Jacqueline put a spoon to her father's lips, the garlic almost overwhelming the bitter scent of the thick minced leaves. She had pita and roasted chicken on a paper plate beside her, but she did not need to ask if he could tolerate these. They would not kill him, but they would not help his comfort.
Jacqueline fed him this holy meal -- vacant of solid belief despite sitting beside the dying god, she knew sacredness in a way she never had in church pews. Mica's hand in the ritual had eased now that food was present, as though it could be forgotten by the presence of grape leaves and falafel. No one told Jacqueline not to offer spoon after spoon on her father's bloodless lips, and no one -- not even Stacy -- moved to feed her father instead.
Jaqueline could recall no intimacy with her father before. He had left so early in her life that anything like this closeness was impossible -- she could not envision he ever spoon-fed her mashed bananas or put a bottle in her mouth. He could have shown her neutered affection -- she did not believe he had -- but it would not be intimacy. For that, one needed the conscious ability to choose it, to feel it. When stuck in concrete operational thinking, she could only handle vague yet powerful emotions -- attachment and safety, mostly. He allowed neither.
It may have been something genetic that moved her hand to spoon Mulukhiyah. Her father was animate now, conscious but laconic. Jacqueline did not care to estimate whether he was still high from the morphine or so near the cusp of dying he had no energy to waste.
He slurped soup, leaving most of the bulk on the spoon, and drink water so slowly it bordered on evaporation. If Jacqueline's father were grateful, he gave no indication. Jacqueline could not be bothered by this. She was not caring for him now in hopes he would say or do anything to make her feel appreciated and even acknowledged.
The others did not speak. Wick remained placid in the silence, heavy though it hung, ruminating over his light meal. He watched Jacqueline's ministrations and offered no commentary. She was doing what she did, neither good nor bad, to him as absent of intention as a flower growing toward the light.
Her father coughed a little up, and she gave him space for the decency of recovery.
Stacy looked both shocked and mortified. Anubis's daughter saw more cause for the former, though the action of the nurse's breast in her father's mouth should more objectively deserve the latter. Jacqueline had not forgotten the overwhelming holiness of the act and trusted she would not for a long time.
Mica stared into her baba ghanoush as though she might divine something. For all Jacqueline knew of her, the steward could do this, but it was more the absent gaze of someone either lost in thought or so hungover that they feared the slightest movement would shatter them.
Having heard the wet exhalation dislodging the food that had gagged him, Jacqueline turned from her companions to try another spoonful.
"I'm afraid," rasped her father, avoiding her spoon, "of dying alone."
"I'm here," Jacqueline answered, though she could not discount Stacy's presence, who was, for all in this house, the best prepared for his death. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Until I die."
"Yes," she said, though the reply confused her. Why would she remain once her father had passed? How could her presence matter to him then? "We don't have to talk about that."
He offered a low grunt, almost a growl, in the back of his throat. It sounded disappointed, as though he confirmed they didn't have to, but the time was short for them to talk about anything. The topic wasn't one her pursed lips could allow her to avoid.
She fed him until his eyes closed. His chest persisted in a mostly regular ebb and flow. He had not died on her yet and would not, she assured herself, with dark green soup on his lips. She brushed a paper napkin against these to let him regain a little dignity. Let no one go to their end untidy.
Jacqueline retreated as far as she could from her dying father and incidentally away from her companions.
Stacy did not hesitate to bring a plate of food, a bit of everything in triangle portions like an edible clock, for Jacqueline had made no effort to pick any of the feast for herself. She hadn't asked for the kindness and couldn't claim she wanted most of it, but she accepted the plate and dipped a pita corner into something it could bear.
"He isn't your mother," said the nurse after watching Jacqueline go for a piece of pita.
Jacqueline took her time chewing, watching the lines of Stacy's face stretch in concern or prepare for the next words she would issue. Jacqueline cycled through the responses that must be expected from her by this near stranger but came up with nothing Stacy deserved. "I am aware" was where Jacqueline settled, and she felt it sufficed.
Stacy crouched on the balls of her feet, resting some weight against the chair leg and some on Jacqueline's thigh. "Death makes us all narcissists. You can only see it through the lens of what you know to expect, through the one that marked you most. He is dying. Soon. Within the hour, I'd guess. You can do something about that, but it can't have to do with your mom."
Jacqueline looked down at this woman who had seemed a part of something godly so recently before she had the audacity to bring up her mother. Stacy was just a woman, nothing and no one special, brought into this in innocence and professional compassion. Jacqueline reminded herself that Stacy took on a burden that she had borne once, exponentially more heavily when her mother died. She ought to be grateful to this nurse who had tended to her father for more than this evening. At the moment, she was not. At the moment, Jacqueline had the childish desire to shove Stacy away, to call her something cutting, but she did not.
"Let me eat."
Stacy returned to the table to finish her meal without bothering Jacqueline further. Surely, she dealt with worse insults from the family of her patients, unable to otherwise process their emotions.
Mica glanced over to what had happened, what she had overheard, but focused back on her food before her peeking could draw more of Jacqueline's attention. The steward said something to Wick. Jacqueline could not understand the words, but the tone was the song of someone who tried and failed to engage another in idle conversation to cut the awkwardness surrounding them. It was the sound of "mommy and daddy are fighting," the one that followed a slammed door at a party.
Jacqueline knew that this was not her mother's death. It was nothing like that. For one, had it been, her father would already be drugged to death. It wasn't a pretty thought, but it was more honest for that. She could not suffer the prolonged pain of someone she loved, but she did not love the man in the bed.
Jacqueline had intended to continue tending to her father, but the purity of the act was tainted now. Not by what Stacy had said. Beneath her irritation, Jacqueline could grant that the nurse had some right to voice this concern, hoping it would be better than leaving it unsaid. Jacqueline had lost the thread of what she had been doing at her father's bedside. She could recall the act -- the weight of the laden spoon in her hand, the scent of the soup mingling with that of her father's body shutting down -- but no longer her meaning behind it. Her father did not need food or drink. It would not nourish him and would not accomplish its path through his body. What she gave him now would exit his body in mortuary tubes.
Mica tried speaking again, this time to entice Stacy, but the nurse had no taste for it.
Soon, the excuse of food was exhausted, though there would be leftovers to spare.
A pall fell, waiting for what must come next, though Jacqueline had no idea what this might be. Wick remained impassive despite Mica's darting eyes and Stacy's involuntary sighs. Jacqueline tried to mimic each without meaning but settled on mirroring Wick. She could not fathom the emotion required of her, so she watched and waited in patience.
Stacy's spine straightened. It was a small gesture, like realizing one's posture had turned to a slouch, but Jacqueline sensed the meaning. As far as Jacqueline could know, of all of them, Stacy best knew the feather touch of coming death on an instinctual level.
Jacqueline sat beside the bed again, confused for a moment to find a plate and cup there. Who would have put these so near her father? She handed these to Mica. Stacy assumed a role across the bed, her hands moving from wrist to throat to arm to machine in balletic choreography.
Her father no longer breathed properly but took only delicate sips of air.
This was not her mother's death. It was like watching a mortally wounded animal, its blood all but drained, about to lose its grasp.
Jacqueline took his emaciated, knotted fingers in hers. Her father did not squeeze or even acknowledge it, retreating deeper into a place beyond his body. His hand was cold -- not cool -- and dry, as though life had already fled.
She leaned close to his mouth, expecting that he would say something now, give her the answer for which she had only now realized she was expecting. No. All he had was this automatic and weakening breathing.
She put her lips to his ear, wanting to offer her own words of comfort or absolution, but that had been the point of the ritual. She had nothing to say. She did not forgive him because he was not something that would know what to do with her forgiveness.
The monitors' sounds grew erratic and insistent. Stacy stepped back to turn them off, one by one, with no hurry. Jacqueline appreciated the consideration. These final moments deserved respectful quiet. The monitors could tell her nothing that was not evident.
She looked with gratitude at the nurse, who shook her head, her expression pleading apology.
"No," said Jacqueline. A sound like laughter welled in her. "He can't have-- are you fucking joking?" She rose, pushing his limp hand away. "I'm sorry, what? No. After all this? This whole day?"
Jacqueline felt the hot tears blossom from her eyes, but these were of frustration, not mourning. Against her chest, she felt a slight, burning itch that scratching didn't relieve. It vanished in an instant.
"I don't accept this." She thumped his chest, not as though she meant this to restart his failed heart, but reprimand him for dying so slowly, then all at once.
Mica approached Jacqueline from behind, gliding her hands up Jacqueline's biceps until they rested on her shoulders. The steward said nothing, no comfort or attempt to speak sense to a disappointing death.
Jacqueline tried with limited success to sniff back her tears. "How fucking dare he."
Mica gave a weak shrug. When Jacqueline pushed fractionally back into the steward's hands, Mica progressed to a full hug from behind, resting her head against Jacqueline's shoulder. "Shit's fucked," she whispered with sobriety.
"Shit's fucked," Jacqueline echoed, squeezing the steward's arms, hugging herself by proxy.
Wick stood behind them, saying nothing, giving no expression that suggested he wished to.
Stacy waited at the end of the bed, watching the solemn company. Though Jacqueline could barely name the emotions roiling in her belly, this was Stacy's realm as much as the ritual had been Mica's. Jacqueline would do nothing to interfere.
"Go into the other room," said the nurse gently.
"But--" Jacqueline stopped, but the argument had already died in her.
She didn't need to be guided, dropping onto the daybed once the living room was at her back. With difficulty through her frustration, she raised her head to say something to Mica and Wick, but only the former remained.
"It was so quiet," she told Mica, but this was beyond inadequate to convey what she meant.
"Your mother's wasn't?"
Jacqueline pulled at a thread on the hem of her shirt, this tiny irritant that became the whole focus of her universe. "Objectively, yeah. Quieter, even. No machines. But it was so loud in my head." Even confessing this, a ghost of it passed through her. "She took pills." No, that wasn't honest enough. "I gave her pills. I could almost tell how many minutes it would take before she would fade from her body, how long I would be watching it happen. Every second ticked like a door slamming."
Mica sat beside her. "The first person I saw die was the steward before me. It was brutal and confusing. He screamed like nothing I'd ever heard." Her voice drained of its vitality. "Maybe like a dying deer, that's the closest, but it doesn't do it justice. Then it cut off all at once—full volume, then nothing. I couldn't trust it, the quiet. I sat there frozen for -- I don't know -- a few minutes, I guess, but they were shrieking minutes with this empty body I expected to jump up at me and try to kill me. It reeked. He was terrified to die like that and--" She seemed to think better of explaining the source of the smell or its reason. "Not like your seconds ticking. He was killed by then, by what he did. A stranger forced me into witnessing his death, making me his murderer. Pushing it on me so I have to-- well, you know."
"You've seen other people die since?"
Mica frowned, but it was tangential to Jacqueline's question. "It is okay if we don't talk about that?"
Jacqueline squeezed the steward's hand, answer enough.
"You wanted it loud," said Mica.
"I assumed it would be. The whole weird day was this build-up, this necessity to get me here. We did a ritual!" Jacqueline paused a moment, finding her hand still in the steward's. Mica had done plenty of rituals and, despite her initial excitement, maybe this was only one more under her belt. For Jacqueline, this journey changed how she conceived of the world and her place within it. For Mica, this might be a typical Saturday. "Am I wrong to have expected some epic moment?"
"No, not wrong. It is the way of these things, witchcraft and the daemons. The supernatural keeps a low profile even when it shouldn't."
Jacqueline slipped her hand free. "Not the magic. That's not the moment I wanted."
Mica's frown deepened, but she could only say, "Yeah." Unless Mica had lost her parents -- and Jacqueline had no reason to know anything the steward had not offered -- she didn't see how Mica could understand this flavor of angst. Jacqueline would not say this. She didn't feel entitled to jagged-edged selfishness as the catalyst to the death of a god she never knew.
The air in the house had grown stale, as though the death from the other room sought to sap the life from Jacqueline, so hungry was it.
"I need to get out of here," Jacqueline explained but did not invite the steward's company.
She got no further than the porch steps. Men -- or things mainly in the shape of men, but gender was far beneath the point -- surrounded the home. Some thirty stood fixed to the spot, each in a dark suit and crisp white shirt. (Jacqueline knew on some unspoken level that they did not wear these garments but that her brain forced itself to process it this way.) Their posture was the unbothered contemplation Jacqueline might have at an art museum. She could point at nothing about them that screamed that they were a threat beyond their numbers, but she had never felt surer she was threatened.
The steward came behind Jacqueline, retaking her hand. Mica squeezed her fingers as a child might be assured of comfort. Mica did not pull Jacqueline to the safety of the house, Jacqueline knew, because it was no safer than the street. If the agents wanted to be inside, Jacqueline could not stop that.
"Is there anything you can do? Magic?" she asked Mica, but she knew the answer.
"They are better at it and are more."
A girl on a pink bicycle barreled down the street full of agents. Jacqueline screamed warning without thinking, realizing only once her yell shattered the silence of how still the world had become in the presence of the agents.
No more than thirteen years old, the cyclist had earphones in and could not hear Jacqueline. She had no time to intercept the girl and did not know what courage would have let her, nor what would happen then.
The child weaved through the agents in her path, neither acknowledging the other.
Jacqueline followed Mica back into the house. She thought, confronted by what might be mortal danger outside the door, the shroud of the death in the living room would be lifted or at least less. It hung heavily, so rich she could feel it on the roof of her mouth like the film of insomnia.
Jacqueline sank to the daybed, too tired to be this exhausted.
"What do they want?"
"Probably you," said Mica, laughing once with regret.
"They should have no trouble with that. Do they want to kill me or eat me or what?"
Mica plopped next to her, laying her head on Jacqueline's shoulder. "Wouldn't that be nice, such straightforward motives, something so unambiguous morally? They don't work like that. They know your father died, I'm sure."
"Can we kill them?"
Mica lifted her head. "You want to kill them?"
"No," she said. "I want to know that they are killable."
"In no useful way. Individuals can be sniped, but it harms them as much as squashing an ant hurts the nest." She lay her head back. "They won't like it, though, the rest of them. And you'd have to know how to kill that they were before and do it much better. Not every daemon has, like, a glowing weak spot you can hit with an arrow."
"So, they want me to--?"
"To accept," said Wick, striding into the room, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. "They are creatures of amoral balance. A god -- or avatar thereof -- has died. They need someone else in that slot."
Jacqueline could not begin to contain her rage at this pronouncement. "How many daemons died from the flu? Did the agents stop that? Did they replace who was lost?"
"Uncountable many died," Wick said as though this were a neutral statistic.
"And they couldn't care then. They weren't stopping it or interceding or--" the anger peaked, thinking this "--or filling fucking slots then, right?"
"I do not know."
"So then why would one fewer supernatural entity matter to them? Do they care who he was?"
"I do not know that either," said Wick, unaffected by how beyond distraught Jacqueline became.
"Then what the fuck do you know?"
Wick inhaled slowly before answering, his lips turning down barely a centimeter, but it was the most emotion he had seemed to have since she had met him. "An agent is in the other room, helping Stacy prepare your father's body. They asked me to let you know they wish to have a conversation."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.