Fruit of Misfortune (13 page)

“Why haven’t you called?” Claire’s
reprimanding voice trilled through my phone’s speaker.

“You didn’t even let me say hello.”

“You said you would call, Isis. It’s been
almost a week.”

“I know, Mom,” I said, smoothing out my voice
so that it didn’t sound too hoarse. “I get confused with the time
difference between us, and I didn’t want to bother you at work or
call while you were sleeping.”

“You sound strange. Are you sick? What’s
wrong?”

My existence,
is what I wanted to tell
her, but instead, I said, “I have—a cold.”

“Otherwise, you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. How ‘bout you?”

It took a moment for her to answer.
“Lonely.”

“I can’t believe you’re already making me
feel guilty about coming here. It hasn’t even been a full week
since I left.”

“Hey, I was the one that told you to go to
Greece. Why would I lay a guilt trip on you?”

“Oh right,” I said, feeling a wave of nausea
making its way up my throat. “Mom,” I pinched the bridge of my
nose. “They’re calling me for dinner. I better go.”

“You sound congested, honey. You need to take
something for that.”

“I will,” I said, racing to the bathroom.

“And don’t have any cold drinks.”

“Okay.” I hovered over the toilet.

“You need to—”

“Okay, okay,” I cut her off. “Yes, Mom. I’ll
take care of myself. I have to go.”

I barely had time to hang up the phone before
I vomited into the toilet bowl. Only it wasn’t soup. It was a thick
fluid that condensed into a jelly-like substance as soon as it hit
the water in the bowl. I didn’t know what to make of it.

“What is that? Ewww!” I pulled the handle on
the tank to flush the debris.

“No!” Out of nowhere Eryx launched himself
forward and reached into the toilet bowl with his bare hand,
managing to scoop some of the substance before it disappeared down
the drain. He gagged and covered his nose with his free hand, and
then dumped the stuff into the bathtub. Heaving, I helped him open
the sink faucet and emptied the contents of the liquid soap
dispenser onto his hand.

“You. Are.
So.
Gross!” I said, the
back of my head against the open bathroom door. “Why did you do
that?”

“We need specimens,” Eryx said, drying his
hands on a towel.

“I’ve never heard of anyone using vomit for
analysis.”

“You should watch more crime shows. They use
everything.” Eryx glanced back at the tub. “I need to gather that.
I’ll send one of the others to look after you.”

“Sick.” I closed my eyes and shuddered.

A few minutes later, with the door to my room
closed, the members of the Chios family were gathered talking over
each other and taking turns looking at the nauseating goo that Eryx
had transferred to a plastic zipper bag. For the next hour, I
listened as they went back and forth about how much of my
background should be revealed to Dr. Gunn the next day.

“You mustn’t tell him that that specimen is
hers,” Nyx said. “Let him draw his own conclusions.” She put the
back of her hand on my cheek, checking for a drop in temperature.
“It’s begun,” she announced, striding to the bathroom. Her black
hair flowed in waves as she walked. From the bed, I could see her
running the water in the tub. She lowered herself to the floor,
raising her hands to the heavens and moving her lips without
emitting sound.

Anxiety started crawling up my back and
through my stomach and limbs. I felt the pain of agony in my chest
and I trembled. David wrapped his arms around me and held me tight,
offering refuge to the feelings of despair that were building up to
screams of emotional torture inside me. Those tormenting screams
petrified us every time. And every time it happened, a part of the
Isis that once was disappeared forever. I feared my soul was dying,
being replaced by the monster I would become.

I clawed my fingers into David’s arms and
pressed my head into his chest, waiting for the deafening scream to
escape my throat. I steadied myself, and then—then it was gone. The
despair, anxiety, and feelings of emotional death vanished. My
fingers eased on David’s arms, but my head was still buried in his
chest.

“It’s gone.” I pulled away from him. “It’s
not happening.”

I raised my eyes to look at David. I couldn’t
believe that the attack would not come tonight. The room was
quiet.

Galen was the first to move. He stepped
forward and placed two fingers over my forehead. “Your vital signs
are normal.”

Relieved, I glanced at David. The feeling
lasted but a brief second. A bright crimson line trailed down from
David’s nose to his mouth, filling the crease between his lips.
Galen’s eyes widened and the color in his face vanished.

“What?” David frowned.

“Your nose is bleeding,” I said.

David wiped his nose with the back of his
hand. He stared at the red smear in awe. His face turned as pale as
Galen’s.

“It’s just a nose bleed, right?” David didn’t
answer me. “Right?”

David parted his lips and touched his throat.
He coughed and a million little specks of red flew through the air
and landed on the side of my face. Then the blood gushed out of his
nose and formed a thick scarlet river all the way down to his neck.
His eyes rolled back into his lids. His body quaked as if thousands
of volts of electricity surged through it, blood bubbling at the
corners of his mouth. I reached out to him as he fell on the bed,
convulsing.

“David!” I gasped.

Galen stuck his hand in David’s mouth. “He’s
seizing!”

In a blink, Nyx and Eryx were on either side
of David’s body. We watched, frozen with fear, as David’s body
arced and jerked over the ivory sheets tinged with splashes of
bright crimson.

“Make it stop!” I cried. “Help him!”

At long last, the bed stopped shaking and
David’s body lay limp and motionless. Most of his face and neck
were covered in a burgundy film. The bleeding had stopped, but I
couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. I saw his chest begin to
rise and fall in a steady rhythm. I let out a short whimper of
relief.

“We need to call an ambulance,” I said, but
none of them acknowledged my words.

Nyx and Eryx fell over David, hugging him.
Through watery eyes, I saw a blanket that had somehow remained
unsoiled. I dabbed David’s face with it. Nyx took a pitcher of
water that was set on the nightstand, wet a corner of the blanket,
and handed it to me. She wiped her tears. I hadn’t even noticed she
was crying. David’s blood covered her face, neck, and dress. Nyx
took in short breaths of air as she cried. I saw on her face the
affliction that only a mother knows. I had seen that same
affliction on my mother’s face a few months earlier for me.

“What’s wrong with him?” I forced words out
through my constricted throat.

Galen was turned away from us, and he didn’t
respond. Eryx’s stare was glossy as he answered, “The
transformation.”

Nyx’s sobs became louder at the statement.
She ran her hand over David’s hair and raised his head to her,
kissing his forehead. “My dear son.”

“Yes, he’s changing.” Galen’s back was still
turned, and his voice was lower than usual. “But we all know this
attack was not normal.”

A sharp pain made my chest cave as I observed
Nyx, rocking David back and forth in her arms. David looked
fragile—so different than I had ever seen him.

“He’ll be fine.” Nyx’s cheek rested on
David’s forehead. “My son will be fine.”

I don’t know if Nyx was saying those words
for her comfort or mine. But as much as she wanted to believe it,
the painful truth was that David would never be fine again. He was
no longer immortal. He bled like me. And worst of all, he could die
like me.

Grandma Eva had told me once that the
greatest pain in her life was outliving her son, my father, who had
died earlier that year. Nyx would outlive David. She had known it
all along.

Now, reality was closing in on us, and Nyx
was no longer the strong woman I had met a few months before. It
hurt me to see her crumbling, afraid of what would come. As I
studied the way she held her son, I saw a mother in mourning.

When David was conscious, I didn’t make an
effort to pull him away from Nyx. I desperately wanted to feel his
heart beating against mine. I wanted to breathe in his scent, which
had all of a sudden become as much a necessity as the oxygen in my
lungs, but I knew how selfish it would be to take David out of
Nyx’s embrace. She was his mother, after all.

Nyx observed David for a long while, before
she let him sit up. He looked pale and exhausted, but he said he
felt fine.

“I don’t understand why David hemorrhaged,” I
said. “He should see a doctor.”

“And he will,” Nyx said. “Tomorrow, he’ll
consult this Dr. Gunn.”

“No, not him. He needs one of your own
people. Dr. Gunn will know he’s not a mortal human. What if he
exposes him—and all of you?”

“If we take him to a deity, we will all die,”
Nyx said. “We have a better chance of survival with this
doctor.”

“And if Gunn goes to the press with
this?”

“Everyone has a price,” said Eryx.

I glanced at David who was sitting on the
floor next to me, and then looked up at Galen, hoping Galen would
take my side. “You’re okay with this?”

“Do we have any other choice?” Galen asked,
raising his hand and pointing.

My eyes shifted in the direction he
indicated, to the blood-spattered sheets on the bed. Galen raised
his brows at me, expecting an answer.

“I guess not.”

We were all a bloody mess. My bed looked like
a crime scene out of
America’s Most Wanted
.

“Isis, you can sleep in David’s room tonight,
and he can sleep with one of his brothers.” Nyx lifted one of the
sheets between two fingers. “I’ll have to clean this mess up
myself. Don’t want to raise any alarm among the staff.”

We took turns showering in my bathroom. We
couldn’t exactly walk out of my room looking like assassins. I
showered first, and then I fetched Nyx’s nightclothes from her
room. Once she was dressed, she gathered all three boys’ pajamas,
and we said our goodnights.

***

I was half asleep when he whispered, “I love
you,” into my ear.

“I love you, too,” I answered, my eyes
adjusting to the dimness.

David clicked on the nightstand lamp, but
paused for a brief moment before he slipped under the covers.

“What are you doing? Galen and Eryx will be
looking for you. Your mom might come in here.”

“The twins went to disable Dr. Gunn’s DNA
decoding contraption. They should be gone a long while.” His arms
tightened around me. “And my mother sleeps much like bears
hibernate. Fortunately for me.”

“Well, you’re feeling a lot better, aren’t
you?” I cocked my brow.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “But I couldn’t sleep
because I’ve been thinking, and well, I wanted to tell you
something.”

“So tell me.”

“Isis, I can’t live this way. I’ve never
wanted someone so much that it made me frantic. I need to know
you’re mine to keep and only for me. We don’t know for how long we
have each other.”

The palm of his hand slid from the center of
my neck down to my stomach. I could feel the heat in his fingers as
he rubbed them against my skin.

“Mihi vivas,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“You are alive in me.”

I felt his hot breath on my neck as his teeth
devoured me with small bites. My eyes closed in response to the
trail his moist, delicious lips left along the curve of my
shoulder. His sandalwood scent was more potent than ever,
penetrating the room. The weight of his body fell over me, his
touch branching and exploring. It was so easy to let myself go when
I was with him, so easy to accept his kisses, so easy to let him
navigate through the waves of caresses that turned us into two
colliding tempests of desire.

“Do you need me?” David asked.

“Yes,” I said breathless.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to be mine?”

“Yes.”

Our lips locked in a long, deep kiss. His
pelvis stirred against mine, creating sweet agonizing quivers
within me. I wanted this. I wanted him. If I let him continue, I’d
be entering a union that was bound by the laws of the gods. Then it
occurred to me that as much as my yearning body ached, I wasn’t
ready to be anyone’s wife.

“David, we can’t do this.”

“You don’t have to worry. The change is
already occurring. The rule doesn’t matter.”

“No, I mean, I—I can’t marry you.”

David blinked. Then he shifted his weight off
me and sat on the edge of the mattress, his back to me.

“You said you wanted to be mine. I
thought—”

“I know. I’m sorry, but I’m not ready.”

“Will you ever be?”

“Yes,” I said with a feeling of uncertainty
that made me hate myself.

“When?” He turned to face me. “When will you
be ready to be my wife? I need to know.”

“Don’t pressure me for an answer I don’t
have.”

He turned away from me again. “What is it
that’s holding you back? A ceremony? A white dress? Tell me what
you need, and you’ll have it.”

“There’s only one thing I need.”

“I’m prepared to give you anything.”

“Then give me time,” I said, knowing that
wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Time?” David looked at me and gave a short
laugh that ended too abruptly to be sincere. He nodded, looking off
to one side, then rose. “Right. Three months ago you wouldn’t have
given this so much thought. Now, you seem distant, and you don’t
want to talk about commitment. What did I do to push you away?”

“You didn’t do anything. It’s just
that—David, I had a lot of plans before I found out that I wasn’t
like everyone else. I always thought that I would make something of
myself. Go to college. Have a job.”