Night Betrayed

When they brought him to Selena, he was already breathing the death rattle.

“Pigment found him covered by a pile of brush,” Sam told her. “Sniffed him right out like he was a little rabbit. He doesn’t look too good, but . . . I thought at least you could make him more comfortable. Help him along.”

She looked at Sam, looked at his young, sad eyes and sighed inwardly. She might be used to the constant face of death, to the “helping along,” but he shouldn’t be. The brittleness that seemed to settle over her lately felt sharper. What kind of life am I giving my son?

“Well, thanks to Pigment,” she said, concentrating on a gentle smile. “I hope Tim gave him a treat.”

“He’s going to give him a rib bone right now, but we wanted to bring him to you first.”

“He was alone?” she asked, thinking about the man’s family. Surely they’d come along and find him. They’d want to be with him.

Sam nodded. “No one else around. Looked like someone either buried him, thinking he was dead, or hid him. We looked,” he added with an earnest gaze.

“All right, then. Thanks, guys,” she said, her gratitude encompassing the two other seventeen-year-old boys. “I’ll do what I can to make it easier for him.”

Selena turned to the man who lay sprawled on one of the beds, having been deposited there gently yet, with the enthusiasm of three teenagers, awkwardly. The familiar gray haze of death shimmered around him, but the afternoon sun pouring through the window sent waves of lavender filtering through it. What should have been dull motes of dust sparkled silver and purple in the light.

She frowned and stared, stepping closer, drawing her fingers gently through the mist, disturbing the glittery dust. Selena hadn’t seen it do that before . . . and she’d been seeing the death cloud, as she called it, for as long as she could remember.

Yet she never found the gray miasma frightening; rather, it was like a cloud enveloping and then cloaking the body—as if to soften passage into the next world. While it often sparkled, she had never ever seen it manifest in hues other than gray to blue.

A quick glance around the room told her that everything else remained the same: Jules lay in the corner section, his breathing shallow and quick—rattling faintly but not as deeply as this new arrival. The haze around this forty-eight-year-old-man had morphed from gray to blue, indicating that he’d be gone soon. Most likely within the next hours. Jules’s heavenly guides, visible only to her and him, of course, sat vigil nearby, waiting for him to relinquish his last hold on life. One of them was Jules’s daughter, who’d died three years ago in this very space. His wife, who was still living, had left an hour ago to tend to their cows and was expected back soon.

On the other side of the room, cloistered by a blanket screening off her section, Maryanna’s breathing was nearly silent. The gray vapor around the young woman wavered, but rose tall and strong, readying itself to buffer her during the change. Her husband rested next to her, exhausted and ashen-skinned, waiting for the inevitable. She looked more peaceful than he did as he held her small, blue-veined hand in his large one.

Selena’s heart squeezed and the edge of emptiness poked her. She pushed it away—for now. She had Sam. And Vonnie. And even Frank.

Later, she would grieve for all of them. But now, she had work to do.

Turning, she checked on little Clara, the sole survivor of a zombie attack in her settlement two years ago. She’d survived that horror only to succumb to a different one. The tumor that distended her belly made her look as if she had an extra pillow under her blankets. She was bathed in the same gentle mist as Maryanna and Jules. And her death cloud had blued as well, though she was conscious, her eyes open and watching Selena from across the room.

“Are you in pain?” Selena asked. “Can I get you some water? A little puff?”

Where the hell is Jen? She should have been back by now. I’ve got to see if there’s any hope for this guy.

But she already knew there wasn’t. Once the gray haze came, that was the beginning of the inevitable. Maybe fifty years ago before the Change, when everything was different, there might have been hope.

“No,” Clara replied. “I’m just looking at him. His cloud is so pretty. All the sparkles.”

Selena smiled at the simplicity and accuracy of the eight-year-old. She wasn’t surprised that the girl could see the death cloud. After decades of experience, nothing about the dying surprised her anymore. They were the only ones who really understood.

And, yes indeed, the new arrival was pretty—all covered in faint sparkling lavender and silvery gray. But what did it mean?

She turned her full attention to him. Sam and his friends had tried to be gentle, but they weren’t used to carrying and moving the deadweight of a full-grown man, especially one as solid and muscled as this one; and he’d been deposited clumsily, half on his side.

Blood stained his shirt, dried and crusted in places, yet damp and oozing directly over his chest. Already, it colored the blanket beneath him, seeping into an irregularly-shaped spot. One arm, bared by a sleeveless shirt and streaked with blood and grime, had a long red dragon tattooed on it.

Selena glanced at it but didn’t have time to look closely because she needed to call Cath, over in Yellow Mountain, to determine if there was anything to be done for him. Usually by the time the sick got to Selena, Cath had already seen them and done what she could.

His breathing shifted, the rattle deepening, sounding like his lungs were filling with fluid. It could be blood or edema, and that meant nothing good. Selena looked at his face, which appeared to be drawn with pain and fatigue. He couldn’t be more than thirty.

Young pup.

And a handsome one at that, with shiny black hair cropped short and falling every which way in ragged spikes. Long sideburns framed a face with high cheekbones, and there was more than a bit of Asian in his eyes and skin tone. Full lips, smashed into an almost-pucker as he lay on his side. Nice, rounded muscles on his arms and beneath the hiked-up leg of his jeans.

If I were twenty years younger . . . Oh. And if he weren’t dying . . .

Smiling wryly to herself—because, after all if she didn’t have a sense of humor in a life like this, she’d be even more screwed up than she was—Selena washed her hands with the lemon-infused soap and reached for his uppermost hip, ready to shift him onto his back. At the last minute, she decided to remove his shirt first. At least she could clean him up, see the injury, and put him in a fresh tunic.

Something fresh in which to die.

She frowned. Humor was all good and well, but lately her thoughts had trailed into unpleasantness more often than not. She needed a change. Or at least some way to find relief and ease from the sadness of her work.

As she removed the grimy, sodden clothing, she saw that he had another dragon tattoo curling down his muscular back. This one was blue, and its single visible eye sparkled down near his hip.

Sparkled?

Selena knelt next to him to get a closer look, unable to help noticing the beginning curve of his butt just below his sagging jeans. Hmm. It was more like a glint than a sparkle. What in the crazy world is that?

Gingerly, she reached to touch it with her finger.

A fiery, painful jolt shot through her, and she jerked her hand away. “What the hell!”

Selena stared down at him, listening to the ragged, guttural breathing that portended no good and went inexorably on and on. She could see the shine of something metal right there, as if it were embedded in his skin.

Or as if his skin was merely a covering over something metal.

Was he some kind of Klingon? A robot?

An Elite?

Heart pounding, she sat back on her haunches, still crouched next to the bed. Could that explain the odd-colored sparkles in his death cloud?

She’d never had an Elite brought to her here—which was no surprise, since, duh, Elites were immortal because of the crystals embedded in their bodies. They didn’t die, so they didn’t need the Death Lady.

But . . . this guy had metal under his skin. Maybe he wasn’t even a man after all.

But then why did he have the death cloud? The haze?

He felt warm, he felt human. He breathed. He obviously bled. His heart tried to pump, but it was weak and erratic. He was definitely a man.

“Use the crystal.”

Selena stiffened so sharply she nearly lost her balance, catching herself with a palm on the rug. She turned. “What did you say?”

Clara had somehow shifted to sit up in her bed. Her eyes in their youthful face were full of wisdom and clarity. “They told me to tell you to use your crystal.”

Heart pounding, Selena rose slowly to her feet. No one knew about the crystal except Vonnie. “Who?”

Clara smiled and made a sharp, jerky gesture to the corner near her bed—where her guides, or angels as she preferred to call them, usually appeared. They weren’t there, or at least weren’t visible to Selena at that moment. “You know,” the girl told her. Her smile grew broader, almost beatific. The blue cloud billowed.

Then, suddenly, the light in her eyes faded as if a dense fog slid in front of the sun. A pang of fear stabbed Selena in the gut and she ran.

She got to Clara’s side in time to touch her hand. “Clara.” No, oh no.

It was hard enough watching life ease from the eyes of any person, but it was the most difficult with children. Yet, they were always so brave, so clear-eyed about it. The death haze had deepened; and as she sat there next to the little girl, feeling herself pulled into Clara’s blue cloud, she could see Clara’s parents in the fog, waiting to help her, and her aunt as well, their images wavering in the distance. Her throat dry, Selena closed her hands over each of the girl’s smaller ones and felt warmth ease from Clara’s fingers.

At least she would be with her parents now.

As the life slipped away and Clara’s muscles relaxed, waves of her memories came to Selena. Images, visions, feelings; in short, jerky vignettes and dreamlike moments flooded into her mind, prickling like a million pin-needles as she absorbed them. She fought back tears and accepted them. This part of her calling was the most intimate, the most difficult . . . and yet, the most beautiful.

At last, the little girl’s hands went soft and limp. Her breathing stopped. Her little heart rested.

The blue haze disintegrated.

And Selena closed the young, wise eyes with two gentle thumbs, then wiped her own.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, looking down at the serene little face with its wispy hair brushed back from the temples, doing her private grieving, her prayers and memorials, but suddenly a gasp from the corner pulled her out of her silence.

Selena was up and away from the small body in a flash, but by then it was too late. The dragon man gave a violent shudder, his eyes closed as if in pain, and a last desperate breath. And then . . . nothing.

She bent, tucking her ear to his chest. Silence. No heartbeat. No faint heave from the lungs. The haze disintegrated, leaving nothing but a few last sparkling dust motes in the air.

He was dead.

And she didn’t know who he was or where he belonged.

“What the hell do you mean, you lost Theo?” Lou Waxnicki heard his own voice rise and crack, not with age but with fear and disbelief. He looked up at the massive man looming over him. For once, Fence didn’t have that devil-may-care glint in his eyes.

In fact, the guy looked downright miserable, and the misery had nothing to do with the streaked blood dried on his coffee-colored face or the way he cradled his left arm. Lou saw the red and swelling flesh on his chin and arms and knew it would turn purple and green with bruising by the next day. He’d been in some hellacious fight, but the real misery was in his eyes, bloodshot and dull with pain.

“And Quent? Where the hell is he?” Lou demanded, but in a marginally lower voice. “Did he find his father?”

Theo was Lou’s twin brother, and Theo and Fence had insisted on going with Quent on his suicidal mission—to find Quent’s father, one of the leaders of the immortal Elite.

Sage rose from her computer chair and placed her cool hands on Lou’s shoulders, a thumb brushing the edge of his gray ponytail. “What happened?” she asked, squeezing gently in a silent suggestion of patience. Her fingers, strong from working on keyboards day after day, were firm and sure.

And how frail he felt, even to himself, under those slim fingers. How old and frail. Both he and Theo were seventy-eight years old, but through a crazy twist of fate, Theo had been affected physically so that he’d hardly aged in the last fifty years. He still looked the same as he had when the cataclysmic events of the Change had occurred, leaving Lou to appear more like his grandfather than his twin.

“We were captured by one of the bounty hunters and Theo was shot. Bad. In the chest,” Fence said, looking at Lou steadily. “The only hope was to get him back here to see if Elliott could save—uh, fix—him ’cause there wasn’t anything else to be done. Quent went on to find Fielding while I brought Theo back here to Envy. He was bad off, and I was goin’ so fast when I—”