Authors: Susan Vaught
I felt it.
I felt
her
, somewhere way down in my bones.
She was trying to tear me apart!
My knees almost gave out as I mentally pushed back, and the bracelet on my wrist hummed and crackled. I tried to scream, but all I got out was a coughing squeak. I backed away, and Levi stepped around my outstretched arm, putting himself between me and—and whatever the old woman was.
It was like he broke a circuit, and the power invading me snapped away. Fog parted around him, rolling back toward the woman.
“Levi,” she said in a voice that reminded me of deep caves and hollows. “You get away from her.
Now.
”
“No,” Levi told the woman in a tone that made my teeth hurt, and the scent of pine went to war with moss and rivers and really old wood. He had his arms out like he was shielding me, which I was grateful for and pissed about all at the same time.
“Her name’s Forest, Imogene. Ease up on her. She doesn’t mean any harm, and I think—I think she might be like you. This whole time I’ve been helping you, nobody but her has been able to see me, not when I’ve had my glamour on.”
I wanted to ask Levi what
that
meant, but the old woman kept staring at me. She looked breakable and terrifying, and my insides were shaking even as her foggy power started to sink back into her skin. “Don’t go meddlin’ with what you can’t control,” she said to Levi. “This one’s more than you can handle.”
Levi didn’t respond, except to let his arms fall to his sides.
My blood was pounding, and my eyes teared from the power still roiling around the old woman. My attention kept yanking to the clock over the office door, measuring each minute. I was
terrified that all this weirdness would steal minutes and hours, and I’d be late and lose my job and my apartment and everything I was working for. College. My ticket out of Never. My future. What was I thinking, coming here, anyway? This wasn’t any part of the real world. It wasn’t any part of sanity.
“Is Forest your real name?” the woman asked.
I gaped at her.
Levi cleared his throat. “Better answer, Forest. My grandma doesn’t wait well.”
Rage bubbled through my veins and swept into my brain. “You try to kill a man in my hospital, then you threaten to kill me. I come here for answers, and
she
tries to kill me, too?” To him and the old woman both, I said, “Get out of my way. I’m done with this.”
Levi just looked surprised.
I reached for him. He jumped out of my way, and I stalked forward, intending to see if I could burn Imogene with a touch, too.
She didn’t budge from in front of the door as I approached, and she didn’t look afraid—more amused. My mind calmly reminded me that she had some kind of freaky power that tried to tear people apart from the inside out. I slowed to a stop a pace or two in front of her. She was shorter than me, so I had to glare down at her. It made me feel like a bully.
She raised her hands above her head to the shelf next to the door, and came down with a huge brown volume identical to those on the other shelves lining the room. It was some kind of oversized ledger with the year I was born stenciled on the spine in black letters, and she opened to its center pages. She kept her
gray gaze fixed on me. “Speak your name, child, so I can see where you came from.”
I turned until I could see Levi, who had his arms folded. His expression was both intense and unreadable, and I could tell he was waiting for my answer.
My eyes darted to the clock.
Ten minutes until the start of my shift. Crap! How did that happen? How did time just
escape
like that?
“Forest Anderson,” I told Imogene, so that maybe she’d get out of my way faster. “But don’t expect the ‘Anderson’ to be much help. I got it from my first foster family. Whoever abandoned me just scrawled my given name in black marker across the front of my shirt. Happy now? Please move.”
“Forest.” Imogene held the big book in one hand and slipped the other into her pocket, producing a pen. She put it to the paper but didn’t start writing, and she didn’t move away from the door. “That don’t ring true. Is it your second name—a nickname, maybe?”
“Actually, it’s Forastera,” I said, my anxiety ratcheting two levels with each tick of the clock above her head. “We Americanized it so I’d fit in better at school.”
Imogene held her pen and stared at me. Her eyes widened, and her thin lips pulled apart into what might have been a smile. “Forastera. Well, I’ll be.”
I glanced at Levi. He looked even more surprised.
“You’ve got my name.” I stepped to the side of Imogene. “So you can research me or look me up or whatever. Now I need to get to work.”
“Forest,” Levi said. “Please stay. We need to talk.”
“No.” My nerves twanged, and I hurried to check the clock. Eight minutes to get to the ward. “I don’t have time for any of this.” I lifted my hands again and wiggled my fingers. “Let me go, or we can do this with a lot of blistering.”
Imogene’s attention fixed on my bracelet. “That wood’s from the other side. And the beads are pure iron. Did it grow up with you?”
That question startled me into stillness. I’d always thought it was a little weird that my bracelet never got too small, but I loved it. I didn’t want anybody to think I was foolish—I just never mentioned it, really. My left hand wrapped around the smooth wood and iron beads, caressing them, which probably gave away how much it meant to me.
“It’s all I have from my real parents,” I muttered, saying way more than I meant to, and hearing heavy feelings lace through each word. I had a bracelet that wasn’t normal. I had known that for a long time but hadn’t admitted it to myself. I sure didn’t want to admit it to this woman.
“You know what your name means?” Imogene asked, her drawl getting more relaxed.
I couldn’t look at her. I could only stare at the clock. Seven minutes to get to the ward. “It’s a type of white grape grown on the Canary Islands. Someday I’ll be a giant yellow wino.”
She didn’t laugh. “‘Forastera’ means ‘foreigner.’” With her accent, it came out as “fur-ner.” “Stranger. Whoever put you out didn’t name you, child. They branded you.”
“Branded me as what?”
Six minutes to get to the ward.
Imogene gave me a scary smile. “Snake-bit, like me.” She cocked her head, and fog seemed to rise off her again. “I ain’t seen another in over a hundred and fifty years.”
A hundred years? Okay, yeah, sure.
Snake-bit. That was old Southern for crazy as hell, cursed, full of bad luck—whatever. And this woman was nutty enough to act like she was hundreds of years old or something.
“I’m leaving now.” My voice sounded low and shaky. “One way or the other.”
“Maybe you ought to pull off that bracelet,” Imogene said, “so I can get your measure.”
“No,” Levi said.
“Boy, don’t you take that tone with me,” Imogene snapped.
My pulse thundered in my ears, and I clenched my hand around my bracelet, ready to go to war.
“Don’t touch her bracelet,” Levi said. “And don’t touch her.”
Imogene stared at him, clearly stunned by his talking back to her. Levi seemed to be radiating a power of his own—only the fog clinging to him was darker than any night I had ever seen.
“What
are
you people?” I whispered, but neither one of them paid any attention to me at all.
For a few long seconds, they faced each other, and I saw how the lines of Imogene’s face matched Levi’s. Grandma, he’d called her. Only she seemed so much older now, like a great-grandmother, or even a great-great. Matching wills with Levi, it was sapping her somehow, and making her sad. Almost making her sick.
I had to fight a sudden urge to reach out and put my hands
on her, to ease the ache I sensed in her knotty joints. Her trembling frown reminded me too much of the patients I took care of, and even with the way she had treated me, I didn’t want her to be in pain.
After what seemed like forever, she nodded once, and the battle between her and her grandson seemed to ebb.
“Imogene’s a granny-woman,” Levi said, shifting his eyes from his grandmother to me. “That means she can do some healing on the living, and spot folks with Madoc in them, and cross spirits to the other side when they have trouble going on their own. Since I got ... well, something bad happened to me, and since then I’ve been helping her.”
“Doing your job?” I asked, my voice sizzling with sarcasm. “Scaring poor spirits to death with dogs and birds so they freak out and run away from you?”
“I upset Forest,” Levi said to his grandmother, almost like an apology. “She needs a little time to get used to how things are, that’s all.”
Imogene rubbed the sides of her face, like she was tired and getting a headache. “I guess that ain’t unreasonable.”
Levi let out a breath. “Okay, then. She needs to go to work.”
Imogene moved aside without another word. She didn’t so much as spare me a second glance.
I didn’t stop to tell her off or thank Levi or punch him in the nose or anything.
I just ran.
“She’s been that way all day,” Leslie told me as we stood in the doorway of Miss Sally’s room. “Talking to herself and smiling and singing when she’s awake like now—but her breathing’s bad and her pressure’s up and down.”
Leslie had on black Halloween scrubs dotted with smiling white ghosts. Her sneakers were white, too, and she had fixed her hair in dozens of skinny braids, each tipped with a happy little ghost barrette. Just seeing her, standing next to her, I felt more normal.
She walked into the room and lifted the sheet so I could see Miss Sally’s swollen feet. “All that puffiness, it’s one of the signs. And touch her.”
When I rested my fingers on Miss Sally’s toes, they were cold.
“Decker,” Miss Sally murmured as I took my hand away. She smiled, then squeezed her vacant eyes shut and seemed to fall straight asleep again, her breath whistling in and out like she was snoring, but the rattle sounded deeper.
It sounded bad.
I fidgeted with the sleeve of my dirty blue blouse, thinking how frail Miss Sally looked in the bed. Her skin had gone ashy, and her hands twitched like she was working hard in her dreams. Her picture slipped from between her fingers, but I caught it before it hit the floor and tucked it between her arm and the bed.
“Is she sick?” I asked Leslie as I walked into the hall.
Leslie snorted. “That’s what that idiot in there’s gonna call it.” She gestured toward the nurse’s station. Arleen was working again to night, and the door was closed. She hadn’t said a word to me, but I had found the two yellow write-up slips waiting in my box, with a warning that the next slip would be pink.
“Arleen won’t want to do the extra care and paperwork,” Leslie said. “She’ll be trying to pack Miss Sally off to the medical hospital. Then they’ll be sticking my poor baby with needles and poking tubes down her throat, trying to stop what can’t be stopped. Seen it time and again at this place—it’s a crime, if you ask me.”
I glanced into Miss Sally’s room again. “But what’s wrong with her?”
“Honey, ain’t nothing
wrong
.” Leslie caught my right hand in hers and patted the back of it as though she could ease the sadness of what she was telling me. “She’s passing. Nobody don’t get in her way, she’ll be gone by morning, and probably peaceful in her sleep, in this place that’s been home to her for longer than she remembers.” She let go of my fingers, then narrowed her warm eyes at me. “And you ... you don’t look much better. Get yourself to a bathroom and wash your face.”
Before I could move, she reached up and ran her thumbs under my eyes, then gave me a frown so full of worry that it almost made me cry. “Them’s some deep circles. You not sleeping?”
“I—” Oh, I wanted to cry
so
bad. I wanted to throw myself into Leslie’s grandmotherly arms and let her hug me, and I wanted to tell her every crazy, impossible thing I had seen in the last day or so.
“I didn’t sleep at all last night.” I barely kept my chin from shaking as I spoke. “The double shift. And then—um, no. Didn’t sleep this morning, either.”
“Not sleeping, not changing your clothes, not taking care of yourself. That’s how it starts, getting sick like these folks.” She gave my cheek a loving pinch. “You watch that, you hear?”
I nodded.
And then I went to the bathroom and washed my face like she told me to do.
And then I went to work.
I changed sheets and bedpans. I made beds and gave baths and trimmed nails. I washed and combed and braided hair, and with every minute that passed the way it should, the world seemed calmer and more real. This was what I needed. This was what I had to have. I didn’t even take a break, because if I didn’t leave the ward, there was no chance I wouldn’t get back on time.
Between each task, I checked on Miss Sally, and I whispered to her that Decker was close by and waiting for her, and that he loved her. This seemed to ease her mind a little bit when she woke and got worked up.
Getting on toward the last hour of my shift, the facility’s
general practitioner came on the ward. She was older than Leslie, and looked enough like her to maybe be an aunt or a big sister. The two of them spoke in hushed tones, occasionally checking to be sure the nursing-station door was still closed. The doctor pulled an order sheet off her clipboard, scribbled a bunch of stuff on it, and then left as Leslie carried the orders to the station.
“This will help Miss Sally be comfortable,” she told me as she passed Miss Sally’s door, waving the orders. “Ought to piss Arleen right off, too, because Doc wouldn’t sign off on the transfer to medical. Makes my night.”
I realized Arleen would be bustling my way to do whatever Doc had ordered, so I slipped out of Miss Sally’s room to check on the patient who slept in the room nearest the exit door. As I pulled up his sheet to cover his shoulders and keep him from getting chilled, I heard a muffled but unmistakable howling.
All the hairs on my arms and neck stood up at the same time, and my stomach flipped.