by L. J. Smith
Poppy was so small already.
He’d always been afraid of hurting her. She looked so fragile, and he could hurt somebody much stronger if he wasn’t careful. That was one reason he kept a certain distance between them.
One reason. Not the main one.
The other was something he couldn’t put into words, not even to himself. It brought him right up to the edge of the forbidden. To face rules that had been ingrained in him since birth.
None of the Night People could fall in love with a human. The sentence for breaking the law was death.
It didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do now. Where he had to go.
Cold and precise, James logged off the Net. He stood, picked up his sunglasses, slid them into place. Went out into the merciless June sunlight, slamming his apartment door behind him.
Poppy looked around the hospital room unhappily. There was nothing so awful about it, except that it was too cold, but…it was a hospital. That was the truth behind the pretty pink-and-blue curtains and the closed-circuit TV and the dinner menu decorated with cartoon characters. It was a place you didn’t come unless you were Pretty Darn Sick.
Oh, come on, she told herself. Cheer up a little. What happened to the power of Poppytive thinking? Where’s Poppyanna when you need her? Where’s Mary Poppy-ins?
God, I’m even making myself gag, she thought.
But she found herself smiling faintly, with self-deprecating humor if nothing else. And the nurses were nice here, and the bed was extremely cool. It had a remote control on the side that bent it into every imaginable position.
Her mother came in while she was playing with it.
“I got hold of Cliff; he’ll be here later. Meanwhile, I think you’d better change so you’re ready for the tests.”
Poppy looked at the blue-and-white striped seersucker hospital robe and felt a painful spasm that seemed to reach from her stomach to her back. And something in the deepest part of her said, Please, not yet. I’ll never be ready.
James pulled his Integra into a parking space on Ferry Street near Stoneham. It wasn’t a nice part of town. Tourists visiting Los Angeles avoided this area.
The building was sagging and decrepit. Several stores were vacant, with cardboard taped over broken windows. Graffiti covered the peeling paint on the cinder-block walls.
Even the smog seemed to hang thicker here. The air itself seemed yellow and cloying. Like a poisonous miasma, it darkened the brightest day and made everything look unreal and ominous.
James walked around to the back of the building. There, among the freight entrances of the stores in front, was one door unmarked by graffiti. The sign above it had no words. Just a picture of a black flower.
A black iris.
James knocked. The door opened two inches, and a skinny kid in a wrinkled T-shirt peered out with beady eyes.
“It’s me, Ulf,” James said, resisting the temptation to kick the door in. Werewolves, he thought. Why do they have to be so territorial?
The door opened just enough to let James in. The skinny kid glanced suspiciously outside before shutting it again.
“Go mark a fire hydrant or something,” James suggested over his shoulder.
The place looked like a small café. A darkened room with little round tables crammed in side by side, surrounded by wooden chairs. There were a few scattered people sitting down, all of them looking like teenagers. Two guys were playing pool in the back.
James went over to one of the round tables where a girl was sitting. He took off his sunglasses and sat down.
“Hi, Gisèle.”
The girl looked up. She had dark hair and blue eyes. Slanted, mysterious eyes which seemed to have been outlined in black eyeliner—ancient-Egyptian style.
She looked like a witch, which was no coincidence.
“James. I’ve missed you.” Her voice was soft and husky. “How’s it going these days?” She cupped her hands around the unlit candle on the table and made a quick motion as if releasing a captive bird. As her hands moved away, the candle wick burst into flame.
“Still as gorgeous as ever,” she said, smiling at him in the dancing golden light.
“That goes for you, too. But the truth is, I’m here on business.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Aren’t you always?”
“This is different. I want to ask your…professional opinion on something.”
She spread her slender hands, silver fingernails glowing in the candle’s flame. On her index finger was a ring with a black dahlia. “My powers are at your disposal. Is there someone you want cursed? Or maybe you want to attract good luck or prosperity. I know you can’t need a love charm.”
“I want a spell—to cure a disease. I don’t know if it needs to be specific to the disease, or if something more general would work. A—general health spell…”
“James.” She chuckled lazily and put a hand on his, stroking lightly. “You’re really worked up, aren’t you? I’ve never seen you like this.”
It was true; he was experiencing a major loss of control. He worked against it, disciplining himself into perfect stillness.
“What particular disease are we talking about?” Gisèle asked, when he didn’t speak again.
“Cancer.”
Gisèle threw back her head and laughed. “You’re telling me your kind can get cancer? I don’t believe it. Eat and breathe all you want, but don’t try to convince me the lamia get human diseases.”
This was the hard part. James said quietly, “The person with the disease isn’t my kind. She’s not your kind, either. She’s human.”
Gisèle’s smile disappeared. Her voice was no longer husky or lazy as she said, “An outsider? Vermin? Are you crazy, James?”
“She doesn’t know anything about me or the Night World. I don’t want to break any laws. I just want her well.”
The slanted blue eyes were searching his face. “Are you sure you haven’t broken the laws already?” And when James looked determined not to understand this, she added in a lowered voice, “Are you sure you’re not in love with her?”
James made himself meet the probing gaze directly. He spoke softly and dangerously. “Don’t say that unless you want a fight.”
Gisèle looked away. She played with her ring. The candle flame dwindled and died.
“James, I’ve known you for a long time,” she said without looking up. “I don’t want to get you in trouble. I believe you when you say you haven’t broken any laws—but I think we’d both better forget this conversation. Just walk out now and I’ll pretend it never happened.”
“And the spell?”
“There’s no such thing. And if there was, I wouldn’t help you. Just go.”
James went.
There was one other possibility that he could think of. He drove to Brentwood, to an area that was as different from the last as a diamond is from coal. He parked in a covered carport by a quaint adobe building with a fountain. Red and purple bougainvillaea climbed up the walls to the Spanish tile on the roof.
Walking through an archway into a courtyard, he came to an office with gold letters on the door. Jasper R. Rasmussen, Ph.D. His father was a psychologist.
Before he could reach for the handle, the door opened and a woman came out. She was like most of his father’s clients, forty-something, obviously rich, wearing a designer jogging suit and high-heeled sandals.
She looked a little dazed and dreamy, and there were two small, rapidly healing puncture wounds on her neck.
James went into the office. There was a waiting room, but no receptionist. Strains of Mozart came from the inner office. James knocked on the door.
“Dad?”
The door opened to reveal a handsome man with dark hair. He was wearing a perfectly tailored gray suit and a shirt with French cuffs. He had an aura of power and purpose.
But not of warmth. He said, “What is it, James?” in the same voice he used for his clients: thoughtful, deliberate, confident.
<
br /> “Do you have a minute?”
His father glanced at his Rolex. “As a matter of fact, my next patient won’t be here for half an hour.”
“There’s something I need to talk about.”
His father looked at him keenly, then gestured to an overstuffed chair. James eased into it, but found himself pulling forward to sit on the edge.
“What’s on your mind?”
James searched for the right words. Everything depended on whether he could make his father understand. But what were the right words? At last he settled for bluntness.
“It’s Poppy. She’s been sick for a while, and now they think she has cancer.”
Dr. Rasmussen looked surprised. “I’m sorry to hear that.” But there was no sorrow in his voice.
“And it’s a bad cancer. It’s incredibly painful and just about one hundred percent incurable.”
“That’s a pity.” Again there was nothing but mild surprise in his father’s voice. And suddenly James knew where that came from. It wasn’t surprise that Poppy was sick; it was surprise that James had made a trip just to tell him this.
“Dad, if she’s got this cancer, she’s dying. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Dr. Rasmussen steepled his fingers and stared into the ruddy gloss of his mahogany desk. He spoke slowly and steadily. “James, we’ve been through this before. You know that your mother and I are worried about you getting too close to Poppy. Too…attached…to her.”
James felt a surge of cold rage. “Like I got too attached to Miss Emma?”
His father didn’t blink. “Something like that.”
James fought the pictures that wanted to form in his mind. He couldn’t think about Miss Emma now; he needed to be detached. That was the only way to convince his father.
“Dad, what I’m trying to say is that I’ve known Poppy just about all my life. She’s useful to me.”
“How? Not in the obvious way. You’ve never fed on her, have you?”
James swallowed, feeling nauseated. Feed on Poppy? Use her like that? Even the thought of it made him sick.
“Dad, she’s my friend,” he said, abandoning any pretense of objectivity. “I can’t just watch her suffer. I can’t. I have to do something about it.”
His father’s face cleared. “I see.”
James felt dizzy with astonished relief. “You understand?”
“James, at times one can’t help a certain feeling of…compassion for humans. In general, I wouldn’t encourage it—but you have known Poppy a long while. You feel pity for her suffering. If you want to make that suffering shorter, then, yes, I understand.”
The relief crashed down around James. He stared at his father for a few seconds, then said softly, “Mercy killing? I thought the Elders had put a ban on deaths in this area.”
“Just be reasonably discreet about it. As long as it seems to be natural, we’ll all look the other way. There won’t be any reason to call in the Elders.”
There was a metallic taste in James’s mouth. He stood and laughed shortly. “Thanks, Dad. You’ve really helped a lot.”
His father didn’t seem to hear the sarcasm. “Glad to do it, James. By the way, how are things at the apartments?”
“Fine,” James said emptily.
“And at school?”
“School’s over, Dad,” James said, and let himself out.
In the courtyard he leaned against an adobe wall and stared at the splashing water of the fountain.
He was out of options. Out of hope. The laws of the Night World said so.
If Poppy had the disease, she would die from it.
CHAPTER 4
Poppy was staring without appetite at a dinner tray of chicken nuggets and trench fries when Dr. Franklin came in the room.
The tests were over. The CAT scan had been all right, if claustrophobic, but the ERCP had been awful. Poppy could still feel the ghost of the tube in her throat every time she swallowed.
“You’re leaving all this great hospital food,” Dr. Franklin said with gentle humor. Poppy managed a smile for him.
He went on talking about innocuous things. He didn’t say anything about the test results, and Poppy had no idea when they were supposed to come in. She was suspicious of Dr. Franklin, though. Something about him, the gentle way he patted her foot under the blanket or the shadows around his eyes…
When he casually suggested that Poppy’s mother might want to “come for a little walk down the hall,” Poppy’s suspicion crystallized.
He’s going to tell her. He’s got the results, but he doesn’t want me to know.
Her plan was made in the same instant. She yawned and said, “Go on, Mom; I’m a little bit sleepy.” Then she lay back and shut her eyes.
As soon as they were gone, she got off the bed. She watched their retreating backs as they went down the hall into another doorway. Then, in her stocking feet, she quietly followed them.
She was delayed for several minutes at the nursing station. “Just stretching my legs,” she said to a nurse who looked inquiringly at her, and she pretended to be walking at random. When the nurse picked up a clipboard and went into one of the patients’ rooms, Poppy hurried on down the corridor.
The room at the end was the waiting room—she’d seen it earlier. It had a TV and a complete kitchen setup so relatives could hang out in comfort. The door was ajar and Poppy approached it stealthily. She could hear the low rumble of Dr. Franklin’s voice, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Very cautiously Poppy edged closer. She chanced one look around the door.
She saw at once that there was no need for caution. Everyone in that room was completely occupied.
Dr. Franklin was sitting on one of the couches. Beside him was an African-American woman with glasses on a chain around her neck. She was wearing the white coat of a doctor.
On the other couch was Poppy’s stepfather, Cliff. His normally perfect dark hair was slightly mussed, his rock-steady jaw was working. He had his arm around her mother. Dr. Franklin was talking to both of them, his hand on her mother’s shoulder.
And Poppy’s mother was sobbing.
Poppy pulled back from the doorway.
Oh, my God. I’ve got it.
She’d never seen her mother cry before. Not when Poppy’s grandmother had died, not during the divorce from Poppy’s father. Her mother’s specialty was coping with things; she was the best coper Poppy had ever known.
But now…
I’ve got it. I’ve definitely got it.
Still, maybe it wasn’t so bad. Her mom was shocked, okay, that was natural. But it didn’t mean that Poppy was going to die or anything. Poppy had all of modern medicine on her side.
She kept telling herself this as she edged away from the waiting room.
She didn’t edge fast enough, though. Before she got out of earshot, she heard her mother’s voice, raised in something like anguish.
“My baby. Oh, my little girl.”
Poppy froze.
And then Cliff, loud and angry: “You’re trying to tell me there’s nothing?”
Poppy couldn’t feel her own breathing. Against her will, she moved back to the door.
“Dr. Loftus is an oncologist; an expert on this sort of cancer. She can explain better than I can,” Dr. Franklin was saying.
Then a new voice came—the other doctor. At first Poppy could only catch scattered phrases that didn’t seem to mean anything: adenocarcinoma, splenic venous occlusion, Stage Three. Medical jargon. Then Dr. Loftus said, “To put it simply, the problem is that the tumor has spread. It’s spread to the liver and the lymph nodes around the pancreas. That means it’s unresectable—we can’t operate.”
Cliff said, “But chemotherapy…”
“We might try a combination of radiation and chemotherapy with something called 5-fluorouracil. We’ve had some results with that. But I won’t mislead you. At best it may improve her survival time by a few weeks. At this point, we’re looking at
palliative measures—ways to reduce her pain and improve the quality of the time she has left. Do you understand?”
Poppy could hear choking sobs from her mother, but she couldn’t seem to move. She felt as if she were listening to some play on the radio. As if it had nothing to do with her.
Dr. Franklin said, “There are some research protocols right here in southern California. They’re experimenting with immunotherapy and cryogenic surgery. Again, we’re talking about palliation rather than a cure—”
“Damn it!” Cliff’s voice was explosive. “You’re talking about a little girl! How did this get to—to Stage Three—without anybody noticing? This kid was dancing all night two days ago.”
“Mr. Hilgard, I’m sorry,” Dr. Loftus said so softly that Poppy could barely pick up the words. “This kind of cancer is called a silent disease, because there are very few symptoms until it’s very far advanced. That’s why the survival rate is so low. And I have to tell you that Poppy is only the second teenager I’ve seen with this kind of tumor. Dr. Franklin made an extremely acute diagnosis when he decided to send her in for testing.”
“I should have known,” Poppy’s mother said in a thick voice. “I should have made her come in sooner. I should have—I should have—”
There was a banging sound. Poppy looked around the door, forgetting to be inconspicuous. Her mother was hitting the Formica table over and over. Cliff was trying to stop her.
Poppy reeled back.
Oh, God, I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t see this. I can’t look at this.
She turned and walked back down the hall. Her legs moved. Just like always. Amazing that they still worked.
And everything around her was just like always. The nursing station was still decorated for the Fourth of July. Her suitcase was still on the padded window seat in her room. The hardwood floor was still solid underneath her.