Branded (3 page)

It didn’t matter that I had meant to save her.

It would still be my fault if she died.

Her coughing grew more violent. She jerked in her wheelchair, her thin frame bucking back and forth between the arm rests. The brakes were on the wheels, but the chair scooted a little with each of her thrashes.

“Mom, you have to…” To what? Not die? Like she had any say in the matter. I glanced over my shoulder hoping to find one of the orderlies or nurses happen to have shown up since I had come into the activities room. No one else besides the men watching golf and the women playing cards were in sight.

“Help,” I shouted, my voice sounding feeble to my own ears. “Please, nurse. Help me.”

Mom’s thrashing turned to a full on seizure. She shook from her shoulders to her slippered feet. I put an arm across her chest to keep her from bucking out of her chair. For such a tiny woman, she held a lot of secret strength. She had always been strong. But after the incident, after three years of sitting in a wheelchair nearly completely unresponsive, I had thought that strength had been stolen from her.

I was damn wrong about that.

“Nurse,” I shouted. “Get in here!”

Finally a woman in white slacks and a colorful flower-print shirt rushed into the room. She took one glance in our direction and stuck her head back out the door. “Connie, I need help here.” Then, without waiting for a response from Connie, the nurse in the flowered shirt hurried over.

“What’s happened?” she asked while she body checking me aside so she could take over holding Mom in place.

Mom’s feet kicked at the wheelchair’s footrests. The chair clattered and rocked. The pink saliva foaming from her mouth turned a darker shade, going close to red.

“I…” I looked down at the paper cup in my hand, then crushed it in my fist. What could I tell this nurse? That I had given my mom a magic potion that was in the process of killing her? “I don’t know.”

The lie tasted like ash.

Something in my voice must have keyed off the nurse. She glanced at me with a suspicious look in her eye. But my mother’s seizures demanded her attention back, so the nurse didn’t question me.

Another nurse in a similar flowered smock showed up beside me seemingly from out of nowhere. Connie, I assumed. She pressed a hand against my chest. “Back up, sir. We’ll take care of her.”

I opened my mouth, but didn’t know what I wanted to say. To object? For what? There was nothing I could do for Mom. Odds were, there was nothing these nurses could do either.

My mother’s fate was in magic’s hands now. And magic had its own rules.

Chapter Four

I sat on a padded bench down the hallway from the nurses’ station. My eyes felt like they had hot coals in them. The back of my throat hurt from a trickle of phlegm left behind by the short crying jag I’d indulged in while hiding in a stall in the men’s room. Nothing loud or especially wet. But, yeah, I shed some tears. Most of them were from guilt. A few were from relief, as just before I finally broke down and ran for the restroom, one of the nurses told me they had managed to stabilize Mom and that, while unconscious, all her vitals appeared normal.

So, I hadn’t killed her.

Lucky fucking me.

Now I sat on the bench, hoping to hear more. I had watched them roll Mom out of the activities room on a gurney shortly after the nurses had taken over for me. I was told to sit tight.

So I had sat tight.

Then I was told she was stable, and if I wanted to go home and get some rest, they could call me when they knew more.

So I sat tight some more, because there was no way I could get any kind of rest until I knew for sure that she would come out of this, at the very least, the same as when she had gone in.

By this point, it was the best I could hope for. I had little faith that the potion would work. I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in anything.

I felt the bench’s plastic-coated padding shift and realized someone had sat down next to me without my having noticed. I almost smiled when I turned and saw who.

“Fiona,” I said.

She was one of the orderlies at the home, a pretty blonde with one of those fresh, girl next door faces that didn’t need any makeup to look good. She wore a pink smock and tan slacks that nicely hugged her hips. Fiona had taken a special liking to my mom from the start. She doted on Mom, would hold one-sided conversations with her like I did, and genuinely seemed to enjoy them, like I did. I had entertained asking her out on several occasions in the past, but life as a sorcerer and demon hunter was a little too complicated for dating uninitiated mortals.

Best to either date insiders to the supernatural world, or not date at all. Since most insiders were of the non-human variety, I stuck to no dating. Not that there was anything wrong with going out with shifters or gnomes or elves. Hell, some even got off on turning themselves over as blood bags to vampires and calling it love.

To each his or her own, right?

Just not my scene.

Fiona touched my arm, and my skin prickled at the contact. “How you holding up?”

I shrugged. I was afraid my voice would sound like the growl of a drunk uncle, so I kept quiet.

She rubbed my back in an overly familiar way. I didn’t object.

“She’s gonna be all right. Judith is a tough old bird.”

I couldn’t help it. I smiled. While Fiona knew next to nothing about my mother’s true nature or history, she somehow seemed to
know
her just the same. Tough? Yes. Old bird? For sure, by mortal standards. My mom was one-hundred and forty-two years old. Spring chicken in the world of sorcerers. Having kids at one-hundred and ten was almost as scandalous as a teenage pregnancy among sorcerers.

If only Fiona knew.

I chuckled to myself. Nice thought, having a girl as sweet and pretty as Fiona knowing the truth about it all.

“What’s funny?”

I swallowed and dared use my voice. “Not funny in a ha ha way,” I said. “Just something I thought of. Something nice.”

She smiled. “Good. Positive thoughts.”

“Yeah, positive.” My voice sounded like an oil streak, and my tongue tasted like one, too.

Fiona caught the tone and gave my back another rub. “Hang in there, Sebastian. She’ll pull through.”

Maybe. But she would still be lost to me, as lost as ever. This potion had been the last option I could find to try and undo whatever had been done to her. And since I didn’t know exactly what
had
been done, I had little more to go on. I had run into a dead end.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “I feel like…”

“What?”

I dropped my hand in my lap, shook my head. “I dunno. Helpless. It’s not a feeling I’m used to.”

“Oh?” She rose one eyebrow. “I feel that way all the time. I thought everybody did.”

Mortals, perhaps. But those of us with the amount of power afforded most sorcerers had an unfair advantage. It made a lot of things come easy. Maybe too easy. I stood slowly. My arms and legs cried out. I had sat too long in the same position and all my muscles had cramped up.

“You heading home?” Fiona asked and stood as well.

“Do you know anything more about her condition?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t. I’m just a lowly orderly. I can fetch things and comfort distraught family of patients. That’s about all I’m good at. Oh, and cleaning up bodily fluids. I’m a pro at that.”

I laughed. Amazed. How could she do that to me? Make me laugh when I would swear it impossible? She was a pro at a lot more things than cleaning up messes and playing gofer to doctors and nurses.

The urge to ask her out struck me again. What terrible timing. Could I actually ask her out on a date and not come across as a total creep after what just happened with my mother?

I needed to get out of there. The nurses had been right. There was nothing I could do for the time being except let the doctors do their job. I started to say goodbye to Fiona, but she spoke first.

“I work a late shift,” she said. “But I’m always starving at about midnight.”

“Um…” I wasn’t sure where this non sequitur was going. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.

She seemed to wait a second to let me get up to speed, but when I didn’t say more, she went on. “Eating in the middle of the night alone is kind of depressing. Like one step away from drinking alone.”

Oh…wait. Was she hinting toward what I think she was hinting toward? I stammered now. I had too mixed up a brew of emotions to know how to respond. I must have looked like a brain-dead monkey.

Her smile set me at ease.

“Would you like to pick me up after my shift so I don’t have to eat alone? Then I can update you on anything I hear about Judith.”

I nodded. That was about all I could manage. Sebastian Light, powerful sorcerer from a storied line of magicians, rendered speechless by a pretty mortal orderly at a nursing home. My ancestors would be so proud.

Her smile turned up a notch. It was like my own personal ray of sunlight. “Good,” she said. “Then I’ll see you tonight.”

I nodded again and forced out a, “Yeah.”

At least I didn’t have drool dripping off my chin.

She reached up and touched my cheek. Her fingertips drew a ticklish line along my jaw. “I’m sure she’s going to be all right.”

“Thanks.”

She gave my cheek a playful pat. “Midnight,” she said. “Don’t be late.”

“Not a chance,” I said.

Chapter Five

I didn’t have to meet Fiona until midnight, but I started getting ready at nine. I didn’t know how to approach our…could I call it a date? Probably not. She felt sorry for me, probably felt like I needed some company. I didn’t want to look too deeply into the whole thing. After all, it was just a late night meal, probably at some twenty-four hour diner. Nothing fancy was even open at that time of night.

Unless she meant to take you home with her for dinner.

Yikes. I couldn’t let my thoughts go down that road. I was nervous enough about this outing, without putting that kind of pressure on myself. Christ, I felt like a teenager on prom night. I needed to get a grip.

The flashback to my teen years was helped along by the fact that I had moved back into my parents’ house after the incident that had killed Dad and silenced Mom. Had, in fact, moved right back into my old bedroom. How many mornings before school had I primped in this very mirror hung inside my closet door?

I tried on a couple of possible outfits in the mirror. I had to keep in mind that Fiona would come out of the nursing home still dressed in her work clothes, her smock and slacks. I didn’t want to show up out dressing her. I also didn’t want to come across too casual, though. I wanted to look as good as possible without coming on too strong.

After finally selecting an outfit—a dark pair of jeans and a loose button-up—I spent another thirty minutes in front of the mirror trying to make my hair look fashionably messy. I needed a trim. I also considered shaving, but I had grown fond of my perpetual stubble. It was the “in” look, and for all I knew was a feature Fiona liked, part of what motivated her to ask me out in the first place.

Assuming she had asked me out.

Which, technically she had. But had she asked me
out
out?

I swung the closet door shut before I could fuss over myself any more.

My stomach did a few twirls as I stepped out onto the front porch. I could feel the humidity in the air already curling my hair. I hurried to my car parked in the drive. I wanted to get the air conditioning going as quickly as possible. But something made me stop when I put my hand on the door handle. A charge in the air. Magical energy.

I looked around. There were plenty of shadows up close to the rows of identical looking houses on the street. But out toward the street itself and most of the driveways, looming street lights kept things illuminated with an orange phosphorescent glow. I couldn’t see anyone, or any
thing
. Yet that static crackle in the air persisted. Sometimes all that signified was a minor natural magical occurrence happening nearby. A sprite giving birth hidden in someone’s garden. A gnome snoring in his sleep. A troll peeking out from under his bridge.

Sometimes mortals cast spells. The occasional Wiccan occupied more normal suburban homes than you’d realize. And while mortal witches typically couldn’t work anything too complex, those sensitive to magical energies could catch a metaphorical whiff whenever they practiced. Whether it was a simple sky clad plea to the Goddess for some material gain, or a dark, candlelit cursing, I could catch a vibe if it happened relatively close.

Thing was, I had grown up on this street, and while some folks had gone and others come, I felt pretty certain we didn’t have any amateur practitioners on the block.

This energy had a different taste, anyway. It felt more natural. Less spell and more presence.

I double checked the shadows. Because now I felt like I was being watched. I’m not typically paranoid. And I sure as heck don’t scare easily. I’m pretty high up on the supernatural food chain. In a manner of speaking. Not that I eat anything or feed off of anything like a vampire or succubus. Just that I sit high on the hierarchy of power.

I’m not used to being hunted.

But that’s exactly how I felt at that moment.

Rather than take any chances, I gathered my concentration and poured a little energy down to my right hand. Warmth spread outward from my palm and into my fingers.

“Who’s there?”

The crickets chirruped merrily, but I didn’t hear anything else.

Maybe I was being paranoid. Best thing to do, if I was being stalked, would be to get in my car and drive away. I let the energy in my hand dissipate and climbed in my car.

The time I had spent standing out in the wet air had made me sweat into my fresh shirt. I could smell the piney menthol of my deodorant activating. I had decided against cologne, since I don’t normally wear it and Fiona probably knew that, so showing up smelling extra smelly might send her the wrong message. Or, send the right message, but at the wrong time.

I started the engine and cranked up the A/C. The initial burst of air from the vents was oven warm, but at least it was dry.