Page 15 of Blood Gift

“That’s not the point.”

“No. The point is, you’ve lost your spine along with your powers.”

“And who do I have to thank for that?”

The traffic light was red, and we stopped at the corner to wait for it while others crossed with no regard for the signal.

He glared at me, and I at him.

We were near mirror images except for our clothing. His suit was nothing like my turtleneck and jeans.

I could imagine the conclusions a passing human would draw—then again, they didn’t pay attention to much of anything around them, especially when they were in a hurry. And they were always in a hurry.

“Is this what’s going to happen whenever we’re together?” I asked. “Will we always come back to this place? I would rather not, but you make it impossible for me to stay civil when you keep bringing up what happened. I’m willing to let it go, but I can’t if you refuse to stop bringing it up.”

Rage, shame, guilt, frustration played over his features, so much like my own face.

I would age faster than he would, even though we were born three minutes apart. There would come a time when strangers would assume I was his father.

Strip a witch or warlock of their powers, you also stripped them of their longevity.

And it was all his fault.

And he knew it.

“We’d better hurry,” he muttered, continuing across the street.

I walked beside him with my coffee and didn’t say another word until we reached the hospital doors.

“I don’t see why she has to be here,” he murmured, eyes scanning the lobby.

He looked like he smelled something rotten.

“Even the priestesses she sought out in India gave her the same advice she got from the doctors. She needs aggressive treatment. This is not the sort of thing that can be magically treated. And they want her to move to a hospice soon.”

“I know what they want.”

We were two grown men, more than three times as old as we looked. Yet there we were, standing in an elevator, bickering over our mother’s impending death because neither of us could process the thought of her no longer being with us.

“You won’t tell her?” I confirmed before entering her room.

“I wouldn’t do that to her. It would…”

Kill her.

He wanted to say it would kill her. And he was probably right.

She couldn’t know about my disgrace. The only good thing about the timing was that she was too sick when the disaster struck to be aware.

The first thing that hit my subconscious was the smell of death lingering in the air.

Not even her death, per se, but the deaths of others who had spent their last days in a bed, covered in tubes. And the smell took me back to my dream.

Crossing a large, death-filled room.

Reaching the girl on the other side, bound to a wooden X. Only this woman was my mother, and she wasn’t bound to anything wooden—rather, she was tethered to countless machines which monitored her fading life.

And I couldn’t save her. There would be no freeing her from this. Only death could release her.

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