by SM Reine
“I see that.”
“What’s the problem?”
“It feels like there are websites I want to visit. I don’t know which ones.” She noticed him carrying luggage. “Why have you packed?”
“I just killed a bunch of assassins within eyesight of my hospital. It seems like it’s time to find a new job.”
“I’m sorry,” Marion said.
He shrugged. He’d known it would happen sooner or later. Luke’s life in Ransom Falls had been too pleasant and rewarding to last very long.
Marion started typing. He looked over her shoulder to see that she was searching for the name “Seth Wilder.” The top results were for a book—an autobiography written by the Alpha of the North American shifter pack, Rylie Gresham.
“Seth Wilder is a historical figure,” Marion said. “How interesting. Do you own this book?”
“Nope,” Luke said. He’d chucked his hardback copy of Rylie’s autobiography in the trash years earlier.
“I don’t suppose there are any bookstores in Ransom Falls. I’ll have to check when I get to the next city.”
“And which city will that be?” Luke asked.
“Whichever one the next bus goes to, I suppose.”
Marion couldn’t be considering trying to get on a bus again after what had happened the last time. She was clearly a public safety risk.
But how else was she supposed to get around?
Luke sighed. “Look…it’s late. You should get some sleep. I’ll take you to Vancouver Island after sunrise.”
Her eyes brightened. “Really?”
“Really. God only knows what’d happen if I let you hitchhike. I just have to check in at the hospital before I can go anywhere.”
Marion’s face fell. “I see.” She scanned his apartment and her eyes fell on the car keys dangling on the hook over by his front door. Luke didn’t need to be psychic to tell that she was thinking about hijacking his car.
Then she picked up the printed version of the bounty. It was strange seeing striking eyes like hers—the eyes of an angel—filled with helpless fear.
Luke sat next to her on the couch and searched the air for words. “Marion…” Nothing comforting sprang to mind.
The problem was her lack of memory. The Marion Garin that Luke was aware of—the mage, the political figure, daughter of powerful people—wouldn’t have been daunted by the idea of people out to kill her.
Marion had been silent for long minutes, and Luke thought that she was worrying until he glanced at her again. Her eyes were getting heavy. The assassination attempt was catching up with her.
“Stretch out, use the blanket, take a nap,” he said.
That woke Marion up. “What are you going to do?”
He grabbed his keys. “Like I said, visit the hospital. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep the lights off, be quiet, and you should be safe. All right? Don’t go outside.”
Marion settled back on the couch, pulling the blanket over her legs. “You don’t need to remind me.”
“I’ll be fast,” he said.
Her head was already resting on her arm, eyes sliding closed.
He waited for a moment to see if she was going to go anywhere. It didn’t seem likely. Her heart was already slowing with fatigue—he could see the way that her pulse decelerated in the faintest flush of skin on her throat.
Luke made himself look away from her veins, clutching his keys hard enough that they bit into his hand, and he left.
* * *
Marion waited until Luke left. She counted to ten. And then she followed him.
Lucas Flynn was a man of mystery folded within mystery. It wasn’t natural for someone to be as helpful as he was, particularly when his mysteries involved such skill with a sidearm, deployed on behalf of a total stranger like Marion.
It would have been nice if she weren’t suspicious, but that simply wasn’t the case.
He took his pickup. She couldn’t keep up with him on foot, but she didn’t need to. She found his vehicle parked behind the hospital down the road, halfway hidden by the trees. He had gone to work and was trying to be subtle about it.
Marion walked along the open windows of the hospital, peering inside. Most patients were asleep. A few rooms were empty. Others she couldn’t investigate at all because their windows were shuttered and locked. The instant that Marion saw the glint of gray metal, she knew that those shutters were lined with silver.
Many urban hospitals had safe rooms for shifters, but it was strange to see such a safe room in a rural area. Stranger still to see one shuttered window hanging open on the night of a new moon.
Marion crouched below the window and peeked over the sill, shrouded in the shadows of the trees.
The safe room was small, but without glasses, her vision was still too blurry to read the whiteboard on the far wall. It was impossible to tell the patient’s name. A shrunken old woman rested in the bed. She was sleeping, but twitching occasionally.
Luke sat in the chair beside her bed, gazing at her face with an inscrutable expression.
When the patient moaned in her sleep, he smoothed his hand over her papery skin. “Mrs. Eiderman.” Her brow crimped, and he said her name again, louder the second time. “Mrs. Eiderman, it’s Dr. Flynn.”
The patient’s eyes opened with effort. “You came.”
“I’d never miss a date,” he said, giving her a slanted smile.
Marion was watching something much too private—the answer to one mystery she never should have stumbled upon. Yet she couldn’t tear herself away from the window. Her eyes were fixed to the place where Luke gently rubbed Mrs. Eiderman’s arm.
“It hurts,” Mrs. Eiderman said.
“I’ll turn up your drip.” But once he inspected the IV pole, he hesitated. “If I kick this up, you’ll have a hard time remaining conscious.”
“I don’t care anymore. This is it, Dr. Flynn.”
The doctor pushed the button to increase the dosage. “Call me Luke.”
“Luke,” she said with a sigh.
Marion couldn’t stay back anymore. She climbed over the windowsill.
The patient’s eyes focused on her. “Oh, beautiful.”
“Marion,” Luke said, rising from the chair.
“I’m sorry,” Marion said. “I’m sorry.” But she didn’t leave. She slipped around the bed to join Luke. “Hello, Mrs. Eiderman. My name is Marion. I’m—I’m a patient at this hospital, too. A patient of Dr. Flynn’s.” The introduction felt inadequate, but that was the only thing she knew about herself.
“Beautiful,” Mrs. Eiderman said again.
Luke sank into the chair again. Rested his elbows on the bed’s rail, put his hand over the patient’s. “The new moon is rising.”
A shiver rolled through Mrs. Eiderman’s body. Her face twisted. “I know.” Shivers turned to seizure, her eyes rolled back, and her skin roiled. Even without her memory, Marion recognized the symptoms of lycanthropy.
She could tell by Luke’s expression that it wasn’t normal, and that Mrs. Eiderman wasn’t going to survive.
This was why Luke had delayed their escape from Ransom Falls. This was the one thing he needed to do that was more urgent than trying to escape assassins.
He needed to be with one of his patients for her final night.
While Luke watched Mrs. Eiderman’s tremors, Marion watched him. What kind of man killed with such grace yet treasured life so immensely? How could a doctor be so deadly, but so merciful?
Mrs. Eiderman’s breathing grew labored. Her lips were turning blue. Fur thrust from her arms, then fell out, spilling atop the sheets. Too weak to change, too sick to stay human. She shook so hard that something inside of her body broke. Marion could hear the muffled pops.
There was no turning up the drip. Nothing could take away her pain now.
For a third time, Marion said, “I’m sorry.” She rested her chin on Luke’s shoulder, and her cheek brushed against his.
She hadn’t me
ant to touch him, but intent didn’t matter. Only action.
Her mind opened.
Mrs. Eiderman was the most brilliant star in the sky, so bright that she dimmed the world around her. Her soul gleamed pristine even when she was dying. And there was no doubt about it: the old woman was drawing the last breaths she would ever take. Her heart simply didn’t have the ability to beat much longer. The fact that she’d waited long enough for Luke to witness it was a miracle.
Thought and memory and spirit tangled over the surface of her mind in silver fibers. They spoke of a long and beautiful life. Of a woman who had known love in marriage and motherhood. Of someone who had forged a satisfying career. Of a survivor who had lived through Genesis and lived to see grandchildren, with a great-grandchild to come.
All of that was sunsetting below the horizon of her life. The pain reduced the glory of her final moments.
Marion also saw how to take the hurt away.
She reached toward Mrs. Eiderman to fix it.
Luke caught her wrist. “Don’t, Marion.”
She only realized that she was starting to cry because his face was blurry despite being inches away. “Please trust me.”
He released her.
Marion linked her fingers with Mrs. Eiderman’s.
Runes appeared in Marion’s mind. She read them as easily as she read the English language, and as easily as she had spoken French when she’d woken up. Some of those runes were to relieve pain. Some were for grace. Some were for emotional peace. All of them tangled together were intended to take a person beyond the harsh cruelties of reality. It would elevate her to something very much like Heaven.
“Come with me,” Marion whispered. “Come with me, Elena.” That was Mrs. Eiderman’s name. It was spelled out among the runes, stamped upon the crystalline perfection of her soul.
Magic braided with a lifetime of moments.
Marion couldn’t take the pain away, but she could lift Mrs. Eiderman above it. And she did. She took her consciousness somewhere lycanthropy and old age couldn’t reach.
The patient stopped shaking. She sagged into the bed.
“You’re okay,” Marion said, eyes burning, throat thick. “I’m with you.” She was with Elena Eiderman—not just in her last minutes, but in every minute that had come before.
“Beautiful,” Mrs. Eiderman breathed.
When she exhaled, she didn’t inhale again.
There was no pain in the end.
6
No animals sang in the depths of night. The forest was hushed. Cool wind breathed the scent of rain over Luke where he sat beside Marion on the tailgate of his pickup.
Black coffee stolen from a hospital break room warmed his hands. Marion held hot chocolate made from years-old powder and water. She didn’t complain about it, but that might have been because she wasn’t drinking, just as she wasn’t moving or speaking.
“That was impressive,” Luke said.
Marion’s eyes lifted to his, as though she’d been startled by the sound of his voice. “Hmm?”
“Your spell. I thought you didn’t remember any magic.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“That’s not what it looked like.” For a few minutes, when Marion had been holding Mrs. Eiderman’s hand, her eyes had shone with inhuman light and her flesh had glimmered.
Her thumb traced around the rim of the mug. “I didn’t remember any magic,” Marion amended. “Not until I touched you.”
Luke wasn’t comfortable with that: not the way that she had suddenly spoken English when their fingers had touched, or how the brush of her cheek against his had given her magic.
But he was grateful for it.
Marion hadn’t remembered magic at a time when she needed to save herself from urisk. It had only come to her in a moment of mercy, when she had been trying to deliver a woman to the other side.
“What I did for Elena must have been an angel thing, wasn’t it?” Marion asked.
He laughed softly. “No. That wasn’t just some angel thing.”
“Isn’t that what they do? Help people when they…” She bit the inside of her cheek and ducked her head. “Angels help people when they need it.”
“Angels aren’t like that.” He hesitated, questioning how much he should tell her. She was clearly sensitive. If he delivered the truth about the role angels had played in the world lately, she would internalize it, turn that on herself. But after what she’d done, he owed her whatever truth he could afford. “If they ease anyone’s death, it’s because they’re doing the killing.”
Marion clutched her cup tightly enough that the foam bent. “Angels are the bad guys?”
“That wouldn’t be the most nuanced analysis of world affairs, but it’s not wrong, either.” He rested his hand on her knee. “It doesn’t matter. We know one thing now. Whoever you were before you lost your memories, you were selfless. You’re kind.”
Spots of pink appeared on her cheeks. “I know something about you now too, Dr. Flynn.” She drained the foam cup of stale hot chocolate, then hopped off of the tailgate. “How far away did you say Vancouver Island is?”
“Twelve hours if we don’t stop.”
They climbed in. His pickup had an extended cab—the most spacious model that had been on the market three years earlier. There was enough room for another person to fit between Luke and Marion, perhaps two if their passengers had been small enough. It felt like too much distance, sitting behind the wheel and watching Marion slip into the seat on the far side.
Demons, angels, and sidhe flitted through his mind. All the things that might be able to rip half of a pickup off the road, killing Marion in an instant.
Who would hold her hand while she died?
* * *
Fatigue took Marion before they got out of Ransom Falls. When she woke up, they were still driving.
“Welcome to Oregon.” Luke must have stopped driving at some point because he had gotten her a fresh cup of hot chocolate, which he offered her as soon as she sat up.
Marion yawned and stretched. “Thank you.” She inhaled the chocolaty scent, which was far richer than the drink she’d gotten from the hospital.
Chocolate was exactly the mood boost she needed. Her sad, confusing dreams had been tinted with silvery light, the glimmer of souls, and the end of a life. Walking someone through the final moments of her life was a sacred thing. Marion doubted she’d ever forget Elena Eiderman.
The old woman hadn’t been the sole focus of her dreams, though. Marion had dreamed of magic—not magic that healed, but magic that destroyed, bending the world to her will. She had dreamed of lightning. Shattering bodies. A sky that wept crimson rain.
She had dreamed of war.
Luckily, chocolate healed all imagined hurts. She emptied her cup all too quickly.
Before long, Luke stopped for gasoline at a farm town. Marion emerged from the pickup yawning and rubbing her eyes.
Oregon looked like a completely different world to Marion. The subtle differences shook her the most: the spacing between lanes on the road, the stoplights hanging from cables, the density of the trees. She had never seen anything like it in the brief expanse of her memories. The air tasted different in Oregon, too. It was wetter.
How many changes could she be expected to adapt to within a span of mere days?
“I’m going to stretch my legs,” Marion said. She needed to get her heart beating and blood flowing to clear her head.
Luke handed cash to her. “Could you get me another drink?”
“More coffee?”
“Whatever they have with lots of caffeine,” he said. “And get whatever you want, too.”
She managed a smile. “Dangerous offer, Dr. Flynn. Perhaps I’ll buy myself the lobster.”
“If you can find lobster in central Oregon, you’ll have earned it.”
The gas station was at the end of a rustic strip mall decorated with beams like tree trunk halves. Marion bought two coffees from a clerk who star
ed openly at her dark hair and shocking eyes. She couldn’t imagine many half-angels visited his gas station.
She paused by his door before leaving. There was a worn, wind-blasted sign posted beside it. “We Report Preternaturals,” it said. It was so battered that Marion thought it might be older than she was.
Report preternaturals? To whom? She would have to ask Luke.
He was leaning against his pickup as an attendant pumped his gas. She hesitated to approach. The attendant looked ordinary enough—as human as anyone else she’d seen—but after her earlier encounters, she was feeling paranoid about strangers.
Marion wandered down the strip mall instead of rejoining Luke. There weren’t any places that might sell lobster, but there was an antique shop and, better still, a used bookstore. That was where she entered. It had a paper notice much like the one at the gas station. “We Report Preternaturals.”
The bell jingled when she pushed the door open. Shelves covered every wall, and every inch of those shelves was packed with books.
“Oh my,” she whispered, breath catching in her throat.
“Can I help you?” A woman sat at the counter with a pile of paperbacks as tall as she was.
Marion must have looked stupid gawking at the bookstore. She floundered for words. “I want Rylie Gresham’s autobiography. Tell me where to find it.”
“Nonfiction, memoirs,” the clerk said. Suspicion flashed across her face.
Marion ducked into the shelves before the woman could speak to her again.
Wandering the aisles taught Marion something new about herself: she loved books. All of them. Skimming their spines made her heart beat faster the way she imagined the touch of a lover might.
Any one of those books could tell her a thousand things about the world she’d woken up in. If Marion had been given infinite time, she could have stayed in that store until she had pored over every page, every word, and gotten to know every character within.
One hardback in particular caught her eye. She’d located Rylie Gresham’s autobiography.
Marion set the coffee cups at the end of a shelf before pulling the book out. The dust jacket had soft corners and the pages were yellowed. The Alpha’s face took up the entire back cover. She was a beautiful woman, as golden-haired and -skinned as Luke was brown. Rylie Gresham might as well have been assembled from pure sunshine.