Page 61 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Dread pooled deep and sick in St. Sebastian’s stomach. Everything he’d learned about fighting he’d learned watching his cousins tussle and spar back in Texas, and it wasn’t much but he knew this: the ground was the worst place to be. A fact that was confirmed an instant later by the jerks and braces and pivots of the boys still standing.
They were kicking Auden.
With a renewed burst of energy, St. Sebastian ran the rest of the way to the wall, making to jump over again, but he tripped at the last second, only avoiding landing face first into the stone with a twist and a shove that had him landing on the ground instead.
Breath knocked clean out of him, St. Sebastian tried to grope his way back up, he had to get to Auden, he had to help—
And then pain, blunt and crushing, fractured through his chest, and from his chest it jangled up and over every single nerve in his body, and he collapsed back to the grass, rolling over onto his side.
He’d been kicked in the ribs.
For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, but he could hear—God, he could hear what they were doing to Auden on the other side of the wall. He wished Auden would just play dead now, maybe then they’d get bored or guilty or nervous . . . it was supposed to work with grizzly bears or something . . . he’d heard that somewhere . . .
Was he himself playing dead now . . . ?
Oxygen came in slowly, like a leak in a balloon, only in reverse, and he realized he’d been skirting unconsciousness only when he opened his eyes to see two fastidiously clean trainers in the grass in front of him. He looked up and up and up to see whom the shoes belonged to and encountered Lee’s emotionless, cold-eyed stare.
“They say,” Lee told him quietly, “that when you get hit in the head, your brain smashes against the inside of your skull. Did you know that?”
St. Sebastian still couldn’t speak—he’d find out later that Lee had cracked a rib with that kick—and so all St. Sebastian could do was moan. Don’t do this, he wanted to beg. Don’t hurt me. Don’t let them hurt my Auden.
He would have begged for days, he would have done any humiliating, degrading thing Lee asked—so long as they would stop hurting Auden, so long as those clenched, trying-to-be-brave noises of Auden’s stopped coming from the other side of the wall.
Lee wasn’t interested in his begging however, because he merely tilted his head and said, “Let’s see what happens to your brain, Martinez. Let’s see if it smashes hard or soft.”
St. Sebastian threw up his hands just in time—if he hadn’t, then he didn’t even know what would have happened to him, he’d be dead, probably—and Lee’s foot was deflected just enough that it didn’t connect with St. Sebastian’s forehead with full force. But whatever else happened—whether his brain smashed or Lee stayed to watch his handiwork or what they did to Auden next—St. Sebastian wasn’t aware of. The kick connected and St. Sebastian’s neck snapped back.
And the world vanished into inky darkness.
Part II
Equinox
Chapter 18
St. Sebastian
Equinox
* * *
During those bleary, delirious days when his mother went from sick to dying to dead, St. Sebastian invented a game for himself.
If he could count every second for one minute, one two three four and so on until sixty, when the minute hand on the hospital clock ticked over—and if he could count each second perfectly, pronouncing the number clearly and loudly inside his head—then he would be given a new minute for each second he counted. So if he counted one full minute, he would be given a new hour, another hour. She would be given another hour.
There was an important rule, however. He would only be given an hour of time equivalent to the minute he had counted; that is to say that if he counted a minute when his mother was writhing in pain in between morphine doses, then the rewarded hour would also be an hour of pain. If he counted a minute while his mother was sleeping, then he would earn an hour of her in peaceful rest, breathing slowly between the beeps and whirrs of the machines around the hospital bed. The best was if he could count a moment when she was happy and awake and pain-free, which he tried to do as often as he could, although those minutes became fewer and fewer between, like islands in a dark and sterile sea, until they didn’t exist at all, and all the moments left were moments of either unconsciousness or misery.
He still kept counting even then, kept trying to earn hour after hour even if they were miserable, trying to earn more time of any kind because the alternative was no time at all, and he wasn’t sure he could survive that.
Toward the end, and he can’t remember exactly when this started happening, only that it did and it made some kind of soothing sense at the time, his numbers began to change into words. It started with stay. Not one two three four, just stay stay stay stay to the rhythm of the ticking clock for an entire minute . . . and then over the next two days it changed to please—please please please—although to whom he was saying please, he didn’t even know. It was probably God—fine, he could admit that—but maybe it was to her or to the doctors or to some universe-as-benevolent-energy bullshit that he normally didn’t believe in. He was past caring about what he believed in, nothing about who he was outside the hospital room mattered, what mattered was that Jennifer Martinez was not allowed to die, not for any reason, especially not from some innocuous scratch on her arm made the day after Christmas. She couldn’t leave him, and if he had to count every second of every minute for the rest of his life to make sure, he would.
He would have done it gladly if only he’d been given the chance.
And at the end, that last agonizing day and a half when no amount of oxygen through her mask could keep the machines from beeping their alerts, when strange bruises bloomed under her skin and her lips began to slowly blue, stay and please melted away just as the numbers had, and it was just her name.
Mamá.
Like a child who’s woken up in the dark, alone and afraid, crying out for the one person who can always make the darkness go away. Mamá, Mamá, Mamá.
