If Angels Burn

"I didn't mind," John said. At church he wore the long black cassock of his order, but today he was in his version of street clothes, a plain black suit. He wore clothes well, too; if not for the priest's choke collar, he would have looked like just another downtown businessman.



God's auditor, wanting to check the books. Alex traded sour amusement for walking over to the cradle and checking the many portable monitors that surrounded it.



Luisa Lopez's face turned slowly to follow Alex's movements. A layer of cadaver skin covered her jaw and neck, not to replace the derma she had lost, but to protect the exposed muscles until the burn lab grew enough of her own skin to begin the surface grafts during the cosmetic phase of her treatment.



If we make it that far. Alex still wasn't sure; if Luisa didn't do the job herself, one major infection would. "How's it going, Lu?"



"She. Dee." Heat damage to her larynx and lungs made her gasp out words in single syllables, delivered on strangled puffs of air.



"Not my best day, either." She checked Luisa's lines, and then carefully applied drops of corneal lubricant to the glaring eyes. "Michigan Avenue was backed up all the way to the pier. I probably could have gotten here faster if I'd jumped in the lake and swam."



The muscles around Luisa's eyes contracted in what would have been a blink if she'd still had eyelids. "Drik."



Alex brought her water cup and straw to her ruined mouth, but after the first sip Luisa turned away. "Swallow a little more. You can use the fluid."



"Real. Drik," she rasped out. "Whis. Key."



"On top of all the drugs you got for ripping out your lines?" She tsked. "I do that, babe, you'll float right out of this room."



"Fuh. Kig. Crack. Her." She managed a snarl, which displayed the jagged remains of her front teeth.



"Not me." She stroked a finger across her forehead, one of the few places on Luisa's upper body where she hadn't been beaten, stabbed, mutilated, or burned. "I'm way more caramel than cracker."



"You. Sis. Der?"



Alex glanced at John, who sat with his head bowed over the rosary in his hand. Explaining multiracial blood was a lot easier when you knew what color your parents had been, which she didn't. John probably did, but he refused to talk about it—another door he had shut in her face.



It really didn't matter; Luisa would probably never see the color of anyone's skin again. "Yeah, I'm a sister."



John didn't look at her, but she could feel waves of disapproval rolling from him. Both Kellers passed easily as Caucasians, and had been raised by white foster parents who had presented them as such. John used to punch out kids who taunted them about their skin color. He'd never admit it, but he liked being thought of as white.



Alex hadn't cared about the snobbery until she had made friends with an African-American flutist named Kevin in the sixth grade. Audra, their adopted mother, had put a quick end to that—We keep to our own, Alexandra—but Alex had been color-blind ever since.



"Hell. Me." One of her bandaged arms jerked up, batting at Alex's. Heat had fused all of Luisa's fingers together, but she managed to rest the twisted, flipper-shaped mass on top of Alex's wrist. "Hell. Me. Go."



Hell me go. Yes, she had, there and back a few times.



"She said that to me, too," John told her. "Where does she want to go?"



Alex gave him a "Shut up" look before she answered her patient. "We need you here, Lu. You gotta stay with us."



The tortured girl didn't like that, and began choking out abbreviated, wordless screeches and fighting the foam cradle holding her body above the hospital bed.



Alex grabbed the IV pole to prevent it from falling over and yanking out the lines keeping Luisa medicated and hydrated. "John, wait outside for me, will you? Lu, I need you to calm down now." Quickly she secured padded restraint straps over the girl's limbs. "Come on, sweetie, don't do this to me."



John left. Luisa ignored Alex's attempts to soothe her and strained against the straps. Scarlet-tinged suppuration from the raw burns bloomed beneath her dressings, and her vitals spiked, setting off three monitor alarms and bringing the charge nurse and a resuss cart.



"Luisa, you've got to chill now. I'm going to give you a little something to help you relax." Alex quickly prepared a syringe and injected her through the IV, then watched the monitors. "This will help. That's it, babe. Let the medicine work."



Luisa struggled to take a deep breath. "Gim. Me. More." Low, hitching sounds came from her chest. She couldn't cry tears anymore, but she could still sob. "Hell. Me. Peas."



"Try to get some sleep." Alex curled her fist against her side as she watched her patient sink into unconsciousness. "I'll see you tomorrow."



She left the nurse with Luisa and stepped outside. John stood waiting for her, the rosary still wrapped around his right hand like a godly good-luck charm. Maybe for him, it was.



"Is she always that bad?" he asked.



He had on his deeply concerned priest face, the one that made her want to sock him in the gut.



Can't punch out a priest. She relaxed her fists. "No. Bad days are when she tries to tear open a vein or bite through her tongue." Alex made a point of checking her watch. "Was there something else you wanted? A donation?"



"I wanted to talk to you. I was wondering…" He hesitated, as if choosing his words carefully. "When was the last time you attended mass?"



So it is audit time. Too bad the accounting works both ways. "Not since you went to South America to save all those poor ignorant Indians' souls." She lifted her eyebrows. "Anything else?"



"I'd like you to come to St. Luke's on Sunday." He tucked his rosary into his jacket pocket. "I'm offering the eleven o'clock mass."



"I've heard all your sermons." Too many times. "I'm due in surgery. Thanks for dropping by." She headed toward the elevator.



"Alexandra, wait." He caught up with her. "Things have to change, but I… I understand why you're upset with me."



Upset? That was putting it mildly.



"Let's review here for a minute, John. After our adopted parents died in that car crash, you came home long enough to bury them and put me in a boarding school." And how she had begged her big brother not to leave her alone. "Now you may dress that up however you like, but the fact is, you dumped me. You remember. Like our real parents did."



He kept his expression priestly. "I had obligations to the mission."



"So many that you couldn't come back until I was in my second year of practice?" She folded her arms. "Must have been Godless Natives-o-rama down there, huh?"



That made his eyes chill. "You don't know what it was like for me."



No, she didn't. "I asked you about it. Or didn't you read the two hundred letters I sent?"



"I read them."



That killed the last of her hope. She'd never asked him about them. She'd always clung to the fantasy that the Brazilian post office had screwed up and sent them to the wrong priest. "You didn't answer them, though. Not one of them. You shut me out, John."



"I had to." Was that shame in his voice? Before she could decide, he touched her shoulder. "I'm still your brother, Alexandra. I care deeply about you."



"Oh, you cared, all right. Enough to ditch a terrified fifteen-year-old in a swank shut-in school so you could play Saint Francis Goes to Save the Poor Jungle Savages."



His hand dropped away. "Yes. I did."



"That's a nice confession, Johnny, but it's not my job to listen to it. Remember, I'm the doctor. You're the priest. If I fuck up, you come in and wave your beads over them before they go see your God." She shrugged. "That's as involved as we get from here on out."



Now his hands were fists. "He's your God, too."



So predictable. Luisa didn't really interest John, and neither did Alex, but skipping church or slamming the Almighty always earned his full attention.



"I stopped believing in God after the first time I treated a toddler with infected cigarette burns. He's all yours, Father." The elevator opened, and she strode into it.



Chapter Two



"Luther Martisse, fifty-three-year-old male with severe craniofacial trauma," the scrub nurse read from the surgery schedule. "Car accident?"



Alex used a rough-bristled brush to get the strong antiseptic soap under her short fingernails. "Ex-wife with a baseball bat."



"Ouch. Fall behind in his child support?"



"Caught in bed with the ex-wife's sister." Alex rinsed, and rifted her foot off the faucet pedal. "I did her jaw last week."



Mrs. Martisse should have tried out for the Yankees, Alex decided after she had a look at the damage through her scope. That one slug to Luther's head had blown out and destroyed all four walls of the internal orbits of his skull.



In order to fix his crushed eye sockets and restore vision, Alex had to extend the surgical exposure of the fractures, reduce and rigidly stabilize the bones with dozens of microplates, an entire sheet of metal mesh, and delicate split calvarial bone grafts.



"Damn it." She tossed aside a bloody probe and adjusted the scope's magnification. Because internal orbit bone was so thin and weak, it was easily damaged. In much the same way Humpty Dumpty would be, after being pushed off the Empire State Building. "Luther, you're making me want to Teflon your damn head back together."



It took another five hours to complete the basic foundation building, and then Alex closed and sent him off to recovery. It would be a week or two before she'd know if the combination of plates, mesh, and grafts would hold, and Luther was still going to need more work. A lot more.



Once Alex had reported Luther's prognosis to the cops, and vetoed the possibility of his appearing as a witness at the ex-Mrs. Martisse's criminal trial, she was more than ready to drag herself home. She paused outside the burn unit, drowning herself in the standing lake of her guilt, and then continued out of the hospital. Seeing Luisa twice in one day would only agitate the patient, and the charge nurse would page her if anything changed.