Chapter 2
For the record: Birth isn’t usually an emergency.
That’s just TV. TV is also always teaching a lesson to the woman who wants to “do everything the natural way.” She starts out with a playlist of soothing cello music, practicing her mantras, and ends up screaming, “Give me the fucking drugs!” as soon as the first contraction hits.
But I’ve attended plenty of births where the playlist stays on, and the mantras get chanted, and everything is (painful but) fine. This is not one of those births.
A lot of people are coming into the room, and I get swept back toward the door in a riptide.
I stand there, watching this sweet woman whose lentil soup I have eaten, her mouth contorting as she convulses.
The doctor is bent over her, and people are giving him space like he’s important.
I don’t recognize him from the back; I’m pretty sure I know all the OBs, definitely the head of labor and delivery, and she’s already here, but she’s standing aside for some reason.
You might ask if I’m punishing myself with all this childbirth stuff. Am I atoning?
Yes, I am.
A little on the nose: helping bring life into the world after taking other life out of it.
But it turns out this is also something I’m good at, something I would’ve been good at, I think, even without the guilt of my lethal past as a motivator. I care a lot about every single one of my clients. I really need Izzy to be okay.
The new doctor turns for a second, talking to someone next to him, and his eyes click on mine. He immediately looks away again.
But it’s too late.
Something has happened.
Not something little and explainable.
It’s more like that meteorite. The famous one that ended the dinosaurs. I have been hit with a giant, world-wrecking thing and gone instantly extinct. In my place stands the fossilized record of me, a monument to my own uselessness, because I have never seen anyone like this man.
He is—the word glorious is not an exaggeration—glorious.
Enthralling would work, too, if anyone uses that outside of descriptions of blue alien abs in erotic fiction.
He seems to glow. Is he emitting actual rays of light?
I squint. No, that’s just the glare from the setting sun hitting a few windshields in the parking lot outside.
Normal to tallish, maybe six feet? Let’s say six foot one.
Stocky build, meaty shoulders under the white coat, heavy-looking hands that seem deft, full of surprises.
A boyishness to his face, round glasses, warm eyes of indistinguishable and irrelevant color, curly milk-and-coffee brown hair.
An unmistakable look of kindness; it’s obvious that he stops to pet strangers’ dogs and sometimes crouches down to talk to little children.
Have I just, in the space of a second, pictured us having sex in at least four different positions? What is happening to me?
I can’t manage to drag my eyes off his face.
“We don’t need it,” one of the nurses is saying. “She’s stable.”
A few minutes later, Izzy looks at me with her mouth back in place, hair sick-wet. “Am I okay?” she asks. Antonio, her quiet husband, is with the baby in the NICU; he doesn’t even know this is happening.
“You’re okay.” I’m holding her hand, a little guiltily, in both of mine. “You’re okay.”
“I need to see Oscar.” Her rambunctious, fairy-faced three-year-old. And then, as though remembering what she’s here for: “I need to see the baby.”
“You will,” I say. “Very soon.”
He’s talking to the head of labor and delivery, his voice warm, midrange.
He hasn’t raised it this whole time, even in the middle of the chaos.
Even giving orders. I can already tell that I’ll go on to think about that—the soft-spoken in-commandness—a lot.
I will probably imagine his voice saying specific scandalous things.
Don’t look up, I tell myself very sternly. Stay focused. This isn’t about you.
I look up. He’s looking at me.
There is something distantly familiar about him.
He looks away, clears his throat. “I’ll be back around to check on you, Ms. Lopez,” he says to Izzy. “I’m Doctor Tav. We didn’t get to meet properly.”
My stomach lunges upward, eats my heart in a single gulp.
Tav.
Not a common last name, but one that is carved in brutal strokes into the flesh of my memory.
DR. JOEL TAV, says the embroidered name, floating in blithe navy cursive on an expanse of white coat. I can see it now. Adam told me once that his older brother was a doctor. He doesn’t really look like Adam. But just enough.
Izzy gives a weak nod, hardly noticing him.
“Do you have anything for me, Tempest?” she’s asking. That’s my name, unfortunately. (I don’t suffer entirely alone; Mom named her other daughter Chickadee.)
“I have some drops. They’ll help.” An herbal blend with pulsatilla that’s supposed to be calming. I feel him pass by me like a planet as I reach for my little bag. Gravity dimples in his direction. By the time I straighten, he’s gone. My heart is back, and it’s making a racket.
Adam never mentioned his brother’s first name. We didn’t know each other that well or that long. He didn’t say his brother lived here, either. Would he have said that? I don’t even pretend to myself, though, that this is somehow someone else.
“Why’d they bring that new doctor in?” I ask Kelly, my favorite nurse, when I can step out for a minute after Antonio arrives.
“It’s crazy,” she whispers. “He just consults here, he’s in private practice.
A pediatrician or something—can you believe that?
—but when he comes in they put him on some intense cases.
He never loses a patient. I’ve seen it a couple times now.
It’s like he has the magic touch.” She leans closer, spearminty, lots of eye makeup.
“And not bad-looking, right?” She winks.
I laugh and shrug, tremblingly nauseous, playing it extremely cool.
A doctor with a magic touch.
Who is Adam’s brother.
My brain, a cesspool of badly spelled conspiracy theories, is working furiously. There is something here, a reason. An explanation for why Adam didn’t die right after I slept with him. I’ve been wondering about it for three years now.
Three years of regaining my footing, of trying, yet again, to accept the blank of my loveless future.
Three years of stumbling under the weight of what I’ve done, dragged forward by the slenderest hope.
Sometimes I haven’t been able to think about anything else.
Sometimes I’ve practically chanted through my day: I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him!
I’m sorry; I don’t mean to be misleading here. Adam did die.
He died two years ago, when he walked into traffic on Harrison Street.
A full year after I slept with him. He stepped in front of a truck.
I overheard someone talking about it at the library.
“They need to make this town more disability accessible,” she said.
But I had a feeling then that I haven’t been able to shake since.
I had a feeling it was still, somehow, my fault.
* * *
I’m on the Discord server dpow badasses, which Grub started from our subreddit r/freaksofnatureforrealz, and which is the only place in the world I’ve ever gotten actual information about my curse.
Well, not mine, really. I haven’t come across any other succubi, at least not ones who are, you know, for realz.
But there are other things: dark powers, we call them.
Like in a low-budget movie. “Dpow,” we say, or “DP,” or sometimes “Dow.” And by we, I mean a small collection of internet weirdos, half of whom are probably lying or think this is all an elaborate role-playing game that may at any moment finally graduate to foam swords and wizardly robes.
Has anyone heard of a healing thing? I ask.
That’s not dp bro, comes the instant response from Nazgul-Farts27 (Grub) who is almost never offline. I should’ve just chatted him separately, but I want to cast a broad net.
I know but.
Yeah tho, he says. maybe got smthng on that.
One of your theories or something real?
What even is reality, he responds instantly.
I roll my eyes and wait. The truth is, it’s all theories.
As far as I can tell, Grub, me, and about ten others are the only people in the world with an actual dark power—an inexplicable negative (in my case, deadly) effect on other people.
Grub’s the one who figured out the definition of DPs, and he did it mostly in the middle of the night, strung out on caffeine, sugar, and misery.
Understandably—his power is terrible. The other Dows that we know of are, in Grub’s words, “kinda suck-ass.” By which he means they aren’t trying to be decent people, the way Grub and I are.
On the contrary, they’re leaning into the dark. Which is disappointing.
FT? he asks a second later and then video calls me. Grub is desperate. I’m his only friend; he’s starved for interaction.
“Hey, kid,” I say, picking up.
He’s wearing black eyeliner, and his long hair is even greasier and stringier than last time, which was yesterday.
There is a new pimple forming next to his nose.
“Hey, Lorelei,” he drawls. That’s his name for me—not Gilmore Girls, Marvel Comics.
Unlike the minor seductress character, who was obviously drawn by a man, I am not incredibly sexy.
You’d think I would be, right? Or maybe, like, at least a B cup?
No, that’s Dee. She’s the one people are like, “You should be a plus-size model” to. (Because they never remember you can just say “model.”)
“Tell me,” I say to Grub. “And don’t eat that.” He’s scooping Nutella out of a Costco-sized jar with a soup spoon, black-painted nails flashing. The nails and eyeliner come and go depending on how much of his sadness he feels like displaying. “When’s the last time you ate something green, Grub?”
“Jelly beans. Mom.” His wide-set eyes and elfish pointed chin make his smirk more mischievous than arrogant.
I sigh. “Come on, kid. Take care of yourself.”