Chapter Seven • Dropped • Damien
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I’m walking back to the couch when Binx lets out a shaky sentence that makes my blood run cold.
“Lillith? What’s wrong?”
I hurry around the corner just as Lillith’s head hits the armrest of the couch with an ominous thud. Binx is shaking her, but her body is rigid and bowing off the sofa. Her slate irises flicker behind fluttering eyelids as she clenches her jaw with what looks like tooth-cracking force.
A seizure. Grand mal, I think, judging by the way her arms lock at an odd angle over her arching from
“Hey, Binx, move for me, alright?” I say calmly, sliding into an old role that feels easy as breathing.
“What’s happening to her?” he asks, terrified.
“Move out of the way for me,” I repeat, and he blinks once before he does.
I kneel next to the couch and grab onto Lillith’s shoulder while supporting the bend of her neck with my other hand.
I firmly but carefully roll her onto her side.
It takes most of my strength despite how tiny she is.
It’s hard to move a body when every muscle is fully contracted.
A bit of spittle dribbles out onto the palm of my hand as she wheezes in a deep breath through her nose that winds up sounding more like a snort. It’s loud enough to pull Naomi’s attention.
“Oh my god,” she says when she appears from behind the couch. “I’ll call 911.”
“No, it’s alright, I’m a paramedic,” I say.
“I thought you were a drummer,” Binx croaks.
“Well, yeah. I am. But my day job before going full-time was paramedic,” I say watching as Lillith’s eyes close and the tension in her body loosens. “There we go, it’s coming to an end now.”
I brush my fingers through her hair. She’s drenched in sweat, and her complexion has drained of color, but her pulse seems steady and her breathing comes and goes at a soft and regular pace. “Hey, Naomi, can you get me a rag and some cool water?”
“Of course,” she says, jogging over to the coffee bar. Lillith’s eyes move under her hooded eyelids right before she blinks rapidly. She’s coming out of it, but she’s struggling. Disoriented.
As soon as Naomi places the water and rag next to me, I wet it and start drawing cool paths across her brow. I watch as her pupils flicker, then contract, homing in on my face as her consciousness fully returns.
“You’re alright, little bird,” I say. “You had a seizure. You’re safe. You’re alright.”
It’s a bit of a blur as the rest of things unfold, but before long, Lillith is asleep on the couch and I’m ordering a rideshare with the destination set as her shop-slash-apartment.
I sit and talk with Binx and Naomi while we wait for it to arrive.
I assure them all that Lillith is probably just exhausted, that it’s normal for someone to need plenty of sleep after a seizure of that magnitude, and that if she’s got a history of epilepsy and vehemently refused an ambulance, that she’s safe to go home.
When the rideshare arrives, I lift Lillith up into my arms while Naomi carefully places the drawing between two of the books I got for Lillith to keep it safe.
It’s easy enough to get Lillith buckled into the back seat of the van that arrives to pick us up. I pull her against me after I slide in after her, cradling her head on my lap.
“Hey, is she alright?” The driver asks. He’s a young guy, probably nineteen. I respect that he’s worried about her, for all he knows I’m just some asshole who roofied Lillith and is taking her wherever I want.
“She’s alright,” I say. “She just had a seizure and is sleeping off the exhaustion from it.”
“Shouldn’t we take her to the hospital?” he asks.
“Nah, she didn’t want to go,” I tell him. “You want me to wake her up so she can corroborate, though?”
Naomi runs outside with her books in a bag. I meant to turn back to grab them myself, but I got distracted by getting her into the car. When she hands me the bag through the window after I roll it down, she says. “Call me tomorrow if you can. Let me know how she’s doing?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I will.” It seems like it’s enough for the young guy to be certain I’m not drugging and kidnapping someone. He pulls away without answering my question about waking Lillith, which is answer enough, I guess.
It’s only about a twenty minute ride before we get to the shop. The driver, who I learn is named Luke by looking at the app, plays some lo-fi over the speakers at a soft volume, taking a break here and there to sip a red bull. He’s patient when we pull up to Lillith’s home.
It’s a cool-looking place on the outside, with a hand-painted sign and black and white striped awnings. The font on the sign is bold with vintage swirls and a painting of an albino nightingale with crimson eyes perched on one of the letters.
I brush my fingers through her hair with a little bit of gentle force. “Lillith, sweetheart, can you wake up for me?”
Her long lashes flutter and she opens her eyes, they’re hooded as she looks at me.
“Damien,” she says, sounding tired and relieved in equal measure.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I say. “We’re at your shop. You said your apartment is here too, right?”
She nods and reaches into her top to produce a black lacquered key out of her bra. I snort a little laugh and she gives me a tired smile.
“Didn’t want to carry a purse—thought a fanny pack would look dumb.”
“I’ll help with the bags you guys have,” Luke says as he exits the car and comes to grab them.
“A fanny pack would be fucking adorable,” I say as Luke carries the bags over to the door. “Can I carry you up the stairs?” I ask her.
She looks like she thinks about it for a moment before she nods. “Yeah, thank you.”
I lift her in a princess carry. She blinks blearily, wrapping her little arms around the back of my neck. “I’m sorry if I’m heavy.”
“You aren’t,” I say, smiling down at her.
The street her shop and home sits on is silent except for the distant crashing of waves from the ocean. It’s dark, but I think I can see the pale light of dawn starting to color the edge of the horizon.
“Can I uh...leave this here?” Luke asks awkwardly.
“Yeah, no worries,” I say. “I’ll grab it later. Thanks for the ride, man.”
“Yeah,” he says before leaving with much more ceremony than that.
The neighborhood is nice. Clean in the strange way everything else is clean in Del Lune.
I swear this place is like a bizarrely idyllic pocket of the world.
I wonder if Lillith has ever left the insular calm of this little town.
These places have a way of putting you in a spell.
An invisible bell jar that keeps you comfortable without even realizing you’re trapped.
We reach the door of her shop, and she leans down to unlock the single deadbolt. A bell rings, announcing our arrival to its empty interior as I push the door open with my foot. It’s dark except for some twinkle lights that frame an open doorway that leads to a set of narrow stairs.
“That way?” I ask. She nods.
I take her up the stairs and she uses the same key to unlock the door to her apartment.
It’s dim inside of her apartment, too, but at least somewhat warmly lit by salt lamps and yellow-tinged lightbulbs behind vintage lampshades.
It’s a cozy place. Not too warm, not too cool.
A salty breeze blows in through a cracked window in the kitchen that holds a distant view of the white capped Pacific Ocean.
“Bed or couch?” I ask her.
She seems to hesitate, and when I look down at her she’s flushing pink. I can tell even in the dark.
“What’s wrong? You getting another aura?”
“You know a lot about seizures,” she says.
“Well—occupational hazard I guess.”
“What do drummers need to know about seizures?” she asks me.
“I told you, we only just got to quit our day jobs,” I say with a chuckle. “My day job was riding around in ambulances all day. I was a paramedic.”
“Mnn—hot tattooed paramedic? Where have you been all my life?”
I laugh. “You are very good at deflection, I see,” I say.
She sighs and lets her head loll against my shoulder. Her hand goes up to her neck where her fingers search for something. Then her face goes pallid again and she drops the hand back to her lap.
Something in her expression looks so...dismal. When I’d met her on the street, she had been so charming and bubbly. I knew she probably isn’t feeling great because of the seizure, but I wonder if something happened to her during the show.
“Bed,” she finally says, looking like a sad kitten.
She points one of her sharp fingernails to a door.
It’s cracked open and the wood is carved with words that are too hard to read in the dim light of her apartment.
The inside of her room is just as charming as the rest of her apartment.
Her bed is set up in the corner of the room beneath the gauzy curtains of one of those ceiling-mounted bed canopies.
More twinkle lights glimmer in a panel of strings behind the bed.
She has a number of floating shelves that house mounted skulls.
I can’t tell what all of them are but I recognize that one is of a cat and then maybe some kind of canine, like a fox or a coyote.
On her nightstand sits a stack of books with surprising titles like The Qabalistic Tarot and The Golden Dawn along with a notebook that looks as if it’s had pages added to it with how it sits with its hard cover distended and a ribbon begging for mercy around it.
I smile at the Portent posters she has on her walls—three of them and all framed like they’re precious. She even has a couple of our vinyls displayed on her walls.
I lay her down on her bed, which more resembles a nest of pillows and some cute plague doctor plushes, Kuromi squishies and Bat-shaped pillows. When I release her, she keeps her hands locked behind my neck, keeping me in place.
“I’m really sorry. I really did want to kiss more,” she whispers, her expression painfully tragic. “I wanted to do other things too.”