Sanctifying Grace (Resurrection) (8 page)

When Roman burst through the door, his eyes lit with a dark and desperate hunger, and an even darker fear when he saw the charnel house that was once a kitchen, his nostrils flaring at the copper-rich scent of fresh blood and lips drawn back to reveal startlingly white canines, I embraced the faintest of tugs and retreated with relief to my own time.

I jerked awake, as a muscle spasm brought me back to full consciousness. My leg twitched again and I moved restlessly in the bed.

My mouth was dry, so very, very dry, and I tried to sit up with half open eyes and reach for the glass of water which always sat on my bedside table, but my body was distinctly unresponsive. My hand hurt, so I raised it to my face and saw the canula in the back of it. I knew all about canulas.

For one disconcerting moment
, I thought I must be back in hospital, enduring another gruelling round of chemotherapy, then my brain processed what my eyes were seeing and I understood I was in my own bed (a borrowed hospital one actually), in my own room (again, not really my room, but the dining room converted for my use because of my difficulty in climbing stairs) and my mother was slumped in one of the recliners that normally lived in the sitting room and was now wedged into a corner.

It was early morning, the dawn chorus in full flow in spite of it being only March. In the soft morning light
, I caught a glimpse of how my mother would look in old age – an old age I wouldn’t live to see. Her skin was pallid with exhaustion, and even in sleep the lines on her face were prominent. I noticed the grey that was coming through her usually coloured hair, and my guilt was overwhelming. She was neglecting herself to care for me, driving her body and mind to their limits in order to deal with the last weeks of a terminally ill daughter. Then I realised it was not just exhaustion I was seeing etched in her every line: it was grief.

If I hadn’t felt like a dried-up flower left too long in the sun
, I would have cried.

I must have made a small sound because she woke instantly, the transformation from deep slumber to alert awareness occurring in the blink of an eye. The old woman disappeared and she was the mother I knew once more, as her face creased into its familiar smile, relief and love radiating from her.

‘Thank God! You’re awake. Don’t move, I’ll get you some water.’

She rose stiffly out of her chair, stretching cramped legs and rotating one shoulder before pouring a glass of nectar sweetness: water had never tasted so good and I tried to gulp more
, but she held the glass away from my lips.

‘Steady,’ she warned. ‘Take it slowly.’

I obeyed, sipping gratefully, life coming back into my parched body, my cotton mouth revelling in the cool water on my tongue.

‘How long?’ I croaked: my throat was raw and it hurt to speak.

‘You gave me such a fright, Gigi. Hilary had just gone and I was in the kitchen when I heard you scream, and when I ran in to see if you were alright you were on the floor and there was blood on your hands and face. And on your neck. But don’t worry, you’re okay now,’ she added, almost as an afterthought.

I remembered blood. I remembered lots of blood and gradually the memory of what I had done flowed back into my mind, sickening me.
I had killed a man
. I had stabbed him and watched the life drain out of him and I had done nothing to help.

The prick of tears hurt my eyes and I tried not to cry.

‘I don’t know what you caught yourself on when you fell; it must have been the chair. You cut your lip but there was an awful lot of blood for such a small cut.’

I recalled Wil’s backhand slap across my face and I nodded slowly. That would have to be the explanation: I couldn’t tell my mother the truth: she would never believe me. It was bad enough for her to witness my body inexorably failing in front of her eyes. I didn’t want her to think my mind was going, too. She had enough to deal with, and besides, the story was preposterous. How could she accept such a thing? I wasn’t sure Ianto was one hundred per cent convinced I wasn’t going insane and he had seen so much more than my mother.

I lifted my hand and she answered the unspoken question.

‘I called Hilary on her mobile and she came straight back. You were in so much pain,’ she shuddered at the memory. ‘The tablets weren’t working and I had given you two, then Hilary said she would put you on a morphine drip, so that’s what she did.’ My mother smiled, trying to lighten the mood. ‘For such a skinny thing you weigh a ton. It took the both of us to lift you onto the bed.’

I gazed at her mournfully, so immensely sorry she had to deal with the effects of my ‘time travelling,’ as well as the problems the tumour itself caused. I was under no illusion my journeys into the past caused the debilitating headaches and I wished with all my heart my mother didn’t have to witness it. But as the time travel was purely involuntary, I didn’t see there was anything I could do to prevent it. I didn’t even know if I wanted to prevent it. Going back in time, seeing Roman, the man I loved, was the only good thing left in my life (apart from my family). It was the one time in this miserable existence of mine that I felt like me – no slurred speech, no muscle weakness, no problems with my memory. No pain.

It if wasn’t for the all-encompassing agony in my head when I returned from one of my sojourns to the past, and the effect on my parents and Ianto when they saw that pain, I would gratefully time travel every day.

As it was, I didn’t think my body could take that kind of abuse on a daily basis. Each time I returned there was a part of me that didn’t function as well as it did before. Whether it was the headaches, or whether it was the natural progression of the tumour, I couldn’t tell. I suspected, though, that each time I travelled, I was causing more injury to my already damaged brain.

I shrugged mentally; I was going to die soon, anyway. The pressure and destruction the tumour was causing inside my head was inevitably going to escalate. If the headaches hastened the process, then so be it. I couldn’t prevent myself from ‘visiting’ Roman, even if I wanted to. And one thing was abundantly clear – I
didn’t
want to, in spite of the knowledge I was not as important to him as I once was.

A thought occurred to me; as the time he was living in became closer to the present day,
Roman was bound to realise my visits must surely cease soon. And although I appeared to him as I always had, full of life, health and vitality, I hadn’t held back when I told him the state of my body and mind in my own world.

He knew I didn’t have long to live. Perhaps he was merely preparing for my death, naturally distancing himself from me and his feelings towards me. And I knew he felt something, even if it wasn’t the same intensity of the love I held for him. He had known me almost all his vampire life and I hoped it would be a wrench for him when he understood I was finally dead. Would I simply stop time travelling once my illness progressed and the essence of me was subsumed by the morphine and brain damage? Or would I cease to travel when the past caught up with the year of my birth? I had no idea how this would play out and I thought there was probably no one else on the planet who knew, either.

Of course, if Roman wanted to stop seeing me, all he needed to do was to stay away from Brecon. So far he hadn’t shown any inclination to do that. In fact, the opposite was true: he had admitted that for the past few hundred years he had found it difficult to say away from the area, in spite of the obvious risks to himself.

My head hurt, mostly from thinking too much and not from the tumour, although the pain from that little alien in my head was ever-present. I wanted to sit up and get moving. I didn’t want to lie here with so many questions and theories whirling through my mind. I tried to push up off the bed and had a moment of pure panic when my arms and legs failed me. I didn’t have the strength or co-ordination to manage even this simple task.

I caught the look on my mother’s face and it almost tore my heart in two.

I flopped back onto the pillows and closed my eyes. I could feel my death moving closer and suddenly I just wanted it all to be over. No more pain, no more dreadful awareness of what was happening to me, no more suffering.

For the first time since the appalling diagnosis, I considered suicide. I had known the pain both myself and my family was going to go through (physical, as well as emotional for me) was going to be horrendous, but until I was actually living it, I could never have guessed just how awful the reality was. Understanding what was going to happen was altogether different from the experiencing it. I could simply end it here and now, put everyone out of this misery my life had turn out to be. Dying was becoming more and more of a way out than something to be fought against at all costs. It would be a welcome relief for both me and my family. It was horrific that they had to watch the person that was me slowly disappear and fade away before their eyes. The only question was – had I left it too late?

My hand was sore and I lifted my arm weakly to stare at the canula.

‘I’ll take it out for you,’ my mother offered. ‘Hilary said that once you are awake and taking fluids, I could remove it. She showed me how. It’s only saline.’

With a minimum of fuss, she withdrew the offending needle. The back of my hand throbbed and a vivid bruise stained my skin. When I examined my hand I couldn’t believe how frail it had become; I could see the shape of the bones underneath and blue-green veins were prominent. I had the hands of a woman three times my age.

I tried not to cry for what I had lost. I needed to stay brave for my mother’s sake; her burden was heavy enough without me adding my despair to her grief.

She helped me sit up and propped the pillows behind me, checking that the sides of the hospital bed were locked into position. She wasn’t going to risk me falling again.

‘Are you hungry? Can I get you anything to eat?’

‘More water,’ I slurred.

I drank another glass and dispatched her off to the kitchen to heat some soup. I didn’t think my throat was up to eating solids. My neck was tender to the touch and I guessed I must have a ring of bruises where Wil had tried to throttle me.

I wondered if Hilary had questioned those strangulation marks and hoped she didn’t think my mother had tried to kill me. Mum hadn’t said anything and I didn’t want to broach the subject
, else she might ask some questions of her own. She must have assumed I had fallen and I was content to let her think that, so I shelved the thought and returned to what was really on my mind. Wil. He was dead and I had killed him. I was going to have to live with what I had done for the rest of my life. Then I barked out a painful laugh, because I wouldn’t have to live with the remorse for very long.

I didn’t want to dwell on those last few moments of his life, but I knew I had to. Never one for running away, I needed to confront my guilt head on and deal with it.

I ran through the sequence of events; I didn’t regret searching Wilfred’s room, my instincts had been correct: he did have something to hide. I briefly wondered if Roman had found the letters and what he had made of them.

I could possibly have begun searching earlier in the day, or left it until the next afternoon, but not knowing whether I would be catapulted back to my own time in the very next second, I felt justified in not leaving my search until later. I had to live for the moment when I was in Roman’s world, because I never knew if it would be my last one for another handful of decades. I’d had to seize the chance and it was simply unfortunate Wil had returned when he did.

I could have given him the letters as soon as he had asked for them, but I knew instinctively that doing so would have made no difference. He had been going to kill me anyway. He couldn’t have let me live.

I recalled my panic as I fled down the stairs, the overwhelming terror an antelope must feel being chased by a lion, and I relived the moment when his hands closed around my throat. What I had done had been in self-defence. I hadn’t had any other option. But did I have to sit there on the floor, covered in blood, paralysed with indecision and fear, and watch his life-force leak out of him? I could have done something to save him; applied a tourniquet perhaps? Anything.

But I didn’t. I had sat and watched him die.

I thought it through as logically as I could. What if I had managed to staunch the bleeding? What then? And then it came to me why I hadn’t made any move to help him. Roman. He would have torn him limb from limb. He would not have shown Wil the slightest hint of mercy.

After what Wil had done, Roman would have had no choice but to eliminate him. I had sat there and done nothing, so Roman wouldn’t have to deal with him. I had watched the light slowly fade from Wil’s eyes and it had seemed like a lifetime, when it was probably only a few minutes. I had let him slip away rather than have Roman end his life, savagely and with no pity or remorse. When it came to protecting himself, or someone he cared about, the vampire was merciless.

I was trying to absolve myself of Wil’s death and although my conclusion was totally logical, it didn’t help with the guilt, remorse
, and despair. However I tried to sugar-coat it, the fact remained that I had killed another living, breathing human being. I didn’t know how I was going to live with myself.

I wondered what Roman had done with Wil’s body and guessed he was well practiced in disposing of such inconveniences. I hoped he didn’t blame me for what had happened (shooting the messenger, and all that), and he realised why I had done it. I pushed away the troubling thought of Roman hunting down and dealing with the unknown Charles. Yet another death on my conscience.