Chapter 53

Chapter 53 of 56 · 7-minute read

Virgil?

The visions keep coming. I’ll take that as a good sign.

I sidestep an orderly in the long corridor and almost bump into Fallon’s friend. We step away from each other in surprise like two magnets thrust together at opposite poles and instantly repelling.

Has she let Ranger in? Or is she just here to spy on my mother’s decline and report back to Fallon?

Either way, Virgil’s still in trouble.

I bolt down the corridor and twist around the corner toward the hospice unit, which has maybe four rooms. Two are obviously vacant. My mom is in the last one, closest to Virgil’s office.

The sobbing comes from one of the other rooms. I can feel the depth of loss rolling out in waves. Someone was special to someone, and now there’s a hole, fresh and jagged. My heart goes out to them in a split second of recognition of the universality of grief. My own loss is on the horizon, though in so many ways my mom is already gone and has been for a while. I’m not sure which is harder.

Ahead, my mom’s door is open, though I can’t see the bed from where I pause. Soft chanting. Virgil’s voice. He’s walking my mama home.

I take a single step forward, just enough to see Virgil in a chair by the hospital bed. Light blue shirt, long sleeves, silver hair in a ponytail, his back to the door.

I can hardly breathe. I stare at the lavender and orange carpet under my feet.

“Where’s Virgil Caine?” someone demands from behind me, shoving me out of his way. Young. Raging energy. Raw.

I slam against the wall. Dazed.

Virgil’s chanting stops.

A tall man in a dark jacket lumbers past me and stops at the threshold of Mama’s room. Something long and metal flashes in his hand at his side.

“Your fault, Virgil Caine!” His voice catches.

The same voice that had been wailing moments ago.

He lunges forward, toward Virgil, but Virgil slams his cane against the man’s arm, driving him into the wall a few feet from me. The man drops the hunting knife but quickly recovers it.

Virgil may have been a military badass a few years ago, but now he’s a badass with a bad knee, and his attacker is half his age and twice as muscular.

I get a good look at the man this time. Not Ranger. Realization sinks in. My cousin had nothing to do with this attack. Ranger’s merely a trespasser.

The man with the hunting knife? I don’t know him, but he’s a clone of Andy Ray as a young man.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Virgil begins.

“Fuck you! Pops should’ve had his whole family with him, but you wouldn’t make them!”

He lunges again, and Virgil dodges the blade as he delivers an elbow to the man’s kidneys.

“Call security!” Virgil yells as a nurse rounds the corner, but then he sees me. “Laurie! Get out of here!”

Virgil grabs my wrist and drags me forward, out into the main corridor. Somewhere nearby, I hear the nurse calling some kind of code over a speaker.

He pushes me in front of him as we move into the short corridor where the last of the visions is already playing in my head. I know this place. I recognize it from the vision and from the dread that accompanies the stumbling forward and falling.

I reach the door, the same one I’d tried to enter but was locked. I press the crash bar to open it just as Virgil wrenches away from me.

Spinning around, I watch as Old Raymond’s grandson, full of rage and grief, sends Virgil stumbling to the floor, the cane bouncing out of reach on the lavender and orange carpet. The steel of the knife glints in the fluorescent lights.

Diving for the cane, I grab it by the base and swing it around, parrying the grandson’s thrust and catching the blade in the antlers of the Stag-headed God at the other end of the carved stick. With a quick twist of the handle, I wrest the knife out of his hand—and stumble backward out the door. The grandson trips as Virgil grabs his foot. He falls toward me.

We’re all falling, all falling.

Before I can hit the grassy lawn, I fling the cane and knife as far from me as I can so the grandson can’t take them away from me and use them on Virgil—or on me.

The grandson lands on my legs, pinning me down. He twists for the blade, just out of his reach. He scrambles to his knees, trying to reach the knife.

I grab his shirt and pull him back to me—to both his surprise and mine. For a split second, we stare at each other, both of us looking into the abyss of our individual grief.

I don’t know what happens now. Everything I’ve seen in visions has already passed. If there are no more visions from Virgil’s point of view, does that mean⁠—?

Virgil grabs the grandson’s jacket and yanks him backward, upright, but the younger man tumbles out of Virgil’s grip and lands on his knees next to the knife in the grass.

I visualize a meteor flying through the air above me and knocking him to the ground, but it’s not a meteor and it’s not even magick.

Everett.

“Shut the hell up, Little Ray!”

Everett pins the man’s arms behind his back, but he doesn’t answer. Old Raymond’s grandson is out cold.

“Laurie?” Virgil whispers. “Are you all right?”

I feel like a freight train hit me but can’t tell that I hurt anywhere I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s the rush of endorphins lying to me, but I nod. “You?”

He tries to stand but surrenders to his bad knee. We clasp hands and stay on the ground, half-in and half-out the door.

“Mr. Virgil?” Everett stands over both of us and extends a hand to Virgil. “You hurt?”

Virgil accepts the hand and pulls me up with him while Everett retrieves Virgil’s stag-headed cane.

“Miss, um… ma’am? Do I gotta have somebody take either of y’all over to the ER? Your feet are bleedin’ sumpin’ fierce.”

“No.” The word comes out in a husky croak. My soles are red from where the sharp rocks and shells cut into them in the parking lot. “Th-thank you, deputy. I’ll be fine. Was this why you were watching me at Virgil’s tonight?”

He laughs and turns his attention back to Little Ray. “You funnin’ me? I was watching you ’cause I’ve got good instincts, and I still think sumpin’s off about you. Besides some damned reckless drivin’. But him?” He jerks his head toward the man in the grass. “I had no idea. I was after you when he came flyin’ out the door here with a deer knife bigger than mine.”

Everett is right, though. His instincts are excellent.

Virgil clears his throat. “Everett? If you don’t mind, can we finish this discussion later tonight? Miss Emma is leaving us now.”

Virgil limps forward along the lavender and orange carpet, propping heavily on me and on his cane. He leads me back toward my mom’s room, but we stop outside the open door, just out of sight of her bed.

“You hear that?” I search his eyes for answers.

A chorus. Not a heavenly chorus, but an ancestral one.

“You hear them?”

I nod. “See them, too.”

Inside the room is a swirl of energy. Colors. Then blinding light. Then colors again. I can see them, each with their own vivid aura, standing over the bed, crowding around my mom, singing to her about cherries and chickens and rings and babies. Not a single voice but many single voices, mostly female.

I recognize my mother’s mother as she was in her youth, and her mother before her, though I know her only from oblong black and white photos of her as a young bride. And my mother’s father, as a young man in a three-piece suit with a watch chain and hat and not the elderly man I always knew and who guarded my threshold when I was divorcing my first husband. Childhood friends who aged with her but now show themselves as they were in their high school days. A throng of family and loved ones and even a dog or two I remember from my childhood.

My dad isn’t among them. Nor is Uncle Bobby.

Another flash of light and another spirit stands at her bedside, smiling, holding out his hand to her. Green light swirls around him. He wears a soldier’s uniform but not from any recent war. Not family. Not husband or brother. But a sweet love that she never fully realized and never forgot. One who never came home to her, but is taking her home now.

I watch as pale pink energy rises in wisps from her bed, but her body is just out of my sight. She slips her hand into hers. Her energy brightens to a deep pink as if she is whole again and all the faded bits of her energy have reconstituted into a new form of both who she was and who she’d thought she would be.

She turns to smile at Virgil and me. Mama presses her fingers to her lips and blows me a kiss. Just as I did as a child, I raise my hand to catch it and rub it into my cheek. I blow a kiss back. She catches it with a contented smile and then rubs it in as the swirl of pink and green energy and all the colors around them meld into a blinding white light that pulses outward⁠—

And is gone, along with the chorus of the family melody shared through generations.

Only the steady whine of the heart monitor remains.

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