Far Too Young To Die: An Astraea Renata Novel

by Wayne, Douglas

  The patient then suggests to the officer that the vehicle was stolen while it sat in the parking lot and begins the process of filing a report. In the end, the police never find out who caused the accident, and thanks to the potential felony, the insurance company doesn’t generally cover the bill, but a few thousand dollars down the hole is a small price to pay to still be alive.

  At least that’s the way we look at it.

  With Aiden, however, he stormed out of Maybella long before we had a chance to talk about the wreck he had been in, let alone give him the story he needed to give to the cops. He might have been clean as a whistle, but when they find what was left of his car resting on its roof in the middle of the road, they’ll ask why he decided to flee the scene. Thanks to our interference, he couldn’t exactly tell them his car had been sabotaged by someone. It’s kinda hard to sell that one when you flee the scene. Not to mention, they’ll accuse him of being the partying type and probably try to arrest him out of principal.

  “Call me a sucker for a pretty face, but I want to find out his story. Maybe I can get to his house before the cops show up and the story can still work. I’ll even shoot Bernie a text just to give him a heads up.” Not that he needed it.

  “I don’t know, Ast. What if the people who wanted him dead show up at his house to finish the job?”

  “All the more reason I need to be there.”

  The streetlight ahead changed from green to red and Greg brought Maybella to a stop well before the white line. “Let him go,” he pleaded through those pretty brown eyes that could always sucker me into doing anything he asked. Every time, unless I was motivated by something greater than his unflinching friendship.

  “I can’t,” I said, sighing. “We started this whole thing to save people’s lives. I can’t remember how many lives we’ve saved…”

  “Thirty seven,” Greg interrupted.

  “That number isn’t the important one,” I countered. “The one we lost does.” I reached over and placed my soft, still clean hand on top of his. “As of now, that number is still one. If we walk away from Aiden now, it might as well be two.”

  “We saved him. If you didn’t do your spirit magic on him, he would’ve bled out long before he made it to the hospital. We can’t help he pissed off someone enough to want him killed.”

  “No,” I said as my fingertips gently touched the underside of his chin and drew his face towards mine. “But maybe I can keep it from happening again. Some fucked up being up there in the cosmos felt the need to give me everything a little ole girl from Georgia could ask for. Good looks. Great health.” I ran my finger’s along Greg’s cheek. “Wonderful friends. They also felt the need to give me the power to save lives. After that night. With that little girl. I promised not to give up until I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the person we picked up is safe and alive.”

  He reached up with his other hand and grabbed mine from his cheek. “There was nothing you could do for her. Nothing you do now, or in the future will ever bring her back.”

  I felt the tear trying to escape long before it forced its way out of my heavily mascaraed eye, causing my makeup to run. “I let her go.”

  “She was alive when you came back up front with me,” Greg said, ignoring the blaring horns of the person behind us as the light shifted from red back to green.

  “I should’ve stayed with her. She’d still be alive if I’d seen the obstruction sooner.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  I jerked away from him and covered my face. It was a good thing we didn’t have any plans after this because my makeup was royally fucked. It was going to take a nice long shower to clean it up before I even started the hour long process of reapplying everything from the beginning. Something I wasn’t about to do at three in the morning, even if there was another party to go to.

  “You did everything you could, Ast. She wouldn’t have survived if the paramedics had picked her up instead.”

  “How do you know? They always keep someone in back with the patient, just to make sure things don’t make a turn for the worse. If I hadn’t…”

  “It’s over.” He placed his right hand on my leg and started to drive again. “Nothing you do now will bring her back.”

  He was right.

  Bless his soul he was.

  As much as I wanted to tell him that, I knew I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, I’d never erase the vision of the girl’s lifeless body strapped to the stretcher. Her death was as much a part of me as my eyes. He may have been able to forgive me for losing her, but I could never forgive myself.

  “I’m gonna take you straight home,” Greg said, shooting me consoling look. “I’ll take care of the cleanup tonight. Just do me a favor and sleep on it. In the morning, if you still want to chase him down and help him out, I’ll do what I can to help.”

  I wiped my eyes again and pulled my poor fist away from my face which was now a unique blend of black, blue, and red blended almost to look like a swirling vortex on my hand, if it wasn’t for the large smudge on my index finger.

  “Thanks,” I said. Then I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and he took me back home.

  - 4 -

  After Greg dropped me off, I took a nice long hot shower. Partially to clean up the mess of blood and makeup that covered my body. Partially so I could cry without anyone else knowing. Greg would be by in the morning to check on me, like he always did after one of our little rescue missions. The last thing I wanted him to find was a soggy pillow at the head of my bed.

  Once done, I slipped into a blue thigh length button up shirt I liked to sleep in and plopped down in my bed. Even with the lights off, I stared at the ceiling for two hours before sleep finally crept in.

  I dreamed I was in the passenger seat of Maybella with Greg at the helm. It was a cold, icy January night around nine in the evening. I looked over at Greg in anticipation of our first ever winter call and he returned the smile while gripping the steering wheel so tight I thought his hands would pop.

  Inside the ambulance was still freezing, as we didn’t think enough to have Maybella running ahead of time while we waited for a chance call as we had nothing better to do after closing the bar early, thanks to a nasty ice storm that was blanketing the area. We were still a good two years from having a heated garage built onto Olson’s, where we could keep her nice and warm until the moment we were ready to go.

  The roads were clear, which was a surprise to hear as the police scanner had been going crazy all night. Mostly with reports of stranded or ditched vehicles where some poor fool had tried to drive around, even though the news and authorities had begged otherwise.

  Street after street there was nothing but clear, yet visibly icy roads, making our trip across town a little less perilous. Occasionally, Maybella would slide to the side as Greg made a turn, but otherwise she stuck to the road rather well. It was a pleasant surprise, as my personal car, a Toyota Camry, wasn’t even half as graceful on the ice.

  I was wearing four layers of clothing, not counting my winter coat. Yet, even with the lack of heat in the ambulance, I was sweating up a storm. Thankfully, I had showered earlier that evening, when we shut down the bar, so whoever we were heading out to save would only see me as a hideous beast and not a hideous beast that looked like she’d had her face spray painted by a five year old before coming to the rescue.

  “Two more blocks,” Greg said, as he turned onto the service road. The tires failed to get grip, sending the back half of Maybella off ahead of the front. I gripped the door handle and arm wrest so hard my knuckles turned nearly pure white as I prepared for the ambulance to go off into a ditch of our own, but Greg brought the ole girl back under control a few feet away from the side.

  As much as I wanted to scold him for being so reckless, a combination of my rapidly beating heart and my stomach being in my throat, kept me quiet. Seeing the accident scene for the first time also had a lot to do with that.

  Up ahead there was an
old station wagon t-boned into a smaller compact car. The large station wagon was relatively unharmed by the accident, the only damage being the scrapes alongside the hood where it had smashed into the smaller car. The other car was another story entirely. The impact had caught the passenger side of the vehicle, smashing the front and rear doors inward. I knew right away that if anyone was sitting on that side of the car, they were as good as dead.

  Greg parked the car next to the driver’s side of the small compact car. The front door opened as I stepped out of Maybella and a man ran out to meet us. Blood covered him from head to toe, soaking more heavily around his chest than anywhere else. While he would’ve been showered with glass, the amount of blood on him wasn’t consistent with any injuries we saw on him.

  “My wife,” he said between panicked breaths, “and my daughter.” He bent over at the waist and let out a mourning howl.

  “Are they still inside?” I asked stepping closer to the car.

  He nodded, and I leaned into the opened driver’s side door to get a better look.

  As I suspected, and feared, there were two other passengers in the car, both seated on the smashed in side of the vehicle. The woman up front was in horrible shape. Blood covered her face and flowed in streams down her neck, soaking and staining her wool sweater with blood. Glass covered the woman’s lap and her legs were bent unnaturally against the new contours of the vehicle.

  She was in bad shape. So bad, that I wasn’t sure I had enough power in me to save her. I wasn’t ready to give up on the woman, but I needed to check the condition of the daughter first.

  In the back seat, strapped into a now shattered child seat was a young little girl, around six or seven years old though I never bothered to ask. Just like her mother in the front, blood covered her head and dripped onto her thick winter coat. It leaned against the mangled door almost lifeless. If she hadn’t let out a momentary whimper while I was in the car, I would’ve guessed her to be dead.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped, which was bad with the amount of glass inside the car. My nerves settled when I noticed it was Greg’s. “What’s the story?” he said, leaning in to get a better look.

  “Two. Both in bad shape.”

  “We don’t have room for both in the back. One of the two will have to take the next one.”

  “Take my daughter,” the father said, between frantic sobs. “Mindy would want it that way too.”

  “Looks like that’s settled,” Greg said, opening the back door of the car.

  I wanted to take the easy way out. Just get the little girl on the stretcher and get out of here to do my thing. But something pulled at my chest, like the weight of the mangled car sitting on my chest. I wanted to save them both.

  “Load her up,” I said as I pulled myself further inside the car. “I’ll do what I can to stabilize her.”

  “There isn’t time,” he said as he unbuckled the little girl from her car seat. “Besides, this little one will take enough out of you.”

  I tried to ignore him, but deep down he had a point. While I’d been able to heal some pretty nasty wounds, something as simple as a broken leg had caused me to become sick for a week while my own body recovered from the stress. If I’d had that much trouble with a compound fracture, there was little hope of me saving two patients from wounds I couldn’t even begin to understand.

  I took in a deep breath, placed my hand on the woman’s cheek, and closed my eyes.

  “Thank you,” the woman said at little more than a whisper.

  My eyes bolted open, and I noticed the woman now looking at me, the slightest smile forming on the corners of her mouth. I forced myself to calm down and then said, “hang in there. There’s another one on the way for you.”

  Her mouth opened, as if to say something, but the words never came. Instead, she let out a long breath and her head slumped forward against her chest.

  I wanted to scream and my lungs begged for it. Going in, I knew I’d run into a dead person or two, but never once did I imagine I’d ever see one die. Definitely when I hadn’t even tried to heal her.

  I placed my shaking hand on the woman’s neck and felt for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  She was gone and there was nothing I could do about it. My healing magic had come around the more I practiced it, but resurrection was so far out of my wheelhouse it wasn’t funny.

  I held back a sob of my own and backed out of the vehicle. The husband gave me a look and his eyes asked if his wife was OK. A tear fled the confines of my eye and I shook my head. He dropped to his knees and placed his head in the seat and screamed.

  Behind me, Greg stepped out of the back of Maybella and held the door open. “She’s secured.”

  I nodded and stepped inside and he closed the doors behind me.

  He’d strapped the little girl to the stretcher, both around her waist and her head, using a pediatric neck and head brace we bought to play it safe. Her thick winter coat draped over one of the stainless steel counters and dripped blood onto the floor. She was wearing what I imagined was a pink dress with floral imprints stamped all over the dress, but it was hard to tell with the large amount of blood caked on it in spots.

  She had a large gash on the side of her head, between her right eye and mangled ear that went to her jaw. Her right arm was purple and swollen though had sparse traces of blood on it. Likely only the blood that had wiped off as Greg removed her coat. Thankfully she was breathing, meaning I still had time.

  I sat down on the bench next to her and strapped myself in while Greg sped off towards the nearest hospital. Not that I doubted my ability to heal anyone, but more a contingency plan in case I couldn’t. We figured we could always tell the hospital we were driving around in our newly purchased ambulance and ran across the accident while on a little stroll if it came down to it. But in three other runs, I’d been able to keep the person alive making our plan worthless.

  But none of them were as far gone as the little girl.

  I closed my eyes and placed a hand on her forehead and another on her hand and probed her with my magic to check the condition of her soul. My mind looked over the girl’s ethereal form as my magic washed over her, unveiling the near black tendrils just barely holding on. My body jumped in panic just seeing it. She was about to go.

  Without wasting another moment, I started my chant which sent the warming touch of my magic into the little girl’s body. Almost instantly, the color on her arm lightened. First from the dark purples and blacks to a red. Then to pink before settling at white.

  The slice on her face closed up slowly, starting down at her cheek and working its way up her face. Once near the ear, the mangled piece of flesh bent and contorted for a moment before growing back and looking like a copy of her other ear.

  Her chest rose and fell at a much faster pace, so I stopped the flow of magic figuring it was done. I looked down, and she opened her eyes and scanned the room as much as her restrained head would allow before crying out, “Mommy?”

  “Mommy’s not here, dear,” I said, trying hard to hold back the tears that wanted to flow anew. “Your mommy and daddy will meet us at the hospital.”

  “Hospital?” she asked confused.

  “You were in a bad car accident. We are going to make sure you get better.”

  She started to cry, and I wanted so bad to unstrap her and hold her, but I knew I shouldn’t. If Greg skidded again, and we got into an accident on her own, she needed to be strapped in to keep her from getting hurt again.

  After a minute or two, she finally settled down and closed her eyes while she held my hand. While I was positive I’d healed her, I wanted to make sure, so I sent another blast of energy into her body and checked on her soul. To my amazement, it was a bright, pure white color that clung to everything she touched. She was young, vibrant, and apparently full of life.

  Her grip on my hand lessened and I let it go. She closed her eyes, looking like she wanted to get some rest, so I kicked off the light i
n the back and watched her for a moment until I was sure she would be fine.

  I made my way to the front seat carefully since I didn’t want to do anything to wake her.

  “It work?” Greg asked, sparing a quick look as he got onto the highway.

  “She’s all better,” I said, plopping my but into the now cold seat. “It was weird though. At first, it looked like she was about to die. I wasn’t back there long, but now it looks like there wasn’t anything wrong with her at all.”

  “Pure white?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “I’ve never seen one so pure.”

  “Me…” Greg’s words were cut off by a horrific scream from the back. I unbuckled my seatbelt and rushed to the back to see what was wrong.

  “Where does it hurt?” I asked as I sat down next to her again.

  Her screamed stopped and her face instantly turned purple. She was mouthing words I couldn’t make them out and told her to point the spot. Her shaking fingers stopped on her chest.

  I pulled up her shirt to get a pure bond and placed one hand on each side of her rib cage. Her chest wasn’t moving at all, but her hands clawed at her throat, probably trying to grasp for air.

  I started my chant anew, more feverishly than the last. I needed to get the flow of magic roaring through her chest in a hurry, but I had to do it blind.

  The near searing heat leapt from my fingertips and into the girl’s chest. The skin around my fingers turned red from the heat. Almost like I was cooking her from the outside. As much as I hated hurting her more, I knew I could heal that damage later on.

  Her face turned blue, and she held her throat, clawing at something I couldn’t see. I wanted to put a hand on her throat, to clear whatever was happening up there, but if I did, there was a chance I wouldn’t get whatever was in the chest. So I did the only thing I could think of and increased the flow of magic into her.