my soul that seemed only to worsen with each passing minute drowned out life and most everything in it, including time.

  When night had fallen and there were no more tears to cry, no more moisture left to shed, and I had only the company of crickets to see me home, I finally left. It occurred to me that no matter how long I knelt there, crying by the river, Bo wasn’t coming back, and since I was no closer to saying goodbye than I ever had been, I might as well go home.

  Closing my eyes against that excruciating memory, I drifted off to sleep for the first time in three days. Fatigue had finally won.

  I hadn’t been asleep very long when I woke. Only forty minutes if my clock was telling the truth. At first, I wasn’t sure what had stirred me. I was still hovering in that place between wakefulness and sleep, suspended between the two. I was so exhausted—emotionally and physically— that I felt as if I’d been drugged, my head thick and fuzzy.

  I listened closely for sounds, for what had roused me. Outside my open window, I heard nothing but the sounds of nature, the same nighttime lullaby as always.

  An agonizingly familiar tangy scent assailed me. Again. I felt the sting of tears at the backs of my eyes and a sob clogged my throat. It was all in my head. It had to be. Bo was gone. I was just imagining his smell.

  As I lay there, breathing him in, I realized that, this time, my treacherous body didn’t even seem to know the difference. It was reacting to him, to the magnetism of him, as if he was near, even though he was no longer with me. It just felt like he was. Just a feeling. Nothing more. Emotional trickery.

  I gave in to the urge to cry—again—the damn breaking as his scent swirled through the air and his presence swirled in my blood.

  “Bo,” I groaned, turning to bury my face in the pillow, wishing that it could drown out the bittersweet memory of him, the smell of him, or that it would swallow me whole so that I could find peace, find relief, find him in death.

  A soft, familiar voice hushed me.

  “I’m here,” it said.

  The voice was Bo’s. I’d know it anywhere. My ears were confirming what my body already knew. Bo was near.

  I sat up and looked around my moonlit room, inspecting the darkness. Desperately, I searched the shadows for some indication that I wasn’t imagining him, but I found none. No matter how much I wished it otherwise, I was still painfully, achingly alone.

  I flopped back onto the bed, tears streaming down across my temples, collecting in a warm pool just inside my ears. I closed my eyes and lay perfectly still, drinking in the still-strong aroma, basking in it.

  It startled me when a cool finger touched my cheek. My skin tingled in recognition when it brushed away a tear as it slid from my eye.

  Slowly, I opened my eyes. In my gut, I knew I’d see nothing. And I was right, but that didn’t stop the electricity that shot through my body when the finger traced a path to my lips.

  “Shhh,” the voice said.

  My soul soared despite my mind’s unwillingness to consider the possibility. I knew that voice. I knew that touch. Even on my deathbed, I’d remember it, crave it, need it. And this was no trick of my mind. It was real.

  It was Bo. It had to be.

  The murmur of death, a dark shadow overcast,

  Ringing long and eternal as life slips slowly past,

  It breeds the unthinkable and touts the unknown,

  It begins at the end, on a whisper, a moan.

  EPILOGUE

  The next day, I woke with traces of Bo all around me, even inside me. He swam in my blood, alive and well. Though I couldn’t see him and I really had no reason to believe that he could’ve survived that last fatal poisoning, I knew, somewhere in the bottom of my soul, that he lived.

  Rather than driving to school, I headed to the forest, to Lucius, trying my best to remember the way. He’d been ready and anxious to talk to me when I’d given him Bo’s final message. I was curious to see what he had to say now.

  Getting to the right spot along the road to stop and enter the forest wasn’t the difficult part of my journey. Bo had parked just beyond a sign about littering that someone had spray painted obscene symbols all over. I wasn’t likely to forget that marker. No one probably did.

  No, it was the forest itself that gave me a fit. I couldn’t imagine how I’d found it so easily the night of Bo’s death, because today I felt like I was walking in circles. Everything looked the same. Just when I thought I was making progress, I’d run into something that I’d already seen once or twice.

  Finally, just before I was about to give up, I widened my path further to the right and came upon the huge boulder that Lars had staked Bo to. It still gave me chills to look at it, although it wasn’t as devastating now that I believed Bo was alive. Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn’t have been able to stand the sight of it.

  Within ten minutes of finding the rock, I found the cabin that was my destination. I hesitated before walking up on the small porch. I was just about to reconsider my impulsive visit, a tiny doubt niggling at my brain, telling me I was wrong, that Bo wasn’t alive. I was suddenly afraid that Lucius would tell me that Bo was never coming back, rather than confirm that what I’d felt had been real. I didn’t think I could survive that soul-crushing loss again.

  Turning back was no longer an option, however, when a quiet whoosh broke into my musing. The cabin door opened and Lucius stood just inside. We stared at each other for a couple of long, tense minutes before he stepped aside and swept one arm in front of him, beckoning me in.

  Taking a deep breath, I walked into the tiny above-ground living area, the one I liked to think of as a decoy, and turned to look back at Lucius.

  “You know,” he said simply.

  I felt like crying again, but this time for joy. Those two words, they said all that needed to be said, all that I needed so desperately to hear. Bo was alive.

  I nodded.