I stepped back into the room with her. She now wore the sweat suit as pajamas, and she sank down onto her inflatable mattress with pink flannel sheets and a quilt. The stuffed animal, still wearing her mother’s shirt, was lying on her pillow.
“Did he come over a lot?” Don’t think about Theo. Don’t fall apart in front of Beverley.
She shrugged. “About once a week, I think. But he might have come over more after my bedtime.”
“What kinds of things did he bring you?”
“Goliath always brought Mom flowers, and he always brought me a little bouquet of colored daisies or tiger lilies for my room. He gave me some books, helped me with homework, and played video games with me. Once he brought me a glass figurine of a unicorn with gold etched into the spiral of the horn. He always had a goofy joke to tell me, and he even gave me an iPod already loaded with a bunch of neat music and super-good earbuds, but that was just to—” She stopped and bit her lip.
I just couldn’t picture Goliath, or any vampire, being so considerate of a human’s needs and wants. Theo had identified him as the one that had run her off the road; to me, that only reinforced his guilt in Lorrie’s murder. “Just to what?”
Beverley blushed. “To keep me from hearing them. But I took the earbuds out sometimes and listened to them. See, he couldn’t be Vivian’s lover, ’cause he was my mom’s lover. He made her so happy. She said she couldn’t date human men anymore because she’d hurt them, but she didn’t have to worry about hurting Goliath. He wouldn’t have killed her. I know it!” She grabbed the stuffed cat and pushed her face into her mother’s shirt. Her shoulders jumped as she cried.
I reached out and rubbed her back, fighting the urge to rush down and question Vivian again, but she wasn’t going anywhere, so I had time for that later. Vivian had said Lorrie had been killed as a warning from some out-of-control Council enforcement agent. But Goliath was a vampire, not an Elder, and the idea that he worked for anyone besides Menessos was ludicrous. Would Menessos have sent Goliath as a favor for some Elder? What would a vampire want from an Elder? Maybe he was trying to get Vivian on the Council despite her stained status. Maybe the Council was politically in bed with the vampires more than I wanted to believe.
There was another possibility—well, okay, there were probably lots of other possibilities, but this one was bright on my radar. What if Beverley was right and Goliath hadn’t killed Lorrie? I had taken Vivian’s word as proof. Now I knew her word was worthless.
But if Goliath wasn’t the murderer, then who was? I didn’t even know where to start if I needed other suspects. What if Vivian had just used this awful situation to her advantage because she could? Because I was that naive?
“Persephone?”
I realized I’d stopped rubbing Beverley’s back. She’d stopped crying, at least.
“Sorry. I’m trying to figure this all out.” I stood. “It’s so…frustrating.”
“Promise me you’ll tell me everything you find out.”
“I promise. I won’t hide anything from you.” At the door, I reached for the light.
“Leave it on. Please.”
Theo’s heart monitor showed a fast but regular rhythm. Dr. Lincoln and Johnny were talking in hushed tones, but stopped when I stepped into the room. Nana was coming up the stairs and followed me in. Celia sat on the edge of the bed holding Theo’s hand. “What do we know?” I asked.
“She had a blood clot; it’s common with leg or pelvis injuries. She ‘threw’ it; it hit her lung. We need an ambulance to get her to the State Shelter where they can perform the emergency surgery she needs.”
“No,” Johnny said. “They have a spell.” He gestured at Nana and me.
“How soon can you do this forced-change ritual?” the doctor asked.
I glanced at Nana. She went to the window seat, leaned and looked up, then stepped back and looked out through the skylights, positioned herself by Theo’s bed, calculating. “About twenty hours from now, the waning moon will be shining through those skylights again. Or we could move her to where the rising moon shines on her.”
“No. Don’t move her.” Dr. Lincoln pursed his lips, and his fingers twitched as he figured in his head. “Look, you have to understand. Without proper radiological testing—” He stopped himself, obviously remembering his audience wasn’t savvy with medical terms. “Without an X-ray or scan, I can’t begin to guess the size of the clot.
I can guess at the location because I can hear the obstruction, but…” He took a deep breath, then said, “Best case: this thing breaks up on its own in the next few hours, but I know for a fact the chances of that are slim.”
“How can you be so sure that’s a fact?” Johnny pressed.
“A pulmonary embolism killed my wife.” His tone was bitter. “The right ventricle of the heart pumps blood to the lungs to get oxygen, and with the clot there, the ventricle will start to fail as it tries to push blood past the blockage. This kind of scenario has a ninety percent mortality rate. Or she could keep throwing clots.” He rubbed his brow.
Johnny took the doc’s biceps in his hand and stared down at him. “What can you do to give her twenty hours?”
The doc considered it. “She needs surgery, but I can’t perform it. Short of that, she needs oxygen. I have tanks, and I think the nasal cannula for a large dog will work for her.” He looked at me. “I’ll stay here and try to buy her a day.”
“But should we wait,” I asked, “until she’s a little stronger?”
“She’s not going to get any stronger.”
Johnny released the doc and took me by the shoulders. “Either she makes it or she dies trying, Red. She’d risk it, and you know it. All or nothing—that’s how Theo has lived her life.” He released me. “And that’s how she’d want to die.”
I looked at Theo’s face, my eyes burning. “I don’t know if—”
“You have to try,” he whispered. “She’ll die for sure if you don’t.”
Did we have what it took to turn away death?
I woke around ten, but I didn’t feel rested. That sucked, because there was so much work to do.
Downstairs, Dr. Lincoln snored loudly in my cozy chair, and Johnny lay stretched over the ends of my couch. Vivian’s chair had been moved to the living room and lowered to its side; one of my worn tan pillows was under her head. She smelled vaguely of valerian. I’d told Johnny about the bottle, and he’d spritzed her with it.
Nana was sitting in the kitchen studying the Codex. A cigarette rested in an ashtray beside her, and the whole of it was one continuous piece of ash. She’d found something so interesting that she’d forgotten the Marlboro.
The aroma of coffee enticed me immediately. As I fixed a bowl of microwave oatmeal, I saw the valerian bottle sitting by the stove. I opened a drawer, took out a marker, and wrote 40 Winks on the bottle. Didn’t want anyone drinking that. With my favorite coffee mug (with Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” on it) and my oatmeal, I sat across from Nana. “Find something interesting?”
Nana reached for her cigarette and swore when she saw it was wasted. “Did I find something interesting,” she repeated slowly, sitting back in her chair in a way that said she was stiff from hours hovering over the book. I don’t think she’d returned to bed. “You don’t appreciate what this book is,” she added angrily. Her leg had started bouncing in irritation; I guessed it was an action I was genetically engineered to copy.
She hadn’t slept and she was grumpy, so I made an extra effort to stay calm. “I don’t understand what it is. Explain it to me.”
Nana put her hands on the pages reverently. “In layman’s terms, this book is, to witches, the equivalent of the Holy Grail or the Cauldron of Annwfn.” She overpronounced the funnily-spelled Celtic word: An-OO-ven.