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Rei
The kid’s pulse is slowing, and his respiration is ragged.
Luke can keep spraying holy water on him, but I don’t think that’s going to help much. He isn’t having a seizure, but he’s not responding anymore. He needs to be hooked up to a machine. He can’t just…lay there, while we wait for him to die.
He needs medical attention.
I hold my hand up to stop Luke from working. “We’re going to have to call an ambulance.”
“And the mother?” he asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know, but he needs around the clock medical supervision, and we can’t do that,” I say. “I don’t have a way to do the exams they would at a hospital. And he needs…fuck, he needs saline, at least. He’s so dehydrated. He’s going to die if we don’t get him hooked up to an IV.”
“So what do you suggest?” Luke says. He’s taking a step away from the bed, tucking the holy water back into the pocket of his jeans, taking the purple stole off his shoulders. If people don’t look too closely, it just looks like a scarf.
It’s fine in colder climates, but here, people give him weird looks.
They also givemeweird looks when I wear my bomber jacket, but it’s whatever. That’s just fashion.
The stole, I don’t know–it feels like there’s something weird about it.
I’m trying to focus on his clothes because I don’t know if we’re going to be able to save this kid and having the conversation we’re about to have with the paramedics is one of my least favorite parts of the job.
But not one of the objectively worst parts. The objectively worst parts are when someone’s beyond help and they end up in a psych facility, and we don’t know if that means they’re going to help the people around them. Or when we have to talk about what a parent needs to do for funeral arrangements.
It’s maybe been five seconds, and it’s already too long. My fingers are still on Tom’s wrist as I feel for his pulse.
“I called them,” Luke says. I try to smile at him, but I think the muscles on my face aren’t working. “They said they’d be here in five.”
“Great. What did you say?” I ask.
“That he was having a seizure, I don’t know him, and it looks really bad,” he replies. “Nothing else. I’ll let you talk to them. How’s he doing?”
“He’s hanging on by a thread, I think,” I say. “None of this is great. What about his…”
“Spirit?” Luke asks, raising his eyebrows as he looks into my eyes. “Honestly, it’s hard to tell. He’s not really responding right now. I just…I’ll do everything I can, but once they take him to the hospital, I won’t be able to do much but sit and pray with him.”
I know that. We’ve had this conversation a million times. It always feels like we’re giving up on the client when we send them to the hospital, mostly because it means our reach will be drastically diminished.
That’s an issue, since we won’t be able to perform an exorcism if we don’t have the space to. But we need to be able to keep him alive. We can’t exorcise a corpse.
“Do we need to tie him down or anything?” Luke asks.
I shake my head. “No, too much to explain,” I say, looking down at Tom. His eyes are closed now, and he’s slumped on his back, his head tilted back on the pillow. He looks like a normal teenager. A sick one, but normal. It’s hard to believe that, only an hour or so ago, he was floating off the bed.
Luke picks up his head to look at me. He lets me handle all the medical care of our clients, but he seems a little hesitant about this one. Probably because Tom tried to kill Trine.
“They can sedate him,” I say. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at him, letting his hand fall by his side. He’s cold to the touch, and his breathing keeps catching. They’ll take better care of him at a hospital. At least temporarily.
“Do you think we’ll be able to get him back out?” Luke asks.
“Hard to know,” I say. “You can probably visit him…”
“If he doesn’t hurt someone else,” he replies.
I nod, my mouth dry. I know we need to do this because Tom needs the medical attention, but I don’t want to write him off. Luke closes his eyes, says a prayer under his breath, and I watch him, barely paying attention when footsteps approach.
“How’s he doing?” Trine asks.
