The Brightest Night (Origin 3)

“Got it,” I said.

“Perfect. Open it and you’re going to see that those needles are labeled. Grab me one labeled morphine,” she instructed. “Don’t worry. They’re capped. Put it on the buffet table behind you.”

Relieved to hear that, I pulled out the needle. The thing was massive. Turning, I went to set it down but got hung up in staring at the framed photos I hadn’t noticed until then. Pictures of Georgie and a silver-haired woman I guessed was the wife cluttered the surface. From young, skin unlined, to laugh lines and more, the pictures chronicled the decades they’d been together.

“Don’t mind the pictures, sweetheart. Doris will straighten up anything knocked over,” Georgie said.

Still, I carefully placed the capped needle beside a picture of them when they were in their twenties, perched on the tailgate of a pickup truck. And as I turned back around, my skin was still crawling with the odd, thick awareness.

“Viv,” Luc murmured, and my heart dropped. I knew that tone. It carried a different kind of softness, a heavy one.

“I know. I know,” she clipped. “Not giving up. Evie, there’s another needle in there, labeled epinephrine. Grab that and uncap it—carefully.”

That was another massive needle. I uncapped it, waiting for further instruction.

“What’s his pulse, Jeremy?” Viv asked.

“Viv,” Luc repeated.

Sweat dotted Jeremy’s brow. “It’s fast. Like, I don’t think I’m counting right.”

“What did you count?”

“It’s over three hundred,” he whispered.

“Shit,” muttered Eaton.

“Ventricular fibrillation,” Viv spat. “Eaton, get the blood pressure cuff. Check it.”

Eaton did just that, pumping up the manual cuff, cursing as he watched the little red needle. He said a number, one that sounded entirely too low.

The white glow receded from Luc’s blood-soaked hands. “Viv.”

“I know!” she shouted, shoving white gauze into one of the wounds. “Evie, hand the epinephrine to Eaton. He knows what to do with it.”

Eaton took it and then asked for the cap. Handing it over, I watched him place it back on the needle. Georgie was shaking his head.

“What are you doing?” Viv demanded, a lock of hair falling across her face. “I need you to be ready to use it when his heart stops.”

“You know we need to shock him, Viv. We don’t have that here,” Eaton replied. “No point in wasting this when we could surely use it later.”

I folded my arms over my waist.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t try.”

“That shot is just going to cause spontaneous circulation. You know that,” Luc said quietly. “It’s not going to do anything else.”

“No. We can still try.” Viv’s eyes flew to his just as blood soaked through the bandages. “We need to try to save his life—”

“We have been, but Georgie is breathing for him. There is no way we can replace that amount of blood,” Eaton argued. “His heart is about to stop, and even if we get ‘hit the lottery’ kind of luck and we manage to restart it, we can’t keep doing that.”

“Yes, we can,” the doctor argued. “Luc can keep healing the—”

“I can’t.”

Those two words silenced everyone in the room. All eyes turned to him.

“I can keep stitching up the tears and eventually they’ll stop ripping open, but there isn’t anything in there,” Luc explained, wiping his forearm along his brow. “There’s massive damage in his brain. They look like lesions.”

“Lesions?” Viv whispered, and when Luc nodded, she returned to packing the wounds with more bandages. “It could be a watershed stroke. Spencer is young. He—”

“Let him go, sweetheart.” Georgie had stopped squeezing the bag and placed his hand on Viv’s shoulder. “You’ve done all that you can. We all know that. Spencer knows that. Time to let God do the rest.”

Jeremy’s eyes closed, and slowly, he lifted his fingers off the young man’s wrist as Viv looked up to the older man. “He shouldn’t die like this,” she whispered.

“Ain’t nobody out there that should die like this.” Georgie squeezed her shoulder.

Evie? Come?

Quietly, I stepped back and then joined Luc. I followed him out of the room and to the kitchen, where he walked up to an old, scratched farmhouse sink. There was a pitcher of water there, and I grabbed the bottle of hand wash, pumping the lemony-scented foam into his hands. Soapy red splattered the basin, quickly circling the drain.

I took a heavy breath. “You did everything you could.”

“I know.” He continued to rub his hands together. “There are some injuries even I can’t heal. He was dead before his body even hit that table in there.”

“Did you…” Hairs all over my body began to rise. My gaze left Luc’s profile and zeroed in on the doorway. “Did you know him? Spencer?”

“Just in passing.” He turned off the water, and I felt his gaze on me. “You okay?”

The humming in my chest grew stronger. “Do you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

A scream rang out from the dining room. “He’s dead? Oh my God! He’s dead.”