Fractured Blood

Aeron's POV Ten minutes before I turned thirty-three, a dying man started to smell like dinner. The smell got to me before the stretcher did. I was restocking saline in Trauma Two, deep in the quietest hour of a Thursday night shift, when something hit the back of my throat like a struck match. Pure unadulterated copper. Rain on hot brick. And under that, impossibly, chicory and smoke, the way the French Market smelled at dawn when I was a kid. The saline bag slid out of my hand and burst on the tile. "Aeron?" Tomasina Broussard glanced up from the computer. Our charge nurse had worked nights for twenty-two years and could read a bad shift simply in the way a doorknob turned. "You good?" "Fine. I slipped." I'd smelled plenty of blood. Gunshots, stabbings, a guy who drove a Buick through a daiquiri shop on Bourbon, a woman who bled out onto my shoes before the helicopter could land. Blood was my job. Blood was a fact: type, volume, pressure, how fast it was leaving. But this one felt like an invitation. The ambulance doors banged open. "Male, fifties, found under the Claiborne overpass," the paramedic shouted, jogging alongside the gurney. "Throat laceration, unresponsive in the field, then he started talking. Pressure's bottoming out but his heart rate's two-forty and holding." "Two-forty doesn't hold," said Dr. Okafor, already pulling on gloves. "Move him. On three." He was heavy the only way money makes a man heavy, someone who ate well and dressed better. Cream linen jacket, black now from collar to hem. A gold signet ring too big for his finger. The silver in his hair looked like frost more than age. His eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling tiles, as if he'd expected to find something up there. I cut his jacket away with the trauma shears. My hands knew the work: collar, sleeve, shirt, pressure dressing, two large-bore IVs. I called out numbers in a voice I recognized as mine and heard from a long way off. Because under that voice, something else was waking up. My gums ached. Nothing like a toothache, it's deeper, the way a muscle aches just before it cramps. My pulse climbed to match his. The fluorescents sharpened until I could see each filament hum, and I could hear his blood moving through him like a river under ice, thick slow and so wrong. "Pressure's seventy over forty." "Get me O-neg," Okafor said. "Aeron, hold that dressing." I put my hands on his throat. The wound was torn, not a cut, ragged and wet, and it didn't match the blood soaking his clothes. There should have been more. Too little had come out, as if something had already drunk the difference. His blood was warm under my gloves. The warmest thing I'd ever touched. I was always cold. It was a joke at work: White's got no circulation, White wears a jacket in August. Cold childhood, I told people, bad genes, a drafty apartment. I'd been cold so long I'd quit noticing, the way you quit noticing a hum until it cuts out. It had cut out. "Aeron." Heat ran up my wrists. I'd bent over him, I was close enough to feel the warmth rising off the wound. My mouth was open. I could taste the air, and the air tasted like him. "Aeron." A hand slammed into my shoulder and hauled me back so hard I hit the supply cart. Tomasina's face swam into focus, looking all furious and scared, her fingers knotted in my scrubs. "Look at me, baby. What are you doing?" "I don't know." It was the truest thing I'd ever said. My tongue was bleeding. I'd bitten it, and the taste of my own blood was thin and bitter, like water when you'd wanted wine. "Step out," Okafor said, not looking up. "Breathe." I wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't have told you why. Maybe it was the way the man's eyes moved. They left the ceiling and found me slowly, the way a compass needle settles. Dark eyes, clear for the first time since he'd come through the doors, with no fear in them at all. He knew me. His hand came up off the gurney. Nobody at seventy over forty should be able to lift a hand. But it closed around my wrist hard enough to grind the bones together. The paramedic swore. Okafor shouted for restraints. The man ignored them. He pulled me down until my ear was against his ruined mouth. His breath smelled of salt and old roses and the river. "Duchesne," he said. The word dropped through me like a coin into deep water. I had never heard it in my life. And still, something at the bottom of me turned over and answered. "I'm White," I said, stupidly. "Aeron White. You're at Mercy Crescent, you're going to be..." "Duchesne." His fingers tightened. His voice was a scrape of sand. "The crown is bleeding." "Sir..." "They found the door. Boy. They've found the door." "Who? Who found what?" His eyes held mine. For one second they weren't a dying man's eyes. They belonged to a messenger finishing the last job he'd crossed the city to do. Then something in them let go. The monitor dropped into one long, flat note. "Asystole. Starting compressions. Epi, one milligram, push it." We worked him for eleven minutes. I did everything right. I know I did, because Tomasina watched me do it. I counted compressions. I squeezed the bag. I pushed the drugs. My body ran the protocol while the rest of me stood very still behind my own eyes, repeating three words I didn't understand. The crown is bleeding. The clock over the door said 12:13 when Okafor lifted his hands from the man's chest and said quietly, "Time of death." Nobody spoke. Then the machinery of the dead took over. The tech silenced the monitor. A resident scribbled the time. Someone went to find the police. I stood there with my gloved hands hanging at my sides, watching blood drip off my fingertips onto the tile, and realized I was thirty-three years old. Thirteen minutes of it, already, and I hadn't noticed. Delphine's happy birthday baby was sitting in my locker, I knew without checking, heart emoji, reminder about Sunday cake. There'd be nothing else. I didn't do birthdays. I did shifts. "Go home," Tomasina said. She was next to me, arms crossed, her face arranged into professional concern. But she was watching my mouth. "I'm finishing the chart." "You're going home. You were about to..." She stopped. Shook her head. "I don't know what you were about to do. I don't want to know. I'll sign you out. Go." I nodded. Easier than arguing. She turned to help with the body bag, and I stayed put, because there was one thing I couldn't leave without doing. I'd spent ten years being careful with the dead. It's a small courtesy when nobody else will. You close their eyes, straighten their hands and put them in order, because someone's going to want to see them, and you want the last thing they see to be neat. I took the man's right hand to fold it over his chest. His palm was open. The skin was very pale against the dark blood, the lines sharp and deep, and in the center, where a fortune teller would've drawn the heart line, there was a mark. A crescent. An old pale scar, or a birthmark, a curved sliver like a fingernail moon, thin at the tips and heavy in the belly, the points facing left. I knew that shape the way I knew my own name. I'd been hiding it under shirts since I was eight. I'd told doctors it was an old burn, told a girlfriend it was a tattoo gone wrong, told myself for twenty-five years that some people are just born with a thing nobody needs to explain. It sat on my chest, directly over my heart, and it had never once hurt. It burned now. I felt it through my scrubs, through my undershirt, a line of cold fire. I pressed my free hand flat against it, and my own heartbeat came up into my palm, fast and strange, answering the stranger's dead one. Behind me, a door swung open. Heels on tile. Not a nurse's shoes, neither a cop's. Slow, in no hurry at all. The air in Trauma Two went still, and the smell of roses and river water that clung to the dead man came back sharp and new, doubled, as if there were two of him in the room now. I didn't turn around. Because the crescent in the dead man's palm had begun, very faintly, to glow. And so had mine.