Moira tapped her foot against the stark white tiles of the hospital hallway. Down in the lobbies and cafeteria on the first floor, large windows let in gray light that dampened the sterile environment. But up here, where the only windows were in the rooms and at the ends of the hallways, everything was bright white and shiny metal.
The soft armchair creaked beneath her as she shifted her weight. For the thousandth time, she read the five steps to prevent a cold listed on the little poster next to the water cooler. She wondered if there were similar posters in the refugee camps.
Derek had insisted on watching the news in the hours before they took him away for some type of ritualistic surgery to make him brand new. The doctor told him not to look at screens until they fixed him up, but Derek was never one to take direction from an authority figure, even a doctor.
So, they watched a program about the logistics of the refugee camps popping up outside the disaster zones all throughout the country. About how they were worried about the outbreak of diseases and were importing hand sanitizer by the tons.
Derek had been fascinated. He wanted to know everything about what was going on. He knew about magic, which Moira pouted about for a whole hour. She was a little pissed at him. For an entire year, her Aunt and Uncle had put off inducting her in preparation for sacrificing her instead, all while Derek was already a part of the council, knew about magic, and did not say anything.
She scowled down at her fingernails. Several had torn, and dirt settled under them in little black lines. There was a nail kit in her backpack from when she used to use the bag for stuff other than running around after the world went to shit. She dug it out while pulling the trash can next to the water cooler between her knees. Then she started trimming her nails and cleaning the dirt out of them.
Derek had barely been able to keep up the thread of conversation while they waited for his surgery. He was so dosed on whatever drugs and confused by waking up from the coma. He hadn’t been down long enough to have any trouble breathing on his own or experience any true muscle atrophy, but it muddled his brain a bit. Or maybe that was the swelling.
Moira sighed and scratched one of her eyebrows. Either way, she had managed to restrain herself from accusing him of being a dick like the rest of her father’s creepy human-sacrificing cult friends for not telling her about magic. It wasn’t fair when he kept asking the same question three times because he couldn’t remember the answer she gave him two minutes ago.
But when he got out of surgery, it would be a different story. She was going to punch him in the fucking nose as soon as he no longer had brain swelling.
He was such a dick, showing more concern for the conditions in the refugee camps on the little TV screen than for his girlfriend, who sat curled up next to his hospital bed. She could hear his voice now, lecturing about how they were worse off and how people with means should be helping in any way they could. He seemed ready to march into the council and give them a piece of his mind as soon as he got his brain back online.
She folded up the nail clippers and sighed. Usually, she would scroll through her phone to stop her mind from wandering, but she was starting to find all the news and opinions about the end of the world tiring.
“Moira?”
Her head snapped up. There Derek was in all his glory, looking incredibly worse for the wear. He was out of the open-backed hospital gown and into a pair of mint-green scrubs. They looked absolutely ridiculous on him, bringing out the dark shadows under his eyes something awful. His eyes no longer had the tipsy, glazed vagueness in them, and his arm was no longer in a cast. But he still looked like hell, hair greasy and a scraggly beard in place of his usual stubble.
“Hey,” She rose to her feet, all annoyance washed away by pure relief.
“You ready to get out of here?” He asked. “They cleared me to go. Clean bill of health.”
She crossed her arms and looked him over, “You are planning on going out there like that?”
He glanced down at himself, “Yeah?”
“You haven’t been out in the world in over a week.” Moira scoffed, “You don’t know what it is like, but scrubs and little hospital slippers aren’t going to cut it. You know we will have to walk, right?”
“Not very far. I called in a favor from a friend. They are going to pick us up a few blocks away."
So they walked a few blocks with Derek in nothing but his scrubs and hospital slippers. Overhead, the sky was dusky, as if they were in southern California during the wildfire season. The traffic around the emergency room had not eased up, so Derek's ride had pulled over on a side street nearby.
Derek opened the door to the backseat for Moira, then slid in after her. In the drivers seat sat the man who'd driven the boat to come and get Moira, Caleb and Richard from the druid tree during the flood. He twisted in his seat and smiled back at them.
"Moira, this is Juan." Derek introduced, "Juan, Moira."
"We met briefly earlier," Moria said.
"Hello again." Juan gave her a little wave.
"You are going to have to tell me more about your encounter with the council members now that my brain isn't scrambled eggs." Derek said to Moira. But he did not seem inclined to hear about it now. His eyes were practically drooping closed. Moira knew how he felt. She'd slept for hours and hours in the hospital but still did not feel rested. She wondered when the feeling of being on edge that buzzed beneath her skin was going to go away. Probably never with the way things were going.
"So," Juan asked after they'd driven for a couple of minutes. "What kind of spell did the doctors put together to fix you?"
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Wait, I thought the council gave all the spells to the doctors." Moira hopped in before Derek could answer.
"The council gave them some of the basic spell work for healing, but nothing as complex as brain surgery." Juan glanced at her through the rearview mirror, then looked back at Derek. "So?"
Derek reached into the breast pocket of the mint green scrub and pulled out a piece of paper. As he unfolded it, Moira could see lines of his neat, blocky handwriting and precise little diagrams. She always teased him about having handwriting too neat to be a doctor.
“He just gave you the spell?” Moira blurted.
Derek grinned at her, “Sure.”
“But they weren’t giving out complicated spells to anybody.” She raised her fingers to make air quotes, “They said it was a ‘liability’ to give that kind of information to people without medical expertise.”
Derek just kept grinning at her, which was terrible because he knew how much she loved his stupid fucking grin and stupid fucking dimples. “Two things. One: I was about to start my residency at the university hospital since I’m finally on the tail end of med school. Two: Since the council was the one who provided the basics for them to construct the surgery rituals in the first place, there isn’t any point to them denying me the information.”
Moira harrumphed, then her eyes widened, “They know you are on the council? They know about the council? Does the whole world know about the council?!”
“Obviously not.” Juan glanced at them through the rearview mirror. “So, how did they fix you?”
“They had already done a craniectomy on me the morning after I was brought in, then put me in the coma.” Derek said, “So the surgery wasn’t all that complex. They were just reducing the final swelling and closing my skull back up. My arm caused more issues because trying to knit the comminuted fracture back together has a higher chance of backfiring. Thankfully, lots of the ER nurses have been dealing with broken bones, so they got one of the more experienced ones up, and he was able to work through the spell without a problem.”
Moira swallowed and stared at the arm in question. The skin looked perfectly smooth, his muscle, tendon, and bone straight and regular beneath it. You would never know that only an hour or so before, it had been crushed. Derek noticed her staring and flipped his hand over, offering it to her. She slid her fingers between his and squeezed.
“So how did they put the spells together then?” Juan asked.
Derek looked down at the paper in his hand. “For the swelling, they used a combination of water and aether to drain out the cerebrospinal fluid that had built up, and in order to close up my skull, they used aether to regrow the bone. That is also incredibly dangerous – trying to regrow bone. The nurse was telling me about how when it goes wrong, people end up with misshapen bones. Then their entire skeletons don’t fit together anymore, or the bones start poking out of their skin. A bunch of nurses have died from that.”
Derek’s fingers squeezed around Moira’s. She realized that she had been crushing them in a white-knuckled grip. She eased off a bit and cleared her throat, desperately trying to think of a topic that didn’t involve Derek’s cerebrospinal fluid.
“What is aether?” She asked.
“It’s the most basic magic." Juan turned the blinker on and eased them over into a turn lane while the car clicked rhythmically. “It’s kind of…” he hummed, “miscellaneous.”
“It has components of both life and death magic and a few other things," Derek explained further. “Healing magic is the best example.”
“There is a separate life magic that does not include healing magic?”
“Yes., Derek said. “Theoretically. I’ve read about it, but I don’t know anyone who practices it. Most people in the council stay in the realm of aether and elemental magic. Anything beyond that is complex and takes an incredible amount of experience to wield.”
“What kind of magic was the spell that my family kept?” Moira asked, trying to think back on the column carved with runes.
“Complicated.” Derek said, “I never saw it, but it had to be more of a ritual enchantment than a basic spell. I’m sure it wove together several types of magic. That is why it required human sacrifices because no one alive was powerful enough to keep the spell going without them.”
“You knew about the human sacrifices?” Moira accused. She watched Derek and Juan make eye contact in the rearview mirror. Her brows shot up. “What is that look for? What are you looking at each other like that for?”
“Don’t get all worked up.” Derek chuckled, setting the paper aside so he could rest his hand over where their fingers were threaded together. Moira tried to wiggle her fingers away, but he held firm, “I knew about them, yes. Did that mean I liked them? No. But what was the alternative? Just stop the spell? You’ve seen how well that is going. I doubt they will ever get an accurate death count, and millions of people are displaced. I’m certain it is only going to get worse. A few sacrifices each year to prevent that was not even a choice, it was a necessity.”
Moira pursed her lips. That logic was very sound. It was the same type of logic she had heard used over and over to justify all kinds of things as she grew up. In the back of her mind, though, she could hear Caleb’s voice lecturing about how the council could talk about noble intentions until they were blue in the face, but their real motivation was to keep all the power to themselves. Moira rolled her eyes and shook his voice away.
The thing about Derek was that he really and truly believed they had been protecting people. Even if the council had created the situation in the first place. It was as if they stacked precious china in a cabinet and slammed the door a little too hard so that it all fell forward against it. They couldn’t open that door again, or else all the china would come tumbling out and break. It was their ancestor’s fault, but here they were with broken china at their feet.
“You didn’t just fall out with your parents about our relationship, did you.” She accused, and Derek’s softened expression was all the answer she needed. She huffed, “So you went off to become a doctor so you could help people in some way. Like trying to make up for murdering people?”
“Moira,” Derek’s eyes curved up in amusement and his voice was low and coaxing as if trying to talk to an anxious horse. She felt righteous indignation well up in her chest at the tone and opened her mouth, ready to spit fire. But then Derek teased her. “When did you grow a moral compass?”
“When I was one of the people being murdered!” She burst out, finally ripping her hand away from his. She crossed her arms, then her legs, and then leaned away from him and stared out the car window. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Derek biting his lip and trying to control his expression like he was about to bust out laughing. God, she hated him. Up front Juan kept his eyes on the road, expression pleasantly neutral.
“Listen.” Derek said, tone serious now, “Nobody ever expected them to sacrifice you. The spellkeepers don’t do that. The legacy of the family line is too important for anyone to even consider it. Your aunt and uncle were way out of line.”
“A real sacrifice.” Moira grumbled, “That’s what they called it. Not some stranger, but someone who it was actually difficult to kill.”
“That’s bull,” Derek said immediately. “It was hardly a sacrifice to them, right? You told me they were doing it to benefit themselves.”
“That’s what Sean said,” Moira told him, lips twisting up at the thought of that dick. Why was she always surrounded by dicks? She found herself actually missing Jeremy a little bit. He was generally so stoic and not a dick. It was refreshing. But she was pissed off at him for taking off without a word, so she put him out of her mind. “But the sacrifices were always about that anyway, right? To get something out of them. It was always to the council’s benefit.”
"We're here." Juan finally interjected as they pulled into a small, sleek building with modern architecture. A garage door opened, and he pulled the car inside. “Let’s debate morality another time. It’s been a long night and day. I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.”