Took a long time for her to start sweating, but when she did it came on fast. Her hair went wet under my chin, an’ the shivering turned to shakes and then to thrashing. I put my leg over hers an’ held her tighter, still whisperin’ reassurances and praying I wasn’t killing my wife. I was damned near as tired as she was from holding her down when the thing finally came loose from her, an’ rattled outta her chest in a coughing wheeze.
I’d seen it before at the hospital, but somehow I wasn’t thinking it’d be a living moving thing again. There was a lot less to it than there’d been in the ward, but then it only had Annie, not a ward fulla folks to feed on, an’ it looked weak from the heat. I reached past Annie, slow as I could, an’ picked up the fire iron.
It died from the iron a lot faster than it’d done with the IV pole, an’ what was left drifted up the chimney as smoke. Annie gasped in a deep breath an’ rolled away from the fire with a cry, the sweetest sound I’d ever heard. I knocked the table over, bringing cooler air in, an’ dropped down beside her to haul her into my arms. She was cold an’ clammy and shivering again, but it wasn’t a sick kinda shivering anymore.
After the longest time I picked her up again an’ brought her to the bathroom, filled the tub with warm water an’ got in it with her. There wasn’t hardly enough room for one of us in it, never mind two, but I wasn’t gonna let her go. ‘sides, at least it being small meant I could reach for a cup and fill it from the sink without movin’ much. Annie drank it, still without sayin’ anything, and I got her another, an’ another, until she finally just held it, half full, an’ fell asleep against my chest. Healthy sleep, not the stillness from before. She barely even woke up with me getting us outta the tub and dried off, an’ she was a warm little lump of softness at my side when I crawled into bed with her. We didn’t wake up, either, not til early the next morning, when she whispered, “I’m hungry.”
“That’s the best news I’ve heard in a while, doll.” I held on another minute, then kissed her hair. “All right. Bacon an’ eggs or you wanna start small?”
“Porridge? I’ll eat it while you’re frying the bacon. And making the pancakes.”
I grinned real quick. “Anything else I oughta be cooking up?”
“I think that’s enough to start.” She smiled an’ I tried not ta see the blue circles under her eyes, or the weight that had fallen off of her in the past couple days. She looked half burned away, an’ the rash hadn’t faded all the way yet, bright red streaks standing out against awful pale skin.
I pulled her close again and held on a minute, finally whisperin’, “Thanks for staying with me, doll. You had me scared for a while there.”
“Me too. Me too, Gary, but I have to eat before I can talk about it. Before I can even think about it. Okay? Please?”
“Yeah. Yeah, doll.” I kissed her again more fiercely, an’ it turned out hungry an’ weak as she was, there was something she needed more’n food right then. Took a while for me to get out to the kitchen, but I started ferrying food right back into the bedroom. Juice first, trying not to see how fragile she looked holding the cup in both hands and drinking with her eyes closed, an’ then the porridge with lotsa cream and brown sugar while the bacon fried up. Turned out making pancakes wasn’t that hard either, following a recipe from Annie’s cookbook. I only burned a couple. We ate on the bed, balancing plates on our laps an’ knees, just like kids sharing a Sunday morning breakfast with their folks.
I’d never seen Annie pack away so much, or been so glad to see it. Seemed like her color got better with every bite, an’ after about six pancakes, a couple eggs, an’ more bacon pieces than I bothered to count, she sighed an’ put her fork down. “You might have to start doing the cooking, Gary. This is delicious.”
“Hunger makes the best sauce, darlin’.”
She nodded, then closed her eyes a minute, like she was fortifying herself. Then she looked at me, straight an’ clear. “What happened?”
I explained as best as I had it figured out, watching Annie’s face grow more solemn with every word. When I finished, she asked the question she’d done before: “Why me?”
An answer came up from the back of my mind, but I choked it off before it got loose. Because I love you wasn’t any kinda answer that made sense, and hell if I was gonna make either of us start wondering if getting married had been a bad idea. “I don’t know, doll, but if something’s comin’ after you, then we gotta assume it’s gonna come again. I’m thinking maybe we got lucky that this…poison-demon, whatever you wanna call it, that it was slow and had ta be carried inside of somebody else’s body to get close enough to strike. If it had been quicker, I wouldn’t have gotten there in time.”
A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth. It woulda been cute any other day, but worry had claws in my guts. After a minute she got what I was thrusting at, an’ put it in plain words. “Are you suggesting I learn to fight?”
“At least a little bit, sweetheart. I know you’re a nurse to help people, but that thing wasn’t a person. I don’t wanna lose you, Annie. Let me teach you a few things.”
“And what if I get a fright at work and use some of those things on an unsuspecting patient?”
“Annie, you saw that thing. Oily black smoke an’ dead eyes. You really think you’re ever gonna mistake something like that for a patient?”
“You said the starlight demon was a beautiful woman.” She took a breath so deep it shuddered comin’ out, an’ murmured, “It’s hard to believe I’m even saying these things out loud. Gary, this isn’t real. Magic isn’t…real.”
“Ain’t it? Didn’t the saints fight dragons an’ heal people and do miracles? Didn’t Christ? I donno, Annie. Maybe it’s right there under our noses an’ we just don’t believe it. Maybe sometimes it just crops up and bites somebody on the—” I cleared my throat. “Knee. On the knee, hard enough we can’t ignore it. Maybe we just got…bit. An’ maybe it ain’t you, sweetheart. Maybe it’s me. I’m the one your pop thought he could pass his burden on to, an’ the one who killed something outta this world in Korea. Maybe you’re just getting tangled up in…me.”
Her frown came back, but then her mouth pursed like she was trying ta hide a smile. “We could spend the rest of our lives doing this, couldn’t we? Worrying about which one of us it is. Trying to take the blame, or reassure the other, or apologize.”
When she put it like that, it was kinda funny. I spread my hands. “Guess we could, yeah.”
“Maybe we should just put it behind us, then. Maybe if we’re going to keep having…unusual circumstances…crop up in our lives, maybe we should just accept them. Together,” she said with a little emphasis. “Husband and wife. Both of us doing our parts, like God intended.”
“All right, but I’m telling you if we’re gonna be ready to face whatever comes along, God intended for you to learn ta use a gun, Anne Marie Muldoon.”
She said, “Yes, dear,” so nice and sweet that even after a while, when we went back ta sleep, I still had the funny itchy feeling I’d been fleeced.
Truth was, Annie took to shooting more naturally than I had. She didn’t like pistols much, even if she saw their use, but she was a rifle sharpshooter inside’a six months. My Sarge woulda loved her, if he coulda put her on a hill with a scope. She wasn’t afraid of knives, either, though she got grim at the idea of using one. “I know what they do to bodies, Gary,” she said one evening. “I’ve helped stitch people up after knife fights.”