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"No." There was an unexpected strength in her voice. "You need to help her, and she needs your skill to save her life."
"How? How can I treat her? The moment I touch her?"
"I-I'll be your hands."
He froze, too stunned for a second to respond. "You'll what?"
She gave him a look so drenched in promise, so filled with love, that for a second he almost believed her. "Trust me ... just one more time, Ian." He wanted to back off, to return to some dark, hidden corner of this hellish house and drink until the wave of bitterness and disillusionment passed, until he'd beaten back the horrifying ray of hope. But it was too strong this time; the need was too seductive. I'll be your hands.
He could not possibly refuse.
The inmates stood around the sofa like a cluster of restless, buzzing bees, their hushed voices droning in fragmented, nonsensical whispers. Ian gave them a disgusted, cursory look, seeing them in a glance. Andrew, the disturbed eighteen-year-old man who routinely tried to kill himself; Johann, a disowned aristocrat dying from syphilis; Lara, a fifteen-year-old retarded girl with the mind of a child; a middle-aged woman who thought she was Queen Victoria; and Dotty, a seventy-year-old former Civil War spy who only spoke in whispers and codes and spent her days hidden in a broom closet, talking to invisible allies.
The bland gray wool of their winter wardrobe created an impenetrable barrier around the woman who lay in their midst.
His step slowed. He felt an instant's unwillingness to enter their ranks. When they were apart from him, when
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he was closeted in his hidden room, he could tell himself they didn't exist. But here, now, he was faced with the truth of their sorry lives, and it filled him with the same sinking sense of despair as always.
The irony of it wrought a bitter smile. Once he had been feted by society's upper echelon; now he lived among that very society's rejects in the house of lost and damned souls.
"Get out of the way." He hissed, striding forward.
There was a sharp, collective indrawn breath. He's here. The words floated through the darkened room, carried by several hushed voices. People moved instantly, parted like the Red Sea before their Moses.
Ian tried to ignore their upturned faces, and the reverence in their eyes. He wished they wouldn't look at him at all. For years he'd taught them not to touch him, never to touch him, but still they looked at him with that naked, blatant adoration, as if he were the god he once believed himself to be.
He walked around the sofa and knelt beside the body stretched out on the white brocade. She lay corpselike and still, her hair a tangled, matted heap, a strand of kelp twined around her throat. Blood trickled from both ears and from her left nostril, leaving a streak of bright red against the already bruising flesh of her cheek. He couldn't make out her face; it was bluish, battered, scraped beyond recognition. He couldn't tell if she was fifteen or fifty beneath the bruises.
Maeve appeared beside him in an instant, offering the expensive leather bag he hadn't used for years.
"Does she have a pulse?" he asked.
There was no answer.
He looked up sharply. "Mother, you brought me here. Do as I say. I need you to be my hands."
Maeve inched toward him and bent down. Then she did the unthinkable?she touched him. Images blasted through his brain in a miasma of pain and sorrow and
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regret; he saw her standing, alone and willowy, at his father's grave site, felt the devastating emptiness of her life. His headache came back, blinded him for a heartbeat to everything except his mother's despair.
"You have hands, Ian. Healing hands." She drew back, leaving him shaken and confused. The medical bag thunked to the floor beside him. "Use them." And then she was gone, melted back into the crazy people who had become her family.
Ian let out a shuddering breath and glanced up. The inmates stared at him in frank, breathless anticipation.
He wanted to bolt suddenly, to simply run.
You need to help her, Ian.
"I need a drink," he whispered, staring down at the pathetic shaking of his hands. He hadn't voluntarily touched anyone in so long. It was too bloody painful. What if he relived her accident? One touch, and he could be thrown into her agony, and still be no closer to saving her life. And what if she died while he was touching her? The thought of that pain blistering through his own psyche made him feel physically ill.
"Ian?" his mother prompted him.
Ian steeled himself, trying to blank out his mind, preparing for the pain. When his hands stopped shaking and his breathing normalized, he reached for the woman again.
