Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 13

Saturday, June 18, 10:18p.m.

“Officer Walker?” A young man’s surprised voice sounded in my ear, welcome distraction from the eye-crossing insurance paperwork I was trying to fill out. I looked up, catching a glimpse of myself in a window reflection. My hair had wilted from the cute spikes it’d dried in after my shower. A boy who looked vaguely familiar was also dimly reflected in the window, standing behind my chair. I twisted around to frown up at him.

“Garth,” he said. “Garth Johannsen. From the coven?”

“Oh!” I blinked at him, my frown getting deeper. “Hi, Garth. What’re you doing here?” I hadn’t even changed out of uniform before coming to the hospital. The nurse I’d talked to said I didn’t need to come during work, but if I could come immediately after that would be great. I’d picked up the paperwork and visited with Gary until he started dozing off, then retreated to the lobby to go through it. It was after ten now and I was sticky and uncomfortable.

“You weren’t at the meeting tonight.” He came around to sit one chair over from me, leaving an empty space between us. I was grateful on a variety of levels, the most basic of which being that I was too damned hot to want to deal with someone’s body next to mine. “We were worried,” he added.

“And so you what,” I said, “hunted me down at the hospital? How’d you do that, magic?” I set my teeth together and flopped my head against the padded plastic chair back. The kid was earnest and polite and didn’t deserve to be the victim of my sarcasm. “Sorry,” I muttered, then straightened up, convincing myself that I would be more gracious from here on out. “I forgot about the meeting.”

“You forgot?” All the injury and dismay in the whole world were conveyed in those two words. “But this isvery important.”

“Garth,” I said in what I felt was a reasonable tone, “a very close friend of mine had a heart attack last night while I was chasing down your goddamn Virissong. Forgive me if your priorities are not my priorities.” So much for courtesy.

“Oh.” Garth’s voice went all hollow. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a jerk.”

Ihad meant to be a jerk, and now I felt like even more of one. Venting at Garth struck me as being on about the same level as kicking puppies. I was going to have to consider the possibility that it’d be better if I never spoke to anyone again as long as I lived. “It’s not your fault. Sorry I snarled.”

“You didn’t,” he assured me hastily, which was nice, if blatantly untrue. “Is your friend going to be okay?”

I sighed and looked down at the paperwork. “Yeah, if I can get all this stuff filled out so they’ll put him in PT.” I shuffled the stack, then shook my head. “Did you really magic up my location?”

Garth looked guilty. “No.”

I frowned up at him. “Then what’re you doing here?”

Garth brightened a little. “Visiting somebody. Come on.”

I eyed my paperwork, then groaned and stood up. “Anything for a break.”

The sordid truth was I expected Garth to lead me through the hospital to meet some handsome, starry-eyed young intern who he would euphemistically introduce as “my friend.” Instead he took my hand and tugged me up to the cancer ward, where we stopped at the reception area and Garth leaned on the desk without letting go of my hand. “We’re here to see Colin.”

The man behind the desk waved us on without looking up, then followed us with, “He’ll be glad to see you, Garth.”

“You come here a lot?” I asked. Garth nodded, knocked on a room door, then pushed it open. Despite the hour, the young man in the bed sat up and smiled wearily as we stepped inside.

“Garth, man, who’s this? You didn’t tell me you were dating an Amazon.” His voice was thin, rising and falling on shallow breaths. He was good-looking, even through the bloat of weight that cancer treatments had put on him. His eyes were hazel and cheerful, and the handshake he offered was full of concentrated strength. “I’m Colin,” he said. “Garth’s my big brother.”

It wasn’t quite full light when I left the cancer ward with Garth. The sky was hazy and light gray, a promise of another beautiful day to come. The air was cool for the first time in forever, although I privately admitted I wasn’t usually up at five-thirty, the past few days notwithstanding. Possibly it was always perfect at this hour on a summer morning. Garth walked out onto the medical center steps with me, hands jammed in his pockets and head lowered. Neither of us had spoken since we left Colin’s room.

“So what’s the deal?” I finally asked. We’d stayed in Colin’s room most of the night, both of them offering up absurd answers to questions on the insurance forms, Garth watching his brother when he slept. Between naps and paperwork, I tried to convince Colin that I was neither an Amazon nor Garth’s girlfriend. He cheerfully refused to believe either.

Garth sat on the steps, not looking at me as he answered. “He’s had leukemia his whole life, pretty much. Since he was eight. We thought he had it beat, but then a few months ago it came back, and he’s been pretty sick since.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventeen.”

I blinked. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

I didn’t say he seemed younger. “I just want him to be okay,” Garth said, without noticing my lack of input. “I tried praying for a long time, and when Colin was getting better I thought it was working, but then he got sick again and God doesn’t seem to care.”

“So you looked for something else?” I ventured. Garth nodded, dangling his hands between his knees.

“Mom couldn’t handle Colin being sick again. She split a while ago, so even trying to hang together with family didn’t work. Dad and me live about five minutes from here. So yeah, it’s how come I got involved in the Craft.” He studied his hands, while I bit my tongue from asking,you got involved in the Craft because you live five minutes from here? “I thought maybe…well, the Goddess is supposed to do magic, right?” Garth went on. “Witches and everything. I thought maybe…”

“Maybe magic could help.” I put my fingertips over my eyes and rubbed. “It’s not really that simple, Garth.”

“I found that out. I was gonna give up, but then I heard Virissong, see? In the coven, I heard him talking to me. He said that when he came back and was strong again, he could heal the earth, and heal my brother, too.”

“Virissong isn’t a god, Garth.”

“I think he’s an aspect of the god.”

“The God?” I pointed upward.

“That God and the god and the goddess are all one and the same. It’s just kind of hard to see it with modern religious trappings.” He sounded like he’d learned it by rote and believed it to the core of his being. “But Colin’s getting worse. I know the solstice is soon and Virissong will come then, but—” He broke off, took a deep breath, and spoke very quickly: “But you have real power. We all felt it. I hoped maybe you could help Colin hang on just a little longer.” The breath whooshed out of him and his shoulders deflated as he curved in on himself.

“Jesus, Garth.” I leaned over, putting my head on my knees.

If I let myself—and I had been careful, on some level, not to—I could feel the hospital behind me. Not just the hospital, but each individual, patients and doctors alike, interns and nurses, newborns and the dying. Sometimes they were one and the same. I could feel places in them that needed healing, sometimes physical, very often psychological. There was too much for me to heal at once, even if those who were in need would allow me to try, and not all of them would. Young doctors, determined to prove that they could hack the harsh realities of the medical world, wouldn’t let someone like me near them, for a multitude of reasons. Skepticism was only the easiest; a fear of showing weakness was the worst.

I wondered for the first time if I’d always avoided hospitals because I caught some sense of the meteoric emotional highs and lows, even before I was rudely awakened to a world that wasn’t quite like the physical one I was comfortable with. Tuning into that sensation didn’t even require any particular supernatural skill or belief. Hospitals carried a lot of psychic whammy.

“I’ll try to help him, Garth,” I said to my knees. There wasn’t really any question about it from the moment I stepped into Colin’s room. I could shrug off responsibility to the faceless masses for months at a time, as I’d less-than-admirably proven already. Individuals, though, in need of help, aching for it with every breath, even if they couldn’t ask for it out loud—I wasn’t a monster, and I was a long way from being that hard. “I can’t promise anything,” I said, lifting my head. “Okay? I can’t promise anything. But I can try.”

“Thank you.” Garth’s voice cracked and he crashed his shoulder against mine as he leaned over to hug me. “Thank you. I know you can help him. I think that’s part of why Virissong called you to the coven. He knew you could help Colin hang on just a little while longer. Until he comes to help everyone.”

I felt very old as I hugged Garth back. I knew Virissong wasn’t a god any more than I was, but he didn’t seem to want to hear it. Maybe some things just had to be taken on faith.

“Go on,” I said, giving Garth a little shove. “I’ll see you at the meeting tonight. I’ve got to think about how I’m going to do this.” My inability to know how to heal Gary only seemed enormously compounded when facing something as invasive as a cancer. There had to be a way to do it. If I’d spent the past several months studying, I’d probably know what it was.

“Okay.” Garth climbed to his feet, nodding, and wobbled down the steps, leaving me alone to my planning.

I didn’t really need to plan. I had Gary’s spirit quest to do in a matter of minutes; making it home in time would be a crunch. A bit of memory floated through my mind, something about traditional shamans using sleep deprivation as a tool to enter their trances. That was good: in my current state, one or two deep breaths ought to put me under. I watched Garth walk away, then pushed to my feet. For once I had a clear path to follow and no qualms about following it. I went to find Petite.