Chapter Twenty-Two Mammon
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“I don’t understand.” Her unit manager stared at her in confusion. “You just got here. What do you mean you want to take a sabbatical?”
Brie took in a deep breath, repeating herself for the fourth time. “With everything that’s happened, I need to take some time away. A leave of absence.” The accusatory gaze of a white kitten hanging from a branch over the words Just Hang in There loomed at her from the poster on the opposite wall. She stared at a paperweight on his desk, unable to meet either of their eyes. “I can’t stay here. I wish I could.”
“You haven’t even finished your orientation yet.”
“I know.”
“Denise is going to be furious. And you’re going to Croatia ?” He sat back in his chair and frowned. “This is highly irregular, Ms. Weldon. This isn’t college. This is a competitive program at a prestigious hospital. You can’t just take a gap year.”
“I know.”
A golden glow emanated from Brie’s purse, one she was certain only she could see. As if on cue, the expression on her manager’s face started to change. He struggled for a moment before the lines on his forehead smoothed, and a blissful, vacant expression graced his features.
“Of course, you’ve been through a lot,” he said vacantly. “You should take some time off. Relax. Get your head straight. I’ll do the necessary paperwork. You are welcome back at any time. Have a lovely day, now.” He turned to his computer and started opening his files.
She slowly rose to her feet, darting doubtful glances his way. “So, is that it?”
“That’s it,” he murmured to her dreamily, inputting her information into his computer. With just a few taps to his keyboard, he placed her on leave. “Have a safe flight.”
She stared for a moment, then grabbed her purse and walked out of his office. It wasn’t until she was safely back in the hall, away from prying eyes, that she looked down into the bag. “That was you, right?”
Silence.
“Cameron, would you get out here, please? I don’t want my last memory of this place to be me walking the halls, talking to my purse like a maniac.”
In a brief golden flash, he was beside her. “Is that better?”
She nodded, then gestured back at the office. “Thank you. Thank you for that.”
“Of course.”
“I need to check on Kylie and leave a note for Rashida.”
He nodded in agreement, and they started pacing silently through the halls, pausing more times than Brie was fully aware of, letting her eyes drift wistfully over all those suspended dreams.
How long did I work just to get here?
“I’m going to miss this place,” she murmured, trailing her fingers along a desk. “I barely got to know it. I don’t even know why it’s called Daya.”
He threw her a peculiar look. “It means compassion.”
“Oh. That’s… that’s really nice.”
Her heart caught in her throat as she walked on.
He moved his hand as though to take hers but decided not to. “It’s a leave of absence, Brianna. Not a death sentence.”
She looked at him sadly, wondering if he genuinely believed that. “Of course.”
With that, every light in the hospital went out.
? ? ?
“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Are you okay?” Cameron asked in a panic-laced voice.
“I’m fine. Stop saying okay.” Brie hissed back in a whisper.
I am so effing far from okay.
They had both instinctively frozen, their backs pressed against the wall, his arm flung protectively across her chest. The lights were still out, casting the hall in an eerie glow from whatever laptops happened to be running on batteries. But that was the least of her problems.
“Um, Cam?”
“What is it?”
“You’re crushing me.”
His arm dropped immediately. “Sorry.”
They inched along the wall, closer to the ICU, then started walking again, their path lit by the flashlight on her phone as they waited for the backup generators to come on.
Both were determined to play it off as casual. Both were entirely incapable of doing so.
“This isn’t right. The power should’ve turned on by now. We have people on ventilators in here.” She shivered. “Something isn’t right.”
That’s when she ran into someone.
“Oh, excuse me,” she apologized, before realizing something was wrong. There had been no give. Their body hadn’t responded at all. She reached out a finger and touched them before shrinking back in alarm. “Cam?”
“What is it?”
“I’m hoping you can tell me,” she said, full of dread.
It was a nurse Brie had seen around the hospital during the past week. He was absolutely still, midstride, his weight already shifted over his front foot at an angle that would have been impossible to maintain if physics had been working properly. He wasn’t blinking, wasn’t breathing.
She circled him in terrified fascination, waving her hand in front of his face. There was no reaction.
Holy Freddy Mercury… we’re in trouble.
Cameron froze in a split second of shock, then nodded his head curtly. “Right,” he said shortly. “I need to get you out of here. Immediately. Now.”
She stared a second longer, then shook her head. “I have to check on Kylie first. They came for her before. For all we know, they might be coming for her again.”
His hands clenched in scarcely contained exasperation. “Brianna, I don’t know what more could possibly happen to convince you that we are far, far out of our depth here. Your safety is my top priority. We need to leave .”
“And the safety of that six-year-old child is my top priority,” she insisted, breaking into a sprint. “I can’t just leave her here. Not without making sure she’s okay.”
For the first time since opening its doors, the chaotic halls of Daya Memorial Hospital were quiet and still. Brie passed dozens of human statues on the way, coworkers she’d barely begun to know by name, frozen in time. Coffees halfway to their faces, orders half-typed into computers, eyes half-closed in a blink. One of them was in the process of trying to use the broken stapler from the pediatric nurses’ station. Her brow was creased in frustration as tiny metal flecks glittered in suspension around her hand.
Brie ran without stopping. She ran until the sudden sound of voices stopped her cold. The angel was beside her in an instant, cupping a hand over her mouth to stifle her instinctive scream.
Of course it’s you. Of course you’re the only ones not frozen.
Matthews and the blonde woman were standing in the atrium she’d stumbled upon just yesterday. She could see them reflected clearly in the window across the hall.
“My dear Jonathan, I thought we talked about this.”
Mammon, or Greed, as Cameron had called her, made a tsk-tsk sound eerily reminiscent of a snake, ticking her index finger back and forth in time with the click of her heels as she advanced on the doctor cowering by the foliage. He was clearly terrified. Every part of him was shaking in fear.
But at the same time, he seemed to have come to a decision. As the tip of her shadow reached him, he drew in a faltering breath and shook his head.
The strangely shaped briefcase levitated towards him through the air as the woman pouted in a mocking sulk. “Just this once, Jonathan. Just one little minute of your time. Only your time, I might add. I stopped everyone else’s.” She gestured around her in false benevolence. The lights flickered back on, illuminating the still-frozen people. “Now you’ll have no interference. No excuses.” Her eyes flashed with what Brie could swear were emerald-green sparks. “Why don’t you get on with it, Mister Matthews? The sooner you do, the sooner all your dreams can come true.”
She let her arms drop by her sides as she walked forward, and showers of golden coins streamed from her fingers. Fountains of incalculable wealth clinked and clanged to the floor, rolling every which way. Then she raised her arms, and the coins on the floor multiplied until there were piles of gold and treasure on either side of her path, crushing the plants beneath their weight, reflecting every ray of light.
“I’ll even kill her if you like. You only have to collect.”
Brie’s eyes widened in panic, and she struggled to get away. She might have even managed it if Cameron hadn’t tightened his grip upon her, silently begging her to be quiet and still.
Matthews was staring at the piles of gold on the floor, the sheen reflected in his eyes.
“Think of it,” Mammon purred, gliding towards him with a terrifying gracefulness. “You could acquire anything. Possess anything.” She laughed, and a shudder ran down Brie’s spine. “Everything you could possibly want on this godforsaken rock can be yours. I’ll take care of that meddlesome mortician. She’ll be dead the moment she walks in the door. Nobody will ever know what happened. All you have to do is stop all this useless moralizing and bring me what I want.”
Matthews slowly turned away from the riches to face her, tears streaming down his face. “It isn’t worth my soul.”
Mammon stopped her advance. The strange black suitcase fell to the ground with an unceremonious thump as her eyes narrowed. Behind her, the piles of golden coins transformed into a horde of vicious, jewel-toned crabs that writhed on the floor in giant heaps of dizzying motion before vanishing in a flurry of popping and ten thousand wisps of red smoke.
She tilted her head. “Your soul, you say?”
Matthews nodded, pale as a bone.
She let out a frustrated sigh and opened one of her palms. There was a sickening sound, like a watermelon being smashed by a sledgehammer. Matthews’ eyes widened. He gasped, clutched his chest, and dropped to his knees. There was a brief moment of silence before he fell forward. His face hit the floor with a hideous crunch.
Brie sucked in a silent breath. She didn’t understand what had happened. Not until her eyes traveled slowly back to the woman.
She was holding a still-beating human heart.
“What an inconvenient time to find out you had one of these.” The woman glanced uncaringly down at the prone figure of the fallen doctor, lifting the heart to her lips and taking an absentminded bite as if it were an apple.
Brie screamed soundlessly into Cameron’s hand as he started to pull her away, easing them from the wreckage and toward the opposite end of the hallway. She closed her eyes, chanting inside her head. The darkness can’t see me. The darkness can’t see me. She can’t see me. She can’t.
“Excuse me, dear.”
The voice came from directly behind them. Brie turned and screamed out loud. Greed had stuck her head through the wall as if it didn’t exist, and they were now eye to glittering green eye. She smiled at them as they scrambled backward, blood dripping down her chin, and stepped the rest of her body through the wall.
“I’m not sure who you’re trying to convince, little one.” Her heels clicked like a metronome as she advanced upon them. “But I see you. And it’s frightfully rude to run off before we’ve been properly introduced.”