Wicked Ever After(8)

Back on Earth, I was a hospice nurse, providing comfort and strength when people needed it most. Here in Sang, a world with no germs, I was a ringmaster’s kept wife with a gift for fortune-telling. As much as I loved Criminy and wouldn’t go back to Earth permanently even if I could, becoming a Bludman meant I stood to lose my home world and the very root of my being. Instead of helping people, I would have no choice but to take from them—even if they gave the blood willingly.

I had always been fiercely proud and self-reliant, especially after I’d left Jeff and his suffocating ways. Nursing was my calling. And Sang had no use for nurses. With Nana in this world and on her way to being nearly indestructible, there was no logical reason to remain human. Nothing to stand in my way of dropping the twenty years of unnecessary aging the witch had gifted me in exchange for the potion I’d just used. Nothing to stop me from learning to laugh as recklessly as my husband. I couldn’t even have children, thanks to a dangerous miscarriage years before on Earth. All I had to take care of was Crim, and he could take care of himself perfectly well and laugh his way through any challenge. I’d have to find a new and satisfying way to be truly useful.

But he wasn’t laughing now—he looked like a bull in a china shop. Carefully, kindly, he leaned over Nana, trying not to touch her fragile bones, probably because I’d told him often enough how easily she bruised these days, how paper-thin her skin had grown. A small flare of jealousy reared up in me, for just a moment, when I saw his lips press to her neck, but when I saw the grim set of her mouth and the fearful cast of her eyes, the way her hands were primly folded in her lap and shaking, I remembered that this was as vital an operation as any she’d undergone on Earth, her one chance to keep going. And I wasn’t ready to let her go, so I held my breath as Criminy’s lips spread and covered the fluttering pulse in her throat.

When Nana’s body jerked, I did, too. Her fingers wrapped around Crim’s shoulders, and she tried to push him away. As promised, he didn’t let her, holding her firmly but as gently as he could, his throat working as he swallowed her blood. There couldn’t be much in her, tired and frail as she was. Her eyes went from terrified to slack, a little misty, her hands loosening from his skin. And then, with the sweetness of a father tucking in a child, he let her swoon to the pile of pillows, where she lay too much like a corpse.

“Crim?”

He glanced at me, panting, with eyes gone nearly feral, and shook his head. This was the tricky part, he’d explained once. Did the Bludman have enough control to stop when the human’s body was on the brink of death, and did the dying person have the good sense and the proper chemistry to accept blud into their system? Criminy’s red-splashed teeth ripped into his wrist, and I cried out at seeing the man I loved dripping with a fresh wound.

Beautiful and mostly naked, he draped himself beside her and pressed the wound to her lips, but she wouldn’t drink. The urge to check her pulse was strong, but just as in the OR, my interference could be what tipped the scales, possibly in the wrong direction. I barely breathed, watching viscous blud dribble from my grandmother’s mouth as she stubbornly refused to swallow, her lips pursed tightly just as they’d been when I’d tried to give her the witch’s potion.

“Nana, please,” I whispered.

“You must drink,” Criminy said in his commanding voice, talking around his fangs, “or believe me, you will die.”

Nana shuddered, and her throat moved. I was holding my breath, expecting every rise of her chest to be her last. I’d always assumed that moment would happen in her bed on Earth, while I was there to hold her hand and smile and ease the transition as I had for so many other patients. I had never in my wildest dreams expected to watch her latch onto Criminy’s naked, bloody arm and start drinking, greedy as a baby at the breast.

It was downright disturbing.

At least at first. And then I had to stop myself from cheering.

Nana’s eyes had gone rheumy and jaundiced recently as her body started to give up the fight, but now they were pinned to Criminy and beginning to sparkle a glimmering grayish blue. As she gulped, her insubstantial puff of hair seemed to turn like fall leaves reversing their transformation, from grayish white to tan to brown to a brilliant chestnut shade I’d seen in pictures of her wedding. Her gulps were audible and insistent now, her strong fingers clutching tightly where she held Crim’s wrist to her mouth, where he was trying to pry it away.

I’d been so busy watching her that I’d forgotten to watch him, and he was drained and beyond pale. I couldn’t tell if the hand he was using to pry her off was being uncommonly gentle or rapidly losing strength. My gut told me it was the latter, and after calling his name several times and receiving no response, I hurried to help.