by J. E. Taylor
The bed creaked and he repositioned me. He spread my knees wide before he grazed my clit with his fingers. “There, I did something.” His lips touched my neck and his body pressed against my back. And then the contact was gone and nothing but chilled air caressed my back.
His musky scent overwhelmed me, a combination of cedar, spice, and sweat. I licked my lips. He chuckled as he moved in front of me; he threaded his fingers into my hair and found my lips with his. His kiss, a blend of cinnamon and Scotch, drew my breath from my lungs. His tongue rolled in a lazy circle and explored my mouth, my teeth, my tongue—as if he had all the time in the world.
When he broke the kiss, I whined my dissatisfaction.
“Don’t worry, baby, I’ve got something else to keep that mouth busy.” With that, he pulled me toward him and pushed my head down. Without the use of my hands, I folded over, right into his lap. His hard cock rubbed against my cheek. I turned into it and nuzzled my nose in the fine curls nested around his balls.
He shifted, adjusting so I would have more latitude in motion and his full shaft to play with. Before I had a chance to acclimate to his new position, his hot breath closed in on the inside of my thigh. I was at a disadvantage with my arms tied behind my back, but the moment his mouth latched onto my clit, I didn’t care. I used my cheek, my hair, my lips to caress the throbbing member before me. I sucked and nipped my way to the tip and slid my tongue in the slit. He responded, the rumble of satisfaction in his chest almost as satiating as the salty drops of pre-cum sliding from his core.
His mouth and his tongue probed my clit; every pass sent a tingling sensation through my pussy and an instant rush of liquid to the spot. Jacob always knew how to make me wetter than a hurricane and tonight was no different. I sucked and pulled his hard shaft farther into my throat in response.
Pressure built, starting low in my abdomen and spread until it encompassed my entire body. He knew I was almost there and plunged his fingers inside me, fucking me with his hand and his mouth, alternating at a pace that left me breathless and frantic in my quest to make him cum at the same time.
Stroking the length of him with my mouth, heat swept over my body, boiling the pressure to the point of overflow and I tensed, the beginning of the orgasm taking shape...
BRIGHT LIGHTS SNAPPED me awake and I sat up in the cot. Sweat lined my back and it took a moment to get my bearings.
“Dr. Robbins?”
Instant irritation slammed into my frustrated body and I glared at the nurse in the door. “What?”
“You asked me to come get you if there was a change.”
Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I swung my feet to the floor and nodded. I pushed the feel of Jacob away and focused. “What’s happening?” My voice lost the chastising tone I used before. I got to my feet and stifled a yawn.
“He’s awake.”
Of all the responses, that was the last one I expected. “Awake so soon?”
Rebecca raised her eyebrow. “Holly, you’ve been sleeping for six hours.”
That really threw me for a loop and I guess it showed because Rebecca laughed. “Why did you let me sleep so long?”
Her hands found her hips and she shot me a knowing glance.
She knew damn well I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night since Jacob died. I said as much one night when I succumbed to the pressure and agreed to go out with the OR staff. I had a few too many drinks and blubbered about my dreams and how I couldn’t stand waking to the void. A drunken blackout wasn’t exactly the rest I needed and it hadn’t kept the dreams away. I’d still woken expecting Jacob beside me, and the empty cold bed that greeted my reaching hand had renewed that awful, empty pain.
“I get it. I’m coming.”
Rebecca didn’t say anything; she just led me to the boy’s room. The teenager offered me a grim smile. His deep brown eyes shimmered with tears of drugged pain.
I picked up the chart and glanced over the latest vitals before I looked back at the boy. “I know you’re probably not feeling like it right now, but you are one lucky kid. You’re going to be a bit uncomfortable for a while and we’re going to keep you in the intensive care unit overnight to make sure you’re out of danger. Do you have any questions?”
He shook his head slightly and I turned toward his mother. “Do you have any questions, Mrs. Albright?”
“How long will my boy be in the hospital?”
I could tell there was more of an underlying agenda with the question and my guess was it had to do with hospital costs. Before I opened my mouth and inserted my foot, I looked at the chart. “Honestly, it depends on how Adam does tonight.” I finally used the kid’s name. Now he was real; he had a name and I was invested in the case. In the past, if I didn’t feel confident the patient would pull through, I generalized.
Husband. Wife. Son. Daughter. Mother. Father.
Anything not to create an attachment.
That’s not to say the death of my patients didn’t impact me, but if they have a name, they take a piece of my heart with them. And after Jacob, I didn’t have much left.
Mrs. Albright smiled and crossed the small space to take my hands. “Your soul mate is no longer with us, is he?”
I found myself shaking my head, confirming her statement, and I sent a glare at the nurse as she stepped from the room. How else could this woman know?
“She did not tell me. I saw it in your eyes. In your heart.”
“Yes, my Jacob died a few months ago.” Again, I found myself compelled to acknowledge this woman’s statement. I took a moment to study her dark lined skin, her deep onyx eyes, and the equally dark lashes—all of which pulled me in, almost as effectively as a pocket watch to a hypnotist. “I miss him.”
The gypsy tilted her head to the right and offered me an encouraging smile. “What would you be willing to give to have him back?”
“Anything.” The answer came with no hesitation.
“Would you give up your soul?”
“Yes.” After all, my soul was empty without Jacob.
“What about all the skill found in these hands?” She squeezed my hands and I hesitated, not understanding the question. “Your surgical skills,” she clarified with a whisper.
I looked at my clasped hands. Hands that saved countless lives. Hands that longed for the feel of Jacob’s warm skin beneath them and without lament, I nodded.
The smile that spread over Mrs. Albright’s face should have terrified me, but instead my heart fluttered with hope. Hope: a strange sensation I vaguely remembered, something I had been absent of since Jacob died, and now it slithered under my skin, taking shape in my mind, in my heart.
She let go of my hands and dug into the pocket of her gypsy garb, producing a worn piece of paper, one that looked like it had been opened and closed countless times, and she placed it in my hand. “If you are willing to follow the directions written on this paper, your lost love will return.”
Whatever spell she had on me broke and I laughed. “What kind of cruel joke is this?” I stepped away and tossed the paper as if it burned the skin of my fingertips.
She retrieved it out of the air with the speed of a cobra strike and planted it in my palm. “Keep it. Time may change your mind.”
Something in her stark stare made me shove the paper in my pocket. I turned and marched out of the room, forgetting the boy in the bed for the moment. I walked out to the emergency bay, stepped outside in the cold, and welcomed the frigid wind slapping at my cheeks. It cooling me down and cleared my head.
I thought about the gypsy’s proposition—the impossibility of it—but tendrils of hope itched the base of my skull and brought with it a shiver. I crossed my arms and rubbed them to ward off the chill. But it persisted and I pulled out the paper from my pocket and studied the way it folded in on itself.
I unfolded the sheet, staring at the foreign incantation. Latin. I recognized a few words, but not all. My gaze dropped to the instructions. No eye-of-newt, no lizard skin, but I d
id need blood and bone. Human blood and bone. I shuddered at the thought and kept reading. Candles, crystals, birch bark, white lotus, graveyard dirt, and rose oils. Not quite as bad as I thought, especially for what obviously was black magic. Then my focus dropped to the details. I would need to mix these ingredients together in a silver chalice along with something of his. Something of personal meaning, preferably something he touched soon before he died.
Once the mixture was complete, the instructions said to read the incantation and drop a match into the cup. If done right, the dead would rise with the next full moon. I looked up at the sky at the waxing crescent and calculated. The full moon was at least a week and a half away. Before I could entertain the thought of actually trying this ludicrous idea, the beeper in my pocket went off. I traded the instruction sheet with my beeper and stared at the words that scrolled across the screen along with the room number. My heart lurched: I pocketed the beeper and ran inside.
I slid into the room and stared in dumb fascination at the flat line on the monitor. My gaze snapped to Adam and the emergency staff surrounding him.
“Clear!”
The staff took a step back as paddles were placed on his chest and side. The electrical pulse lifted the failing body from the sheets in a graceful arc, one that brought me back to Jacob—to his death—and I blinked back my reverie to focus on the situation before me and wonder what the hell went wrong.
I stepped into the melee and ordered an adrenaline push.
“Already done. No response,” Dr. Harrington said from the other side of the gurney. “Where have you been?”
“I stepped out for some air.”
“We’ve been paging you for fifteen minutes,” he snapped. He diverted his gaze to the display and waited for the paddles to charge again.
“That’s not possible.” I instinctively pulled my pager from my pocket. Only one page showed and it blinked in and out like the unit had a short. “Shit.” I pocketed the pager and stepped to the side of the bed.
“Clear,” Dr. Harrington said when the indicator turned green. The staff stepped back and he shocked Adam again. The line on the monitor didn’t change. It remained ruthlessly straight, accompanied by the monotone buzz.
“I need to open him up.” I stepped to the side of the bed and kicked the brakes off.
When no one responded, I glanced at Dr. Harrington. “Unlock your wheels so we can get him to an OR.”
Dr. Harrington glanced at the clock and shook his head. “It’s time to call it.”
“Look, he was awake the last time I was in the room.”
“And when was that?”
“I came in here a little while ago. It couldn’t have been more than a half hour. Now let’s get him to surgery.”
“According to the chart, you were here at seven. That was a couple hours ago.”
My gaze snapped to the clock on the wall and the room suddenly sparked, heating my skin from the outside in. I lost two hours. Two hours. There was no way I was outside for that long. No way.
“I’m calling it. Time of death: nine fifteen.” He snapped his gloves off and left the room, his last glance one of disgust, as if I was the one responsible for Adam’s death.
My heart pumped hard in my chest as adrenaline-laced despair rocketed through my veins. Fingers groped my pocket, felt the soft paper folded in the confines, and I exhaled. I didn’t dare pull the instructions free, not here, not with the wailing cry coming from the hallway followed by the gypsy flying into the room and throwing herself across her dead son. At first she didn’t acknowledge me, her words muffled sobs, pressed into her son’s chest; each rasping sound shot straight to my heart and pressed the weight of the loss on me like a ten-ton boulder.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Albright.” The words tumbled from my lips and gained her attention.
Her eyes narrowed and she spewed a Latin curse in my direction. Her hands balled into tight fists—fists that pounded on her son’s chest with her exclamation and I stepped back, away from the venom in her words, in her eyes, as if she could strike me dead with her steel-tipped curses.
Her hand shot out, palm facing toward the ceiling. “Give it back.”
I blinked at the order, not quite understanding what she was asking.
“Give what back?”
“His heart. Give me back his heart!”
I didn’t know what to do, but I knew enough to take another step back and put distance between us. “His heart is in his chest, ma’am.” I gestured toward the boy and swallowed hard. I planted my hand in my pocket and pressed the sheet of paper against my leg in an effort to safeguard the contents.
“Give me the instructions.” She converged on me like a hungry leopard.
Her face took on a feral quality and my hand grasped the sheet; I pulled it out and tossed it in her direction. She had no way of knowing I had a photographic memory and the words were burned in the flesh of my brain like an obscene Braille storybook.
The minute the cloth-like parchment was in her hands, she turned and stormed out of the hospital room; the curses still flowed from her lips, fading with her. I glanced at the dead boy and blinked back the tears that warbled my vision. His chest looked like a concave plate and I gasped. Whoever had administered CPR had crushed his broken ribs. I covered my face. If I had been here, I could have stopped it. I could have saved his life.
Instead, I was in some sort of time warp, studying that damn paper and entertaining the thought of enacting black magic to bring Jacob back to life. Nothing good could come of it and yet, the idea festered.
IN THE MORGUE, I OPENED Adam up and sighed. All the bones that had been set earlier in the day fractured under the pressure of CPR and one of the jagged pieces pierced his heart. I pulled the shard out, inspecting it as a layer of regret clouded my mind.
I should have given him a more thorough check when I was in the room. I should have gotten that page. I should have been there to oversee the resuscitation.
I dropped the shard into a small metal bowl the size of a loose powder container, watched the blood drip off the bone and fill the base of the pot. I refocused; I cleaned out his chest cavity, suctioned the coagulated blood and removed the rest of the broken shards. Each plunk into the container cracked my core and pushed me deeper into the hole of depression that started when I lost Jacob.
I glanced at the collection of debris.
Bone and blood.
Human bone and human blood.
Despite the shiver, I screwed the top on the small container and set it on the table behind me with the rest of my notes.
I took extra care in stitching Adam back together. Each pull of the thread through his flesh pressed a sob deeper in my chest and when I was done, I pulled the sheet over him and left with my notes.
The dark entryway of my house welcomed me. I locked the door and stumbled to the living room, too tired to climb the stairs. The couch beckoned but I don’t remember crossing the room or my head even hitting the upholstery.
A clap of thunder woke me from the first dreamless slumber I had in months. I blinked and moved my head from my folded arms. The pungent odor of sulfur struck first. On the heels of the scent, the fact I was sitting at my kitchen table caught my attention and jump-started my heart. I pushed away from the table in a violent rush. The chair tumbled behind the force of my legs and slammed onto the tile floor with an echoing clang.
Arranged on the table before me, a string of flickering candles lit the morbid cluster of ingredients: a silver wedding chalice, a small pile of dirt, a few shimmering crystals, a strip of bark, a white lotus, and a bottle of rose oil. But that wasn’t what tripped my heart into overdrive. No, what set my heart into near heart-attack pace was the shredded, bloodied shirt I cut off Jacob at the hospital, the one I thought I destroyed in the hospital incinerator. Positioned on the tattered fabric was the small metal bowl—the one that held Adam’s fragmented bones.
I gasped and slid away from the table, horrified at the collection and th
e implications. My gaze fell to a piece of paper, worn and old just like the one I had given back to the gypsy. The instructions screamed at me and propelled me into motion. Without thought, I hastily mixed the concoction in the silver flute.
Words tumbled from my lips. My Latin was rusty as hell, but I read the incantation, wondering if my pronunciation was off. If so, I might be raising the devil instead of my dead husband.
“Spiritus mortuorm. Offero tibi anima mea. Ego praecipio tibi ut sugere.”
I dropped the lit match into the silver flute. Nothing happened at first, but then the flame licked the rose oil. A plume went up into the air and devoured the contents in a whoosh. Black smoke tinged with embers drifted to the ceiling and dissipated, leaving that odd ozone stench behind.
The shakes started in my hands but soon they encompassed my whole form to the point my legs would no longer hold my weight. I sat on the floor next to the tumbled chair. My breath wheezed from my chest, each inhale drawing the invisible strap across my chest tighter until white spots filled my vision and I fell back and welcomed the light, welcoming the nothingness that came with it.
LIGHT FILTERED IN THROUGH the sheers and blinded me. I rolled, burying my face in the back of the couch and cursed the arrival of sunrise. The strange dream surfaced, and I snapped my eyes open, glancing around at the living room. Was that bizarre ritual only a dream?
I rolled and stared at the ceiling for a moment before dragging my tired butt off the couch and into the bathroom. The mirror showed me more than I wanted to see. Dark circles surrounded bloodshot eyes and the smear of soot on my cheek gave credence to the ritual. I didn’t need to venture into the kitchen, but I did. The macabre scene at the table sent a chill from my heels to the tip of my cranium and I shuddered.
It was real and despite the blood and bone and ash scattered on the tabletop, hope’s bright light edged its way into my heart. Was it possible?
For a moment I believed, and then reality crashed down and obliterated hope like a broken dam annihilates everything downstream. I shook my head, disgusted with even entertaining the thought. I grabbed the Clorox wipes and scrubbed the blood from the light surface, sweeping the contents into the garbage. I wrapped my fingers around the silver flute and the smell of smoldering skin filled the room before the burning sensation shocked the nerve endings and produced a yelp from my lips. Pain gripped my hand; the glass tumbled to the floor and the ping of silver bouncing off the tile rippled through the air. I stepped back, held my wrist, and stared at the red flesh and the surfacing blisters.