Grace of Day - BK 4 of the Grace Series

by S. L. Naeole

  “No. No, I’m not,” I said before looking away and instantly filling my mind with several false thoughts all at once before effectively splitting them down the middle and forming a wall around what suddenly made my heart begin to pound a frightening beat beneath my t-shirt. I looked at him and smiled when he nodded.

  “Good, I’m glad. The wedding was supposed to be small anyway, so we can push it back a few weeks—I’m pretty sure your father will be ecstatic with that, even if the reason won’t make him all too pleased. This will work out, Grace.”

  “Yeah, yeah it will,” I replied softly.

  “Come on, let’s get you home. I’m sorry for the detour, love.”

  Once again, I was scooped up into strong arms and soon we were sailing across the sky towards my home. I hid my disappointment when we landed in the backyard, this time the impact absorbed wholly by Robert, and I walked into the kitchen nonchalantly, Janice standing in front of the stove with a spoon in her hand, stirring something in a large pot.

  She turned to look at us, her face flat, emotionless. “How’d you two get here?”

  “Um…we just dropped in,” I said quickly before pulling Robert towards the living room where I was certain dad was sitting.

  Why didn’t you say we flew in?

  I looked at Robert and realized that I had lost my concentration and his thoughts were free once more to penetrate my mind. She and dad have come to a compromise—she won’t leave him if he doesn’t bring up the subject of angels, demons, zombies, or eggplant ever again.

  “Eggplant?” he said aloud.

  My eyes widened as I turned a quick glance behind us to see if Janice had overheard, but thankfully she was too engrossed in whatever was in her pot to notice. Yeah, eggplant. That health food kick she went on during her pregnancy has made her swear off certain foods for life. Just saying them makes her nauseas—eggplant especially.

  “Robert, Grace,” Dad said when he saw us. He pressed a button on the remote control in his hand, while shifting a sleeping Matthew over onto his other shoulder with the other. “I didn’t hear your motorcycle or the car, so I’m guessing you came in some…other way, Robert.”

  “Yes, sir.” The look on Robert’s face told me without words that the thoughts running through my dad’s mind weren’t pleasant. They weren’t pleasant at all.

  “Well, that’s going to have to stop. Janice wants a sense of normalcy to return around here, which means no more flying in, no more misting, no more late night visits to Grace. Is that understood?”

  I felt my eyes bulge at dad’s list of demands. “Wait—you knew?”

  He looked at me with a rather bored expression on his face. “I was born Electus, remember? I knew what Robert was the moment I saw him; I knew exactly what was going on.”

  I choked down my response when Robert spoke up then. “And yet you did nothing to stop us. Why?”

  Dad looked at Robert with anger in his eyes before turning to look at me, his anger dying away as sadness took over. “Because I knew that you wouldn’t do anything to hurt Grace.”

  “That’s because I love her.”

  “I know you do, son. I know you do, which is the only reason I can stomach seeing the two of you together—especially knowing…what I know.”

  Robert’s hand tightened around mind before loosening. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Well, I suppose you two want to talk to me about next week, and what happens afterwards, right?”

  Dad’s voice had suddenly grown surly and I felt my knees begin to shake as the letter in my backpack grew heavier and heavier. Robert said nothing, instead waiting for me to tell him the truth.

  “Well, what is it? I’ve already given my consent to this wedding and I’ve pretty much reached the conclusion that nothing I say or do is going to make you change your mind about what happens afterwards-” his voice cut off and he looked away, too emotional to continue.

  Afterwards. How strange that the rest of my life could be compacted into a simple adverb. What happened afterwards was something that Dad knew he could not prevent from happening no matter how he felt. Robert and I looked at each other and sad smiles crossed our lips as we both shared a silent understanding of what it was we were doing. Neither of us could live without the other, but one of us would have to.

  I was born specifically to die; that’s how it was explained to me. My mother had been an angel, like Robert, but living with my father meant more to her than living forever. She gave up her divinity and immortality to be with him, and then gave that up to have me. Because of this, I was human in every way except one: I had a call; the divine reason for every angel’s existence. I had to let the person I loved most in the world take my life so that his own call could be fulfilled.

  Robert had fought against it; we both did, but it was stronger than we were. In the end we gave in, only I didn’t die when I should have, and he couldn’t kill me when he had the chance. And so here we stood, suspended in our fates as time pressed on with neither of us knowing when the signs that our time was running out would reappear. But we accepted that when it did, this time we would not fight it. It hurt too much.

  “Dad, I…I’ve got some bad news.”

  I paused to gather my strength, but this seemed to confirm whatever suspicions Dad had already formed in his head and his expression turned angry once more as he pointed an accusatory finger at Robert. “You bastard! I trusted you! How could you do that to Grace?”

  “Dad!” I shouted, angry at the fact that his booming voice had woken up Matthew who now wailed against Dad’s shoulder, upset that his nap had been disturbed. I reached for Matthew and took him from Dad’s arms, patting and cooing him softly as I glared at Dad’s beet red face.

  “My God, Dad, really? Do you really think that we’d do something like that after everything we’ve been through?” I groaned.

  “Well, what else could it be? Bad news when it involves two normal teenagers is one thing; a parking ticket, a broken condom—those things are fixable. Bad news when it involves my daughter and an angel could only be one thing,” he responded as his breathed normalized a bit.

  Janice, who had rushed out of the kitchen at Dad’s outburst, returned to her pot, once again ignoring what was going on to maintain her self-imposed “normalcy”. I frowned at this but knew that there was no real point to mention how I felt about it. Instead I gently rocked Matthew in my arms and tried to explain as calmly as I could what had been detailed in my letter from Mr. Kenner.

  Dad’s reaction was mild. Actually, he was rather giddy about the entire thing because he came to the immediate conclusion that Robert had: we’d simply have to postpone the wedding until after summer school. When Robert openly admitted that he shared this opinion, he and Dad suddenly became occupants of the same shared ground.

  “I think waiting an additional month is fine, Robert; better than fine. This is probably the best news I’ve received all day.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The sudden pleasantries and politeness were too much for me to take. I headed upstairs to put Matthew down, content to watch him sleep while I imagined what it would’ve been like to graduate with the rest of my class. As I passed my bedroom door, I saw my cap and gown hanging on the closet door where I had left it after bringing it home.

  I placed Matthew into his crib, waiting a few moments while he stirred, before tiptoeing out of the room. I returned to my room and flipped on the light.

  “Jeez, Stacy!” I gasped when the light revealed the waxen figure of my friend Stacy Kim standing in front of the closet door. She’d chosen to be my friend when everyone else refused, and through everything she had remained a loyal friend.

  Even through death.

  The pale color of her skin might have looked normal during December, but it was the beginning of summer and she looked like she’d spent the past year living in a cave.

  “Sorry, Grace. I just needed a place to rest for a while,” she groaned as her head leaned back and a vis
ible sigh left her body.

  “I don’t understand; you look so…tired,” I said to her, concerned as she slowly began to sink down to the ground, her knees giving way to the exhaustion that her body was fraught with.

  “I am,” she replied, her voice fainter now.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She looked at me and the woebegone expression on her face was a clear indication that whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  “I can’t do it,” she uttered, her tone utterly woebegone.

  “Do what?”

  “Do this. Be…this. Be what I am, what this…is. I can’t do it, Grace.”

  I moved over to her and sat beside her, taking her cold hand into mine and squeezing the clammy flesh. “Is it that bad?” I asked, knowing that personally, the idea of becoming one of the undead wasn’t exactly a good thing, but it was better than being completely dead. At least, that’s what it felt like at the time. That’s what we all believed.

  “I thought I could deal with this, you know? I thought that being an erlking wasn’t going to be that bad—I’d drink a little blood from a bag, like Ambrose said, eat a rare steak or something and then I’d be alright, I’d be great, but…it’s not.”

  I’d never asked Stacy what it had been like, what she had gone through. Dr. Ambrose, the erlking who had given Stacy a second chance at life when the cancer that she had been fighting since childhood returned, had insisted that the transition would be much easier to deal with than the actual transformation. But it appeared that the opposite was true.

  “Talk to me, tell me what’s wrong,” I told her as I pushed aside the hair that had fallen into her face so that I could see the exhaustion that plagued her eyes and darkened them even more than they already were.

  “I…I thought that when everything was done, when the whole change thing was over that I wouldn’t have to feed for a while—Dr. Bro said that I could go up to a month without needing to feed; he said that I wouldn’t even realize that anything had really changed inside of me. But it’s not true. I’m always hungry, but I can’t drink that bagged blood.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Bro thinks it might be because I was virtually dead before the change happened, so my body probably won’t recognize and accept altered blood. He believes that the only way I can feed properly is if I take fresh blood.”

  I squeaked. “That means you…”

  She nodded and looked away, ashamed. “When Dr. Bro bit me-” she scratched the crook of her arm “-the kid that was working with him used this syringe to pump blood into my mouth. I remember that I couldn’t move, I couldn’t tell them to stop; I just laid there and tried not to choke to death, which seems ridiculous because I was dying one way or the other, right?

  “And, this might seem gross, but the taste of the blood…it didn’t seem right to me. It didn’t taste like how it does when you prick your finger and stick it into your mouth, or when you bite your tongue and it bleeds. It tasted…spoiled. Can you believe that? Can you believe that I would know what spoiled blood tastes like?”

  She paused then, as though the next part was physically painful to recall, much less mention. When she began to speak again, I knew why.

  “Lark…she told Dr. Bro that something was wrong, that she could hear my thoughts going in and out and that I was screaming inside of my head. I don’t remember that at all—I don’t remember any part of that—I only remember that she kept looking at me and telling me that everything was going to be okay. Dr. Bro started to check me out, doing the usual doctor stuff; that was when I began to vomit up all that blood.

  “It kept coming out and I smelled it, Grace, and it smelled…dead; like something rotten…or worse. That was when I knew that I wasn’t alive anymore. But I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t feel dead. I didn’t feel any different at all; I still don’t. It was like I just woke up from a bad dream, and couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t.

  “Dr. Bro and Lark, they were too busy arguing about what might’ve gone wrong to notice. And that kid—that poor kid who was there helping Dr. Bro, the kid who had tried to feed me that nasty blood—came to check on me. I could see his face, see how terrified and curious and jealous he was all at the same time, and when I looked at him, the only thing I could think about was how good he smelled, and how good he must taste.

  “It happened so quickly, I couldn’t stop myself-”

  She stopped talking and began to sob, her hands covering her face in shame as her body shook with the tortured and violent sounds that came out of her. I wrapped my arm around her and tried to bring her close to me, to comfort her the same way that I knew she would have comforted me, but her reaction was the rude awakening that I had not been expecting, though should have been prepared for.

  She pushed me away roughly; so roughly in fact that I crashed into the wall behind my bed, having slid several feet from her. My head slammed into the painted surface, the crack filling my ears with a pinging that brought with it the speckled and blurred vision that I had almost—and morbidly—grown accustomed to.

  “I-I’m sorry,” she moaned when she took in the surprised expression on my face. “I’m still not used to this strength yet… Oh God, I killed that kid, Grace. I killed that poor kid; I took his life and it made me realize that I can’t do it again—I can’t kill people! It’s wrong; it’s not who I am. I can’t live like this; I can’t be dead like this.”

  “So what does that mean? That you’re just giving up?”

  She looked at me and nodded.

  “So, when you said you’d come to the wedding-”

  “You and I both know that was never going to happen, Grace,” she said softly. “I wish it was different but-”

  Her head turned to the door and I followed her gaze, seeing Robert standing there with a frightfully enraged look on his face as he took in Stacy’s weakened state and my position in the corner. “What happened?” he demanded to know as he glared at Stacy while gracefully leaping over the bed to reach me.

  “Nothing,” I told him reassuringly as his eyes scanned me for visible injuries—and not so visible ones—while his hands gently roamed the back of my head, feeling for the lump I knew was starting to form. “She’s tired.”

  “She’s hungry,” he said darkly as he turned his head to focus his heavy stare onto Stacy. “You’re starving yourself, aren’t you?”

  She nodded, but something in her expression changed as she stared at Robert, as though she was looking at him for the first time.

  “I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “Dr. Bro said I’d see it when I got used to my eyes, but I didn’t believe him…”

  “What? See what?” I asked as I looked around Robert’s stiff frame.

  “She sees me,” he answered before she could.

  “Sees what?”

  “Dr. Bro said that I’d be able to see all things dead and dying when my mind fully accepted the changes that had happened to my body. The new strength, the new speed, the new…sight; my brain had to adjust to these things he said, because it was used to the human way of doing things. But I didn’t realize what exactly he meant by that last part until now. You’re dead,” she said to Robert.

  “No more than you,” Robert replied.

  “No…no it’s different with you. You’re not just dead. It’s like it’s…pouring out of you. God, if death was light then I’d be a light bulb and you’d be the…sun,” she finished, too exhausted to continue.

  “Grace, we need to get her out of here,” Robert informed me as he slowly approached Stacy’s still body. “She’s starving; if she doesn’t feed soon, she won’t be able to control herself and she’ll attack the first living thing she sees—that’s you.”

  “She…she doesn’t want to feed,” I said softly.

  “I know that-” he looked at Stacy and quieted.

  I know she doesn’t want to feed. She thinks that she can simply starve herself to death, but that’s not how it works. When she’s f
ed she’ll act like she normally does, but if she intentionally starves herself, she’ll go mad, Grace. You saw what happened in the woods with that erlking. We need to get her to Ambrose now.

  My gaze latched onto Stacy’s limp body and I sighed. I didn’t want to reveal her secret, but there was nothing else I knew to do. She can’t eat that donated blood. She gets sick. She…she killed a boy…

  The air turned cold around us as anger flowed in and around Robert, affecting the air as he fought between the fire and ice of his emotions. I told you this would happen. I told Ambrose. I can’t allow her to kill people, Grace.

  I grabbed my blanket and wrapped it around me before I responded. I know that. But what if she just drank the blood from people after they cut themselves or something? I read in a book once where there were people who did that sort of thing…

  Robert sighed and shook his head, the futility of my suggestion plain. This isn’t make-believe, Grace. An erlking’s saliva is not just toxic, it’s instantaneously deadly. Once it touches blood, it grows, spreads like a flood. If the blood is still on the human, it will leech into the bloodstream where it will attack the body in seconds.

  There’s no way to remove it, no way to avoid contaminating any wound with it if an erlking feeds from it. You can’t suck it out, you can’t wipe it off, and you can’t disinfect it. And besides, the blood is only to mask the taste of the raw meat she needs to survive. Looking at her, I give her about a week before she starts rampaging, and if that happens, I have no choice Grace…

  My head bobbed down once in understanding but inside, my heart was caving in. I had done this to her. I had turned one of my best friends into a killer, thinking to save her life, and instead I had condemned it.

  One week was all she had left. One week was all we had left.

  BY DESIGN

  Stacy left while I was downstairs but she left a note saying that she’d try to return later that evening to finish our conversation. I hid it from Robert and sighed when I realized what I had done. So much for starting clean.