Page 104 of Succubus

The woman is still screaming—it’s ragged now, frantic.

Joel shoves himself up, drags himself across the stone. The effort is visible in his face. I don’t know what to do. I am standing there, standing over Ella where she lies. He makes it to us. He is on his knees. He turns her face, which has broken on the corner of the column’s base. Is she breathing? I ask myself. Can you tell if she is breathing?

I can’t tell.

Someone is roaring. Or screaming, suddenly, near me. The woman—I think—she’s come back up here. But no, it’s Dee. Her coconut-shampoo-with-undertones-of-coffee scent is unmistakable; it smells like home. How did she get here? My brain can’t make sense of things. There are too many jagged pieces.

Dee is panting, heaving, falling down beside Ella.

Here’s Mom rushing up the steps after her, yelling, “Chickadee!”

“Baby.” Dee is gasping. “Baby!” And then, to Mom, “Call 911.” Her voice is orderly again, somehow, efficient.

“I left it,” says Mom, her voice peaking. “I left my phone in the house! You ran out and I just ran after you!” She covers her mouth with both hands.

“Baby, baby, open your eyes,” Dee is saying, cradling Ella now. But Ella’s legs are wrong, too, the way her feet hang in their loose-looking rain boots. Her hand is wrong—I can’t look at it. “She has to be okay,” Dee tells me. “She has to be okay. She has to be okay.” Her words fly straight into my body, each one puncturing a different organ.

“Let me.” Joel reaches for Ella. “Trust me. You need to trust me.”

“What— ” Dee stares up at him as though noticing him for the first time, even though he is right here, an unsteady block of giant dark. “What are you saying? Why are you here?”

Joel touches Ella’s face gently. He takes her face in his hands.

“He’s a doctor.” It’s the first thing that comes to my mind.

“Yes,” Dee says. “Oh my God, you have to help her!”

My hands twitch against their binding.

Mom is saying to Joel, “Please save my granddaughter. You can kill me if you want!” What a time for her to remember the other part of what I told her in the hotel room.

“What?” cries Dee, but Mom continues: “I’m the reason Tempest is—whatever she is! I brought her into the world! I fell for her asshole father— ”

“Mom!” I snap, and she stops.

There is a vibration in the air, an anticipation.

The field has gone silent and I can’t tell where the woman is, or Al.

Joel doesn’t talk, not like at the hospital, where it was official, where he was giving medical instructions. Here on the platform in the dark he only closes his eyes. His hands on either side of Ella’s damaged face begin to glow—phosphorescent, as though the dark air were murky water, rippling. The light, which is not even exactly light, not a color so much as a visible hum, seeps into Ella’s skin. For a few moments the terrible injury is brought into vivid relief—the bone of her skull, the torn skin, the severed blood vessels. The pink coat stained dark, rabbits suspended in shocked flight.

The three of us have fallen completely still. No one can look away.

And then Ella’s skin, all of it, grows iridescent, glinting from inside. And there is a feeling that emanates from her, that radiates from the place where his hands connect with her. It’s a feeling of standing on a rock and looking out over the size of the world—the trees are a fuzz like moss and the shape and scale of things emerges, the land weaves its way into the sky. It’s endless: the ocean, storms that hold the power to wreck cities, the cycles of the moon, the wearing down of stone, the inching up of a mountain levered by centuries upon centuries of incremental adjustment, the drift of winter toward the spring that always lies inside it, the drift of spring toward the summer that always lies inside it, the drift of summer toward an inevitable fall. It’s strange and unknowable, a sense of relentless infinity that a mind might break on, the whirling magnitude of silent galaxies, the incomprehensible distance between solid bodies.

I’m tipping, trembling.

The ever presence of a billion variations of pain, of cruelty, of sorrow.

The possibility in a newborn—I’ve seen it—the moment when the eyes connect, when the soul flares in them.

The gravitational imperative within the machine of life, pulling toward change. Every leaf, every brain, every cell, poised—a participant in movement that can only be felt generationally, only over the soft, massive swells of time.

It’s a holy feeling.

Sacred.

The feeling of God?