by Rob Cornell
The air had a dry taste and a starchy smell. It left my mouth pasty. I couldn’t stand the feel of my own skin because of how much the arid heat dried me out.
Three other people shared the room with me. A man, woman, and a teen girl, who all resembled each other so much, they could never deny their relation. The woman and the girl had glassy eyes and furtive gazes. The man sat with stiff back, but a slack expression, gaze never so much as twitching. I didn’t know their story, and didn’t want to. I knew whatever was going on with them, that sick feeling of helplessness probably sat in each one of their bellies.
The woman caught me staring. Instead of scowling at my rudeness, she offered the saddest smile in world history, and the sickness in my own belly doubled.
Last I had seen of Sly, he had nearly quit breathing. They had whisked him away, leaving a nurse behind to tell me how to find the waiting room and promise they would keep me apprised of Sly’s condition.
I felt my phone buzz against my leg in my pocket. When I checked the number (it was Mom), I also saw the time. Somehow two hours had passed since I sat down in the waiting room. What the hell were they doing to him for so long? He had a bad flu. Right? What else could it be?
I shouldn’t have asked myself that. The default answer came quickly to mind—cancer. It was always fucking cancer. At least for average mortals. People like me and Mom, sorcerers born with natural magic, did not develop tumors of any kind. It probably had a lot to do with that inherent magic. It certainly wasn’t anything we did consciously. After all, other magical practitioners who weren’t born with their power still could end up victims of the Big C.
Sly’s mother had died of some kind of cancer; I couldn’t remember which. Wasn’t there a genetic component that would make Sly susceptible as well?
I squeezed my eyes shut. I had to stop thinking like that. Especially since—
“Sebastian, are you there?”
I had forgotten I had the phone to my ear.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah.”
“How is Sylvester doing? Better I hope.”
For a moment, I suffered a spin of vertigo. I stared at a fixed point in front of me, a spot of something on an otherwise clean wall. The spinning passed. “Worse,” I said. One word seemed plenty enough. Too much.
“Worse? What do you mean? Sebastian, what’s going on?”
“I had to call an ambulance,” I said slowly, enunciating each word because my lips felt numb and I didn’t want to slur my speech. “I’m at the hospital now. I haven’t heard anything more since we got here two hours ago.”
I heard a soft gasp through the phone. “I’m on my way.”
“Don’t, Mom. You’ve got enough to deal with.”
“What are you talking about? I’m fine.”
“Did you end up eating lunch?”
Silence. But I could practically hear her eyes roll.
“I will pack myself a sandwich before I come.”
My stomach gurgled. I hadn’t eaten anything. I didn’t want to eat anything. I felt guilty for feeling hungry. Thankfully, my rational brain parts knew how stupid that was.
“Can you bring me one, too?”
“Of course.”
About fifteen minutes later, a short, dark-skinned doctor with thinning black hair and a soul patch on his chin came into the waiting room. He wore a white coat with a gold name badge that I couldn’t read from where I sat. His gaze went from the family, then to me.
“Mr. Light?”
“Yes.”
He came over and sat next to me, offered to shake.
I took his hand. His skin felt rubbery and moist.
“I’m Doctor Prashad,” he said. “I have good news. We have managed to stabilize Mr. Petrie.”
After that, all the stuff he said flowed into a meaningless blur. He sounded like a character out of Grey’s Anatomy (not that I ever watched the show). That mundane touchstone was the only thing that kept me from shouting at him to stop babbling and go do something. Stabilize. Stabilize. What the hell did that mean?
Then Prashad ended his spiel with the doctor cliché of all doctor clichés.
“We’ll need to do more tests.”
I nodded, then tilted my head to one side and looked at Dr. Prashad as if he had slandered my best friend. “In other words, you don’t have a fucking clue what’s wrong with him?”
To his credit, Prashad didn’t so much as flinch. In fact, he gave me a thin smile. “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said.
At that, I shut him out of my mind. He had nothing to say that I cared about. I didn’t notice him leave, didn’t know he was gone until I felt a touch on my arm from someone sitting in the same chair. I jerked my arm away, thinking for a goofy moment it was Prashad, that he’d never left, that he refused to leave until I acknowledged how smart and amazing he was because he was a doctor, and doctors were the gods of the mortal world.
Of course, it wasn’t him. It was Mom.
I blinked at her. “When did you get here?”
“About ten minutes ago. I thought that was plenty of time to let you stare at the wall before you needed to snap out of it.”
I smelled something meaty. Ham. Mom had a plastic bag in her lap with a pair ham and Swiss sandwiches in it. My mouth watered, and that stupid guilt came back. Hunger won the fight, and in another three minutes my ham and Swiss was nothing more than crumbs down the front of my shirt.
With that out of the way, I gave Mom a more thorough look. She had her purse and tan tweed coat on the chair beside her. She wore a plain white blouse and jeans hitched up too far above her waist. Since when had she started dressing like an old lady?
I noticed her wedding ring turned around on her finger with the diamond pointed in the wrong direction. She had thinned out since October, and it had started to show in her fingers now, leaving the ring loose enough to twirl in whatever direction it felt like. And unlike mine, her sandwich only had a few bites out of it, and it lay on the bag in her lap, forgotten.
I pointed at the sandwich. “You need to eat that.”
“I’m not hungry.”
I waved a hand, not interested in having that argument at the moment.
“Have you heard anything yet?” she asked.
I filled her in on the couple sentences I had heard from the doctor.
She frowned and crossed her arms. “Damn doctors. We need Elaine.”
“Who’s Elaine?”
“Old family friend. A healer. Used to date Sylvester matter of fact. Sturdy Welsh woman. Cold, but good at what she does.”
From that description, I knew it had to be the same woman Sly had brought to heal me at the Silverdome. I had a hard time picturing her with Sly, though. Their builds couldn’t have been more different. The mechanics of their love, I thought, would have proved…difficult.
“I think I know her,” I said and explained.
“We need to get Sly out of here and over to her,” Mom said. She looked around the room as if it were a very insult to her existence. “You should have never brought him here to begin with.”
I strained to keep my voice low. We were already getting funny looks from the other family in the room. “I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t know Elaine’s number, let alone her name. And how would I know if she could make it in time? We don’t even know what’s wrong with him. He was on the floor, hacking up blood for the gods’ sake.”
Mom took a slow breath. “I’m sorry. You’re right. But the fact remains. We need to get him out of here, and I doubt they’re going to let us check him out and roll him to the car in a wheelchair.”
I pressed my hands against my face and rubbed. The day had started so nicely. That sun through the shop’s front window. The clean smell of paint. The sense of a new beginning after all the shit the three of us had been through. Now this. After facing a legion of vampires and a cadre of Ministry conspirators out to murder half of Detroit’s population, some kind of illness fucks up our chance at a reset?
Thank you fate, for that big, wet loogie in the face.
“We can’t get him out of here. He’s in ICU. He’s probably got all sorts of tubes and shit sticking out of him. Do you think we could bring Elaine to him?”
Mom spat a disdainful puff of air. “She wouldn’t step foot in this place. Besides, she wouldn’t know what materials she’d need, since we can’t tell her what’s wrong with him. Besides, do you honestly think these animals would allow Elaine to work magic on Sylvester in here?”
Wouldn’t that be a sight? “At the very least, she could check him out. Are you sure she wouldn’t come, just to do that?”
She shrugged. “All we can do is ask. But I know her feelings on doctors in general, and hospitals in particular.”
“Okay. Can you call her?”
“She doesn’t own a phone.”
“You’re joking.”
Mom leaned in close. “Healers tend to be eccentric. They all have their quirks. Elaine is a bit of a technophobe.”
Fabulous. All the more reason she wouldn’t come to the hospital, what with all the beeping machines and computers and more phones than you could count in a lifetime.
“You’ll have to visit her in person,” Mom added.
“Me? You know her. She’d be more likely to help if you asked.”
She laughed and bowed her head. “Not a chance. She doesn’t particularly like me.”
“I thought you said she was a friend.”
“Family friend. Not my friend.”
“What’s the problem between you two?”
She still had her gaze down as if had she suddenly decided that ham sandwich in her lap looked good enough to eat. But I could see her wry smile. She wasn’t looking at her lap. She was looking into her past.
“I’m the one who broke her and Sly up.”
Chapter Four
Mom gave me the short version of the story behind how she had wrecked Sly’s relationship with Elaine. She hadn’t believed that Sly really loved Elaine, but that he stayed with her because he was afraid of hurting her. She and Sly also apparently argued all the time, mostly about the alchemical trade. They had very strong and opposite views on some technical aspect of the craft.
It seemed like a petty difference to me, but I didn’t know anything about alchemy or healing. Maybe their disagreement was deeper than a simple tastes-great/less-filling debate. The more important takeaway to my mind was Sly’s continued devotion despite his own needs. That sounded a lot like the Sly I knew. His loyalty had saved my ass more than once.
In any case, Mom forced a breakup by giving Sly a sit down and grilling him until he admitted what she’d suspected. Once the truth was out in the air, he couldn’t ignore the right thing to do. So he broke it off.
And Elaine had blamed my mom ever since.
“So I shouldn’t even mention your name?” I had asked before leaving for my Mission: Impossible.
“She’ll know you’re my son, of course. So you won’t need to mention my name. But hopefully she can see past all of that. You’ll have an uphill battle, though. No doubt.”
Those not so comforting words ran through my head as I knocked on Elaine Voyle’s door.
She lived in Warren, not far from where the magical entrance to the Switch used to be—before the vampires killed the owner and the place shut down. As the only bar around Detroit that catered to those in the supernatural world, the Switch had been one of my best sources of information for the goings-on of Detroit’s paranormal community.
Those fucking vampires ruined all the good stuff.
Elaine’s house, judging from the outside, couldn’t have been more than seven-hundred square feet. The wood siding looked termite-ridden and needed a fresh coat of paint—preferably something other than the faded puke green on it now.
It was the middle of winter, but her aluminum storm door only had a screen, no glass. The inside door looked sturdy enough. But it, too, needed a paint job. I couldn’t tell if it was coral or just a really faded pink.
I recognized her the moment she opened the door and peered at me through the screen. She had a wide, full face with deep-set, bright blue eyes, like a set of crystals embedded in dough. Her skin had a freckled red tint, strongest around her cheeks. Her hair was a deep burgundy. And her body filled the entire doorway.
She wasn’t overweight, but the term “big boned” was made for women like her. She looked like she could lay me flat with a single punch from her thick-knuckled fist.
She studied me for a moment, eyes squinted.
I waited to see if she recognized me. I wanted to keep from announcing my surname in case it triggered any sour memories of my mom.
While she scrutinized me, I caught a whiff of what smelled like rich beef stew. My stomach forgot all about the ham sandwich I’d already eaten and demanded some stew like right now.
Elaine’s thin lips quirked up on one corner of her mouth. “Smells good, don’t it?”
I wondered how she knew what I was thinking. Was I drooling? I casually brushed a finger across my chin to check. Came away dry, thank goodness.
“You wouldn’t wanna eat it, love. T’aint whatcha think it is.”
Her accent puzzled me. Mom had said Elaine was Welsh, but her accent sounded like a cross between old English and a Southern drawl. Weird, right?
“It’s a potion,” I said.
“Indeedy.”
Wow. Her stuff smelled a hell of a lot better than any of Sly’s mixtures. Maybe that was the thing they had always argued about.
“So, whatcha need, Sebastian?”
I raised an eyebrow. “So you do recognize me.”
“When ya seen a man as bloody as you was, you tend to recall.” Then she surprised me by pushing open the storm door and inviting me in.
I stepped into a most glorious warmth. I hadn’t realized how cold it was outside until I came into Elaine’s house. It was nothing like the dry heat in the hospital waiting room. This had just the right bit of moisture without making me all sweaty. Between the comforting temperature and the wonderful smell coming from the back of the house, I felt like I could stay here forever. If I couldn’t convince her to come with me to the hospital, maybe she would agree to let me move in with her.
Elaine closed the door and looked me up and down with a small smile. “You’re feeling the effects, am I right?”
I stammered, not sure what she meant.
She pointed down a short hall that led into a kitchen. I could see a simmering pot on the stove and assumed that’s where the beefy smell came from.
“It’s the mixture. I’m testing it, see? Supposed to ease a troubled soul so he don’t feel a thang when ya cut into him.” She exploded into deep, full, and contagious laughter. I couldn’t have kept myself from laughing along no matter what was going on with Sly. She could have chopped off my arm, and I still would have laughed. Which explained exactly what she meant about her concoction.
She waved me close. “Tell me, love. What’re you smelling?”
“Beef stew,” I said slowly.
She slapped me on the shoulder so hard I staggered sideways. “What a good one. A fine one.”
“Why? What’s it smell like to you?”
“Ginger snaps,” she said and snapped her fingers, too.
Which, of course, I found hilarious and tore off on another laughing fit.
Her smiled faded, and she gave me a hard look, her hands on her wide hips. “Maybe I need to tone it down some.”
I pressed a fist against my mouth to stifle my laughing, ended up snorting through my nose instead.
She fluttered a hand toward a leather two-seater with a couple tears in it. It sat across from another couch the same size, but with a floral upholstery so gaudy it hurt my eyes. “Go and have a sit, love. I’ll take it off the stove.”
I sat. She hurried down the hall. A minute or two passed, and the smell began to dissipate. I was sorry for it to go, but at least I didn’t feel like I’d overdosed on n
itrous oxide anymore.
I glanced around the living room. I’d seen bigger walk-in closets on HGTV. The walls were covered with paintings and embroidery with no discernible pattern. Landscapes, horses, wolves, Native Americans: all were portrayed in the paintings. The embroideries mostly consisted of religious symbols from faiths across the globe.
No shelves. No knickknacks. Not an end table or coffee table in sight. They would have overcrowded the space anyway. Once the beef stew smell cleared out, I caught a whiff of cat dander and a litter box somewhere in the house. I don’t hate cats, but I sure couldn’t imagine having one in the house. No matter what you did, you could always smell them. I supposed you’d get used to it after a while. Or maybe I was too sensitive to their particular scent. In any case, I would have made a terrible witch with a cat for a familiar.
Elaine came back, brushing her hands together as if shaking off dust. She eased down onto the couch across from me with a strained sigh. The couch springs spoinged under her weight. “So tell me, now.”
I assumed she meant me to tell her why I’d come. So I led with, “I’m in desperate need of a healer.”
She scrunched up her face. “To the hells with that. Of course ye are. That’s not what I’m askin’.”
I waited for more.
She rolled her eyes and slapped her hands onto her lap. “Sylvester. The Sly pup. How’s he behaving?”
I cringed. I didn’t want to answer. All at once, I wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want this extremely friendly woman—contrary to Mom’s description—to hear the bad news about a man she had loved. My hesitation said enough, though.
Elaine’s lips puckered. Her eyebrows drew together. “Oh, heavens. Not my Sly.”
I swallowed, nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”
She rocked forward and back, then forward once more, using momentum to help her up off the cough, grunting on the way up. She flapped her hands at me impatiently. “Let’s get on, then. Take me to him.”
I tensed. This was the tricky part. Would she agree to see him at the hospital? So far, she hadn’t lived up to Mom’s concerns. She didn’t have any issue inviting me into her home despite who my mother was. And while I didn’t see a TV anywhere—a technophobe’s worst nightmare next to the Internet, I’d guess—she did have a battery-operated clock on one wall, nearly lost among the decorations. How averse to technology could she really be?