The Deception Dance (29 page)

They do, all of the men and the one woman pull up their sleeves and
show their un-marked wrists.

Whether it’s the smell or something much more fundamental a
couple of the pairs of eyes widen as they gaze at me, many of the
mouths pucker, a few of the bodies shift back. It’s almost as
if they’ve never seen anyone be raised from the dead before.
Boo
.

Madeline must pick-up on the general feeling of repulsion because the
moment she lowers her sword she bellows, “Don’t you have
jobs to be doin’ now?”

The objecting man and one woman rush forward; they start prodding me
still in Nicholas’s arms. A thermometer goes into my mouth, a
stethoscope onto my chest, something I don’t know the name of
goes in my ear. I can only assume that both these people are doctors.

“
She’s hypothermic
,” the woman doctor says
as she peers at my thermometer. “Get her in the bath, quick.”

“No,” this is from a nasally familiar voice, Tobias. “We
need to film...”

“You’re joking, right?” Nicholas says, “If we
film her now, looking like this, what do you think his reaction is
going to be. She looks half-dead and she can’t even talk.”

For some reason his words sting, or maybe just
the way he said them.

Nicholas continues, “The runners can’t even leave until
sunrise. Let her bathe and recover, then we'll film.”

****

The bath's warm water feels like the right place for my re-birth,
rather than being surrounded by demons in a rough-hewn nest.

“Madeline, why d’it take so long?” The doctor says
to Madeline. They are on opposite sides of me, the doctor scrubbing
my back, Madeline my legs.

“Well, mam,” Madeline replies, tartly, “Even in the
sealed box she decomposed more than predicted. I had to use twice as
many sacrifices and it still took additional time to rebuild her
organs. Not as if anyone came at me with advice over this, is it? Not
as if raisin’ the dead is as easy as whistlin’ a tune?”

My gaze darts between Madeline and the spot she’s scrubbing. My
breath comes faster and faster.
Decompose? Sacrifices?

“Oh, you’re scaring the bejesus out of the poor girl,”
I feel the doctor’s arms tighten around my soapy shoulders.
"You tell this girl what happened to her."

“Mother...” Madeline drops her sponge.

“No, nothin’ about it."

Madeline stands with a groan, she looks exhausted, dirty and sopping
wet. This is the first time I can really take her in (in any detail),
my eyes only now focusing. She’s wearing a filthy grey dress
that looks to be more of an eighteenth-century puritan garb than a
witch’s gown. She has deep dark circles around her eyes and
dirt everywhere the water didn’t splash.

Madeline takes a seat behind me and speaks inches from my ear, “We
took you to the hill...”

“Earlier. Start from the beginnin’, before she died.”

“Mother,” her voice lacks its earlier exasperation, now
just sounding exhausted. She groans, “Ah...well, I was on my
way passin’ through Hognas when Nicklaus called to tell me what
you were doin’ and where. He had told Mrs. Trandle too, we got
there at the same time, and too late to stop ya’. Surprising,
too, because it only took me a coupla’ minutes. You swallowed a
charm I always kept on me. The charm took in your soul before you
died and kept it there...”

I flinch.

Madeline’s grip tightens around my arms. She says, scolding,
“Did you want something different? Maybe you should’ve
thought twice about killin’ yourself.” She makes an
exasperated sound. “So I was sayin’, you died and your
soul was still inside lodged in your throat. And as we promised, we
told everyone you were dead, and that was the end of that. I had to
fight Nicklaus every step of the way but I had you sealed in a box
and kept from being embalmed, buried, burned or any other outcome.

“We had to move you sudden-like and ended up bringin’ you
here to my house in Ireland. Yesterday mornin’, I got the call
that Stephen saw your sister and father safe in America and we
started bringin’ you back at sunset.

“There’s no nice way of puttin’ it, so I’ll
not try, your body decayed, we weren’t even sure you’d
come back at all. To do somethin’ like what we did you need a
whole lot of energy; and, to make energy you need to sacrifice
something living.” Her voice fills with emotion at this.
“Living things have energy, and when they die you can pull
their energy with spells.”

This is when I start hyperventilating again.

“Tell her what you sacrificed, now,” this from Madeline’s
mother who just finished cleaning my feet.

“Six trees.”

I release a long breath.

She shakes me. “Don’t you be sighing now. Don’t you
be relieved that old, beautiful, living beings had to die to bring
back the sorry life you threw away.” She’s crying, I can
tell.

My body is limp as she shakes me.

“Stop that now!” Her mother scolds, “Get a hold of
yourself, Madeline Emily Ruuth!”

This takes a few minutes, she sobs but does not let go of me. When
her weeping subsides she sniffles a bit while continuing, “I
used the energy, I killed for, to reverse your decay. You recomposed
just as you decomposed, from the inside out. It took several hours
before your body was functional enough to digest the charm and
release your soul. By that time, the demons had found us...and then
they killed my entire coven...”

“That was a choice they made, it was somethin’ they were
willin’ to die for; so hold your crying ‘till we fail and
they die for nothin’.” The doctor holds a hand to my
forehead. “She’s warm enough now. We should probably get
her to the filmin’ before that man combusts into a million
pieces.”

They dress me in light blue; an airy floor length cotton dress that I
assume is supposed to make me look more alive.

Nicholas carries me to a stiff, tall-backed chair with two hand-rests
pulled up to a small folding table. The chair forces me to sit
straight and tall. Madeline's mother places an enormous cup of water
on the table beside a stack of papers and a sharpie. It takes a few
strenuous attempts and a little sloshing to get the straw between my
lips. Sucking is another challenge, one that makes my cheeks hurt,
but it’s worth it. Ahhhh ...Water. It’s sweeter than
anything I’ve ever tasted. A little dribbles down my chin, but
I don’t care.

Madeline strides up as Nicholas pushes my chair even closer to the
table. She picks up the sharpie and snatches my hand. Her grip is too
strong to resist, and I don’t even try. She marks six lines
across my palm before snatching up my other hand and marking five
lines from pinky to thumb. “Six trees and five women died for
you today, and don’t you ever forget it.” With that, she
marches out of the room calling, “I’ll be restin’
up now,” over her shoulder.

I stare at the marks. Marked again, but this time not with love or
possession, or whatever the mark on my neck is, these marks are of
death. She wanted me to have their blood on my hands, or I guess, sap
in the tree’s case.

“Raven, say ‘I’m Alive’ now into the camera,”
It’s Tobias, where did he come from? He’s talking to me
with slow annunciation, as if I’m dim-witted. He’s pacing
behind a camera and tripod that I didn’t notice either.

“Ieh...” Well, no wonder he’s talking to me that
way; I sound like I’m too inebriated to talk. “Aliaeeeeee....”

I can hear Nicholas pacing behind me now, also.

I lean forward to sip through the straw and wet my mouth. When I’m
no longer parched, I try again, “Ah aala...” Oh, that one
sounded even worse. “I alah.”

Tobias looks as if he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown;
his pacing has turned into stomping and his already red nose is
running. He makes huffing sounds as he listens to my pitiful
attempts. “This is just terrible, awful. I thought that witch
was going to bring her back to life. Not bring back some half-witted
shell of a person. How permanent do you think this brain damage is?"

I momentarily stunned out of my, ‘I’m alive,’
endeavor.

I swing my head to look at Nicholas. He stares at me, he has to see
the intelligence in my eyes; but, he says nothing.

"This
thing
is pitiful; do you really think it'll
convince that demon to stop?"

I can hear Nicholas stop pacing and I'm sure he'll defend me, but
what he says when he responds is, “Two days ago we had no
solution, you have to admit that
this
is an improvement.”

Ouch
. I didn't think I could possibly hurt anymore today; I
was wrong. Now that I think of it, Nicholas hasn’t said one
word to me. Not a ‘hey’ or ‘nice to see you alive
again’.

“Hardly...” Tobias throws up his hands.

“Iah aliah.” I don’t think I’m helping my
case, because the men seem to just feed more tension into the already
crackling air.

Tobias turns, pointing into my face. “Use the pen,”
This
is not a request
should finish that statement. Tobias glares and
points down at the layers of paper on the desk.

I should throw the sharpie at his face and spit into Nicholas’s,
but instead I do exactly as Tobias’ orders. My hands shake even
more than they did a moment ago. On the paper I manage a line that
looks more like an ‘S’ and takes up half the page.

Tobias rips the paper out from under my pen. I slowly look around at
Nicholas, but this time he won’t meet my gaze. With as little
movement as possible I search for the doctor, Madeline’s
mother, who might still be here. She’s not.

Tobias slaps the table and in his nasally snotty voice demands, “Pay
attention.”

I narrow my eyes and fix him with a glare. Channeling all my energy
and rage, I manage to carve the word, “snot
”
into
the paper, though the ‘t’ runs a little off.

He takes a second to read the messily scrawled word, “Sn-snot?”
He says the word as if it’s in a different language, and then
flicks his gaze between my face and the paper. I know he catches my
meaning when his hand shoots up to his face and he conscientiously
wipes his snot with a handkerchief from his lapel pocket.

I grin up at him, half-witted shell of a person am I?

He lowers his arm with a jerk and spins away from me. Tobias crosses
the room to a laptop, which contrasts with this setting almost as
much as the guards outside. He stiffly drops the computer on the
stack of papers in front of me and taps the space key.

The monitor fills with a short-haired brunette in a tan suit in front
of an opaque white screen. She starts with, “Thank you,
Michael.” She has an English accent. “What was earlier
this month referred to as the
Carrion Bird flu
is now by some
experts called: a pandemic, and by some religious extremists: a
plague; as the death toll rises from thousands to hundreds of
thousands in a matter of weeks. The current death toll is,
unfortunately, unknown, as the world has lost contact with those
inside the quarantine zone. The last contact we had was, to say the
least, disturbing.”

It takes me a second to realize that the street the news broadcast
flashes to is a street I know, a street I walked down in Copenhagen,
but it’s nothing like what I remember. Whoever is holding the
camera is running and the shot is nauseatingly shaky. But everywhere
the Camera points is destruction, and fire, and bodies; so many
bodies, living bodies raging, running, destroying, and dead bodies
trampled beneath them. It’s not a flu they’re talking
about it’s Hell, it’s Hell in the streets of Denmark.

A female voice continues over the shot, “...The spread of
Carrion Bird flu
or the disease itself has yet to be proven as
the cause for the violent riots spanning across Denmark, Sweden, and
now threatening to spread into Finland. But could this really be a
deadly coincidence?”

The screen returns to the brunette who looks so clean compared with
the carnage that had just burned into my retinas.

She continues “... infectious-disease specialist, Dr. Fredrick
Matron, does not think so.” The shot pans out to include a thin
elderly man who looks as if he doesn’t like the smell of the
studio. The female anchor smiles not-too-broadly at the doctor, “Dr.
Matron, you have a theory that the
unkindness’s
, or
groups of ravens’, deadly attacks starting nearly a month ago
in quarantine area, the infectious spread of disease and the violent
behavior that followed, can all be linked?”

“Well...” He has a thick accent (German, maybe), “It’s
hard to consider that they could not be linked. Until a month ago,
the idea that any raven’s beak could even penetrate a human’s
living flesh was limited to unconfirmed reports and horror movies,
now...”

Tobias leans over me; he has a sour day-old cologne scent that makes
my stomach turn-over. He fast-forward through Dr. Matron’s
rather lengthy interview.

When the broadcast starts again, the doctor is mid-sentence, “...
it’s not. So, my colleagues and I have come to the conclusion
that no matter the species infected, violent behavior is a symptom of
this disease.”

“Thank you, Dr. Matron. With more on the communication barrier
with quarantine is special reporter Paul Brawler at the
Germany/Demark border.”

“Thank you, Sarah,” a tall man standing in front of what
looks like a maximum-security-prison-gate in the middle of a freeway
says into a wireless microphone. “I’m standing here at
the border to Denmark. These defenses are not the only factor that
keeps our communication with those within the quarantine zone
impossible; satellite photos taken last night revealed that after
seven days, the power has not yet been restored. The black-out spans
all the way from Copenhagen to Stockholm effecting roughly four
million homes and businesses. Cell phone calls received from within
the quarantine area have decreased daily as this power shutdown
persists. In Hamburg families and people with loved ones...”