Rising (20 page)

“He shouldn’t have come.”

“He saved our lives.” I turn around and,
for the first time, realize something is wrong with Tarren. Really, really
wrong.

The whole time I’ve been in the shower, he’s
only managed to write two lines of his coded notes into his notebook. The
perfect block letters that always fall so effortlessly from his pen are shaky
and crooked. The last word is incomplete, sloping into a black, wet bead, like
he was pressing down hard on the paper.

Now that I’ve pulled my head up from
Maya’s Wonderful World of Woe, I realize what I should have seen long before –
his clenched jaw, the chalk white skin beneath the smudges of ash on his face,
the way he sits so straight in his chair like he’s afraid to touch any more of
it than absolutely necessary.

And his aura, all that red churning on
the fringes even though he’s obviously trying to control it.

Red is anger. Red is also pain.

“You’re hurt,” I tell him.

Tarren lays down his pen. In the pulse
of quiet that follows, I hear muffled sobbing coming from the room below. A
mother’s heartbreak.

“It’s nothing,” Tarren says, but his
voice is all wrong. Soft. Restrained.

“Like hell. Where? Show me.”

Tarren glowers at the messy letters in
front of him and closes the notebook. “I’m fine,” he says, louder.

“Tarren, you’re not fine. You’re in
pain. Let me help you.” My mind flashes back to the burning house, those strong
arms around me, a crack, shower of embers, a scream.

“The beam of the roof. You said it came
down on us. What, a broken rib?”

“It’ll heal,” Tarren says.

He’d put his jacket back on just as I
was coming around. I try to remember if I saw anything, but those images are
blurry and unstable in my mind.

“A burn?” I ask.

Tarren responds by clenching his jaw
even harder. A vein twitches at his temple, and even from across the room, I
can hear how heavily his heart pounds.

I’m right about the burn, but that’s not
what we’re talking about.

“Tarren,” I sigh and try to figure out some
way to break through his mental phalanx. “If you’re hurt, we need to deal with
it. I don’t care about the….”

Tarren glares at me and stands up
abruptly. “I’m leaving.”

For a moment the pain overwhelms him,
breaking through his control and staining his aura crimson all the way through.
He wobbles and plants both palms on the desk to steady himself.

“Oh god, it’s bad” I whisper. I put
myself in front of the door. “Tarren, please, you have to let me—”

“Get out of the way,” Tarren says, his
voice hoarse and shaking.

“AAARGGGG,” Gabe jackknifes up from the
bed, clutching his abdomen. Tarren and I both stare at him, dumbfounded by the
sudden interruption.

Gabe flops off the bed and writhes on
the floor, groaning in pain.

Tarren moves first, staggering toward
his brother. “What is it? Another seizure?”

“I can’t…I can’t….breathe,” Gabe huffs
and lets out another terrible groan. “Oh shit, uuuughhh.”

This is wrong. All wrong.

Tarren turns to me. “The medical kit,”
he commands. Sweat drips off his face. He’s losing his grip on his aura, and it
twists in spectacular swirls of color, the rubies of his own terrible pain
mixing with the blinding white of his fear.

Those vibrant colors…the power of it. My
thoughts flee, leaving only the animal hunger. I back up until I hit a wall,
and then I pin my palms behind me.

“Gabe, it’s okay,” Tarren tells his
brother as he kneels down. “Just relax. Breathe. Maya’s bringing the medical
kit.”

“I see…I see a light,” Gabe whispers.
His whole body quakes. “It’s beautiful. Tarren, can you see it?”

“Maya, the MED KIT!” Tarren commands.
His eyes are wide and wild.

“T…Tarren,” I whimper. “It’s not….not…”

The words won’t come out. Can’t think. I
use all the strength in my legs to press myself into the wall, keeping my hands
pinned. The song. Everything the song.

“Gabe,” Tarren’s voice cracks. “Breathe.
You have to try to breathe.”

“Hold me,” Gabe whispers. Tarren gathers
his brother in his arms. Gabe’s head lolls in the crook of his elbow.

“There’s something….” Gabe’s voice is
less than a whisper. He pulls in a short, wheezing breath. “There’s
something…I…I…need to…”

Tarren leans closer. “Please,” he chokes
out, “I can’t…”

“…need to tell…you …” Gabe’s eyes
flutter. He grabs the collar of Tarren’s jacket with his left hand, and raises
his head so that his lips are at Tarren’s ear. “I got your tranq gun.”

I hear the hiss of a shot. Tarren drops
his brother and staggers to his feet.

Gabe sits up. He grins.

Tarren looks down at his chest, pulls
out the tranq dart, and then stares at Gabe. “What?” he asks numbly.

Gabe gives him a little wave. “Sweet
dreams bro.”

Tarren takes three long strides toward
the door, and his knees buckle.

“Maya, can you…” Gabe says.

I’m already there, catching Tarren and
pulling him into me, chest to chest. I slip my arms under his, taking his
weight. His aura is wild, cloaking my skin, raising every hair on my body.

He clutches my arms, streaking my clean
shirt with ash, and chants, “No, No, No, No, No,” as I lower him down. “No…No….no…..no.”
The words grow softer and slower. His aura dims, allowing me precious strands
of control.

We sink to our knees, and I’m afraid to
let him down any further, not sure where the wound is. Heat pours off his body,
and that wretched burned plastic smell is so strong. How could I have missed it
all?

“Separate rooms,” Tarren mumbles. “Take
care of it…when…separate rooms.” He gazes at me with glassy eyes.

“It’s okay, I’ve got you,” I say to him.

“Persephone,” he slurs and tries to push
away from me.

“Don’t, it’s okay.” I hold him against
my body even though the hunger lashes at my brain.

Tarren’s body relaxes against mine, and
his head sinks forward against my shoulder. “Not a…,” he whispers, his voice
barely registering.

“What?”

His grip is feather soft on my arms.

“Not a…not a….” His hands drop away, and
his last word is nothing but air on frozen lips. “…cure.” 

“Man, was that performance Oscar-worthy
or what?” Gabe asks.

I carefully lower Tarren to the floor, positioning
him on his side. Deep shivers of need cascade through my body. It’d be so easy
to take off my glove, to reach down…

I back away from Tarren.

“You…” I look up at Gabe, at that wide
grin that hasn’t left his face. “You tranqed Tarren!”

“Damn straight.” He pulls himself to his
feet, pressing his hand on the bed for support. “I get so tired of all that
stoic bullshit sometimes. Don’t you?”

I watch the ruby reds fade from Tarren’s
aura. “That was really cruel.”

Anger boils inside my chest, some of it for
the devastation that seared Tarren’s features as he held Gabe, but most of it
because I almost lost control…again.

“He thought you were dying,” I snap at
Gabe. “How could you do that to him?”

My brother loses his smile. “I’m not
going to let him suffer, no matter how pig headed he is about the scars. He
wasn’t going to let you near him. There was no other way.”

Tarren’s aura is settling into its
natural cobalt blue, a rare enough sight over the last two months.

“You shouldn’t have tricked him like
that.”

Gabe shrugs. “Probably not. Can you lift
him onto the bed?”

After pulling up my mental shields, I
gather Tarren up from the floor. He’s a rag doll in my arms, a heavy, sweaty, ash-smelling
rag doll. He lets out a woozy grunt when I slide him onto the bed on his
stomach. A single, small tick rises in his aura, but quickly dissipates.

Gabe sets up his laptop at the table and
hunches over it. “Alright, I’m looking up burn treatments. Do you know where he
was hurt?”

I put a pillow beneath Tarren’s head and
gently turn his face to the right – the side without the scar.

“I think it’s his back.”

“Then we need to get his shirt off.”

I stare down uncertainly at Tarren.
“Gabe, if we do that, he’ll never forgive us.”

“You said it was bad didn’t you?” Gabe
looks up from his laptop. His face is flushed with fever, and different hues
twitch in his aura. I see his exhaustion, adrenaline, and the honeyed shades of
disquiet.

“Yeah, it’s bad,” I admit.

“Then we don’t have a choice.”

While Gabe goes out to the jeep to
retrieve the medical kit, I sit on the edge of the bed and work to get Tarren’s
jacket off. It’s strange, almost unreal to see his aura so flat – all those
wheels and cogs inside his head silenced. I keep expecting Tarren to react, to
groan or flinch or to snatch his arm away, but his limbs bend in passive
submission to my tugging, and those blue, accusing eyes stay hidden beneath his
lids.

As soon as I pull the jacket off his
back, I see that his injury is worse than I thought. His black Under Armour shirt
is soaked in sweat, and that tainted smell of burnt barbeque saturates the air,
almost overwhelming my senses. A long jagged streak of black melted fabric slashes
across his left shoulder blade. Two smaller burns, one toward the middle of his
back and another near his left hip, ooze clear liquid.

I sit back on the bed and stare. The
smell of it alone is enough to make me gag. This is…this is…he could die from
something like this. And I’ve read that burns are painful. Not even broken bone
painful or massive paper cut with lemon juice squeezed over it painful. Burns
are prolonged agony, the kind where every single nerve ending gives everything
it’s got and more.

And this is my fault. He stayed. He
searched for me. He ran into those flames, and I never even thanked him for it.

“You should have left when I told you
to,” I whisper to him as I carefully remove his two side holsters. “Why didn’t
you leave?”

“Because he loves you. Duh.” Gabe kicks
the door closed behind him and hefts the large medical kit onto the table.

“Shit Tarren,” he mutters, as he peers
at his brother. His aura erupts in pale golden streams of distress.

“You didn’t notice this before, when you
found us outside the guest house?” I ask.

Gabe shakes his head. “Tarren was facing
toward me. As soon as he was awake, I was kinda more focused on making sure you
were breathing. And then he had his jacket back on. Stupid bastard. ‘Course he
wouldn’t say anything.” Gabe lets out a heavy sigh, the kind of sigh that comes
from having a martyr for a brother.

“Get his shirt off. Be careful.” Gabe drops
down heavily in the chair and holds his head in his hands like he needs the
extra support to keep it up.

“Gabe, you’re—”

The look he throws at me stops my words.

“Tarren needs us,” he says, as if this
statement will magically prevent him from collapsing from exhaustion.

I know a lost cause when I see one, so I
swallow my mother hen clucks and open the medical kit. A vial of morphine is
missing, but that quandary will have to wait. I take out the scissors, and,
with trepid hands, put the hem of Tarren’s shirt beneath their sharp teeth.

The metallic
sic
reminds me of
the day I used these same scissors to cut away the locks of my blonde hair
after my transition. They fell limp and dead on the floor, and I remember with
perfect clarity how it felt – like I was severing the tether of my entire life
along with those tangles.

I cut all the way up to the collar of Tarren’s
shirt and then realize it would have been smarter to go up the side seam. Now I
cut across, all the way down his right sleeve. Each time I lower the scissors
to cut, my hand dips through the placid layer of Tarren’s aura. Even with the
three rats I recently drained, my body wants more. It wants human energy. My
hands tremble.

Tarren needs us,
I think and turn it into a desperate
mantra as I start cutting up the left side of his shirt, making wide detours
around the wounds.

Sic, sic,
go the scissors.

Tarren needs us. Tarren needs us….

Sic, sic…

Tarren needs us…

I pull away the scraps of Tarren’s shirt,
revealing his broad, muscled back and the terrible map of scars that are his
greatest shame. A twisted network of shiny pink roads travel up, down, and
diagonally through his flesh. Grand used different knives. Some of the scars
are small. Others are wide and furled with stiff healed tissue. One starts at Tarren’s
right shoulder and streaks all the way down to his left hip, disappearing
beneath the waistband of his pants. Shiny, penny size burns stand in columns of
four on each arm.

The scars tell a story, one that begins
with Tarren following his twin sister, Tammy as they tracked Grand. Tarren was
shy and resistant to the mission back then, but Gabe insists that he would
follow Tammy into hell, and he did. When Grand captured them, he set his knives
upon Tarren’s body, every cut deep enough to scar but not to kill. Mystery
shrouds the story’s ending, but what I do know is that under Grand’s sharp
coaxing, Tarren revealed my existence, which our mother, Diana, had successfully
kept hidden. As a reward, Grand let Tarren go, but not before turning Tammy
into an angel.

Tarren insists that Tammy is dead, but
could he really have killed her even if she begged for death like he claimed? Doubts
have been sitting dark and heavy on my mind, unspoken but growing like a tumor.

Gabe isn’t privy to this full story, and
I understand why Tarren wants to protect him from the truth. Gabe is our light.
It’s better that he believes Grand killed Tammy. That she never lost her
humanity and Grand discovered my existence on his own.

I cut away the fabric around the burns.
Tarren’s skin is an angry red, blistered and wet with clear liquid that doesn’t
smell like sweat. It is immediately apparent that even with our
professional-grade medical kit, we’re under-equipped, and I’m way too inept to
handle this situation.

“Gabe, I think we need to get him to a
hospital.”

Gabe comes over to the bed. His aura
jumps with a flourish of colors, and his jaw sets.

“We can’t,” he says. “There’d be too
many questions about the burns and the scars. Plus, our prints are in the
system. Hospitals check those sometimes. We’re wanted for questioning in quite
a few places.”

“We can’t treat him. Look at this.” I
wave my hand over Tarren’s back as if it all wasn’t plain enough already.

“We’re going to have to. I’ll call Dr.
Lee, and he’ll walk you through everything.”

“Me?”

Gabe holds up a trembling hand. “Not so
steady,” he says and gives me a weak smile.

I almost suggest a show and tell. My
hands are starting to glow.

Tarren needs us. Tarren needs us…

“Alright. Call him.”

Gabe dials, and I hear Francesca’s soft,
accented voice answer on the other end. Deep purple hues flicker to life in
Gabe’s aura.

“Hey, it’s me,” Gabe says, his voice gruff.
“I need—”

“Gabe, are you okay? Are you safe? Is
everyone safe?

My sensitive ears can easily pick up
Francesca’s side of the conversation.

“I’m good. Maya’s good. You can go back
to the cabin now, by the way. The situation…it was taken care of. There’s no
danger anymore.”

So, Gabe did get everyone to safe
locations. I wonder how he explained it to Francesca. Maybe he didn’t have to.
After seeing how close to death he was three months ago, Francesca knows we do
dangerous work even if she’s not privy to the specifics.

“Oh, okay,” Francesca says. “Good. Yes,
I’ll let Dr. Lee know. Wait, you didn’t say anything about Tarren.”

“Huh?”

“You didn’t say that Tarren was good,”
Francesca presses.

Gabe bites his lip. “Francesca, I need
to talk to Dr. Lee. It’s important.”

“He went out for a walk. Did something
happen to Tarren?” Francesca’s voice wavers.

“What? I told you to find a motel and
stay put, curtains closed, doors locked.”

“I know…I told him,” Francesca’s voice
is all apology, “but he is stubborn. He said ‘what will happen, will happen.’”

Gabe groans. “Yeah, that sounds like
him. Okay, you need to go get him. Now. Fast.”

“I…I don’t know which way he went. He
left half an hour—”

“When will he be back?”

“I don’t know. Another half hour, maybe
longer?”

“Fuck!” Gabe pulls the phone away from
his ear, and his aura arches up before collapsing back down into agitated waves.
Our eyes lock, and he takes in a deep breath before bringing the phone back up.
His voice is tender. “Sorry Francesca. It’s Tarren. He uh…he got hurt.”

Francesca is quiet for a moment, but
when she speaks her voice is steady. “How bad?”

“Burns,” Gabe says. “We had to put him
out.”

“Okay.” In that word, I hear her
gathering herself. I can almost see the intense gleam lighting up in those
large doe eyes. She helped Dr. Lee pull Gabe from the brink of death with that
gleam in her eyes.

“Okay,” she says again. “Is there any
chance that you can bring him to a hospital?”

“No. We can’t do that,” Gabe responds.
“I can’t tell you—”

“Fine,” she cuts him off. Her voice is
different, a little deeper, a little stronger. “Are you close by?”

“No.”

I hear shifting on the other end of the
line and then a soft
thud
like she just put a book on a table.

“Describe the wound and your supplies,”
she says.

“She’s still in her second year of
nursing school! We need Dr. Lee,” I hiss at Gabe. He ignores me, puts Francesca
on speaker phone, and gives her a rundown of the blistered skin, jagged burns,
and melted fabric. To her credit, Francesca doesn’t ask us how the injury
occurred.

I lean against the wall, near the bed,
and let the vibrations from the heater run through my body as Gabe lists off
the supplies in our med kit. His knowledge of the compounds and implements
surprises me, but it really shouldn’t. That box is life and death. It pays to
know it well.

Francesca’s voice is soft and steady as
she guides us through prep. All I can think is,
Shit, we’re actually doing
this.
I wonder how much of Francesca’s calm is feigned.

Gabe strips back the covers and sheets
and lays out towels beneath Tarren, while I soap up in the bathroom sink using
the antibacterial soap in our kit. Then I slip on a pair of latex gloves.

Upon Francesca’s direction, I give
Tarren an injection of antibiotics and then wash his back with antibacterial
soap and water. Francesca explains that infection is the greatest danger when
dealing with burns, and that Tarren will need heavy doses of antibiotics until
the skin grows back over the wounds.

Her knowledge seems way advanced for
second year nursing school. Either Dr. Lee has been teaching her a thing or two
off book about catastrophic wound care with minimal supplies, or she’s been
doing a hell of a lot of extra credit.