Page 54 of Gifted & Talented

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“You know, if you do decide to kill me, you’d probably be doing me a favor,” Jamie had remarked some seven hours prior as he and Meredith had sorted the refuse of their coffee paraphernalia, the recyclable lids in one bin and the compostable cups in another. “I sometimes think I’d do just about anything to get away from my completely diabolical ability to like you.”

“That’s demented,” had been Meredith’s only available reply.

“Yeah,” Jamie agreed, sounding genuinely sour. “It is, and so are you.”

It floated through Meredith’s mind as she knelt down beside her brother’s unmoving body for the second time in twenty-four hours. Specifically, the illogical thought that maybe Arthur had died just to get away from her, which was frankly believable in the moment. It was the only thing that made sense, because the alternatives—that Arthur had died from grief, or that he was somehow at risk for repeated heart failure at the tender age of twenty-nine—were flatly impossible. It seemed to Meredith, particularly with the way Eilidh had just looked at her, much more likely that Arthur’s death was an act of desperation, and that he had said her name as he went made it all the more unmistakable; cosmic requital for her personal sins.

But, of course, beside her, Eilidh was hysterical. “Oh my god, we killed him again,” Eilidh was saying. “He was asking for help and we just ignored him!”

“What, pray tell, were you going to do?” said Meredith, attempting to slap Arthur awake. He again had no pulse, but historically, brutality sometimes worked. Or at least it had one time before, which under the circumstances felt statistically significant.

“This is my fault,” said Eilidh in a quietly agonized voice. “I did this somehow, I know it.”

“The world doesn’t revolve around you, Eilidh,” snapped Meredith, despite having had the exact same thought moments before. “Unless you physicallypulled the trigger that killed him, let’s just stop fixating on you forfive fucking seconds—”

Eilidh, who had been pacing, pulled up short. “Oh god. I know what it is.”

“What?” As inWhat are you talking about,notI’m so intellectually curious about your thoughts in this critical moment,though Meredith lacked confidence in Eilidh’s ability to recognize the difference.

“Firstborn sons.” Eilidh went pale. “That’s one of the plagues.”

“What? Jesus.” Eilidh was unsurprisingly useless in a crisis and always had been. Meredith was running through her head for anything magically relevant that Lou had ever taught her, though she had never had a strong grasp on physical things. Arthur could do them, Lou could do them… Meredith was really only good at mental things, ideas. She was trying to think but she couldn’t, because now the ghost of Lou was standing judgmentally in her periphery again and Eilidh wouldn’t shut up.

“Sometimes it happens when I’m not fully keeping it at bay, and Iwasreally angry—”

“What the hell are you talking about?” demanded Meredith, ripping her attention away from her brother’s body to look up at her sister’s colorless face.

“There’s—there’s this thing,” Eilidh said hesitantly. “I don’t know if… I don’t know how to explain, really, but—”

“Eilidh,” Meredith seethed, her vision a blinding white starburst of impatience, “would youget to the point?”

“I make apocalypses happen!” burst out of Eilidh’s mouth. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“What?”

“Apocalypses… doomsday things.” Eilidh was ringing her hands, beginning to pace. “The ten plagues of Egypt, you know, with the firstborn sons—”

“What?” said Meredith, who was feeling increasingly ill with frustration.

“I don’t know if they happen in any predetermined order—they don’t seem to? The first time, when I was in the hospital, I made the sprinkler system rain blood. Yesterday my plane was going down and there were locusts—”

“What?”

“I once made all the sea animals come up on the beach in Mallorca!” Now Eilidh was wailing. “I don’t know if it wasallof them, but I don’t really understand if there’s any, you know, doomsdayexactness—”

“Firstborn sons,” Meredith repeated, and felt a sudden stab of rage. “You’re telling me multiple millennia have passed and we’re still gendering the apocalypse?”

“Soyou’drather be dead?” said Eilidh in piercing disbelief.

“I’m just saying it’s absurd that I’d be passed over! Even the monarchy evolved!” shrieked Meredith.

“Sister Hysterical,” said Arthur, “you’re crushing my legs.”

Both Meredith and Eilidh screamed, rising abruptly to their feet as Arthur sat up, swaying a little from apparent dizziness.

“But you were—” Meredith stopped, pressing one hand to her racing pulse as Eilidh scrutinized her hands as if this, too, were somehow their doing. “But I swear, you really weredead,like actuallydead—”

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