Page 43 of The Unraveling

They both grip me so hard it’s like I’m being split both ways, though the crater inside me is widening on its own.

“You’re not going to die, Isla,” Daisy cries, hooking her fingers together in front of my stomach like she can keep me away from any grave.

She says it with so much conviction, but there is no light in this dark. If my life were the night sky and Victor my moon, the lost light is the smallest horror when there is no longer gravity.

“Please,” I insist. “Please finish Daisy’s treatment if I . . . if this happens to me, too.”

“I will,” Dr. Smith whispers, chilly breath gusting through my hair.

“Promise,” I choke out. “Promise she’ll be immortal.”

“I promise. I swear it.”

I let my soaked eyelids slide closed, my body limp in his grip as tears streak my cheeks.

My heart flutters in my throat, and I cough, but it doesn’t stop this time. I cough harder, liquid spraying up thick and rusty over my tongue. It’s like a panicked butterfly is caught there, fluttering mad between my collarbones like it’s pressing against the top of a bone cage. My chest heaves, and I try to cough it free. Its panic seeps into me, like it might flail there forever and never settle back behind my ribs.

“Isla,” a man calls, voice muffled by the pulsing blood in my ears. “Isla, can you focus on my finger?”

There is no light in this darkness.

A shrill, muffled voice calls my name, and I think of the time I laid beneath the water in the bath, loving the way I could hold ‌my breath as long as I wanted. Loved that I could pretend to sleep on the ocean floor like a mermaid.

Daisy was my new familiar. My first. Her name on that patient list—my favorite flowers, always dying at the end of the season—was like kismet. After being dead for nearly three decades, I wanted to try helping someone like Victor does. Wanted to rescue my own immortal best friend. Someone who deserved to be taken care of—sweet, incapable of ever hurting anyone, and deserving to be saved. But I was so used to it being just me and Victor, his patients never living here, that I forgot that witnessing what looked like your best friend drowning could scare someone so badly.

Though it’s strange how my lungs burn now with that watery fullness. My chest heaves, and I cough hard to get it out, mouth flooding with the tang of iron.

Dr. Smith stares down at me with calculating eyes, a bloody finger hovering between his face and mine. My eyes cross to focus on it.

“Did I have a seizure like Victor?” I whisper, voice so weak it only trickles back. My elbows ache like I repeatedly slammed them both against the hardwood floor. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Isla.” His finger slides out of sight, and I gag on the taste of my blood before trying to swallow it.

As Dr. Smith sighs and rakes his bloodied fingers through his hair, I ask, “Can you get Dr. Todd? I don’t feel well and could really use his blood.”

When I turn my hands to plant them against the floor to prop myself up, my fingers slide against another set. Emotions flood back, heart struggling like there’s a cement block on my chest as I—with wide eyes—turn my head.

Victor’s hazy brown eyes gaze back, and I scream.

“Victor!” I scramble onto my hands and knees. “Victor, no!”

The memory of him staring up at the blue sky on the garden swing snaps back to my mind. I lean my forehead against his, my hand cupping his jaw as I sob.

Dr. Smith squats down on the other side of Victor, and from the way he slides his arms beneath his knees and shoulders, I know he’s going to take him away.

I grip Victor by his vest, pressing my lips to his as if a lover’s kiss will force Dr. Smith to show me mercy. And it does, for a moment that could never be long enough, before he calls Daisy’s name like an unspoken request and heaves Victor off the ground.

She clings to me as I sob and plead for Dr. Smith to bring Victor back as he crosses the room.

“Why are you taking him?” I cry. “Please don’t take him! Do something to save him! Please, I can’t live without him. I need him!”

“I tried,” Dr. Smith says, voice hollow.

“You said he’s human! Try CPR! Get his heart pumping, then give him your blood!” I plead.

Dr. Smith doesn’t respond, doesn’t look back as he carries Victor into the hall. I’m too weak to resist Daisy’s jailer grip as she binds me in her arms on the floor.

No light. No gravitational pull to steady my unmoored soul through each wave of grief. Nothing but a black hole on the horizon, growing each moment to blot out the rest of my days.