Fallen Angel

by Melody John

  She laughed, and said, ‘Okay, just hang on half a tic.’ She went out, but was back again in a few minutes with a plastic cup full of water.

  I gulped it down in two seconds flat, and she patiently went out again and came back with two more. I drank them all down, and then lay back in bed with a sigh of relief. ‘Golly. Thank you.’

  ‘That should help your headache,’ the nurse said, ‘but if it doesn’t, then let me know and I can give you something.’

  I assumed she meant like a paracetemol or something, and was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t have a morphine drip that I could overuse, just like in an actual episode of House. ‘Did they take blood?’ I asked, looking at my hand.

  ‘Yes, they did a blood test,’ the nurse said, ‘and they had you on a drip for a while.’

  ‘A drip?’ I asked, startled.

  ‘You were very dehydrated,’ she said. ‘Doctor was a bit worried for a while, but you responded well.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. That was something new. I’d always been tired after using my power for too long, but I’d assumed that was just because I wasn’t used to it. I was always ready to munch on something at any time of the day, so I hadn’t noticed feeling especially rundown afterwards. I’d have to remember that.

  ‘So make sure you get a lot of fluids,’ the nurse said. ‘Something sugary as well, to help with the shock. I think your friends have food for you—they’re waiting in the nurse’s station, if you’d like to see them.’

  ‘Yes please,’ I said.

  She went out, and in a few moments, the curtains were pulled back again, and David and Dmitri crowded in.

  ‘Hey,’ David said, coming close to the bedside. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘A bit yucky,’ I said.

  ‘They said you were dehydrated,’ Dmitri said. ‘I guess it must have been caused by you using your power so much in such a short space of time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve never known that to happen before. But, well, I guess I haven’t really used it enough to find out.’

  David still looked a little spooked by our talking so freely about it. He lowered his voice and asked, ‘Is it okay? Your power, I mean?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and grinned at his expression. ‘I’m not going to, like, flip out and tear down the building.’

  ‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘Because the rest of us aren’t exactly the Fantastic Four.’

  I met Dmitri’s eyes briefly, then looked away. So Dmitri hadn’t told him that much. I didn’t know if I was surprised or not, but I could see why he would want to keep it a secret. If Dmitri were going to tell David, then he should do it properly, not when everyone was running around focused on something else. That reminded me— ‘Where’s Laura? Is she okay?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ David said, ‘she’s fine. Well, she’s not fine—she has a concussion, and they want to keep her in overnight, but apart from that, she’s fine. Her parents are going to come and pick her up.’

  ‘Really?’ I frowned. ‘What are they going to say? What did you tell them about what happened?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ David said. ‘I just said that Laura had been in an accident, and she had a concussion, and then they said that they would come up and get her.’

  ‘Oh.’ I chewed on my lower lip. ‘That means we’re going to have to work out what to say.’

  ‘Jamie’s gone,’ Dmitri said. ‘Ted’s still here. He was really worried about both of you. But apparently Jamie hasn’t come back, and he’s not answering his phone or any texts. Ted’s left him about twelve messages, but there’s been no reply.’

  ‘Good riddance,’ I said feelingly. ‘I hope the police pick him up.’

  ‘Laura remembers that he was following her after she got out of the van,’ Dmitri says. ‘She doesn’t remember him hitting her.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ David said, ‘he told us what he did. We can still at least try to press charges and get him arrested.’

  I glanced at Dmitri. ‘We can—we can say that he was boasting about what he did. And he let it slip.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dmitri said.

  David frowned. He looked from one of us to the other. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ he said. His eyes widened. ‘Is this—is this a thing, to do with,’ he lowered his voice, ‘with your power?’

  Again, I met Dmitri’s eyes. He looked away. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can—I can kind of help people tell the truth sometimes, even when they don’t want to. Or make people think that—that something’s happening even when it’s not. So when—when we were talking to Jamie, I—made him tell us what he did, and I made you and Ted think that nothing weird was happening.’

  ‘What about Dmitri?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said quickly. ‘I did it to Dmitri as well.’

  David frowned. ‘Oh. Okay. Yeah. The police might think it a bit weird that Jamie would suddenly start boasting about it… but Jamie is an idiot. They might believe it.’

  ‘Yeah, they might,’ Dmitri said. ‘If we just make sure that we all say the same thing.’

  ‘Jamie was getting worked up because we were all so worried about Laura,’ I said, thinking it up as I went along.

  ‘He was angry,’ Dmitri said, ‘because we were all so concerned. It must have been because he felt guilty.’

  ‘And he was looking so shifty that we kept on asking him questions. We forced him to tell us.’

  ‘Forced him?’ David echoed. ‘What, did you punch him until he answered?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I’m a lady. I kicked him in the balls until he wept the answers.’

  We giggled for a moment, then grew serious again.

  ‘He didn’t tell us much,’ Dmitri said. ‘Not outright. But he mentioned the park, so we went there and searched until we found her in the rubble.’

  ‘And then… Lizzie fainted,’ David said.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said indignantly. ‘Why have I got to faint?’

  ‘Well, because you did,’ Dmitri said unsympathetically.

  ‘Well, yes…’

  ‘It was stress,’ David said. ‘You hadn’t eaten enough. No, you’d eaten something, and it had made you feel sick. So you were sick, and you were stressed, and then heaving all the rubble aside made you feel worse.’

  ‘Hopefully they won’t ask about that,’ Dmitri said. ‘Being sick and ill doesn’t really explain why you were so dehydrated. They had to have you on a drip, and everything.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and waved my hand at him. ‘It hurts.’

  ‘Pity they took it out,’ David said. ‘I’ve never seen one of those things IRL. It’s all so much like a House episode, isn’t it?’

  I grinned, and rolled my eyes. ‘So have you seen Laura? Where is she?’

  ‘She was in the bed next to you,’ David said. ‘But I think she went to get her stitches done, or something like that.’

  ‘So she’ll be back soon?’ I asked.

  ‘Should do.’

  I let out my breath in a long sigh. ‘That’s good. Golly. It feels like ages since we left uni. This was just meant to be an overnight thing. A road trip. A pretentious indie movie, not a medical drama.’

  ‘Dramatic genre switch,’ David said. ‘How terribly unexpected of us.’

  I grinned. ‘The nurse said you had food.’

  ‘Oh yes. We, uh, ate it.’

  ‘You beasts!’ I exclaimed. ‘Is there like a McDonald’s or something near here?’

  ‘Yeah, just down the road,’ David said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Anything,’ I said. ‘Just so long as it’s salty and greasy and delicious.’

  David grinned. ‘Okay-dokey. Dmitri, you coming?’

  ‘Well,’ Dmitri said. ‘If you get me an apple pie, I’ll…’ He shrugged, and grinned. ‘I’ll owe you a favour.’

  ‘Oh right, that’s a major incentive.’ David raised his eyebrows and grinned. ‘Lol. Ok
ay. I’ll be back in a few.’ He pushed through the curtains, and we heard him go away down the ward.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I sighed, and rubbed my thumbs into my eyes. ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dmitri said.

  But there was something in his voice that made me drop my hands and look at him properly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Dmitri said. I noticed for the first time that his face was very pale. He scratched the back of his head, and the dull hospital lights caught the bright highlights in his tawny hair.

  ‘Well it’s clearly not nothing,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me force you to talk, I’m still weak and feeble. They’ll have to put the drip back in.’ I meant it as a joke. I wanted him to laugh, wanted to relax after all the tension of the past few hours. But Dmitri didn’t even smile, and I felt a cold snake of fear coil inside my stomach. ‘Dmitri? What’s wrong?’

  Dmitri sat back in the rickety hospital chair. He didn’t anything for a while. Then he said, ‘How did you know what I was?’

  That wasn’t what I’d been expecting. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you first saw me,’ he said. ‘You knew that I was a sylph. You said that you’d met my kind before. How come?’

  I opened my mouth to say something, then shut it again. My heart suddenly started beating very fast, and I felt that queasy unease start to churn in my insides, just like it always did.

  I didn’t want to tell him. I’d told Laura, but that had been different—and it hadn’t even been the full truth. But if I told Dmitri, it would be the first time I had ever told a single living soul about what had happened with Liam.

  For a moment, I almost wanted to laugh. Dmitri, of all people. I supposed that I’d thought that if I ever did end up telling anyone at all, it would be David. Or maybe Laura. But not Dmitri. Never Dmitri.

  I’d been so scared of him when I first saw him. I hadn’t dared look at him in case I made accidental eye contact. I’d sidled away from him whenever we ended up within ten feet of one another. But now… We’d sat on the sofa next to each other and watched Alien and Doctor Who and Star Wars. He’d made pancakes, and I’d made popcorn, and we’d eaten them together with the others. We weren’t close in the same way that I was close with Laura, and I was probably still more comfortable with David than with him. But I knew that we were friends, even if I did sometimes get stupid flashes of doubt about his motives, like I had at the park earlier. And I was still jealous of him because of David.

  But we were friends, and I’d never thought that would happen. And now, maybe he would understand my story even better than David or Laura would.

  ‘Back home,’ I said. ‘When I was at college. A guy moved in next door to us. He was a sylph, like you. I thought—I thought I was going crazy when I first saw him. He had wings, but no one else seemed to be able to see them. It was just me. And when I actually spoke to him, he was pretty weirded out that I could see his wings… He was terrified, actually. I think… I think that was why he acted the way he did. He was scared. He was all alone in a strange country, surrounded by humans, and he knew he had to stay a secret. He was really, really desperate to fit in. To be liked. Not to be, like, shunned or forgotten about because we were all humans and because humans don’t like stuff like that, we don’t like people that we don’t understand.’

  After a little pause, Dmitri said, ‘He mesmered you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and was proud that my voice managed to remain steady despite the sickness and shame that was still twisting up inside me. ‘He—made me think that—’ Deep breath. I could do this. ‘He made me think that I loved him. He manipulated me. We—I—it got very intense very quickly, and…’ Don’t cry. Don’t cry. ‘And it was pretty bad afterwards. It—I found it very difficult.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  I swallowed. ‘One of his family—his uncle, I think—came and fetched him. He said that he had to go back to his old home. So they just—left.’

  ‘I see,’ Dmitri said. There was another pause, longer than the first. Then he leaned forward, and said in a voice that was very low and very quiet, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  I sniffed, and tried to smile. ‘Not your fault.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I’m so sorry you went through that. And then I turned up in your classes and on your floor… It must have been terrifying.’

  ‘It was,’ I said, and almost burst into tears with the feeling of relief that came with the admission, of finally being able to tell someone about it. ‘I thought—I thought you were going to be the same as him. I thought you were going to be—a monster. And—I was really mean to you. I’m sorry about that.’

  He shook his head. ‘I understand. I would have done the same thing.’

  I swallowed hard past the knot in my throat. ‘Thank you. It was—it was really hard.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dmitri looked down at his hands. There was silence for a little while, and then he said, ‘That guy. His uncle came and took him back because of the law. I said, I think, that it is the oldest law. Not to use the mesmer on humans, unless the circumstances are really exceptional. They took him back home so they could punish him properly.’

  For a moment I didn’t really understand what that meant. Then I realised, and a hard cold feeling of fear clutched my heart. ‘You used the mesmer,’ I whispered. ‘On Jamie. You broke the law.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dmitri said, still studying his hands. He began cracking his knuckles, finger by finger, working his way from left hand to right. ‘I did. So… yeah.’

  ‘But exceptional circumstances,’ I said, almost as though I were pleading with him. ‘What does that mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Exceptional. I’ve never actually heard of exceptional circumstances… it’s what people say, but pretty much anytime anyone uses the mesmer, they get the full punishment.’

  ‘What is the full punishment?’ My throat felt dry.

  ‘It depends.’ His voice sounded light, casual, as though he were talking about something that was going to happen to someone else, as though he wasn’t involved in it at all. ‘I knew of one sylph, he’d been mesmering a whole house of humans, making them into his slaves. Brainwashed zombies. They never really recovered afterwards—their mind couldn’t handle the strain. The elders killed him.’

  ‘Who are the elders?’

  ‘The old ones of the group. They are the ones who pass judgement.’

  ‘And they… they killed that sylph.’

  ‘Yes. But that was a rare case. They don’t usually go that far.’ He laughed. ‘They won’t kill me. A five minute mesmer won’t warrant that much.’

  ‘But what will they do?’ I felt a bit as though I were drowning, as though I only had to claw to the surface and everything would make sense, everything would be all right. ‘Dmitri?’

  He shrugged, looking down at his fingers. ‘Not much, I should think.’

  ‘Dmitri,’ I said. He didn’t say anything, and my anger suddenly flared up. ‘Dmitri! What are they going to do? What’s going to happen?’

  ‘How can I know for sure?’ he returned. He was so calm, so calm, as though he didn’t care, as though he didn’t realise…

  ‘You must have some idea!’ I snapped, not meaning to snap, but suddenly overcome with emotions that rose up like a wave, threatening to drown me, because he was so calm, so bloody careless and unfeeling, and he wasn’t thinking… I didn’t mean to cry, but without warning my eyes filled with tears, and I dashed my hands across my eyes, trying to contain them.

  Dmitri gave a little sigh, and when I looked up, glaring at him through the haze that my tears made, I saw that he was smiling. A wavering, but almost mocking smile, that made my heart twist inside me. ‘Oh Lizzie,’ he said softly, poetically, in a way that made it seem like he was laughing at me.

  ‘What?’ I demanded, wiping my nose with the back of my wrist.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be so upset,’ he said. He gave a little broken la
ugh, and I knew that he wasn’t laughing at me at all.

  ‘Of course I’m upset!’ I said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, and lifted his shoulders. ‘We didn’t have the best of starts. And… well, David.’

  I was silent.

  ‘And we’ve never been as close as we are with the others,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said unwillingly. This was exactly what I’d just been thinking minutes earlier, so I didn’t know why I didn’t like to hear it now. ‘But still. Of course I’m going to be upset if something bad happens to you. And the only reason you did the mesmer was to help Laura, and you asked me about it first because you knew I knew about it, and you could have just mesmered me along with him to make sure I didn’t make a fuss about it…’ My voice trailed away, and I sniffed.