“Be not afraid, Kaelene Lambros. If the sheep remain faithful to the shepherd, their flock will be spared from the wolves. You, however, are to be a lion amongst them.”
An unearthly chill takes root deep inside me. In all of my many nightmares, nobody has ever spoken to me. Not once. I’ve always been a specter—just another lost soul, wandering around in the desolation. But this dream is something entirely different. Like a mother knows her child, I recognize it in the cornerstones of my soul.
I’m compelled by a nearly tangible force to stand up and walk towards the angel, as if a rope is pulling me towards him. It is not a sight, smell, or sound—but it is everything I feel.
I listen, walking down the sandy bank as the angel leaves the sea behind him. The more the distance between us closes, the more I can feel the pure power radiating off him. By the time I’m standing before him, it warbles through the air like a magnetic cross between a low sound and a heat wave on the horizon.
“Take this and consume it,” he commands, holding the scroll out.
Simultaneously, the same otherworldly force that compelled me to move materializes inside me. It speaks without a voice, writing a secret promise deep within my soul:
Devour the message. Accept the call. The seeds of purpose will be born from the tree of sacrifice. I swear this to you.
A foreboding terror seizes me, but I endure, if only because taking the scroll feels inexplicably right. Even if I don’t understand the strange command, every fiber of my being tells me that I should listen—that I was bornfor this moment, and nothing in the entire universe could take it from me.
However, when my fingertips graze the parchment, it instantly turnsto ash.
An astonishing, strange, horrific change rises in my body. My blood seems to turn into electricity—only a gentle vibration at first, but the voltage rises rapidly. It becomes so strong, so fast, that it feels like lightning struck within my core and is bursting out of me.
A blood-curdling scream flies past my lips.
I’m nailed in place, unable to move, unable to collapse. My suffering seems eternal, without an end in sight. I fear there must be no way out of this but to explode from within and cease to exist. Every inch of me, beyond what should even be physically possible, crackles in the power, the pain.
Indescribable, endless pain swallows me whole until there’s nothing left.
2
Someone nudges me.
I rub my eyes, looking up from my chair to find a lanky young scribe standing with a stack of papers in his hand. A snotty-nosed freshman, by the looks of him. He seems to be waiting expectantly for my attention.
“Can I help you?” I ask through my haze, sparing a quick glance at my surroundings—the urgent care clinic. That’s right. I must have spaced out while waiting for some records to fax. Good thing that’s virtually impossible to mess up… But this is exactly why I’m not interacting with the patients right now.
I might be a glutton for punishment, given my endless guilt and sense of failure for deferring my degree, but I’m only going to endangermyselfwhen I’m this sleep-deprived. As long as I’m here unpaid, the administration won’t make me do anything substantial—which means the patients are safe from my clouded judgment, and I get to keep bolstering my delayed application to med school with little real obligation. It’s the only way I can feel like less of a failure lately.
“Did you not hear me?” The boy huffs, waving his stack of papers in my direction. “I asked if you could put these into the EMR for me.”
My eyes narrow on his nametag. “Pete. You know I’m shadowing today, right? I’m not here as a scribe. Why would I do work for free that I regularly get paid to do?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like you’re busy. Were you asleep?”
Yes—well, no. I wasn’t asleep. But I wasn’t quite awake, either. I don’t think I’ve fully slept since that dream of the angel, and that was Saturday night. It’s… Monday morning now, I think.
Regardless, it’s none of this kid’s business.
“With my eyes open? Seriously?” I give my most convincing scoff. “You need to be typing your own transcriptions. You have to actually dothe work to learn something.”
He shifts on his feet. “But what if I misheard something? They talk so fast sometimes, and I haven’t taken Medical Terminology yet, so I don’t know if I wrote down the right words for everything. And isn’t this, like, your third year here? Surely it’d be easy for you.”
Ah, sothat’swhat this is about. He’s still green. A year ago, I would have been eager to show off my experience and aptitude. Unfortunately for Pete, I don’t have the energy to spare anymore.
“That’s why you’re supposed to use critical thinking.” Something I’m in short supply of lately. “Just go slow and Google anything you’re unsure about. I’ll check it over—” I choke on my next words.
Petey here must have taken what’s left of my sanity, somehow, because I catch a glimpse of something inconceivable in the corner of the room.
The angel from my dream is here.
Even in his unremarkable khaki pants and white button-up shirt, he sticks out like a golden goose in a flock of pigeons. He might be lacking the glowing, radiant splendor from before, but Iswearit’s him. He’s unmistakable. Which is just… completely impossible. I’m either transposing faces or outright hallucinating.
