After the death, she had closed the door to that room and not reopened it for a good year and a half. When she finally did venture across the threshold, chinks in the all-is-forgiven armor she’d girded herself with had appeared the instant she’d seen that desk and chair.
She’d shut things up again.
Remembering Gerry as anything other than a good, hardworking man had felt like a betrayal. Still did.
Sarah had been through this post-passing recasting of character before with her parents. There were different standards for the quick and the dead. Those who were alive were nuanced, a combination of good and bad traits, and as both full-color and three-dimensional, they were capable of disappointing you and uplifting you in turns. Once a loved one was gone, however, assuming you were essentially fond of them, she had found that the disappointments faded and only the love remained.
If only through force of will.
To focus on anything but the good times, especially when it came to Gerry, felt just plain wrong—especially given that she blamed herself for his death. On their second date, he had taught her how to identify the symptoms of insulin shock and use his glucagon kit. She had even had to mix the solution and inject it into his thigh on three different occasions while they’d been in Cambridge: His cousin Gunter’s wedding when he’d drunk too much and not eaten. Then when he’d tried to run that 5k. And finally after he’d taken a big dose of insulin in preparation for a Friendsgiving dinner and they’d gotten a flat tire on Storrow Drive.
If she hadn’t stood there in front of the goddamn Indian food in the kitchen and been angry at him, could she have saved him? There was a glucagon kit right there in the top drawer by the sink.
If she had gone right upstairs for her shower, could she have used it in time and then called 911?
The questions haunted her because her answer was always yes. Yes, she could have turned the insulin crash around. Yes, he’d still be alive. Yes, she was responsible for his death because she had been condemning him for loving his work and finding purpose in saving people’s lives.
Reopening her eyes, she looked over at the counter. She could remember, after the body was removed and the police and medics had left and the phone call to Germany made, she had told herself to eat something and shuffled toward the kitchen. The silence in the house had been so resonant that the screaming in her head felt like the kind of thing the neighbors could hear.
Entering the kitchen. Stopping dead. Seeing the two paper bags full of now utterly cold and congealed food.
Her first thought had been how foolish to worry about putting them briefly in the snow to unlock the door. They had been destined to lose their warmth.
Just like Gerry’s once vital body.
Weeping again. Shaking. Jelly legs going out from under her. She had hit the floor and cried until the doorbell had rung.
BioMed security. Two of them. Coming for the computers.
Returning to the present, Sarah shifted around and looked through the archway, past the living room, to her front door.
She had been honest with Agent Manfred. She had told him the whole story—well, minus the emotional bits like the stuff about calling Gerry’s parents and her Cold Indian Takeout Food Breakdown.
Also the part about her feeling responsible for the death—and that was not just because she didn’t want to share the intimate details of the loss with a stranger. Bottom line, it didn’t feel smart to even hint to a federal agent that she believed she might have played a role, however unintentionally, in the very thing Manfred had come to talk to her about.
Other than those two omissions, both of which were non-factual, she’d hid nothing about the natural death that had tragically occurred to a Type 1 diabetic after he had no doubt kept on his insulin schedule but forgotten to eat all day long.
Utterly heartbreaking, but a totally common, garden variety way for someone with Gerry’s condition to die.
Frowning, she thought about her statements to Manfred. Relating the this-then-that-after-which-this-other-thing-happened to the agent had been the first time she had relived Gerry’s death from start to finish. In the intervening two years, she’d had plenty of flashbacks, but they had been out of sequence, an unending supply of discordant, invasive snapshots unleashed by all manner of foreseeable and unforeseeable triggers.
But tonight had been her first full replay of the horror movie.
And that was why she now wondered, even though she had spent too many hours to count ruminating on the natural death of her fiancé …
… how it was that BioMed had known to come pick up those computers before she had told anyone at the company that Gerry was dead.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood Mansion
Caldwell, New York
Born in a bus station. Left for dead. Rescued from the human world by a stroke of luck.
If John Matthew’s life had been required to carry ID, some kind of laminated card detailing its vitals, those would be his birth date, height, and eye color.
Listed also would be mute and mated. The former didn’t really matter to him as he had never known speech. The latter was everything to him.
Without Xhex, even the war wouldn’t matter.
As he entered the King’s study—that pale blue French sanctuary which suited Wrath and the Black Dagger Brotherhood about as well as a ball gown on an alligator—he found the four walls and the silk furniture crowded with big bodies. They were all there waiting for the King, these prime males of the species, these teachers and smart-asses, these fighters and lovers.
This was his family on such a deep level that he felt like he should caboose that particular f-word with “of origin.”
Not everyone was a Brother, however. Still, he and Blay fought side by side with them in the war against the Lessening Society, and so did Xcor and the Band of Bastards. There were also trainees in the field and females. And the team had a surgeon who was a human, for godsakes. And a doctor who was a ghost and an advisor that was the king of the symphaths and a therapist who had been taken out of time continuum by the Scribe Virgin.
This was the village that had sprung up under Darius’s old roof, all of them living here on this Adirondack mountain, mhis protecting them from intrusion, time’s passing marked by the collective purpose of eradicating the Omega’s lessers.
Squeezing past Butch and V, he zeroed in on a spot in the corner. He always hung back, even though nobody asked him to last-row-it.
Leaning against the wall, he adjusted his weapons. He had a belt with a matched pair of forties and six full clips around his hips. Under one arm, he had a long-bladed hunting knife, and on the other side, he had a length of chain on his shoulder. Before he went out into the field, he’d throw on a leather jacket, either the new one Xhex had just gotten him or the old one that was beat to shit, and the wardrobe addition was not because it was a howling winter’s night out there.
If there was one thing he’d learned in the war? Humans were like toddlers. If there was something that could kill them, they would beeline for that mortal event like the gunfight/knife fight/hand-to-hand was calling their name and promising free Starbucks.
One rule in the war. One common ground between the Lessening Society and the vampires. One single, solitary issue on which both sides could agree.
No human involvement—and not because anybody cared about collateral casualties of the noisy and nosy variety. What neither Wrath and the Brotherhood nor the Omega wanted was the bees’ nest of Homo sapiens rattled. On so many levels humans were inferior: not as strong, not as fast, not as long-living—hell, lessers were immortal unless you stabbed them back to their black gasbag of a master.