Fourteen

Anxious, I pressed my knees together as Ivy wheeled me down the hall. We'd passed the long walkway over the service drive, and we were indeed in the children's wing. An awful feeling of dread and familiarity settled in me, and my gut clenched.

The smell was different, holding the scent of baby powder and crayons. The walls were a warmer yellow now, and the railings…I eyed them as we rolled past. There was a second, lower set, which just about killed me. Pictures of puppies and kittens were on the walls at seated height. And rainbows. Kids shouldn't be ill. But they were. They died here, and it wasn't fair.

I felt the prick of tears, and Jenks landed on my shoulder. "You okay?"

It isn't fair, damn it. "No," I said, forcing myself to smile so he wouldn't ask Ivy to stop. I could hear kids talking loudly with the intensity that children used when they knew they had only a short time to make their voices heard.

We were going by the playroom, the tall windows with the blinds open to show the snow, and the ceiling lights turned up to make it almost as bright as noon. It was just after midnight, and only the Inderlander kids would be up, most of them in their rooms with a parent or two, having their dinner. If they could swing it, most parents visited during meals to try to make their child's hospital room into a piece of the familiar by eating with them, and the kids—without exception—were too kind to tell them it only made home look that much farther away.

We slowly rolled by the bright room with its night-black windows. I wasn't surprised to see it empty but for the pack of kids whose parents were too far away to stop in for meals or had other responsibilities. They were an independent bunch, and they talked a lot. I smiled when they caught sight of us, but shock filled me when one of them shouted, "Ivy!"

Immediately the table in the far corner emptied out, and I sat in amazement as we were suddenly surrounded by kids in brightly colored pj's. One was enthusiastically dragging her IV stand behind her, and three had lost their hair from chemotherapy, still legal after the Turn, when more effective biomedicines were not. The oldest of the three, a skinny girl with her jaw clenched, lagged behind with a tired determination. She wore a bright red bandanna that matched her pajamas, and it gave her an endearing bad-girl look.

"Ivy, Ivy, Ivy!" a red-cheeked boy about six shouted again, shocking the hell out of me when he flung himself at Ivy's knees in an enthusiastic hug. Ivy flamed red, and Jenks laughed, spilling dust in a sheet of gold.

"Did you come to eat with us and throw peas at the parrot?" the girl with the IV asked, and I turned in my chair to see Ivy all the better.

"Pixy, pixy, pixy!" the boy on her legs shouted, and Jenks flew up out of his reach.

"Uh, I'm going to do a nurse check," he said nervously, then zipped off at ceiling height. There was a chorus of disappointment, and Ivy disentangled herself, kneeling to put us all on the same level. "No, Daryl," she said, "I'm sneaking my friend out for some ice cream, so lower your voices before they check up on you."

Immediately the shouts diminished to giggling whispers. One of the bald kids, a boy by the cowboys on his pajamas, ran to the end of the hall and peeked around the corner. He gave us a distant thumbs-up, and everyone sighed. There were only five of them, but they all apparently knew Ivy, and they clustered around us like…kids.

"She's a witch," the red-cheeked boy, still attached to Ivy's leg, said, pitching his tone imperialistically. His hand was on his hip, and he was clearly the floor's self-proclaimed king. "She can't be your friend. Vampires and witches don't make friends."

"She has a black aura," the girl with the IV said, backing up. Her eyes were wide, but I could tell by her plump, healthy body that she was going to survive. She was one of the kids who come in, stay, then leave, never to return. She must be special to have been accepted into what was clearly the clique of children who…weren't going to have an easy go of it.

"Are you a black witch?" the girl who had lagged behind asked. Her brown eyes were huge in her medicine-ravaged face. There was no fear in her, not because she was ignorant, but because she knew she was dying, and she knew I wasn't going to be the cause of her death. My heart went out to her. She was seeing around corners, but not yet ready to go. One more thing possibly to see and do.

Ivy shifted uncomfortably at her question. "Rachel is my friend," she said simply. "Would I be a friend to a black witch?"

"You might," Daryl said haughtily, and someone stepped on his foot to make him yelp. "But her aura is black!" the king protested. "And she has a demon mark. See?"

Everyone drew back with fear except the tall girl in the red pajamas. She simply stood before me and looked at my wrist, and unlike most times when someone pointed it out and I tried to hide it, I turned my hand up for all of them to see.

"I got it when a demon tried to kill me," I said, knowing most of them had to gain a lifetime of wisdom in just a few years and had no time for pretend, yet pretend was all they had. "I had to accept a very bad thing to survive."

Small heads bobbed and eyes grew wide, but the king lifted his chin and took a stance that was utterly charming—a round, chubby Jenks with his hands on his hips. "That's evil," he said, certain of his belief. "You should never do anything evil. If you do, you are evil and go to hell. My mom says so."

I felt ill when the smallest girl, with the IV, shrank back farther yet, tugging at her friend to leave with her.

"I'm sorry," Ivy whispered as she stood up and took the handles of the wheelchair. "I didn't think they would come over. They don't understand."

But the thing was, they did understand. They had the wisdom of the world in their eyes. They understood too well, and seeing their fear, I felt my heart gray.

Ivy made shooing motions with her hand, and they broke their circle. All except the skinny girl in the bright red pajamas. Seeing my misery, she reached out with her small, smooth, child hands and delicately took my wrist with her pinkie extended. Turning my hand palm up, she used a finger to slowly trace the circle and line. "Ivy's friend isn't evil for doing something to survive what hurt her," she said, her voice soft but certain. "You take poison to kill the bad cells in you, Daryl, just like me. It hurts you, makes you tired, makes you sick, but if you didn't you would die. Ivy's friend took a demon mark to save her life. It's the same thing."

Ivy's motion to push the chair stopped. The kids went silent, each thinking, assessing what they had been told with the harsh reality of what they lived with. Daryl's sure look faltered, and he pushed forward, not wanting to look like a coward, or worse, cruel. He peered over the arm of the wheelchair at my scar, then up to my face. His small round face broke into a smile of acceptance. I was one of them, and he knew it. My jaw unclenched, and I smiled back.

"I'm sorry," Daryl said, then scrambled up to sit in my lap. "You're okay."

My breath came fast, in surprise, but my hands naturally folded around him to keep him in place so he wouldn't fall. Daryl gave a hop and settled in, snuggling his head under my chin and tracing the demon scar as if to memorize its lines. He smelled like soap, and under that, of a green meadow faraway and distant. I blinked fast to keep the tears from brimming over, and Ivy laid a hand on my shoulder.

The girl with the red pajamas smiled like Ceri, wise and fragile. "You're not bad inside," she said, petting my wrist. "Just hurt." She put her hand on Daryl's shoulder, and her gaze going distant, she murmured, "It will be okay. There's always a chance."