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I wanted to stay with him forever, of course, but the thought that I was hurting him with my very presence made me horribly uncomfortable. The idea that I was making his excruciating thirst worse and there was nothing I could do about it was a special kind of torment.
Or was there?
Suddenly I had an idea. Probably not a very safe idea, but one I thought might really help if it worked.
Though if it didn’t work, I might end up dead.
59
I looked around for a knife or anything sharp, but I couldn’t see anything that would be remotely useful. As I said earlier, there were no kitchen implements anywhere in the converted caboose except for the sink.
Then I felt the black key pricking at me, as though trying to get my attention.
Oh, no, I thought at it. There’s no way I’m pulling you out again—seeing you was hard enough on Griffin the first time and I’m trying to make his thirst better, not worse.
But the key pricked at me insistently, scratching me almost sharply enough to draw blood.
Suddenly I understood what it was trying to do.
Before I could give myself time to think, I plunged my hand down the neckline of my shirt and gripped it between my fingers.
“Megan?” Griffin was looking at me warily. “What exactly are you doing?” he asked in a low, measured tone. “Please don’t bring the key out again. You have no idea how difficult it is to resist or how sharply it makes my thirst spike.”
“Your thirst is what I’m going to try to help,” I told him. “But I have to take the key out for just a minute to do it. I promise I’ll be quick.”
“Megan, please—” he began but then I pulled the black key with its glittering Blood Stones out of my shirt.
Gripping it tightly between the finger and thumb of my right hand, I pressed the sharp end of the key—which had somehow gotten sharper until it was almost like a needle—into the pad of my left thumb.
Griffin’s eyes widened when he saw what I was doing.
“No!” he roared. “Megan no—don’t cut yourself in front of me! The scent of your blood so close will be too much. You can’t understand—”
And then his words died away to nothing and a look of wonder and surprise came over his face as his long fingers went to his throat.
At the same time, I felt my own throat tighten. Agonizing pain shot through me, as though the tender tissues there were suddenly lined with barbed wire. At the same time, a thirst so great I felt like I could drink an ocean of water suddenly struck me.
I struggled for a moment with the pain and the desperate thirst. I felt like I was dying—like I had to drink something or I would shrivel up and blow away like a tumbleweed on the wind.
Was this what Griffin had felt every moment of every day for the last fifteen years? No wonder he was often scary and sarcastic—this was agony—complete torture! And yet somehow he dealt with it and went on about his day—I wondered how he could.
“Megan?” His voice brought me back to myself and I looked up at him as the intense pain began to ease a little bit. As with my mother, the pain I had taken didn’t last forever—it was only hard to bear at first.
“I’m…” I coughed. “I’m okay,” I finished hoarsely. It hurt to talk but not as much as I had feared.
“Here—you need some water. It helps.”
He got up from the couch and got me a glass of water from the sink. I drank it thirstily and it helped a little. Bit by bit I felt the pain and thirst fading—I just hoped they weren’t pouring back into Griffin. But from the cautiously relieved look on his face, they weren’t.
Somehow, I had given him a temporary respite, just as I had been able to do for my mother.
He put his hand to his throat again.
“This is the first time in fifteen years I haven’t been in pain—haven’t been tormented by thirst.” He shook his head and looked at me wonderingly. “You took the pain and thirst for me, didn’t you? You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” I asked and found that I had hardly any pain at all now. I took another swallow of water and was glad to see that it quenched the last of the terrible thirst.
“Because I don’t want you to hurt yourself for me.” Griffin sounded stern.
“But it helped, right?” I asked anxiously. “And it’s still helping?”
He nodded reluctantly. “How long will it last?”
I shrugged. “For my mom it seemed to be anywhere from two to four hours. So I really don’t know. I hope as long as possible.”
“It’s amazing.” He touched his throat again as though he couldn’t believe it, then frowned at me. “I don’t want you doing it again, though.”
