The Stroke of Midnight: A Supernatural New Year's Anthology
Page 26
It didn't matter that they were willing participants; the guilt ate at me mercilessly.
Sensing my mood, Pierce finally wrapped his arms around me. He kissed my hair reverently. "What are you thinking, love?"
"There's no going back, is there?" I hated how broken I sounded.
Pierce sighed as he turned me to face him. He gently brushed the snowflakes from my hair and shoulders, and then kissed the tip of my nose. I couldn't help the tremulous smile that crept over my lips. I knew that my lover, my sire, my soul mate would always be there for me. I wanted nothing more than to stay in his arms forever.
Even if it meant going back on my vow to never harm another being for self-gain.
"I won't pretend to fully understand why you fight this so hard. I will always support you, you know that. But you will never be whole subsiding the way you have been. I know you regret what I have done to you…"
My heart nearly broke with the pain in his voice, and tears sprang to my eyes again. "No. Never that. I don't regret this, Pierce. Truly." I whispered. "It's just hard, that's all."
He held my hands, keeping his eyes on mine. After searching my soul for several minutes, he closed his eyes and rested his chin on the top of my head. Serenity flowed through our bond, with a hint of fear. "I don't want to lose you, Teagan. I can't exist without you. Not now that I have known you."
I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn't form words past the lump in my throat. I settled for squeezing him tightly. I would be a fool to give up eternity with the other half of my soul. Pierce lifted his head, and I was surprised to see tears on his cheeks. Pierce never cried. Not ever.
I reached up to wipe away his tears, and he held my hands against his cheeks. His broken whisper was barely audible. "Please don't make me watch you fade away like that again?"
It would be hard, going against my core beliefs, I knew that. But looking at the man I loved more than my next breath, I knew it would be more than worth it. I just needed to work on adjusting my beliefs to match my new life. The old Teagan was long gone, and it was time I let her go.
As the first fingers of dawn lightened the horizon and we made our way into the hotel, I buried the old me, the one that had lived blissfully unaware in a world of sunshine and rainbows. My world was darker now, with new needs, but it wasn't all bad. After all, I had Pierce to love me forever. The first dawn of the New Year pushed away the darkness, bringing new beginnings and fresh promises. In the time honored tradition of New Year's resolutions, I made a new vow to fully embrace my life as Pierce's mate.
Maltese Cross My Heart
F.F. McCulligan
"Nobody has a heart anymore," I said.
"Come on, baby. You're late for your medications."
"You know what I mean though, don't you Cara?" I asked. "You do. I know you do."
"Sure, baby," she said, trailing her hand across my shoulders as she left me in the harshly lit bathroom, alone except for the pills.
Was that really me in the mirror? Most would say that guy was perfect, better than perfect, like the ones you see who look good for a living, posing in the magazines, using their good looks to sell shit.
I was no model, though even if I looked like one. The life of a career firefighter had attracted me since my youth, like a candle calls to a moth. There were men who called me Captain, who I'd die for. There were many who owed me their lives.
No matter how many times somebody told me how great I was, I got one hell of a strange feeling, like they were talking about someone else. I couldn't shake the thought that whoever that man was–the man in the mirror–he looked sad as hell. He looked confused, maybe that's why he splashed water on his face and sighed.
Then the cup was in my hand, Cara's fingers encircling my wrist as she rested her cheek on my arm. I looked over at her, startled. Where did she come from? When I flinched, she bounced off of me and lost her balance.
"I'm sorry!" I said holding up a hand, placatingly. "You know I get jumpy."
Sitting in the bathroom doorway she said, "Honey we can't go through this every night. I was just trying to help you. You've been in here over an hour. I know how you lose track of time."
"That's an understatement," I laughed, helping her up. "Really? An hour?"
She put her hand on my wrist again. She lifted it for me and I let her. I didn't have to let her. The pills went down the same way they always did, bitter and sticky and foul.
"There that wasn't so bad," Cara said.
"Are you my nurse now?" I asked.
"You know how you get," she said. "They're good for you. Take them on your own if you don't want me to be your nurse."
I wanted to answer her, but the troop of chemicals sparkled in my brain, trying to numb it or make it go to sleep. Trying. Nevertheless, the paranoia faded along with the words of protest that died before reaching my lips.
The dosage used to put me in a state of euphoria and it would black out my memory for days at a time. Now my resistance had built up. I was confused, sure, but somewhere inside me there was a fighter now. He shouted, "Let me out," but he was a million miles away.
"Honey? Glen!" It was her tone that meant "warning." Like the pills, it too had begun to lose its effect as I got more used to it over time. I looked around, letting her have my attention. My hand was on the metal railing of the balcony.
Apparently I had been looking out at the thousands of identical housing units that stretched ahead and below, but time had slipped away for who knows how long and I didn't remember leaving the bathroom. The monotonous streets and high rises of Esperanza made me sigh and my jaw was clenched. The wide vein in the back of my forearm was standing out. "Oh!" I said acting surprised. "I'm sorry, sweetness," I felt my face smile. "The medicines hadn't quite hit me yet."
When she gently lifted my hand away from the railing, the metal was twisted and deformed under my grip. "Yeah," I said. "The medicines hadn't kicked in yet. I'm sorry." I heard someone using my voice say the word medicines, which meant the drugs were starting to work. Somewhere deep down, the part of me that still held onto independence called them what they really were–poisons, chemicals–but that guy was buried so deep by now that he was easy to ignore.
My soul spent the rest of the night in a dark closet while the poisons lived through my body, chatting with my wife, watching my TV, making that dumb, glazed-over smile with my mouth.
Time slipped again. It was like the chain falling off a bicycle drive train, steadily humming along until some little hiccup in the road knocked it loose. When time jerked itself back into line, it dragged me with it. I was in the bathroom again. The razor glided smoothly across my face. It was morning. Already there were pills lining up for me on the bathroom counter, heading me off at the pass. They weren't so bad this time.
The insignia on my navy blue 2XL T-shirt hugged against the curve of my chest. The Maltese cross. Its four quadrants depicted different symbols of the fire service, the helmet, the bugles, the crossed ladders, and the fire axe. Perhaps they put it on our shirts to mark us as men with a death wish. A warning for rational folk to stay away.
The pills sizzled into the crevices of my skull again. "That cross is a mark of honor," they told me and the fists I had made slowly eased.
I didn't recall leaving home, but all at once I was commuting through traffic. I blinked, like I often did when time slipped past me like that. The brake lights flared in front of me for miles, undulating like a huge insect with far too many eyes under the dull gray haze. The chipper radio DJ sounded like a huge bloodthirsty rat. His voice was like honey, but he was so urgently titillated by telling me what to think, what to buy. I could hear his anxiety the same way you can hear the difference in someone's voice when they're sick. Greed choked his throat and sinuses like snot.
The bobbing of my head in the claustrophobic stop and go traffic gave rise to a vague urge to rip off the steering wheel, which I suppose the drugs helped suppress. Maybe I should abandon the car and run to work? I sighed
and my hand turned up the radio.
My morning commute used to be manageable. This city used to make more sense. The next time the car jerked to a stop I had apparently parked it in the parking lot behind the station. The radio died with one last vain attempt to sell me something hanging on its tinny, threadbare voice and I straightened gratefully when I emerged from the door.
"Hey, Proctor," someone said from across the lot.
"Yeah, hey," I said. I stood head and shoulders above the other firefighters–built like a tank they said, and from another era like the tanks of old.
Heading into the station, I had a vision, the kind that always made me pause. There was a country lane, the morning sun flashing on the windshield as I passed through the shadows of well pruned apple trees lined up by the roadside. Now that was a commute! But where was that road now? There weren't any hills in Esperanza and that road was on a hill. I didn't remember. I had given up trying to piece together these phantom memories long ago, they never led anywhere–at least nowhere that I could follow.
Then I realized I was looking in the mirror again. It was a little polished piece of plastic in the back of the ambulance. I heard the other guys laughing.
"What's so funny?" I said.
"Just mark down the tape, Prock. Put a check on the line." I did. Then laughed at myself with them.
"Wasn't paying attention," I said. In fact I had been reflecting on the lack of recognition I felt toward the man looking back at me. Half black, half white. A little salt in the tightly curled black hair. Was that me? I actually looked around the ambulance to look for the guy in the mirror. There was a break somewhere in my timeline.
Then all at once, it broke again.
Her voice was frantic and it was dark out. "You gotta help me!" she said. And I believed her. I was in the firehouse, but it was different.
"Come on in," I said. "It's cold, let me see if I can help you."
"Of course you can. My dad was a fireman, he always told me to go to the fire station if I ever needed anything."
"Absolutely, absolutely." I said. "What do you need, are you hurt?"
"It's my mother–she won't pick up the phone. I'm worried it's her heart. Can I get a ride up there to check on her?"
"Well…" I said, looking over my shoulder. There was no one else here for me to ask permission. I nodded and guided her elbow past the jutting mirror of the ladder truck. As she walked by I looked up at the big clunker. Well it was a ladder truck, but not one I recognized. Ours had a rear-mounted boom, this one was mounted in the middle of the truck, just behind the cab. And who on earth would paint a fire truck yellow?
"Everything all right?" she asked. Something crunched under my boots as I caught up with her. Road salt? What the hell?
Big snowflakes assaulted the ambulance windshield. I had my bunker coat on, with the radio slung over one shoulder and resting by my hip. I didn't bother with a seat belt, but she did.
I didn't remember getting into the vehicle or where we were going.
"Take the next left," Selena said. Her name was Selena. I swung the boxy apparatus into a spacious, snow-bank rimmed driveway where an old car was parked crookedly. It looked like one of those elderly housing units. I should have recognized it though, our ambulance rolled to the senior housing places day and night for fall victims, codes… I laughed a little under my breath. Why should I be surprised at not recognizing a housing unit when I didn't even recognize my own face in the mirror?
"Open up, Fire Department," I said banging on the locked door. Selena shrugged with a desperate, defeated look on her face after searching her purse for a key.
She pounded and called out in a pretty-sounding string of Spanish. The fluency of it was thrilling, like music, and it explained her exotic features.
"Hold on, miss." I said, brushing her aside. I gripped the door knob and twisted it until something snapped. The door gave way as I pushed, splintering the right side of the door frame. Selena rushed past me and turned on the lights.
The lights in the hospital were harsh when they pronounced Selena's mother dead on the sterile cot. The hospital staff watched me suspiciously. I tried to put them at ease with kind smiles, but it couldn't be helped. A cop arrived on scene, his thumbs hooked through his belt, wearing the faceless mask of authority. The mirrored visor of his helmet rotated to survey the scene, pausing unabashed when it pointed my direction. My smile disappeared as soon as the cop's silvery mask reflected it back to me. You're not too different from me, are you? I thought.
Then she was in my arms telling me she didn't want to be alone. She felt like Cara in my arms.
The snow hadn't let up. I closed the bay doors, sealing the cold out of the firehouse, and plugged in the ambulance. I turned my radio off and the heaters overhead kicked on. They looked like they were a hundred years old, but they surrounded us with air that was a little cold and a little warm, like sweat inside your boots.
"I've gotta get some sleep, Cara," I said pecking her on the cheek like I always did. I wasn't sure if she was really there, but I acted like she was, just in case. She followed me upstairs. My room was pretty bare. It had one bed instead of two and was bigger than I remembered it.
"This isn't how I pictured starting the New Year," she said.
I tried hard not to look confused, but she must have seen it in my face. "What, did you forget it was New Year's?" Forget didn't seem like the right word, but on some level she must have been right. I was used to taking cues from other people to help me pretend I knew what was going on.
"Yeah," I said. I put my hand on the back of her neck and rubbed softly. She hugged herself and leaned her head against my chest, crying. I held her so gently. I had learned to almost hold my arms away from people when I hugged them, to almost hold my hand open when I shook hands.
Fireworks went off outside my window. I didn't have a window. I did now. She looked up into my eyes with an incomprehensible expression on her face, and got on her toes to invite me to kiss her full, Spanish lips. I knew somehow it wasn't right, but I couldn't put a finger on why… Cara wasn't Spanish, but she seemed calm, so I took my cues from her and I gently touched my lips to hers, then kissed her cheek, her chin.
She touched my arms, my chest, my face. She said something softly that could have been, "Oh Ed." I didn't know why she would call me Ed, but couldn't think of any good reason why not.
The fireworks were like the sound effects of a war scene in one of those old movies. I leaned to look around the corner of the window frame up at the dark, snowy sky, and I saw flashes of pink and green on the surface of the clouds, on the snowflakes.
When I turned back around, Selena was slowly taking her clothes off. The old fashioned LED streetlights outside accented every curve of her figure, but also made her rich toned skin lose its pigment and go white. The bright parts of her looked like Selena, the beautiful woman I had just met, but where the shadows hugged her sumptuous body she looked exactly like my wife. Somehow both were familiar.
The tight, white tank top and red thong were the last to go. Her hips were wider than her shoulders, and her smooth, fit-looking backside was the perfect completion to the elegant, curved shape of her narrow waist and lower back.
I felt her hair, working my fingers into its fruity smelling thickness. Then I found the plastic clip and released it, allowing the heavy mass to fall down to her shoulders, I pulled the neckline of the tank top down and took one small breast into my mouth. It was cool, and had goose bumps, but it soon warmed as the nipple stood up against my tongue.
I undressed myself and stood there, ready for her to come to me. A desirous smile parted her lips and she said something about what she wanted to do to my "fire pole" that made me laugh.
The whole scene was numb and dreamlike. I carried out my part in it because it felt like it was important to someone. Not to me maybe, but to someone. Neither one of us questioned why we called each other by the wrong names as she slid up and down with her chest against my face and my
fingers spread across her round buttocks guiding her. I wanted badly to feel it, but I didn't. I just watched it happen. I played the part I was supposed to play.
"Hey Prock? You all right?" It was Ben. My pants were down and I was sitting on the toilet in the firehouse bathroom, the stall door closed. Selena or Cara, was gone.
"What? Of course, man, what's the problem?"
"Phone call. I said that twice already."
"I heard you. I heard you. Jesus," I lied. I washed up and left the bathroom to find the old-style push-button phone lying on its back off of the base. Though the pills kept me pretty numb, the phone felt heavy and familiar. I liked that. Heavy and familiar was as close as I usually got to reality these days. I tried to bring myself into this time and place, to focus on this one phone call despite the distracting visions from moments before.
"Captain Proctor, here." I said. "What can I do for you?"
"What's going on, Prock?"
"Who is this? Is that you, Brant? From the program?" I didn't mean to sound incredulous, but I had assumed that he was dead–that Davy who worked out in Carolina was the only one left besides me.
Brant laughed, telling me I was right. "You're not gonna believe this Glen, but I need you're help. Come down to the county jail and bail me out."
"What did you do, man? You're gonna give us an even worse name than we already have."
"I didn't do jack shit. Just come down here and I'll explain everything, all right? Can you do that for me? This is my one call you know, I'm kind of counting on you here."
"How much is the bail?"
"You can afford it. Just get down here. Besides I wanna talk to you." That voice on the phone was like a bad dream come true. The program. I could pretend that my decision to enroll in the augmentation surgeries all those years ago was still something I was proud of, but coming face to face with another augment always spooked me, as if the bad fortune that had befallen him might pass to me like a virus. Murderers, suicide victims, drug abusers. My program didn't have a very good track record.