Elixir (15 page)

There was a beat of extremely awkward silence between us.

“How is Eva this morning?” I asked, trying to speak slowly, hoping to make myself easier to understand. I wished I spoke her language.

Eva’s grandmother looked over to the hospital bed at the mention of her granddaughter’s name. I tried to peer over her shoulder and catch a glimpse of Eva. When I did, I felt like my heart thudded to a stop.

Eva lay limp as a doll on the hospital cot, her skin the color of dried, dead leaves. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was open, like a baby bird gaping into the air for nourishment. Her arms hung limp at her sides and there was plastic tubing coming out of them. Beside her, some kind of machine was making a rhythmic beep-beep noise.

Seeing her like this, I felt like crying.

I could feel Eva’s grandmother’s eyes on me and I turned back towards her. There was a cold intensity in the old woman’s stare—it was an accusation.

“I’m so sorry about Eva,” I said again.

No response.

“It was an accident.”

She didn’t respond, but I thought I detected rage beneath the dull stare of her eyes.

I didn’t know what to say.

I held out the little pot of African violets.

She picked it up, but there was no register of emotion in her eyes. Mechanically, she set it on the empty chair on the other side of Eva’s bed.

Giving me another long, hard, accusatory stare, she left the room.

She thinks Eva’s fall was your fault,
was all I could think as I watched the small woman walk down the hallway. Where she was going I had no idea.

But I couldn’t help but sigh in relief that she was gone. I wanted some time alone with Eva.

I walked towards Eva’s bedside. I could hear her breathing, a soft whistling sound. The machine kept beeping.

“Eva?” I asked.

There was no answer, no change in her limp face.

“Can you hear me?”

Her face was blank, expressionless.

I’d heard that sometimes unconscious people can hear you, even though they can’t respond. It was all I could hope.

Her breath whistled in and out. The machine continued its regular beep-beep. The sound was growing annoying and part of me wished it would just stop, so we could stand in silence together. But of course I didn’t want it would stop, because this machine, whatever it was—Eva would know, she was the nurse—was the only sign of life she had. I just hoped it kept on beeping.

There was a knock on the door. I walked towards it, but whoever had knocked didn’t wait for an answer. I assumed, as the door opened, that it would be her grandmother again, but it wasn’t.

Instead a doctor in a white lab coat walked in. He was tall and thin, of Indian descent, and quite young. Maybe right out of med school. He seemed startled to see me. I think he’d been expecting Eva’s grandmother.

“Are you a relative of Ms. Morales?” he asked, glancing down at his chart to check Eva’s name.

“I’m a friend.”

The doctor walked over to the machine, fiddled with one of the dials and made a notation on the small pad he carried. He smiled at me, his manner brisk but not unkind.

I decided to cut right to the chase.

“Is she going to be okay?”

He stopped what he was doing and turned to me.

“There is really no way to know that,” he began, and I could tell he was giving me his standard answer.

“I know, but, do
you
think she’s going to be okay?”

The doctor, whose name tag said “R. Mehta, M.D.,” paused, as if weighing his words.

“Your friend is a very unusual case,” he said, putting down his clipboard.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s really quite remarkable.” He looked back and forth between Eva and me. “In many ways, she’s quite lucky.”

I stared at him, aghast—I couldn’t see how any of this was “luck.”

“What I mean is, considering her fall, I would have expected a lot more injuries,” the doctor added, explaining himself, “but she doesn’t have a single broken bone.”

“She doesn’t? But she fell from over fifty . . .”

“I know,” the doctor interrupted me. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

“But why is she unconscious? Does she have a head injury?” I asked.

Dr. Mehta sighed.

“That’s what’s so strange about it. We did an MRI, and we could find no sign of brain damage.”

“But something is wrong—I mean, why is she unconscious?”

He paused, and I could see the fear in his eyes. I knew in that moment that he had no idea what was wrong with Eva, and it really, really bothered him. Smart people are used to knowing the answers—and when they don’t, it scares them.

“We don’t know,” he said at last, and I knew that had been hard for him to say.

“All we can hope is that, given there is no detectable damage, your friend will recover consciousness.”

He gave me a nod goodbye and then, clipboard in hand, he left the room.

It was indeed strange—that she could have fallen so far and not broken a single bone. I mean, I was glad to hear that, of course—but it was strange.
It must have been the Elixir,
was all I could think. Somehow having magic in her system at the time of the fall had prevented her from becoming injured. It had saved her life. And yet, if the doctor said she had no signs of head injury, what was this inexplicable coma?

I bent down and picked up Eva’s hand, which was lying limply by her side.

The instant my fingers touched her skin, I recoiled.

Eva’s hand didn’t feel like flesh. It felt hard and rubbery—like rotten wood.

For a second I couldn’t breathe—I was so afraid she was dead. But the machine that I’d figured out by now measured her heart rate went on beeping regularly. She was alive. But something was very, very wrong.

There was a plastic folding chair next to the bed and I sat down on it, scooting myself closer to her. I leaned down, my face inches over her body.

As soon as I did, I smelled something. Instantly I knew what it was.

Mixed in with all the awful scents of a hospital—the rubbing alcohol, the bleach, the stale coffee—was a faint whiff of something utterly different. Something clean and unpolluted—the smell of rain—the smell just before the storm, when the air is crackling with life.

“Elixir,” I said to myself.

But it wasn’t just Elixir. There was another smell too, underneath it. I picked up Eva’s hand. I didn’t want to. It was clammy and cold, and my heart clenched as I felt it, but I drew her limp fingers up to my face.

A realization was dawning in my mind.

Eva’s skin didn’t smell like Elixir—even though the smell was all around. It smelled like the forest—earthy, woodsy, damp—like something slowly rotting.

My brain was whirring fast. It couldn’t be—but it was the only explanation that made sense—how she could have sustained the fall without injuries, why she seemed alive and unharmed, yet totally unresponsive, no longer herself.

My breath was coming in short, sharp heaves. I couldn’t believe it—and yet what other answer was there?

“You’re not Eva,” I whispered to the body lying in bed. “You’re a Fetch.”

CHAPTER 12

I
’d seen the Fairy Queen do it so many times. We would replace a human child with an enchanted copy made of Elixir-soaked wood. It would last a few days or weeks, and then “fail to thrive.” I’d believed in what we were doing back then. Why had I believed her? I was cursing myself now.

Had the same thing happened to Eva?

Had the fairies somehow switched her when she fell?

But why Eva? The Fey didn’t take adults. And of every adult on the planet they could take, why my roommate?

I looked back at “Eva” on the bed. I wasn’t even sure I was right about this. Maybe my mind was just spinning ideas, trying anything to distract me from the horrible reality that my friend was in a coma and that it was my fault.

I needed to get a second opinion. There was only one person I could call. The only person I knew in this world who might understand what I was talking about.

Obadiah.

It was just at that moment that I heard the familiar sound of heavy boots clomping in the hall. My heart leapt up. He had come to the hospital to visit Eva, just like he’d said he would. I couldn’t help but smile, knowing he’d been true to his word.

I turned to look through the open door.

I could see him striding down the hall. How was it that Obadiah was comfortable wherever he was? On the crowded floor of supernatural dancers, or in the sterile corridors of a hospital—he seemed to belong everywhere. Maybe because he didn’t truly belong anywhere, I thought, watching that sad expression that returned to his face when he thought no one was watching him.

I noticed Eva’s grandmother was out in the hallway, talking to one of the nurses in Spanish. As Obadiah walked by, he nodded at her, and I detected a slight smile in her despairing eyes. Somehow he’d gotten her to smile. How had he done that, when I couldn’t? There were things I still couldn’t understand about Obadiah. But I liked them.

He knocked on the door, though it was open. I saw that he was holding a bouquet of get-well flowers. He was classy like that.

“How is she?” he asked, but he saw his answer in my eyes. “That bad?”

“It’s not the fall,” I said. “I don’t think that’s really Eva. I think someone replaced her with a Fetch.”

Obadiah looked at me gravely.

“I know it’s hard to accept, when something terrible happens to someone you love . . .”

“No! I’m not deluding myself!” I shot back at him, insulted that he would think I was just in denial. “I know what you’re thinking, but no. I know what I’m seeing. I can smell it, Obadiah. Touch her, smell her skin. The heart monitor keeps beeping but she’s not alive. Don’t tell me you can’t smell the Elixir in this room!”

“I thought it was just residual.”

“I don’t think it is. And you can smell something else too. Something rotting.” I grimaced.

He nodded.

“Someone took my friend,” I said, my voice tense, blistering with the anger that had begun to flow through me. “Someone replaced her. If this was the Queen’s work, I’m going to kill her.”

Obadiah folded his hands over his chest.

“Are you really sure?”

“Obadiah, I used to help the Fairy Queen on her rescue missions.”

“But they don’t take grown-ups,” Obadiah said. “Why her? Did your roommate have any business with the Fey?”

“Certainly not that I know of,” I said miserably.

“Then why would she be taken?”

I sighed, covering my face with my hands.

“That’s what I don’t understand.”

A nurse popped her head in the door. She looked back and forth between Obadiah and me—clearly she knew she had interrupted something, but she didn’t know what.

“I’m here to change her IV,” said the nurse, politely smiling and then turning her back to us, towards the machine.

“We should go,” I said to Obadiah. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”

The nurse shot me a sad, sympathetic smile. I tried to smile back at her. I had so much admiration for nurses. I didn’t know how they did it—deal with sickness and injury, death all day long and yet always stay so cheerful.
Eva would be able to do that. She was going to be a great nurse.
Dammit, I was trying so hard not to cry—and I was failing.

Obadiah took my hand. “Come on,” he said, “you’re right, there’s nothing more we can do.”

We walked out of the hospital room together. From behind me I could still hear the rhythmic beep-beep.

Out in the sterile hallway, I turned to Obadiah.

“If she’s a Fetch, that means she’s somewhere in the Vale. I have to get back there somehow. I have to find her. If the Queen took her—she’s in danger, and I need to get her back. I don’t know how to travel to the Vale.” I looked up at Obadiah. “But I know you do. If you’ve found a way to smuggle the Elixir out, it means you know a way in.”

Obadiah was silent.

“I need you to take me back there.”

It was a ballsy thing to ask. But seeing the state Eva was in now, I didn’t have any time to waste.

“It will be dangerous to travel back . . .” he started to say, but then he must have seen my resolute expression, because he finished, “You’re hell-bent on doing this, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“I’m coming back to your place, and I’m drinking some Elixir. I don’t care how dangerous it is,” I said with finality, “I need to go home.”

I
t was strange going to Obadiah’s club in the daytime. The place had an oddly innocuous look in the winter sunshine, just an old, slightly dilapidated building that had perhaps once been a pickle factory when Brooklyn was a very different place, the kind of building some developer would want to turn into exposed brick condos, not the midnight lair of supernatural expats. I wondered what the other residents of this neighborhood thought of Obadiah’s after-dark premises.