Coven of Mercy (3 page)

I wasn’t going to look at Mrs Curtis’ results, as I was still unable to accept what I’d seen. But on some level, I needed to prove to myself that I’d been right, that Micah had been wrong, just in case I ever saw him again and could tell him so. I needed data to argue my point of view.

I knew this was ridiculous – that I needed to muster my resources to argue with a vampire – but couldn’t put it out of my thoughts. I argued with myself until close to midnight.

Then I gave it up. I got a coffee from the vending machine, sat down at my desk and clicked through on the file. I stared at the numbers for so long that my coffee got cold.

I checked them four times. I assumed initially that they had to be wrong, but they were completely consistent. The cancer had efficiently progressed while we’d thought we were killing every last cell.

Against all expectation, it had turned even more virulent and metastasized. It had used the highways and byways of her lymphatic system to colonize every corner of her territory. Despite the treatment regimen. Mrs Curtis had been so much more ill than she had appeared to be. The counts were staggering and impressive.

Cancer had already won. I had maybe slowed its progress, but I hadn’t come close to stopping it.

I remembered how Mrs Curtis had cheerfully suffered through her more recent bout of treatment, enduring more no matter how violent her reactions were. I had been so sure that short-term pain would lead to long-term gain. I had never underestimated the disease so much.

I felt a bit sick that she’d gone through that for nothing.

Just like my mother.

Yes, my mother’s treatment had been just as futile. I’d found copies of the correspondence with her doctors in the house after my father’s death, when Rick and I were cleaning things out, still refusing to speak to each other. I had reviewed them with the eyes of a trained oncologist, seeing then the inevitability of her counts. She was diagnosed too late for the treatment protocols available at the time to turn the tide.

I had known at twelve that she would die, even without that training, and I had been right. Later, I saw that there was mercy in the speed of the disease’s progression. Three weeks of knowing, two weeks of suffering, then the battle had been won.

It wasn’t always that kind.

I stared at Mrs Curtis’ charts.

Coven of mercy.
I recalled Micah’s words and had to consider them. If Mrs Curtis hadn’t died two days before, would these two days of treatment have been merciful? No, of course not. Chemotherapy and radiation are seldom easy, and we would have had to hit her harder this time. I had to face the truth.

With counts like this, she would have been gone in a week or two anyway, barring a miracle.

I felt a presence at my side and knew who it was. It was the warmth, the watchfulness, the scent of leather that gave Micah away.

“You knew,” I said, without looking.

“I knew,” he agreed.

I spun in my chair to face him, surprised at his size and intensity. He was all male – brooding thoughtful male – and he filled the bit of spare space in my crowded small office. “How?”

He frowned and folded his arms across his chest, scanning the floor as he sought the words. I liked that he didn’t dismiss my question, that he didn’t rush into explanations.

I felt a strange sense of union with him and was struck by the fact that it was easier to talk to him than any other person I’d known.

“We can smell it.”

“Cancer?”

“Death.” His gaze collided with mine, his eyes filled with enigmatic shadows. “You have to understand that it’s our biological need to feed on blood. Some of us choose to use that need for compassionate ends. Some of us choose to feed strategically.”

“Why?”

His smile was fleeting and his eyes gleamed as he watched me. “Some of us have an inexplicable fondness for humanity.” He shrugged. “Or maybe we just remember the pain of being mortal.”

“You’re immortal, then?”

He nodded.

“But every day, you have to kill somebody?”

He shook his head. “The hunger comes with some regularity, but not daily. Exertion affects the appetite, as does quality and quantity consumed.”

It made sense to me, in biological terms. I could understand him as a different species better than as a fable. I looked at my computer screen again, fighting the sense that I could fall into his eyes and lose myself for ever.

I looked up. “‘We’? You said ‘we’. How many of you are there?”

“The coven has twelve members right now . . . ”

“Shouldn’t there be thirteen?” I joked but he didn’t smile.

“Yes,” he agreed, then continued with his original point. “We are committed to mercy, to using our power to improve the lives of individual humans.”

“To killing.”

“Sometimes it is kinder to die. Sometimes suffering achieves nothing but pain.”

That was a sentiment too close to my own recent thoughts. My tone was more sarcastic than he deserved. “So, you’re all stalking cancer wards and palliative care units?”

He didn’t respond to my tone, which only made me feel rude.

“We all have our tendencies and our passions. Beatrice is sensitive to victims of abuse, perhaps because of her own history. She knows some scars cannot be healed. Adrian hears the anguish of broken children, and Lucinda shares her kiss with the old and infirm. Ignatius can be found in war zones, Petronella in areas struck by famine, Augustine near outbreaks of plague.”

“And you?”

That sad knowing smile curved his lips. “I have my own quest.” His words were soft and he seemed to have turned inwards, away from me. I felt the loss of his attention and the weight of his grief and had to say something.

To my surprise, I didn’t want him to leave. “Tell me about your child,” I invited. His gaze locked with mine, a familiar sorrow lighting its shadows, then he swallowed. “You said you had a child. Tell me.”

Micah shook his head and stood, facing the window and the night. I was struck that he seemed overcome with emotion. I had thought that he would be a monster, a cold and calculating predator, but his anguish was raw.

And I was astonished by my own wave of compassion for him. I stood, but couldn’t bring myself to go to him, to touch him.

“Boy or girl?” I asked quietly, not expecting him to answer. He sighed – a shudder that rolled right through him – and glanced over his shoulder at me.

That gaze, so filled with torment, caught at my heart. I couldn’t look away.

“Elsebietta,” he murmured, reverence and love resonant in every syllable. He swallowed. “Her mother died in labour and they said she would be a sad child.” He fell silent for a moment, and his voice was thick when he continued. “But she was as radiant as sunlight.” He raised a hand, closing it on nothing. “She was my joy. The centre of my world.”

I had to ask. “Did you kill her?”

The quick shake of his head was no lie. “It was before, before the coven.” He swallowed. “I had to watch her die, and then there was no point in living any more.”

“But you’re alive now.”

“The coven came to me and I found their proposition appealing.”

“Why?”

“Elsebietta had consumption. There was no real treatment and no cure. She wasted to nothing before my eyes.” He inhaled sharply, then eyed me. I couldn’t avert my gaze. I knew that consumption was an historic diagnosis that contemporary researchers believed meant cancer. “My daughter needed my help and I had nothing to give her.”

I swallowed then, knowing that sense of helplessness all too well. We had been to the same place, Micah and I.

“Only her hair held its colour.” He smiled, lost in recollection. “It was so beautiful, like spun gold.”

I knew then that his wife and daughter had been blonde, like me. My hair has always been wavy and unruly, so I keep it tightly controlled, captured beneath dozens of pins and clips. I saw the yearning in Micah’s eyes, though, and I wanted to console him, this haunted man who mourned his only child.

It was such a small thing to give. Even if I was clumsy with such gestures.

I unpinned my hair and shook it out. It fell just past my shoulders, and seemed to writhe with pleasure to be free for once. I shoved the pins in the pocket of my lab coat and looked up to find his dark gaze fixed upon me.

Filled with admiration.

In an instant Micah was beside me, although I never saw him move. He lifted a hand and gently captured one tendril between finger and thumb. That secretive smile touched his lips again.

“So soft,” he whispered, then bent his head and kissed that lock of my hair. When he glanced up, those dark eyes were near mine, that mouth so close that I could almost feel it on my own lips. I caught my breath, felt my eyes widen, and saw that sparkle light his eyes. There was a moment in which we stared at each other, a moment in which time stood still, a moment in which there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

Then he kissed me.

I could have stepped back. I could have ensured that he never touched me. But one kiss, one kiss was nothing. A taste. A tease. A temptation.

And it had been so long since I’d kissed anyone.

I let him kiss me, and he seemed to understand that I wouldn’t give much, not without being persuaded to do so. The first touch of his lips was as light as the brush of a butterfly’s wings. Ethereal. Almost illusory. I made some small involuntary sound – one of disappointment – and he bent close again, his kiss soft upon my mouth.

Persuasive.

Tender.

I thought of Micah helpless to save his child. I thought of the wife he had lost. I recalled my own mourning of my mother. I remembered how our small family had dissolved and scattered in her absence, and guessed that he had experienced a similar loss. The same sense of having no direction. Of being lost. Adrift.

Alone.

The isolation must have been worse for Micah. I had had my father, barricaded as he had been in his own grief. And my brother, Rick, now on the other side of the world and estranged. We had had the comfort of each other’s physical presence, at least.

But Micah . . . Micah had been all alone.

I kissed him back. There was solace in the common ground of sorrow, purpose in consoling another. Our kiss was sweet and gentle, but then it changed. Then it became more sensual, more rooted in desire than in consolation, more demanding.

More exciting.

I opened my mouth and gripped his shoulders, leaning against him as he caught me close. He knew when to entreat and when to wait, how to drive me crazy as if we’d been lovers for years. I wanted more. I wanted it immediately, and I knew he tasted that in my kiss.

It was unlike any kiss I’d ever had, making all others look like pale shadows of this perfection. It was the kiss I had always wanted and I realized, as he let his tongue tempt mine, that I had been looking for just this kiss.

Then I felt the brush of Micah’s sharp tooth against my lower lip. There could be no stronger reminder of the predator he was.

And I heard music.

I broke the kiss and backed away from him in fear.

He let me go, watching as intently as I’d come to expect. “Now you look alive,” he murmured with satisfaction.

I pivoted to check my reflection, and was shocked at my own appearance. My hair was loose and wild as it had never been, my eyes sparkling, my lips swollen. I looked like a woman who had been thoroughly kissed, and as different from my usual prim self as could be.

I would have blamed Micah for that, but when I turned back, he was gone.

As surely as if he had never been. My hands were shaking as I scooped up the scattered pins from my hair, and I pulled my hair up so tightly that it made me wince.

I could still taste that kiss, though.

I knew I would relive it in my dreams.

We aren’t supposed to become involved.

We learned that in med school. Oncologists should be professional and detached, in order to make the best logical decision for treatment. We are the rudders, the realists, the rational ones. It’s the only way to balance the emotions we encounter, the ones that cancer rouses.

It’s the only way to fight the battle over the long term. I may have been called Icicle Taylor, but I haven’t been the only one with my moat filled and my portcullis dropped. I have waded through buckets of emotional reactions every day since graduation, but always kept my eyes fixed on the prize.

Maybe it’s not an accident that I chose to stay in research, to be a specialist called in for tough cases, but never the primary contact.

But, two years before this particular March, a little boy named Jason had reached in and grabbed my heart.

He had been all of five years old when he came to the ward with leukaemia, the adored elder child of a devoted couple. They were a picture-perfect husband and wife, trim and attractive, affluent and kind, professionals. They were affectionate with each other and with their adorable son and daughter. They were the kind of people who get what they want, and what they wanted was their son healthy again.

They would do whatever it took.

Jason was solemn, with a tangle of dark hair and eyes that seemed too big for his face. He had beautiful dark lashes and a surprising ability to understand what was really going on. His leukaemia was aggressive and I was testing a new drug. Their oncologist, pushed by Jason’s parents to do more, called me in.

I was not used to being noticed in these situations. I’d explain the drug or the protocol, the risks and advantages, the unknowns, then step back and let the patient’s oncologist handle the rest. I witnessed but didn’t really participate.

Jason was the first to challenge that. We were at the end of our meeting, the oncologist summing up the strategy for Jason’s parents, when this boy reached out and grabbed my hand. I jumped. I had thought they had all forgotten my presence.

“Will it hurt, Dr Taylor?” he demanded, his eyes wide.

I was so surprised that I couldn’t lie to him. “Yes,” I said. “But if you can do this, you will get better.”

His mother caught her breath sharply. His father watched in horror. The oncologist closed his eyes. The tension in the room was palpable.