Poe (40 page)

There are no words.

There are no words.

No words.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: LIFE SUPPORT

F
rantically I try to staunch the flow of blood from the gaping wound on Lisa’s neck, but there’s too much, too much—it seeps through my fingers, hot and sticky, drips down my wrist onto the snow, turning it a deep, profane red.

“
Please
,” I whisper. “Oh please don’t. Don’t go, Lisa.
Don’t go
.”

I press my trembling hands against her neck while her skin turns pale—
This is all my fault; oh God, this is all my fault
. Her eyes are half-closed and glassy; they are beyond me, beyond this world, this moment. She warned me, oh God she
told
me not to go messing around with Daniel’s numbers, but did I listen? She said she knew how it would end, and now it’s too late.

“Nachiel,
do
something.”

Nachiel places a weighty hand on my shoulder, his broken arm miraculously healed.

“You can save her,” I protest, sweat beading my forehead. “I’ve seen you—”

“It doesn’t work that way. A spirit can only heal the body it possesses.”

A shudder runs through me. “Christ, I don’t know what to do,” I say, my voice breaking. “It’s all my fault. I’ve killed her, the one good thing—”

“
Dimitri
,” says Poe with a fierce intensity. “Her life force is still there. Faint, but there. It will not be for long.”

I glance up and see that Poe’s eyes have changed; they’re lighter now, a pale wintry blue. And I notice the morning is coming. Warm slices of sunlight reach through the trees, glint against the broken glass, and a small flicker of hope lights in my chest. “Cell phone,” I say quickly. “There’s a cell phone in my jacket. We can call an ambulance.”

Nachiel looks down. “It won’t get here in time.”

Lisa’s warm blood flows through my fingers, and she’s lost so much already.
Why
didn’t my father tell me more about this goddamn inheritance? But then he did. The inscription in the watch: “Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

Which gives me an idea. How can I make time disappear? Maybe it’s not the most brilliant idea, but it will have to do.

“She’s going,” whispers Poe.

No, she’s not. The rest I’ll have to work out later.

To say Nachiel’s pissed is an understatement. For the first time I’m actually glad to be immortal, because if I wasn’t, I think he might actually go over to the dark side and kill me. Cradling Lisa in his arms with a strength I envy, he charges through the woods—I have to jog to keep up. Not easy, since my feet are frozen and my teeth are chattering. I really need to get a decent winter jacket one of these days.

“Uh, where are we going?” I venture to ask.

“Nate had medical supplies in his pack,” hisses Nachiel through his teeth.

But I really don’t care if he’s pissed, because Lisa, while still pale and unconscious, is now
breathing
, and with each soft breath I’m pushed a few more steps past punch-drunk into the giddy arms of hope. It only took a few seconds for the gash in her neck to heal, and

although her shirt is covered with blood, her face is peaceful, almost like she’s sleeping.

I trip over a rock, nearly slamming hard into a tree face first, but Nachiel doesn’t miss a step. He takes the next hill with long steps and momentarily disappears from view.

“Hey, Nachiel, wait up!”

I’ve got a migraine so fierce that I might need to stop sometime soon to vomit, but I’m so euphoric I don’t care about that either. Lisa is alive. Lisa is breathing. Lisa is—

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” mutters Nachiel as I catch up to him.

“I’ve saved Lisa’s life?”

Nachiel glares at me.

“Okay, yes, I understand that we have a small technical difficulty with Poe, but Lisa’s breathing, okay? Her heart’s beating. You told me yourself a body possessed by an immortal spirit can’t die. So this is like life support. Only—creepier.”

Nachiel stomps down through a small gulch. “That’s a pretty big technical difficulty. Think Poe’s going to give up a nice human body after all those years in hell so you and your girlfriend can go live happily ever after? Sound like something she’d do? But I guess you know her
so
well, after what? Talking to her for five minutes? Or was it ten?”

“I am an
excellent
judge of character,” I reply hotly.

“You shot me in the chest.”

“I’m
almost
an excellent judge of character. But I apologized. Plus we can exorcise her if we have to.”

“We don’t have the missing
Fiend
pages,” says Nachiel tersely. “And even if we did, you remember what happened to the first Dmitri?”

Oh right, those minor details.

“If I remember correctly,” I reply, “my great-grandfather or whoever said
usually
the body dies when a bad spirit vacates someone we love. Usually. Usually isn’t always.”

“Usually is usually. As in almost all the time.”

“Okay, give me the percentage,” I say, panting as I try to keep up.

“Ninety percent. Ninety percent of the time people die.”

My heart does skip a beat at that news. “But that’s still a ten percent chance of surviving. Ten percent is better than zero percent. What was I supposed to do, just let her bleed to death? No way. Not gonna happen. Besides, I’ve got a good feeling about this, and—”

“For all you know, as soon as she regains consciousness Poe will stab herself in the neck and save Sorath the trip.”

“She’s not
like
that anymore.”

Nachiel snorts derisively. “Changed her colors that fast after nearly a hundred years on the dark side? I don’t think so.”

“Plus she has to do what I tell her to. Right?”

“What you have is the spirit of a psychotic murdering fool who despises every fiber of your being in complete control of your girlfriend’s body.”

“Well when you put it that way… So how
do
we get her out of Lisa’s body?”

“By any means necessary.” Nachiel plunges ahead of me into the thick brush, disappearing again.

“Well everything happened so fast,” I say, pushing my way past a low-hanging branch, “I didn’t exactly have time to think things all the way through. Easy enough for you to criticize
now
—”

But I’m stopped short at the sight of a hunter who is standing four feet in front of me, completely frozen, his mouth hanging open in shock. He wears one of those stupid L.L. Bean plaid flannel caps that cover your ears, a puffy bright orange coat that any deer with a lick of sense would steer clear of, and a large, well-oiled rifle is slung over his shoulder. I look down and realize the degree to which I’m covered with Lisa’s blood.

And great, there’s no sign of Nachiel—he’s vanished entirely, leaving Lisa curled up neatly on the snow. And to someone who didn’t
just see her turning blue a few moments ago, she probably looks like a fresh corpse.

The man nervously reaches for the tip of his rifle.

“Hey,” I say, holding up my hands and taking a step forward, which makes him take two back. “We—I mean
I
—just found her. She’s alive but badly hurt. But we need to get an ambulance. Fast.”

The man twitches his finger toward his gun, keeping both eyes firmly on me. “Were you talking to someone?”

“No, just a bad habit. I talk to myself when I’m freaked out.”

He stares at me closely, assessing.

“
Please
,” I say with the ache of truth in my voice. “She’s the love of my life. I just want to get her to the hospital. I just want to get her help.”

Slowly the man’s hand drifts down from the gun to his right front pocket. He pulls out a cell phone, but he keeps me dead center in his sight. He presses a few buttons, slowly raises it to his ear.

“There’s a girl here, seriously injured. We need an ambulance…”

But I don’t hear the rest of what he says, because I’ve dropped to my knees, utterly spent. I press my forehead to the cold ground, and when I sit up on my heels I reach out for Lisa’s hand, the faint pulse in her wrist an echo of my own beating heart.

After I’ve given my statement to the police, a strange amalgam of truth and lies needed to cover what they’d never believe—“Yes, I went to Aspinwall to see if Lisa was there”; “No, I didn’t see anything suspicious, I just found her lying in the snow”; “Yes, she was unconscious, and it looked like she’d been bleeding from her nose”—I’m finally allowed to visit, or at least look through the glass of (with police supervision), the hospital room where Lisa is hooked up to a series of machines I’m familiar with. After a blood transfusion, her lips have gone from deathly white back to their normal rosy pink, and there’s even a faint glow in her cheeks. The doctors have given her a serious
dose of sedative drugs—something I’m grateful for, because who knows what Poe would say or do if she was conscious.

But my 10 percent chance of getting Lisa back feels smaller with every passing minute. I press my finger to the glass and wish I could go sit beside her, but they’re not letting anyone but family in.

The police pointedly asked me for my bloody clothes, which I was more than happy to get rid of anyway, and I was finally given a blue set of surgical scrubs after I flat out refused the offer of another ducky hospital gown. I’m sure they’re wondering how on earth anyone could lose that much blood from just a nosebleed, but given the lack of any visible injury, there is no other explanation yet. They’ve got a series of MRIs and brain scans planned, and there’s serious talk among the doctors about a tumor or possible hemorrhage, which is good because it will give them something to do instead of look at me oddly, like I’m surrounded by an invisible haze of bad juju.

Suddenly I’m almost knocked over by what feels like a small bear gripping my legs. I look down into the beaming face of Amelia and see she’s actually wearing loosely tied sneakers. One red, one blue.

“Are you a doctor now too?”

“Yes,” I say seriously. “My specialty is shoe removal. It’s a very complex operation. Many people suffer greatly when their feet are confined by shoes.”

Amelia holds up one foot hopefully.

“Oh no you don’t,” says a warm voice behind me. I turn to see Elizabeth, looking relieved but also haggard. “It took me two hours getting her into them.” She leans forward and gives me a dry kiss on the cheek. “You look like shit, by the way. You should get some sleep.”

“Nana, you said the S-word. Do
you
have a record deal?” asks Amelia slyly, obviously happy to have caught an authority figure breaking a rule.

“Not today, love,” replies Elizabeth in a distracted tone. She gazes into the hospital room, a few years of sleepless nights recorded in her distant stare. Along with Lisa, there are two others hooked
up to machines: an elderly woman who was just wheeled in from Crosslands making her next stop in the Quadrant of Death; and a blond teenage girl who, I understand from overheard snippets of conversation between nurses, is a runaway in a vegetative coma after a drug overdose.

“You can go in,” I say. “I’m just stuck in the nonfamily zone. Give her hand a squeeze for me.”

Elizabeth swallows hard and looks at me closely. “You didn’t see him? Daniel?”

There’s no passing a lie by this woman—she should have been a detective. I try for a moderated truth. “I thought I did. For a second.” And I do think I got a glimpse of the real Daniel in that brief moment before Lisa was able to break free.

Elizabeth nods weakly. And I realize that while one child is safe now, the empty loss of the other still aches fiercely. The manhunt for Daniel is on now. Rumors of the video were leaked to the press, so it’s headline news across the nation.

“Go on,” I say softly.

“Can you watch Amelia?”

“I want to go in too!”

Elizabeth quickly hugs Amelia’s tiny body tightly; tears bead her eyes, as if she can somehow hug Daniel through her.

“C’mon, Amelia,” I say, grasping Amelia’s small hand in mine. “This floor’s no fun, and it smells like pee. Let’s grab a gurney and find an empty hall to race it in.”