by Laura Bickle
“Your science cannot explain that,” I said to Alex.
He was silent. The men, panting, had backed off. Peter lowered the rifle, let it dangle by the strap from his hands.
But Linh moved forward, slowly, as if sleepwalking. At first, I thought she was following her sister. Then I thought that perhaps she’d been glamoured, that she felt the pull of Yen’s need through the gate.
In a burst of speed, she snatched the rifle from Peter’s grasp. She lifted it to her shoulder, advanced upon the gate.
The men began to pursue her.
“No,” Peter said. “Let her go.”
Linh moved the slide back on the rifle, held it to her good eye. She looked down the barrel at her sister, hissing, on the street. I didn’t understand the language that they spoke, but I knew that Yen was pleading by her tone, knew that Linh said something soothing.
And then the loud crack of a rifle shot obliterated her soft words.
Yen fell backward on the pavement, her forehead blossomed in a red smear. Linh held the rifle out to her side, her gaze fixed on her sister, her back turned to us. Peter snatched the rifle away.
Linh stood there at the gate for a long time after, unmoving.
It was done.
***
“This is irreversible,” Matt said.
“It’s what I want,” Alex said. “It’s my only hope of getting north in one piece.”
The two men stood in the kitchen. Matt was sterilizing metal syringes in a pot of boiling water. I stood in the shadows, watching.
“I don’t know what it will do to you, long term,” Matt warned. “It could make you sterile. Give you cancer, or worse.”
“Nothing is worse than that.” Alex jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at Outside.
“If you’re willing, then, I want to try something different.” Matt went to the refrigerator and pulled out a dish of something that looked like mold. He unfolded plastic wrap on the top.
“Is that . . . the algae?” Alex asked. It looked faintly grayish green, floating on a pool of clear liquid.
“This isn’t the original culture . . . it’s a colony of it. I want to see if we can create separate colonies that can thrive, if we can perhaps take the cultures beyond the gate. Give the immunity to vampirism to other people.”
Alex nodded. “And I get to be your guinea pig. I figured that you guys had a motivation for letting us in.”
Matt shook his head. “Well, we try to be good Samaritans, but I wouldn’t pass up a chance to see if we can go beyond what we’ve done.”
I found my voice. “I don’t like the idea of you being part of an experiment.”
Alex reached out to me, took my hand. “I know, Bonnet. But I gotta try.”
I lowered my head. I had no choice but to accept this. He let my hand go.
“What can I expect?” Alex asked, rolling up his sleeve.
Matt fished a syringe out of the boiling water with a pair of tongs. “Well, it sucks, to be honest. I won’t lie to you. It’s painful. The algae and recombinant virus DNA will invade your cells. It will hurt like nothing you’ve ever felt. You’ll vomit, shake. It’s a lot like going through drug withdrawal.”
I could see Alex hesitate. He rocked back and forth on his toes as Matt drew up some of the fluid from the bottom of the dish with the syringe.
“Still want it?” he asked.
Alex stuck his arm out. “Yeah. Load me up, doc.”
The bright silver needle slipped underneath his skin. I heard Alex hiss in pain. The contents of the syringe disappeared slowly.
Matt nodded, withdrew the needle. “It’s done.”
Alex rubbed his arm, flexed his elbow.
I looked away. There was no going back.
***
Becoming an angel is not like I pictured it.
The Bible told me that angels are luminous shining beings, sitting at the foot of God. I believed that they bask in the direct love of God. There is no need for them to prove themselves. They have eternal love and eternal life.
Humans are not that fortunate.
Alex went to bed with a fever and stayed there.
I sat beside him with a bowl of cool water and a sponge. I bathed his hot face as he tossed and turned. I watched as cramps racked his body, stroked his hair as he retched into a bucket. He grew pale and his eyes sunken. Water would not stay down.
“You know, Bonnet,” he said. “I thought about forcing you to take the serum.”
My brow narrowed. “You wouldn’t—all that talk of respecting strength and self-determination?”
His sweaty hand crept toward mine like a spider. “But all that seems like nothing when you’re considering life and death. I want you to live.”
“I want you to live too.” And I wasn’t so sure that he was going to.
Three days later, he was still suffering. His skin was loose, and sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. He was freezing, teeth chattering. He’d grown delirious, babbling about bonnets and vampires and Dracula when his eyes were open. When his eyes were shut, his breathing was faint and shallow. His pulse was light and thready. Once or twice in the night, I thought he’d stopped breathing, only to hear him start again with a rasp.
I looked over his head at Matt standing in the doorway.
“Is this normal?” I demanded of him.
“Nothing’s normal around here,” he said. “But . . . it hasn’t been this bad before.”
“Do something!” I insisted.
“There’s nothing to do. Just wait . . . and hope he survives it.”
Furious, I lay next to Alex in bed. Fenrir was draped across his feet, watching him with worried eyes. I closed my eyes and prayed in the darkness, prayed that Alex would survive, even though he had turned his back on God’s plan for his human form.
I was pretty sure that even if he did survive, God would not accept him into heaven, no matter how much he might repent for it later. The only lifetime he would have was this one, here on earth.
And that made me angry. Angry that he would leave me. That he had somehow pushed me aside.
I drowsed, listening to his breathing. I slept with my hand on his chest, feeling his heart and rib cage move.
I dreamed strange dreams of glowing, wingless angels with sharp teeth that could sever bone. No matter how far I ran, I couldn’t escape them. They followed me wherever I fled, in darkness, in daylight, on ground sacred and profane.
Perhaps it was the sudden stillness that jolted me awake.
I opened my eyes to stare at Alex. I could see tiny blood vessels shining a phosphorescent green, a fine and blotchy webbing beneath his skin.
His breath shuddered under my fingers, and I saw the artery in his neck push light from his chest to his head. The light had spread beneath his tattoos, sharpening their black outlines in the darkness.
I pulled my hand away. He seemed alien to me. Unreal. Tainted.
His eyes opened. They glowed in the darkness.
Not so different from vampire eyes.
***
Alex had emerged from the grip of the serum. Alive, but changed.
He and I sat on the bench at the end of the dock, watching the gulls wheel overhead in the cold sunshine. The sky was clear and blue and the lake calm. Black ducks bobbed and fished in the rills of waves. A blue heron paced along the edge of the dock, opening his wings to the sun.
Alex and I sat at opposite ends of the bench. Fenrir sat on the ground between us, though he leaned against Alex’s leg. I knit my hands together. I felt that everything was leaving me. Without Alex, there was nothing left.
“What’s it like?” I asked at last.
He shrugged, the movement constricted by his hands in his pockets. “No different from how I felt before, now that I’m past the assimilation sickness.”
I glanced sidelong at him. “Really?”
He squinted at the distant horizon, and I could tell he was thinking. He took a hand out of his pocket and wiggled his finger
s, examining them as if he hadn’t really looked at them before. I didn’t think that he would lie to me.
“It’s subtle. But I feel a bit lighter. A bit more at peace. I think that probably has to do more with the decision being done than any actual biological effects. But I feel . . . hopeful. Hopeful that some of us might survive this. That there might actually be a future.” He blew out his breath. “But it’s gonna be hard. It’s going to be beyond what any of us expected. Something completely crazy happened. But this might allow us to continue to exist.”
“You would take the serum north?”
He nodded into his coat. “Yeah. Matt says that the daughter cultures will grow all on their own. They just need cool temperatures and darkness. If there’s a chance that I could bring this to my parents, or, or . . . whoever’s left . . . I feel like I have to.”
“I understand.” But I also understood that I couldn’t go with him, not like I was now. Vulnerable. I had lost the Himmelsbrief, and I was just meat now. I had no choice but to stay here.
“A bunch of the others are going to take cultures, go out, try to find others and give them the serum.”
“It sounds like missionary work.” Plain people didn’t do such work. We believed in conducting life according to God’s will, according to the Ordnung, and teaching only by example.
“In some way, yeah. Perhaps, eventually, there will be enough of us to survive as a species.”
I looked down at my hands. I didn’t want to never see Alex again.
“You could do that too, you know. Take the serum back to your community.”
I can’t say that I hadn’t thought of that, but I figured it would be a useless errand. “It’s against every belief we have. It’s tampering with God’s creation. Railing against God’s will.”
“There’s a myth from ancient Egypt about how the souls of the dead are judged by Ma’at, the goddess of justice. The heart of a deceased person is weighed against a feather. If the heart is pure, lighter than the feather, then its owner is allowed to enter the afterlife.”
“That’s a lovely story.” I felt my jaw tighten. “But I don’t think it’s Ma’at who will be judging me.”
He shrugged. “The whole game has changed, Bonnet. Dogma’s gonna change. You can’t say that things weren’t changing when you were placed under the Bann.”
I frowned. “The Elders were acting . . . beyond the Ordnung.”
“To put it mildly. They tried to kill me. They imprisoned your Hexenmeister, denied the evil when it was on your doorstep. In the crucible of a crisis, Bonnet, power corrupts.”
I could not argue with that. “But I have been sent away. If I came back, under the Bann, no one would speak to me or open their doors to me.”
“Even if you had the only means of survival?”
My voice was small as I spoke aloud a dark thought, my worst fear that had begun to grow deep in my chest, chewing into my lungs with black roots: “If there is anyone left.”
“They may refuse it,” Alex said. “But you could offer them a choice.”
I thought of my parents. Of my little sister. And the incredible possibility of having the power to save them all.
It was too seductive.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I had prayed to God for guidance.
I went to the little church in the center of Water’s Edge to see if perhaps God would hear me more there. The building was cold, empty. My breath made ghosts in the air as I knelt before a wooden altar, as I had seen Ginger do. A carved wood cross cast a shadow down upon me.
“Please,” I said. “I know that I’ve been selfish and willful. And that I have no right to answers, to question your divine will. But please . . . tell me what I should do. Give me a sign.”
Sunshine burned through high windows. I watched the dust motes stir. Doves warbled in the rafters above.
There was no answer.
I knew that I was safe here. I could stay here at Water’s Edge, eat down the stores of food in the household pantries with the rest of the inhabitants. I could listen to the lake, lose myself in that roar. I could spend the rest of my days here, on my knees, asking for forgiveness from God and hoping that my soul would be saved. I could wait for the finality of the end of the world, for God to say “Enough” and bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.
Or I could fight.
My knees ached when I climbed to my feet. I felt anger. I had devoted my life to God but had received no answers. I felt betrayed. That anger scorched my throat as I whispered, “How could you let this happen?” And that damning whisper echoed incredibly loud in that bitter, vacant space. I felt tears dripping down my chin, and my fingernails pressed into my palms. “How could you let this happen if you loved us?”
Doubt overtook me. What if Matt was right? What if all our safe places and holy relics only held some molecular evidence of our beliefs, and there was nothing behind them? No God, nothing but atoms and molecules aligning in crystalline forms?
I left the silent church without an answer from God. But I had an answer from within.
***
I asked Matt for the serum.
I rationalized it, told myself that it was no different from getting an immunization. Many of the children in the Amish community received immunizations when they were available. But I knew an immunization would not change me in the way that this shot would.
I was a coward about it, looking away when the needle slipped beneath my skin. I felt a hot burn of metal and something spreading within my veins. It scalded like the snake’s venom, and I feared I had made the wrong decision. Maybe it was the right one, but I had come to it from the wrong source, from rage and anger. Either way, I would have to live with it.
Alex took me upstairs to bed. He murmured soothing words, scraped my hair out of my face as I vomited. When my fever grew high, he shoveled me into the shower and turned the frigid water on. He wrapped me in blankets and told me it would be over soon. I felt Cora’s cool hands on my forehead and the murmuring of Matt and Judy.
And I dreamed. I dreamed, in my delirium, that I had returned home, under a thick and leaden winter sky. I had come back to houses razed by fire, to blackened and hollow barns. I searched for my home and found it still standing.
The old Hexenmeister stood at the door. He was nearly translucent in his paleness.
“Herr Stoltz,” I said. “What has happened?”
The old man’s rheumy eyes filled with tears. “The Darkness came. And I could not root it out alone.”
I reached out to steady him. I could see that he was too frail to fight now. His hand shook on a cane, and I knew that it was too palsied to write, to script another Himmelsbrief or paint another hex sign.
My hand seemed very strong beside his. Young. Powerful.
“My family?” I choked.
“Go see.”
I walked into my house. The screen door slammed behind me. I could see the Darkness moving inside.
And also light. I saw the green glow of foxfire, seething within.
Only the green glow wore the faces of my family members. It was an eerie incandescence, uneven under mottled skin and fading into my mother’s and sister’s hair and my father’s beard. I felt no heat from them, nothing but the pale light of their hands.
I reached for them, expecting them to be as solid as the people I’d met at Water’s Edge. They had been convinced to take the serum. I had saved them. I felt my heart sing in happiness at seeing them whole and alive, no matter their form.
But my hands passed through them, and I realized that they were no longer alive. They were just apparitions. Ghosts. Dead and gone.
The light faded, and I was in darkness.
Alone.
I stared up at the ceiling, awake, knowing that I had made a terrible mistake. I heard the ticking of a clock, heard the thin roar of waves outside and the sound of voices downstairs in the kitchen.
I sat up in bed. Alex was gone. I thought I heard his voice downstairs.<
br />
I looked down at my hands.
They glowed. I could see tiny pulses of light in my palms, pushing blood and light from my wrists to my fingertips in a smear of phosphorescence. I rubbed my palms together, but the light wouldn’t rub off.
With dread, I crept to the mirror above the dresser. I lifted my hands to my face. My skin shone with a dull luminescence. My eyes were like stars and each faint freckle part of a constellation. My jaw fell open and the interior of my mouth shone, backlighting my teeth, light leaking around the edge of my lips, as if I’d just eaten a handful of bright berries.
I felt dizzy, my weight shifting from foot to foot and heart hammering. I was not myself.
I was incandescent.
I was beautiful.
I snatched up my coat and slipped it on over my nightdress, jammed my feet into my boots. I fled down the steps and out the back door before anyone could stop me, into the darkness that I had feared for so long. The wind lashed at my legs, and I instinctively ran to the water.
Shivering, I stood on the rocks and stared up at the sky. I knew that I shone brighter than the full moon. My fractured green reflection in the waves was more luminous. I felt terrified. But not numb. Every nerve ending felt abraded and open. My frozen breath even reflected the green gloaming.
I stumbled down the jagged rocks to the edge of the water to press my hands to its shocking coldness. I wanted to scrub the light away. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still human, could still feel.
I waded into the water. I sucked in my breath as the cold invaded my boots. My nightdress floated around my knees, my coat opening like a black wing. I knelt down, reached for my reflection in the water.
“Bonnet.”
I whirled. Alex approached me, Fenrir at his side. The wolf ran into the lake and began to whimper. My wet hand strayed into the soft fur between his ears.
Alex glowed like I did. The planes of his face were illuminated in odd angles. Like something terrible, other than human. I was reminded of Eve’s awful choice in the Bible, of being tempted by the serpent and the knowledge of good and evil. I wondered if she thought she could protect Adam from it by knowing it.