Gifts of the Blood (22 page)

I had just turned to Ethan, at peace with my decision, when the screaming started far across the square.

I felt it like a punch in the stomach, and I
knew
.

Chapter Fifteen:

Truths Laid Bare

I had one horrified second to look Ethan full in the eyes, to see the horrible certainty stamped there, before grabbing him by the front of my brother’s borrowed sweater. My hands trailed shadows as I fisted them. “Take me,” I demanded. I did not shout. My voice surprised me with its low, deadly hiss. “Use your wings if you must.
I don’t care who sees.
But do it.
Now
.”

I was a feral thing, snarling against him, against the rising screams and breaking glass across the square. I had just enough time to see his eyes flare an intense silver as my own terror spiked and reflected back at me, drowning out the pale blue green tint of his own eyes completely, before light flared at his back and we were gone.

A brief moment of disorientation, of nausea that should have brought me to my knees but didn’t. Grief did that, all by itself.

Funny how we’d spent all our time worrying about Dark Nephilim and the insidious spread of cancer, yet in the end, something as routine as a traffic accident struck the final blow. Later I would read the report. Later I would close my eyes and see the scene of the accident: the way one car had swerved to avoid another, and lost control of the vehicle. I would read about how the driver of the second vehicle had driven into a lamppost, putting himself in the hospital, in an effort to avoid hitting pedestrians. I would hear the word “hero” applied to my brother with only the barest hint of a snarl, because Logan had pushed Amberlyn out of the way. If he hadn’t, she’d have been pinned between the oncoming car and a wrought-iron lamppost reinforced with concrete and steel posts. She’d have been crushed. She’d be dead.

Instead, my brother got her out of the way.

How had he managed it? Long-buried Nephilim blood must have come up boiling, because no cancer patient should have been able to move so fast or shove a healthy young woman, even a small one like Amberlyn,
eight feet
clear of the wreck. Yet he did. Amberlyn recalled only motion and sound and the final jarring impact of pavement well clear of the wreck.

I wondered if I would ever stop hating her.

Lying in a pool of his own blood, flat on his back across the hood of a car, eyes glassy and staring up at the sky, my brother Logan stretched immobile and white. Shattered glass glittered across his body like cheap carnival jewelry. The shoulder and arm nearest what remained of the windshield were oddly angled. One leg lay twisted back and under. But the rest of him seemed grotesquely peaceful, as if he had just chosen a particularly dangerous and uncomfortable place to watch the sky. He didn’t blink. His chest neither rose nor fell.

Nothing in the whole world existed but my brother: not sound, not the driver of the car, not the flashing ambulance lights, not Amberlyn, not even Ethan. I’m sure someone must have tried to stop me, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anyone touching me or restraining me at all. Maybe they didn’t. Perhaps Ethan brought me right up to the wreckage and kept them all away. Maybe they saw something in my face, in both our faces, Ethan’s and mine, worse than death. Later, I would wonder how I managed to get past law enforcement and EMTs to perch directly on the car hood next to my brother’s inert form, but right then, I was safe inside my bubble with Logan.

“Hey, Logan,” I said softly. I found myself looking directly down at him. I brushed glass off his forehead. He’d lost his ball cap. He wouldn’t like that, all these people seeing his bald head. His glassy eyes held no recognition. “It’s ok,” I said, sliding up next to him. “You’re going to be cold,” I told him, placing one flat palm, light as a single sheet of paper in a strong wind, over his heart. “We can’t have that.” Tears had started. I made no move to stop them. Something subhuman had taken over; the wrecked body underneath my palm was the only thing linking me to the person who had been Caspia. “You can’t leave yet,” I insisted. “Not like this.”

Someone else was inside the bubble with me. Or something. A being made almost entirely of Light. I looked, disbelieving, as Ethan held out his hand to me. “Let me take him,” he said, softly, as if talking to a child. The tears were coming harder now, so I had to squint to see him clearly. “Cas. Please. Let me take him.” Ethan stretched to grasp Logan’s hand, the one attached to his grotesquely twisted shoulder.

Take him? Take him where?

I tried to speak. I discovered a new thing, then; tears do not just happen in the eyes. They collect in the throat, where they can choke and drown. “Resting,” I finally managed, almost dying on the word. “He’s just resting.” I did not move my flattened palm. It hovered just above my brother’s unmoving chest. Glass ground into the backs of my thighs, slicing through the silver of my skirt. I did not, dared not move.

“Caspia,” Ethan said again. Light pulsed at his back, strong and steady as ever. “Let me take him. He’s…” Ethan tore his eyes from me to look, long and hard, at my brother’s wrecked body. “He’s in agony, Cas. Let me give him rest.”

Rest?

“No.” I rubbed my face against my free forearm. “He’s
not dead yet.
It’s not supposed to happen like this.” I looked at Ethan. “You know that. It’s not right.” This last, in a whisper.

“I
don’t
know that,” he countered, releasing Ethan entirely. He moved closer to me, crawling up the hood of the car until he faced us both on his knees. “I only know it’s my job to see him safely home. To the Realms, Caspia. Where he won’t feel any pain. Where your family waits for him. Where it’s beautiful. You know it is. It’s another reason I took you there, if only to the edges. It's not allowed, but I wanted you to see. Don’t you want that for him?”

His voice was soft and warm and all enveloping. He was so careful with me, my Ethan, over my brother’s broken body. He was afraid for me, I could tell. This moment could break me, shatter me forever.

He was afraid for
us
. This moment could break us.

Would break us.

I felt it happening. Half my heart was dying between us, and what could I give him, give anyone, then?

I looked down at my brother again. His blood soaked my silver skirt. “Your… job,” I echoed. “And then what? You’ll turn your back on the Realms and move in and play house?” I felt my eyes blaze to match my skirt, my hands smeared with blood. “Is that what you want, Ethan? To get this over with so you can hurry up and join the ranks of the Fallen?” I said the word “this” with a brutal emphasis that made me draw my knees up to my chest. “A job, your job, that’s what he was, the whole time, and you didn’t even pay attention to him.”

“That’s not true.” Light enfolded us both. “I’m so, so sorry. Maybe you’re right that it wasn’t meant to happen this way. Maybe it's not some random accident, and if it's not, I swear to you, we'll find who did this. But he’s in agony, Caspia, and I
will
see him safe.” He softened his tone as he steeled himself to gather us both in his arms. “You would want that, too, if you weren’t in shock.”

Rage, the feral subhuman kind that seared all reason, ran through me in one angry throb. “Get your hands off me,” I snarled in a voice even I didn’t recognize. “Off both of us.” I scrambled backwards, laying both hands on my brother’s heart. “The Light. You draw power, sometimes. When you…” I trailed off, frustrated. The right words wouldn’t come. Fine. I’d show him. Palms out, I tried to focus. “Let me
try
.”

He stood with his head bowed, as if I also held his heart in my hands. “You’re going to try to draw power from the Realms. For Logan.” It was not a question, so I didn’t answer. “I should never have taken you. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll change everything.”

Why did he sound like I was tearing out
his
heart, instead of giving my brother’s back to him?

Sobbing, I pressed down on Logan’s chest like I was trying CPR. “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “You only just started to teach me. We had so little time.” For the first time ever, Ethan looked like the fragile one. I needed him to be strong. I needed him.
“Please,”
I whispered, and this time, it
was
a prayer, of a sort.

“I’ll do it,” he whispered. “Light save me, I’ll do it.” Rough warm fingers wrapped around my neck. “It’s a gift of your blood, Caspia,” Ethan said. Gran’s words. “The Light, your drawings… even the Dark. They all come from the same place. But it will take Light to bring your brother back.” All I felt was emptiness and cold, bitter fear, until Ethan said, so faint I think I wished it, “Take mine.”

Light pulsed against Logan’s chest, the same kind I had used to knock Ethan down when he took me to the Realms of Light. I felt it burn through me, taking all my rage with it, out through my hands and into my brother’s body where some answering echo in the blood recognized the light and welcomed it.

I fell back against the hood of the car, my palms blistered.

Logan began to breathe.

EMTs swarmed us, crowding around my brother, creating a screen between us with their unfamiliar actions and equipment. Ethan had me around the waist, pulling me backwards and out of their way. Only when I was off the car hood did I start to fight him in earnest.

If I had any doubt Ethan was abnormally good, they evaporated right then. He let me hit him. He let me yell at him and claw at his sweater. He let me sob and shriek. In short, I went hysterical on him, and he merely stood there and took it until I ran out of anger and hysterical fear. Even then, he was there to catch me. Eventually, I calmed down enough to realize that Amberlyn was standing beside me, standing statue-like and glassy-eyed, except for a violent trembling that came in occasional spasms.

“It was going to hit me,” she finally managed to explain, after many stops and starts. “He pushed me out of the way.” Then she burst into hysterical sobbing that didn’t stop until I pushed her over to an EMT who seemed more than happy to take charge of her. I didn’t want to look at her anymore. Maybe later I would regret it, but for now, I cared about no one except Logan.

No one.

“Would you really have taken him from me?” I asked Ethan wearily at last.

“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.”