C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

Hester, not knowing more than that Annie was dying, got up, put her hand on my shoulder, an’ stood there a minute without tryin’ ta find the right thing to say. Then she walked away, an’ I never saw her again, alive or dead.

Annie came home ‘round midnight, and only shook her head, telling me not to say anything, when I mighta asked about the kid. We slept late, an’ when she woke up she stayed nestled beside me, taking careful breaths and listening to her own chest rattle with a clinical ear. “I’m breathing more clearly. It’s easier than it was yesterday, before the spirit quests. But I can still feel the weight of it in me, Gary. I’m not going to beat this, not in the long term. You have to promise me something.”

“Anything, darlin’.”

“Help Myles out, if you can.”

“What? He ain’t dead? I thought—”

Annie shook her head. “I was too tired to talk about it last night, but Miss Jones…well, I suppose she healed him. I hope it was she, and not that…thing.”

Feelin’ pretty confident, I said, “If it was that thing riding him he wouldn’t have come outta this alive. Pretty sure being possessed burns a fella out. I don’t think he woulda recovered from it, or anything else, if Hes hadn’t been there. So what’d she do, put his guts back together? Ain’t Crohn’s genetic?” I’d been underestimating Hester’s power, if she could do that. I wasn’t sure Jo could.

Annie shook her head again. “If there’s a genetic component, no one has found it yet. No, the surgical procedures are still in place, but by time I left the hospital last night none of his system was inflamed any longer. He hadn’t been that healthy when he left the hospital. He’d only been in remission, but Crohn’s does that. It flares and fades, so while it had been a remarkable recovery, there were still signs of it in his body. Last night the doctors couldn’t find any evidence that there had ever been a reason to give the poor boy an ileostomy. So whatever’s happened with him, whatever happens with me, Gary, if you can, help Myles out. This is going to be very hard for him.”

“An’ you think it ain’t gonna be for us?” I had just enough smarts to say us and not me, but Annie saw through it anyway an’ tucked herself closer to me.

“I know it will be.” That was all she said. It was all either of us said about what was coming at us fast, ‘cause there wasn’t much else to say. She got weaker as the days went on, until I realized for the second time that she was holding on, waitin’ for our wedding anniversary. I’d been slow figuring it out the first time, and was just as slow the second time around, ‘cause I was trying hard not to think about anything but the last hours I had with her. We had strawberries on waffles in a room full of roses, same way we’d had ‘em every morning of our anniversary since the first one, an’ then, finally, she said, “I think I should go to the hospital now.”

“No reason to, darlin’. Nothin’ wrong with home.”

“What did we do last time?”

“We went to the hospital three days ag—” I snapped my teeth together, tryin’ ta eat the words I’d already said, but Annie only smiled like she wasn’t surprised.

“So we’ve already changed it. Do you think the changes are enough? Is it going to make a difference, somehow? Will we win, Gary? Tell me what happens,” she said, real soft. “Please tell me what happens, Gary. I won’t be there to see it, so I want to know. We’ll stay home,” she promised, like promising would be the thing that would make me tell her. “We’ll stay home, we won’t go to the hospital, and you can tell me the future.”

An’ I did. It took all day, sittin’ in the bed with her, holding her like I couldn’t the last time through, and I told her about the next three or four years. Told her about picking up a mouthy fare one January morning, just a couple days after I turned seventy-three, an’ she got a notepad outta her nightstand and wrote that down, the time and date and SeaTac terminal, and she made me put it in my wallet. “Just to make sure you’ll be there,” she told me, an’ I smiled a bit.

“Like I could forget, sweetheart. I’d been kinda living on auto pilot up ‘til then, just kinda waitin’ to catch up with you. Jo…you gotta forgive me, darlin’. Jo gave me something else to live for, made me not wanna hurry dying up too much. I wish you coulda known her, Annie. She’s just a kid, and she was a real mess when I met her, but you wouldn’t believe the woman she’s growing up into. She’s our girl, Annie. She’s the girl we shoulda had. So brave she’s stupid sometimes, but her heart’s in the right place.”

“If we’d had a girl of our own all of this would be different, and you might never have met her. I don’t know if things happen for a reason, but I think perhaps all of it comes around to where it’s supposed to be, in the end. Tell me more. Tell me how you got the tortoise spirit animal. I can still feel this ridiculous cat in my mind, you know. It’s getting ready to run. Gathering itself. I can’t see its prey, but I suppose something must be out there for it to hunt. I don’t think cheetahs run just for fun…”

She quieted down, an’ I told her all about being witched, and how I’d known sorcery was eating away at Myles ‘cause I’d seen it happen to another kid. “She didn’t want anything to do with magic, Jo didn’t. Not up ‘til then. She just wanted a regular life.”

“Not so much like us, then,” Annie murmured.

I nodded. “She had a harder time taking it in. She was determined not to believe, but she had reasons. I ain’t told you about her babies yet. Shh, I’ll get to it. Anyway, she stepped up after the mess with the sorcerer, an’ from there on out she’s been…the only other person I was ever so proud to know is you, Annie. An’ I gotta say, even with what we’ve seen an’ what we did, it was small peanuts compared ta the ruckus I been getting up to with Jo. She looks just like that painting your Pop did, ‘cept it don’t show you how big she is. She’s six feet tall, an’ don’t tell her I told you, but she hits like a brick wall. Not that she’s been hitting me, but we shoved the top off a crypt once—”

“Was there a vampire inside?”

I laughed right out loud and kissed my girl’s white hair. “No, but we both thought there was gonna be.” That got me back to the beginning, and I tried keeping the story more or less in order, but Annie kept having questions and I kept remembering bits I hadn’t said before, until it was closing in on midnight an’ I was finishing up the last details, telling her about the quiet ride I’d been taking through our own lives for the past fifty years.

“All that time,” she whispered. “All that time and you never changed a thing.”

“Couldn’t risk it, sweetheart. I was bettin’ everything on this last fight.”

“And we’re losing it. At the last minute, we’re losing it. Oh! That silly cat just started running. Inside my head, Gary. I can feel it— pulling me. Oh. Oh no, Gary, it’s hunting the stag. My stag!”

I looked for the clock. Seven minutes til twelve. That was the last minute. That was the time burned into my memory forever, ‘cause that was when Annie had died. An’ then the clock ticked over, six minutes to midnight, and all of a sudden we were living on borrowed time.

A shot of pain smacked me between the eyes. The same shot that the kid had taken, burning another hole through my brain, and everything started slipping away.

All the memories that had been brought back to life, the terrible gift of magic that had been part of me and Annie since the beginning. If I was stealing Annie from him, stealing time, then the Master was stealing something back. Maybe that was the whole damned reason for the kid showing up at our house a week ago at all, so he could take that shot, set some magic in my mind that would start erasing everything if somehow we held on longer than we were s’posed to.