So they danced carefully around
each other. Was he trying to figure her out? Because she sure as hell didn’t
understand him. Or what he was doing. That first cancer patient had gone into
full remission after their late night visit confrontation. Since then, she had
seen Nazu go into several patient rooms at odd hours, when no one was around to
observe him. They were never his patients, and they always went home a day or
two later. She never caught him doing anything like with that first one again.
She still didn’t know what she had seen that night, and it bugged the hell out
of her, chasing its tail around and around in her mind.
She’d worked an extra couple of
shifts to cover other nurses who got nailed by the bronchitis epidemic.
Fortunately, Rachel never seemed to get sick. But she worked more hours than
the hospital allowed and found herself with a long weekend and nothing to do.
With the apartment freshly cleaned and all the laundry put away, she wandered
outside and through the park, feeling restless. Twitchy.
She stopped to watch the three
teens performing aerial acrobatics on their skateboards. They were loud and
beautiful, losing their gangliness in their jumps and flips and turns. Until
one flipped upside down and lost his skateboard, crashing down into the
pavement head-first. Rachel felt that shift
she took for granted in the ER, as her whole awareness focused on the boy
sprawled at awkward angles, with blood already seeping from under his head.
Before his friends reached him, she was sprinting across the concrete pad,
shouting, “Don’t touch him! Wait! Don’t move him!” They looked up at her
charging toward them, and both jumped on their skateboards and fled. She swore,
spitting a few choice words with her choppy breath as she reached him.
Pulling out her phone to call
911, Rachel swore again. Great. No
signal. The boy had obviously broken his left arm, and there was an
alarming amount of blood from his head wound. He was unconscious, and she was
afraid to move him without any support. As she watched, his skin was turning
gray. She looked closer. What were those white lines appearing along his arms?
She touched his shoulder and flinched at the heat. How could he have spiked
such a fever so quickly? She’d never felt anyone with skin so hot to the touch.
Standing and holding her phone up
in a futile quest for a signal, Rachel turned and froze at the sight of Dr.
Nazu racing toward them. He pushed past her and dropped to the boy’s side. But
rather than any accepted emergency medical practice, he flipped the boy onto
his back and lifted him into a two-armed carry, the boy’s head dropping down
and dripping blood onto the concrete. Rachel stood, dumbfounded by his
carelessness. He glared at her. “Throw your water on the ground,” he snapped.
She glanced down at the bottle
tucked in her bag. What? She shook her head in confusion.
“Please, Rachel. I don’t have
time…he can’t stay here. Please throw your water on the ground.”
Why did she pull out the bottle?
Open the top and splash water at his feet? Something in his face, his eyes. She
thought he was crazy. She thought he might be killing this boy with his
careless treatment. And yet, she remembered the yellow sparks fading into the
patient’s dark room.
He stepped onto the water and
looked up at the sky. “Engur! Ninazu!” He shouted. Rachel felt another shift and looked down to see the damp
patch of concrete spread out, water rising under Nazu’s feet and splashing
across hers. She screamed as they dropped down through the sudden pool.
Water splashed around them on the
tiles of a brightly lit hallway. Nazu shouted again, in a language that Rachel
didn’t understand. It was harsh and guttural, not like the poetic Hindi she
often heard Indians use. She was trying to catch her breath and her balance when
the hallway shifted again. She
blinked and stared. It was a rock cavern.
The boy thrashed in Nazu’s arms, and
the white lines flared along his skin. It looked like they broke him open,
spilling out like a pumpkin thrown on the ground at Halloween. Huge yellow
membranes spread out from his arms. Wings. He lifted into the air and flew
stumbling around the cavern.
Nazu shouted up to him. Rachel
realized he was still speaking that other language, but now she understood his
words. She shoved that thought away, as she heard him calling to the boy. Or
whatever that was flying above them. “Come down! We didn’t hurt you! We’re
going to heal you. Come down before you bleed all over my hospital!”
The boy, and Rachel still saw the
boy under the grey skin and yellow wings, landed, crouching a few feet closer
to Rachel than Nazu. “Good,” Nazu. “Rachel, please move very slowly. Step
toward him and hold out your hand. When you reach him, put you hand on his
shoulder and rub it gently.”
Rachel stared at him, but he
nodded to the boy. “He trusts you, that’s why he landed closer to you. He’ll
let you approach. Won’t you?” He turned his head slightly to the boy, who
remained motionless.
Two steps closer, and Rachel raised her left hand, holding it flat in front of her like she would for a wild animal. The boy watched her with unblinking solid green eyes. She saw the blood running down his head and along his left wing. She reached out slowly and put her hand on his right shoulder. He trembled but did not move. She rubbed his shoulder gently, and he…purred?
“Very good, Rachel,” Nazu said in
his calm voice, walking over to kneel on the other side of the boy. “You’re a
natural with the vorgrath. Just keep doing that, and he’ll let me heal him now.
Then, I think, we’ll have to talk…”
TBC…
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Dogs in house:
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Houdini
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Time writing:
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~ 1 hour
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June word
count:
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12,363
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