My son paused, looking over at the warm source of light. He squeezed my hand.
"He's going now, Mommy. He wants you to know there are no wrong choices. Do what you have to do to be happy."
Now the light near the window began to fade, and as it did so, my son turned somber. A moment later, his eyes shut tightly.
"Anthony!" I cried, suddenly terrified. But he was still breathing. Barely.
"Mommy?" His voice sounded weak, tiny. It wasn't the same voice I had just heard.
What the hell was going on?
"It's me, honey," I said, sounding weak myself.
"I feel sick, Mommy." He was hotter than ever.
"I know, baby," I said, as I pushed up the sleeve of my sweatshirt. "I know, and I have some medicine for you."
I brought my exposed wrist to my mouth, paused briefly, and then bit down.
Chapter Six
The hospital was nearly silent. The hum of machines. Light murmurings. Beeping somewhere. Actually, lots of beeping.
But now another sound filled the air. This one had been barely distinguishable at first, but now it was growing louder. And not just louder. More frequent, too.
It was the sound of drinking, slurping, swallowing.
At first, I had let the blood from my wrist drip freely into his mouth, although a lot of it didn't actually make it into his mouth. Some of it had spilled down his chin, and I had acted quickly with tissues from his bedside table to catch the stray droplets before they stained his sheets and gown, and led to unwanted questions.
But as more blood passed through his mostly closed lips, he began to react. First, his tongue appeared, swiping at the blood. Then his lips parted.
And then he swallowed.
He made a noise then, a strangled gasping noise, and as he did so, I saw something remarkable. A soft white light issued from his mouth, briefly hovered before the bed, and then faded away.
And just as it faded away, my son reached up and gripped my wrist with surprising strength, and held onto it tightly as he drank from my wound.
And he drank and drank.
My blood. My tainted blood. I'm horrible. I'm a horrible mother. I'm a ghoul. I should be locked away. But you're saving him, dammit. You're giving him a chance to fight another day.
I was a wreck. My mind was a wreck. My heart was a wreck.
As my son suckled from my wrist - reminding me briefly of the babe who had suckled at my breast so long ago - something else amazing happened, something that made me realize there was no turning back.
The black halo began to recede...to be slowly replaced by a faint silver shimmering, emanating perhaps an inch or two from his body. My son's beautiful natural golden and red aura was nowhere to be seen.
It's happening, I thought.
And still my son drank from my wrist. I could feel the blood being drawn from my arm, sucked into his ravenous mouth. The instructions had been quite clear: You will know he's had enough when you begin to feel weak, as weak as you do in the presence of the sun. The instructions had come from a fellow creature of the night. A much older creature of the night. It was, she said, a fine balance of giving him enough but also not depleting myself.
In the hallway, I heard footsteps. In fact, two sets of footsteps.
They're coming.
And still my son drank, biting down onto my wrist hungrily, drinking great gulps of blood from my open wound.
The footsteps were just outside the doorway. I could hear urgent talking now.
The weakness hit me with a shudder. I gasped and yanked my arm away, tearing some of the flesh. My son's drinking had kept the wound open, kept it from healing supernaturally, as it was inclined to do.
But now as I pulled it free, I could already feel it closing, healing. I grabbed tissue from the bedside table next to me, and had just wiped my son's lips and chin when the lights flicked on.
Doctors and nurses rushed in, and as I stepped aside, I discreetly wiped the blood from my wrist and pocketed the crimson-stained tissues.
* * *
The cause for the alarm had been simple enough.
My son's heartbeat had rapidly decreased, so much so that the heart monitors had alerted the nursing staff.
I stood back, watching the nurses and doctors swarm over my son, and as they swarmed over him, my son sat motionless. Fully alert and awake.
Watching me.
Chapter Seven
While the doctors fussed with my son, I stepped out of the room and headed quickly for the elevators.
My hands shook the entire way down, even when I held them tightly together. As I stepped past the receptionist and security guards, I found myself cursing God, the Universe and everything in-between for putting me in such a shitty situation. The security guard said something to me, but I couldn't hear him. I hid my face and walked quickly out into the night. Certainly, this hadn't been the first time he'd seen an upset mother.
Outside, I took in a lot of air, filling my dead lungs, walking in tight circles, running my hands through my hair. I was a wreck. The tears flowed.
What had I done? What had I done to my baby boy?
You saved him, I thought. You saved him, dammit.
I fished out my cell phone from my handbag and called my rock, the man I had leaned on for so long, the man who had been just a name until recently. Now he was a name and a face...and teeth.
"It's late, Moon Dance," he said, his voice groggy. He yawned loudly, smacking his lips a little. It was only recently that my relationship with Fang had graduated from instant messaging to phone conversations and even personal meetings. Even so, I was still getting used to the gentle sound of Fang's voice. A mellow tenor, so different than Kingsley's deep baritone. "How's your son?" he asked.
I told him much better. Much, much better, and he snapped awake instantly. I filled him in on my night, a night that had taken me from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, to my son's side, and feeding him from my bleeding wrist.
Fang said nothing at first. As he digested this information, I realized that just by hearing his soothing voice I had calmed down enough to stop my hands from shaking. As I waited for Fang to speak, I saw a man standing in a nearby pool of light, smoking and looking up towards the heavens. The gleam of tears on his cheeks was evident. A children's hospital in the dead of night is not a good place for a parent to be.
Finally, Fang said, "So, you really did it?"
"I had to."
"I'm not judging, Moon Dance. Actually, I think you made the right choice. A brave choice."
"Then why do I feel so horrible?"
"Because it's the unknown. Because it just happened. You saved your son, honey. He's alive because of you. Because of his mommy."
But I couldn't escape the feeling of being selfish, that I had exposed my son to something dark and horrible just to keep him alive, just to keep me from dealing with a lifetime of heartbreak.