A Dark and Stormy Knight Page 6

  Not from this world.

  I lick my lips again, feeling sick inside.

  She’s mentally ill.

  Pain washes over me; I hurt so much for her…because this woman’s last moments alive are going to be spent trying to give me a message for a queen from another world who doesn’t exist. She’s so confused. She thinks she’s from another world—and she’s in so much pain…

  I don’t know what to do. I feel so terrible that she's suffering, so confused, unaware of what’s really going on, pain lancing through her. This is the worst way to die, and I don’t know how to make things easier for her, more soothing…except to play along. That’s what I did with my grandmother before she died. She had dementia, didn’t know who I was, thought I was her sister who was long gone from this world. But I played along when I went to visit her. It made her so happy to talk to her “sister” that I couldn’t deny her that simple joy.

  And it’s the least I can do for this woman now, this woman in immeasurable pain, whose blood is dripping on the floor, who I promised to help…and who isn’t getting the help she needs.

  “Sure. Sure, I can get a message to her,” I tell the woman in the most pacifying tone I can conjure. I lean forward, holding the woman’s gaze. “What do you want me to tell her?”

  She watches me closely, her forehead creased, still staring out of fevered eyes…but her brow is raised. For a long moment, we look at one another, and then she shakes her head slowly.

  “Do not patronize me,” she murmurs, her voice low as she growls out the words. “You do not believe me.”

  I stare at her, blinking. “Believe…what?” I hazard.

  “You do not believe that I am from another world,” she tells me bitterly.

  I clear my throat, sighing for a long moment as I gaze down at my ballet flats…and her big black leather boots.

  “I believe you,” I tell her then, mustering up the strength to lie. Of course I don’t believe her. She’s delusional, but she’s also dying, and she deserves respect, kindness, a listening ear…

  But the woman leans forward now, and she’s gripping my upper arm with her strong hand, her leather-gloved fingers pressing into my skin. “I am from Agrotera,” she tells me, her voice heated now, her other hand clenched hard against her wound, but the blood is pumping faster; it’s cascading over her hand. “I am the vice queen of Arktos City. I serve Queen Calla of Arktos.”

  But as soon as she finishes this litany, the light leaves her eyes, and she slumps back in the chair, her face anguished. “You must think me a madwoman, muttering rantings of no truth.”

  My heart is aching. At this point, I'm moments away from running into the hallway, grabbing a doctor by the collar of his lab coat, and hauling him out here to help this woman. “I’m really sorry,” I whisper softly, but the woman grips my arm harder, so hard that I wince as she pulls herself forward again, locking her eyes on mine.

  This close, her eyes are breathtakingly clear, like blue crystal.

  “What,” she growls softly to me, searching my gaze, “is your name?”

  “Mara.” I place my hand over her hand. “What’s yours?”

  “Charaxus,” she tells me, and when she speaks her name, her voice takes on a stronger accent. “If,” she says then, her face tight with pain and concentration, her voice low, “there is no healer coming, I will die; I cannot heal myself yet. I’m too weak.” Her jaw clenches as she looks at me. “But…but I think I could heal myself…if you gave me some of your energy for the spell.”

  “Um…” I have no idea what that means, and I have no idea how to respond to her.

  “Knights should never ask for something for themselves. It is our code. We help others; we do not ask them to help us,” she says, shaking her head. “But…now is a desperate time. I must return to Queen Calla. She needs me.”

  “What…what do you need?” I ask her, feeling my throat tighten. I glance back up at the nurse’s desk, but there’s no one behind it now. Where the hell is the doctor? This woman needs help, and she needs help immediately. The blood is pouring through her fingers; it’s excruciating to watch someone bleed to death in front of you. My heart is tight in my chest as I look at her, as I gaze into her bright blue eyes…

  “What do you need?” I repeat when she closes her eyes, when she vacillates in her seat a little, shifting from side to side because she’s too weak to hold herself up.

  “I…I do not know. I have not done this before, taken energy from another,” she says, licking her lips. Her eyes are still closed, and her face is pained, as if she’s thinking very, very hard about a solution to a problem. But then her brow’s furrow smooths, and she opens her eyes, pinning her gaze to me. “Are you willing to try this, Mara?”

  The way she says my name… Her voice is low already, but when she speaks those two simple syllables, it sounds as if we're sharing a secret. I watch her, and suddenly my heart is beating a little faster—but not for the reasons you’d think. Yeah, I’m in an emergency room. Yeah, I just saved a woman from drowning…

  But there’s something I've never experienced before pulsing between us.

  “Yes,” I tell her, and then I clear my throat. “I’m…willing.” My voice cracks, and that makes me feel a little strange, but Charaxus is already nodding.

  “All right, then. Please stay still.”

  I sit there, feeling more helpless than I’ve ever felt in my life as a bleeding, dying woman grips my arm tightly and concentrates on something only she is aware of, or believes in. These could be the last moments of her life; I'll do anything within my power to alleviate her pain.

  You take care of everyone but yourself. Cecile’s words come back to me unbidden, and I close my eyes, shaking my head slightly as I hold the woman’s hand.

  She needs my help. And I’m going to give it to her.

  Time passes, and nothing happens. I can only imagine what she was hoping for, can only assume she believes she’s doing magic... Maybe she expected her wound to magically heal itself. I watch her carefully now, see concentration etched on her beautiful face, her brow breaking out into a glimmering sheen of sweat.

  Anxious, I glance back up at the nurse’s desk. Still, no one is there. No doctor is coming. The blood drips down onto the floor. People moan all around me in pain, terrible pain.

  This is one of the worst moments in my life.

  And, trust me, I’ve had a lot of bad moments.

  But I have to do whatever I can to make it better. So I sit, still and quiet, as the woman continues to concentrate…

  And then...

  This is impossible.

  Something…changes.

  At first, I think it’s my imagination. I’m exhausted, after all. Maybe exhaustion is just making me see things.

  Making me see light traveling over my skin.

  That’s the only way I can describe it. Beneath the florescent bulbs of the hospital, a flicker of white and blue and green starts to appear, like a mist, over my skin. It’s hazy, but then the colors solidify, spiral... I’m wearing a black skirt with a black tank top, my arms and lower legs uncovered, and the colors spiral over my limbs, about an inch above my skin, as if I’m a sun and a miniature galaxy is spinning around me. The colors are transparent, a light show dancing across my body.

  A few moments later, and the colors parade along the arm that Charaxus is holding.

  “What's happening?” I whisper, as the colors spiral faster and faster; they pulse over Charaxus, too, over her gloved hand, her arm, her body, as if she’s drawing the colors from me to her.

  Charaxus doesn’t reply, but the creases in her forehead deepen, a single trickle of sweat trailing over her face. Open-mouthed, I stare at the colors, mesmerized and disbelieving but unable to look away, unwilling to even blink.

  I do blink eventually; my eyes are watering from holding them open. And when I open my eyes again, the colors are still there, still moving over my body and hers—faster, faster…

  I lo
ok up, gaze around me, but no one is paying attention to us.

  Suddenly, there’s a bright flash of light. It’s like the flash of a camera, and I close my eyes against it instinctively. When I part my eyelids, the flash of light has grown brighter, brighter… I shield my eyes with my other arm, but all I can see right now are colored spots, blinding me.

  It takes a long moment before I can see again clearly. My breathing is shallow; Charaxus has released my arm. I blink away the spots, and then I’m looking at the woman in front of me, the woman who—a moment before—was slumped in the chair, her face so pallid that she almost looked dead, blood pouring over her leather shirt, dripping onto the floor below.

  I stare.

  She’s sitting up in the seat, her back poker-straight. Her long, black hair falls in waves down her back, shining in the overhead florescent lights. Her skin is still pale—I think she’s just naturally pale—but now there’s a rosy glow to her cheeks. Her eyes are no longer feverish but bright with energy, the blue of them so brilliant that I blink again, taken aback by their clarity.

  There is no more blood on her shirt, only a hole, the leather torn over her stomach…

  And there is no wound.

  I stare at her smooth stomach, and then I lift my gaze to take in her relaxed posture; she's calm, at ease, when a moment before she was making her final requests.

  I open my mouth. I shut my mouth.

  I…have no idea what to say.

  Charaxus looks to me, and she nods her head. She’s no longer panting with pain, her mouth a thin, hard line. Instead, she's breathing evenly, and her lips are softly parted. She leans forward in the chair now, toward me, lifting her chin.

  “Thank you for helping me, Mara,” she says, and then she’s standing smoothly. “How are you? Do you feel all right?”

  I stare up at her, shocked.

  I mean, I know I dragged her out of the river, but I've never seen her standing before: she’s really tall. Like, a whole head and shoulders above me, and I’m not short myself. She towers over me, and when I find myself tongue-tied, unable to reply to her question, her brow furrows, and she offers me a gloved hand, palm up and open.

  “Are you all right?” she repeats, her voice low, her bright blue gaze piercing me through. I notice so many things at once, like how her full lips are parted, how her metal-clad chest rises and falls with each breath, how her hand—once I take it—is firm and gentle as it closes around mine, the soft leather of her glove supple as she holds my hand.

  There’s a spell on this moment, I realize, as we touch for the first time since the magic. There’s something potent crackling where our hands come together…

  Something electric.

  But, as I watch her, as my own breathing starts to come faster, as I open my mouth to speak…that’s when the spell is broken.

  Because I hear the first scream.

  Chapter 4: A Surprising Development

  I stand, Charaxus assisting me to my feet as she casts a glance behind her. With her free hand, she's reaching over her shoulder, as if for a weapon, but her fingers grasp at air. There’s nothing there.

  The scream continues, echoing through the halls of the hospital, and it isn’t the sort of scream I'm used to hearing—like a kid’s scream when they’re in the middle of playing with their friends, or the short scream of someone who was just startled.

  No, this is the kind of bloodcurdling scream that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard before in real life. A terrible, bone-chilling sound that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere as it echoes off of the walls. Charaxus and I are both on guard as we try to figure out where that scream is coming from and, more importantly, why.

  Everyone else around us is standing, too, instinctively turning their heads this way and that…

  And that’s when I begin to realize that things have become really, really...well, strange.

  Because all around us, the people have leaped up from their seats—they’re standing, even though they were hurting or injured, awaiting medical attention in the emergency room. These were people who were bleeding, collapsed in the blue waiting room chairs bonelessly, and they’re on their feet now. Even the woman who had been holding a bunched-up piece of clothing tightly to her thigh, looking as if she wasn’t going to be standing without medical attention anytime soon, is standing by herself, that piece of clothing now crumpled on the floor at her feet. I can see her thigh through a hole in her jeans, and her copper skin is unblemished, smooth, no wound in sight.

  She’s fine.

  The man who was holding a towel over his eye? He’s standing there with his mouth gaping open, both brown eyes gazing around the room in shock, his hands hanging limply at his sides.

  His eye looks fine: he’s staring around at everyone else.

  And everyone else…looks fine, too.

  They're looking at their hands and their legs as if they're in some sort of daze. A man who had been cradling his hand, a red bandanna wrapped tightly around it, is unwinding that bandanna, taking in his whole, albeit grubby, hand. There appears to be nothing wrong with it. A woman who was seated closest to the emergency room doors wearing a silver formal dress, formerly doubled over in pain, is standing with a surprised smile on her face, patting her much-hairsprayed updo with her hands, looking perfectly well.

  That scream isn't coming from the waiting room, not from any of the people gathered here, looking around at one another in wonder. The scream is coming from somewhere deeper inside the hospital.

  I see that the nurse is behind the front desk again, and she's wearing a disgruntled expression as she peers around the corner, as if she’s waiting for someone to come clear things up, someone to explain what all this fuss is about…but that someone just isn’t coming.

  That’s when her phone starts to ring, the sound of it startling as the scream—at last—dies away.

  Hand over her heart, the nurse snatches up the phone from its cradle and asks the caller, testily, “What do you want?” The caller says something, and then the nurse behind the desk, the nurse who—I’d assumed—had seen and heard everything in her years at the hospital, blanches as white as a sheet.

  “That’s…not possible,” she whispers, a whisper I can hear in the near-silent room. Then, with a shaking hand, she sets the phone back down in its cradle.

  She looks around at all of us, and she stands still for a long moment before she bolts from the front desk, and then she’s shuffling quickly down the corridor, away from the waiting room, until she disappears from sight.

  The lady by the waiting room doors in the silver dress is now whispering something to herself, but then she lifts her face up at that moment, and she looks so happy, so joyful, that I’m stricken speechless as I stare at her.

  “I’m better,” the woman keeps saying over and over again, each word louder than the last. “It… I mean, it doesn’t hurt anymore!”

  “Me, too!” mutters the guy with the bandanna, holding up his hand in awe. “I cut my fingers with a hacksaw blade,” he’s saying in a thick, southern drawl, “and they were bleeding pretty badly—but I don’t even have cuts no more! They’re all gone!”

  People are starting to exclaim to one another, and Charaxus, towering over me, folds her arms, regarding the people in the waiting room with a soft, thoughtful frown. Overwhelmed, I fall back into my chair, and then Charaxus is crouching smoothly in front of me. She searches my face.

  “What did you do?” she asks me, arching a single brow. The words aren’t soft, aren’t kind; rather, they’re pretty sharp. I stare at her in shock.

  “Me? Do?” I repeat, and then the adrenaline finally catches up with me. “I didn’t do anything,” I reply quickly, and—if I’m being honest—my voice is a little sharp, too. “There were colors…and then…” I gesture to her stomach. “This is all really weird. I mean, what happened?” I ask her, point blank. “What just happened?”

  There’s another scream from a distant area of the hospital, a woman’s
scream, high-pitched and prolonged, and while the scream is still going on, a male doctor starts backing out of the swinging doors that are used to discharge patients. He looks just as pale as the nurse did earlier, and his mouth is sagging open, slack-jawed.

  “The people…in the morgue,” he whispers, and he’s turning around to stare wildly at all of us as he raises his hands. “They’re… I think this is the zombie apocalypse. Like, the actual fucking zombie apocalypse,” he whispers now, his eyes glazed, and he starts to move as quickly as he can toward the front doors.

  “Wait a second, doc,” says the guy with the bandanna, gripping the doctor as he tries to sprint past him. “Whadya mean? Zombies? You playin’ a cheap trick on us?” He laughs a little, though the laugh sounds uncertain to my ears.

  “Everyone in the morgue came back,” says the doctor, rolling his eyes so that the whites are showing. “They’re… I mean, they’re all alive. They came back from the dead. They slid out of the… I mean, they literally slid out of the drawers. They were dead, and then they just…” He laughs, bewildered. “They just weren’t. All of them,” he gulps. “Even the guy in the bus accident. The one who lost his head. It’s back on him.”

  Charaxus lets go of my arm, and she’s stepping forward, gripping the doctor on his other side now, her eyes as hard as stone. “Explain yourself,” she says, her voice gruff. When the doctor looks up at her, he seems to quake in fear. She is a little intimidating: a tall, gorgeous woman wearing spectacularly spiky armor, demanding something of him in a cool, commanding tone.

  As we all wait for the doctor to say something, anything, I realize how surreal all of this is. None of this is possible, from Charaxus' wound disappearing, to the other patients' injuries vanishing, to the corpses rising from the dead...

  But…it looks it's happening, anyway. Right now. To us.

  Or it could all be a really spectacular dream. I latch onto that idea, swallowing the lump in my throat. Yeah, maybe it’s a dream... I mean, it has to be a dream…