House of Mercy (40 page)

Her grip on Garner’s arm had become damp. It was the tears, she thought, the intensity of her prayers. The sweat of begging. But when she opened her eyes she saw that their arms were red and sticky. The cut on her shoulder had opened up. The wolf’s claw and the knife of glass had cut through her trail-dusty shirt, sliced it open, and created an ooze of red that matched her grandfather’s shoes. Even now it dripped down his elbow and left droplets on his shirt.

At his wrist, her fingers felt his strengthening pulse. The color in his skin was coming up from the sickly yellow of butter beans to the rosy glow of a belly laugh. His breathing deepened and became a lifesaving wind that pushed his boat of life out of dangerous waters and back toward home.

He slept like Adam in God’s garden, before the world ever knew death.

Beth released her grasp of his arm and laid his hand over his heart. He would wake up when he was ready. Perhaps God had a few things to say to him too. The wolf had vanished from the window frame.

She remembered Dr. Ransom, and Trey, and turned to find them.

Trey was standing in the hall behind her, staring. “You’re about to tell me you’re related to Mathilde, aren’t you?”

“What?” She got to her feet.

“It’s actually a who—Miracle Mattie? Never mind. That. Was. Amazing. You should have watched that transformation! I could see him change, like one of those time-lapse films! Is he okay? He looks better. What happened? What did you do?”

She couldn’t think of any answer that would satisfy Trey’s curiosity right now. “Is Dr. Ransom—”

“On the brink of hell.”

“Did you do CPR?”

“She’s breathing. Her heart’s beating. I don’t know what else to do for her. I’m not even sure I’d want to if I knew how. Just being truthful.”

Beth took a step toward the room. Trey stepped in front of her and swept a flyaway curl behind his ear. “It’s ugly, Beth.” He held up an empty gallon-size bag labeled
Zigadenus venenosus
and pointed to the words. “That translates to English as ‘eat me and you die.’ Meadow death camas. It looks to me like she boiled up some kind of decoction for Garner, then pumped it into his IV bag.”

He pointed to the floor, and Beth noticed a trail of plastic tubing still connected to Garner’s hand, the one she hadn’t been clutching. It trailed along the hall and around the door frame to a floor littered with more plastic tubing, and needles, and a nearly empty bag of some cloudy liquid. Beth stepped over a backboard as she entered the room. On the counter, an electric kettle was tipped over, and a mess of translucent pulp that looked like mashed onions soaked in water.

“Get that out of him.”

“Already did.” Trey held up the detached tube. “So the reduction of death was for Garner. But it looks like our doctor consumed hers raw.”

Beth glanced around for Dr. Ransom but didn’t see her.

“Which is worse?”

“I wouldn’t know. Survival classes just teach you to stay away from the stuff. They don’t tell you how to prepare it for a murder-suicide.”

The bulbs in the hot pot wouldn’t have filled a sandwich bag, let alone the empty gallon-size storage bag hanging from Trey’s fingers.

The room contained medical equipment and monitors that gave it the appearance of a hospital room. Opposite the counter, a hospital bed stood at an odd angle away from the wall. Trey nodded at it, and Beth moved around the foot.

Dr. Ransom lay on her side as if she’d fallen off the bed. She was pressed tightly into the joint where the wall met the floor, her legs unnaturally rigid and jammed at right angles between her hips and the bed. Her shoulders were rolled inward, collapsing her chest, and Beth couldn’t see any movements of breathing. The doctor’s neck was strained upward, tendons pushing against skin, as if her head were trying to escape her body, and her eyes were open, blind but terrified. White bubbles of saliva coated her lips and tongue and left streaks on her cheeks. Beth could see where the doctor’s convulsing had spattered the wall and floor with the terrible poison.

The long, dried stems of the poisonous plant protruded from Dr. Ransom’s frozen fist.

“Stay with Garner,” Beth told Trey as she pushed the hospital bed aside so she had room to kneel and search for a pulse.

“Is she dead?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“You’re not going to do what you did for—”

“It’s not for me to say,” Beth said.

“Well, I think some people deserve what they get.”

Beth pushed damp strands of black hair out of the woman’s terrified eyes. “Mercy’s all about what we don’t deserve.”

“What?”

“Stay with Garner. Just stay with Garner.”

36

A
s Cat lay on the floor choking on her last worldly hopes, she watched Garner rise from the dead and walk out of the room. He saw her, and then he left her. The pathetic turn of events brought a soundless laugh to her silenced throat, and she sputtered more frothy drool.

She surrendered to the pain of the poison. It was less than the pain of her lifeless life. She could feel the death camas seeping into her gums, floating like mist through her throat and belly, seeking out the nerve endings that would transport its toxins to the command centers of her brain.
Slow down
, the invader would command her lungs and heart.
Slow down, shut down
. Her stomach resisted the hostile takeover, but Cat was on death’s side. Let her central nervous system lose its grip; she would hold on to the contents of her stomach more tightly than this unfriendly mountain held its precious metals.

It was her last intentional action before she was overtaken, like dry brush in an inferno, like a person drowning in the ocean. And then the water quenched the fire, and the moisture evaporated in the heat, and the world became black and silent.

There was no pain. She could not move. Her ears strained and couldn’t even hear the sound of her own breath. Her eyes were wide and sightless and full of dry heat that radiated from the ground. What was first a comforting warmth quickly deepened and sucked up all her tears, vacuumed all moisture out of her mouth, parched her throat. It grew in intensity and seemed to melt her clothes to her skin, and she could smell the synthetic fibers burning, and she could feel the metal buttons and rivets of her jeans, the buckle of her belt, the wires and hooks of her bra, the jewelry on her fingers and in her ears—all of it become molten and begin to drip from her body,
through
her body, which was as pliable as wax.

Still, no pain. And complete silence. And unbearable heat that would melt away the very memory of her soul. She was fading away, she was already gone.

The first stab of agony was a sound, a voice rising from the saturated blackness like an invisible fanged snake. The voice of a child, tender and happy. Amelia’s voice.

Dr. Ransom! Dr. Ransom!

Her heart was still beating after all; Cat discovered this when the twin cry clamped down on it and held it tight in its jaws. And then the heartache serpent began to thrash. It raised her up and slammed her down and rattled the sight back into her eyes, and she could see, high in the infinite blackness above her, a pinprick of light that was little Amelia, coming down.

I am lost
, Cat thought.
Come quickly, child
.

The light grew. The point sprouted wings and became like a white butterfly, like an angel descending from heaven to the bottom of the black pot where Cat melted. Amelia’s love fluttered. It rippled with hope on outstretched arms. The closer it came—though still it was so, so far away—the more violently the serpent flailed with her disintegrating body in its jaws. The harder the knocks to the back of her head. The deeper the piercing fangs.

This was the true pain of death: the memory of lost love.

It was no memory, though, not in this layer of existence where the human senses went haywire and reality was bent by hyper-real perceptions. It was a new experience, not from the past but from the future. A reality she had not known until this moment.

Amelia was coming for her. Love, finally, was coming for her.

The floating gauze of the girl’s sleeves were angel wings, the tips pointing upward, out of this despair. The shape of Amelia descended, coming closer to Cat’s upturned face, her whiplashed head. But as she approached, all but her pure white wings changed shape. Her hands and feet vanished. Her skirt turned gray and merged with the darkness. She bowed her faceless head, and the hair of her crown turned black and shiny. And under the wings, a terrible chasm began to open up. The blackness peeled back and exposed a bloody red mouth more terrifying than the consuming heat, and glowing white fangs stronger and longer than the ones gripping her heart.

She was not looking into the body of an angel, but the muzzle of a fierce gray wolf. He dropped his snout toward her, the white wings of snowy fur splayed out under his eyes, golden irises like new sunlight. She couldn’t hold the gaze. She couldn’t look away.

He snarled, and the reptile slamming her heart into the ground released her but left his venom behind. Her dead heart would never beat again on its own.

Dr. Ransom
. Amelia’s tender voice was so very far away.

The wolf sniffed her, and his hot breath was like a cool breeze in hell. And then it opened its mouth wide, and Cat watched as its jaws became unhinged, gaping over her battered head. It closed the final gap between them, and she felt its razor teeth on her jaw, on her temples, as he took her entire head inside of his mouth.

And then it swallowed her whole.

Beth was unprepared for the mystery of what had happened to Garner and Dr. Ransom. She had not anticipated the intensity of God’s healing work, the exhaustion and the exhilaration that ran circles around her mind. She knew she would never be able to adequately explain what had happened to her or to the others in those moments after she placed her hands on them and before she opened her eyes again.

But she was even less prepared for the aftermath.

On the cold floor of the exam room, Dr. Ransom’s body began to quiver. Beth was sitting at her head, hands gently cradling her skull while she prayed for God’s will to be done in this broken life. The convulsing began in Dr. Ransom’s foot, in a spastic ankle that jerked the toe of her shoe against the floor, and then it moved upward through every joint and along every muscle long enough to contort until it reached her head, which she began to knock against the floor so violently that Beth expected the force to break one of her fingers. She entwined them in the doctor’s hair to prevent the woman from cracking her skull.

Then there was the retching, overwhelming and foul and necessary, as purging of any kind always was. Beth was unaffected by the stench, relieved that it had finally happened. And when it was finished, Dr. Ransom opened her eyes, and Beth smiled at her, overcome by the generosity of God.

Cat Ransom looked up into Beth’s upside-down gaze and began to shriek. She took into her lungs all the air that had been denied to her and expelled every last bit of it in endless streams of piercing noise. With unexpected strength, she yanked her head out of Beth’s protective grasp. She fought Beth’s hands and pushed them off her head as if fighting a helmet. Then she created quick distance between them, a gap too far for Beth to bridge with a calming hand or soothing words. The doctor’s noise settled down into a stream of fierce curses.

“You’re not Amelia,” Beth made out between gasps and shouts. “Where’s Amelia, you devil, you dog?”

At first Beth was too stunned to answer, and then she opted not to say anything until Dr. Ransom’s panic subsided on its own. Instead, the disruption mounted. It seemed the doctor’s outburst had roused Garner from his peace in the hallway. There was a confrontation of words between Garner and Trey that Beth couldn’t make out in her corner of the office, where Dr. Ransom’s yells ricocheted around Beth’s head.

When the doctor saw Garner enter the room, her screaming stopped like a car crash, and for a few brief and wonderful seconds, the only sounds were of breathless lungs trying to catch up with the moment. Beth drew in a breath and looked to her grandfather, who was on his feet in the doorway, blocking Trey from entering. The stern gaze he was leveling at her looked so much like her mother’s.

“Garner,” Dr. Ransom said.

Garner didn’t respond to her.