Taking Angels (The Angel Crusades) Read online

  Lifting the mirror I looked at a stranger. Light colored fuzz covered my head, softening the appearance of the purple scar from the most recent surgery and deep blue eyes met my gaze. I stared for a long time as the room remained silent except for the steady breathing from the other occupants. My breathing, on the other hand, came in uneven rasps as my mind tried to wrap around all of this. The waterfall, the angels, my changed appearance; they must be connected, but how?

  “There are known cases of accidents where head trauma has altered the person’s eye color, although it is very rare. Britt doesn’t show any signs of head trauma. She doesn’t show any signs of trauma from going over the falls at all.” The doctor shrugged, clearly bewildered. He handed me my discharge papers, placed a hand on my shoulder, and gave me a comforting smile as I lowered the mirror and looked at him, also at a loss.

  “Good luck, Britt. I hope your good fortune continues.” He turned and walked away as my eyes followed his white lab coat out the door.

  We left the hospital, rushed back to Grand Rapids, packed up some things, and headed to the Rochester Mayo Clinic to see my specialists. The entire ride to Rochester, Mom kept peering back at me as if I would grow another head or something. The fact was I didn’t know for sure I wouldn’t. I couldn’t even rule that out for sure. Staring out the window, trying to ignore her, I thought about the encounter with the angels. Why did this happen to me? It felt as though someone had interceded in my life, giving me another chance. But why? What made me special?

  We reached the Mayo Clinic early the next the morning and they admitted me. I slipped into the too familiar hospital gown and climbed between the notquite-soft sterilized linens I’d vowed to avoid a mere twelve hours ago while floating in the cold lake.

  “Hey Britt.” A red-headed nurse greeted me as she entered the room.

  “Hey Sandy,” I sighed.

  “You missed us so much you had to visit early?” she teased.

  “Guess so.” I shrugged, not amused.

  “Little miss sunshine.” A large man with a long blonde pony-tail and a big grin on his face chimed in as he walked in.

  “Hi Roger.” I sat up, smiling.

  “The Doc says you need to give us some blood to check out.” He placed the kit complete with test tubes and vials sticking out of the compartments on the stand next to the bed.

  “You guys are like vampires,” I groaned, extending an arm.

  “The life of a lab tech,” he chuckled.

  Sandy hooked up the standard equipment and started an IV in the other arm as Roger drew some blood. None of it fazed me anymore and I sat looking at them in silence until they finished.

  “There you go.” Roger opened a Band-Aid to cover the fresh puncture mark. “Hopefully we won’t need anymore.”

  “I’ve heard that before. You’ll know where to find me if you do.”

  “Hey, where did it go?” Roger said, moving my arm and looking at it from different angles.

  “Where’d what go?” Sandy asked, walking over next to him.

  “The needle mark.” Roger motioned to my arm. “I can’t see it.”

  We stared at my arm as Roger lifted it to look closer, but none of us could see the mark.

  “That’s odd.” Sandy shrugged at Roger.

  Roger tossed the opened Band-Aid in the trash, got up, and walked out shaking his head.

  “Just give me a buzz if you need anything, alright?” Sandy said to me as Roger left.

  “Yeah,” I acknowledged, looking past her to my parents as they visited quietly. This all seemed routine, yet hope tingled in the back of my mind that it didn’t have to be, not anymore. Lifting my arm closer to my face, I studied the perfect skin. Drawing blood usually made me bleed a lot. This wasn’t normal. My breath caught in my throat as my eyes widened.

  When I was eight, I wiped out on my bike and broke my arm leaving a long scar where the bone punctured the skin. The scar was gone. Lifting my other arm, the scar from getting burned on a hot poker stick at the campfire was missing as well. Staring at Mom and Dad for a moment to assure they weren’t watching, I shifted in my bed and pulled the open back of the hospital gown around to look at my right side. Smooth skin replaced the four inch appendix scar.

  Did the angel’s touch do this? Lying back, I wondered what other changes might come. I pondered this until I fell asleep, ending the craziest day of my life…so far.

  I woke the next morning to see Doctor Morgan, my epidemiologist, smiling at me. My parents rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and straightened their clothes as they sat on the two small couches in the room; their beds last night.

  “Good Morning, Britt,” Doctor Morgan greeted me. “I understand you decided to take a water ride without the water park.”

  “I guess you could say that,” I said, embarrassed. “The blood work came back and the results are quite surprising.”

  Mom gasped and Doctor Morgan turned to her. “Nothing bad, just surprising,” he assured her and then looked back to me. “The preliminary tests show your cancer is gone.”

  My parent’s cries of joy filled the room as I stared at the wall. A tickle in the back of my mind kept me from feeling the happiness my parents felt. Something about the way the angels spoke of ‘touching’ me came back, giving me pause. Like something wasn’t right about what they’d done.

  “I’d like some other specialists to take a look and see if we can figure out what happened,” Doctor Morgan said.

  “What kind of specialists?” I asked.

  “Another epidemiologist and a neurosurgeon,” he said calmly.

  “Neurosurgeon?” Mom spoke up.

  “Doctor Kramer from Ely mentioned your eyes changed from brown to blue.” He leaned closer, verifying my eye color and leaned back nodding. “We have to make certain you didn’t sustain any sort of head trauma. We should have you out of here by the end of the week.”

  “A week?” I moaned.

  “We don’t want to miss anything,” he said pressing his lips tight together. “Let me examine you before we start the next round of tests.” He stepped over and began to run his hands along my arms, watching my reaction as he pressed in the joints, the muscles, and along the bones. “Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s take a look at your incision from your last surgery,” he said, as I leaned my head forward and he ran a hand through the new growth of fuzz. “When did this start coming back?”

  “After the accident,” I said, stumbling over the word, ‘accident.’

  “This is odd.” Doctor Morgan reached over, clicking on the exam light and pulling the extending arm over my head.

  “What?” I said.

  “What is?” Mom said, as she came over to stand next to the doctor.

  “Her scar is gone,” Doctor Morgan said.

  “No way.” I lifted my head only to have him push it back down again.

  “Oh my lord,” Mom gasped.

  Dad shuffled over and his feet joined Mom’s and Doctor Morgan’s in front of me.

  “I’ll be damned,” Dad sighed.

  “Really?” I asked, forcing my head up against the doctor’s hands until he let me look up.

  “No scar.” Mom nodded.

  “We all saw it at the hospital in Ely,” Dad murmured.

  “But it isn’t there now,” Doctor Morgan said.

  “Cool,” I grinned.

  “Yeah, cool, but strange. We need to get those tests going and the other specialists in here. We’ll have them in to see you right away.” He looked at me and then my parents. “Alright, talk to you later.” He nodded and walked out.

  Mom leaned over and gave me a hug. “I’m so happy,” she whispered.

  Dad looked at me, a blank expression. A slight smile curled his lips as he stared in a daze. This was much better than having them watch me die and me watching them watch me die. A slow smile spread across my face at the thought of having a normal life, for once.

  “Morning Britt.” A
woman broke in as she pushed a wheelchair into the room.

  “Morning Courtney.”

  “Ready to take a ride to the MRI?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not really,” Courtney joked as she took the IV tubing from the shunt in my arm and hung it over the monitor.

  I climbed out of bed and into the chair, glancing over at Mom and Dad. “Be back in a flash.”

  “Well, more than a flash, probably a couple of hours. Plenty of time to go to the cafeteria,” Courtney said.

  “See you later,” Dad said, standing and coming over to give me a kiss on the top of the head.

  “We’ll be here when you get back.” Mom joined Dad by my side and placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “No worries,” I said. “It’s not my first time around the block.”

  Courtney wheeled me out of the room and down the hall into an elevator. As the doors closed, she stepped around me to tap a button on the panel.

  “Waterfall?” she asked, turning to stare at me in disbelief.

  “What?”

  “You went over a waterfall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now I’ve heard it all.” She shook her head.

  Guess everyone had heard it by now. News travelled fast in these halls.

  I lay in the MRI for over an hour, trying to stay still, until Courtney wheeled me back to my room and my waiting parents. I climbed into bed and fell asleep, exhausted by the morning’s activities. It takes a lot of effort to stay still.

  I dreamt of the voices, the sensations surrounding me in my moment spent in heaven. They spoke uneasy, not certain about what they’d done. What had they done? I woke with a heavy feeling of uncertainty, but was determined to keep a positive attitude. Doctor Morgan sat visiting with my parents. When he saw me awake, he stood and came over to the bed and sat down on the edge.

  “The MRI was inconclusive,” he began. “We would like to do some injections and then run it again.”

  “Inconclusive?”

  “We couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary and that concerns us.”

  “So if there is nothing out of the ordinary, does that mean the tumor is gone?” I asked, already knowing in my heart it was.

  “We aren’t sure. A tumor like that doesn’t just go away. We need to discover what happened. We’ll run another MRI tomorrow and then do a CT the next day.”

  “What else?” I asked, reading his hesitancy.

  “We need to take some bone marrow from you and check that as well.”

  “No, not that, any of the other tests, but not bone marrow.”

  “Britt, I know it’s unpleasant…”

  “Unpleasant? Have you ever had it done to you?”

  Doctor Morgan shook his head.

  “Exactly. If you had, you’d know it’s a lot more than unpleasant. Next you’re going to tell me that I need a spinal tap too.” My jaw dropped at his blank expression.

  “Britt, we need to be certain the cancer hasn’t relocated. We have to check every possibility.”

  Tears filled my eyes as I looked to my parents. Their faces told me they weren’t going to be any help. I turned back to the doctor.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re hopeful there’ll be nothing to find.” He stood, gave a nod to my parents, and walked out.

  “This really sucks,” I said, rolling away from my parents and pulling the covers up to my neck.

  Lab techs came in two more times to draw blood, making it impossible to get to sleep until after dinner. The dreams of my angels came again. Only the good parts as the voices reassured me everything would be alright. The soothing, melodic way they spoke sent waves of comfort through me, giving me a fresh attitude before waking up to more tests.

  The next morning, true to his word, Doctor Morgan had them take me back to the MRI after injecting me with some sort of dye. I struggled to hold still as they searched, and searched, and searched.

  The CT scan was next and I didn’t get back to my room until just before dinner. Sliding into bed, completely exhausted, Mom handed me her cell phone. Staring at her questioningly, she motioned for me to talk.

  “Hello?”

  “Britt, is it true?” A familiar voice said.

  “Hey Trish,” I grinned into the phone. “So far, so good.”

  “That’s crazy,” a different person said.

  “Elisa?”

  “Hey Britt,” Elisa said.

  “Where is…”I began.

  “I’m here too,” a third voice spoke up. “Cassie,” I laughed.

  Cassie, Trish, and Elisa were my three best friends in the whole world. “The three amigos” I called them, well, Dad started calling them that first because they were inseparable. They always came around to lift my spirits after tough chemo bouts and kept me up to speed with the high school gossip.

  “Your Mom got us on a conference call and filled us in,” Trish said.

  “Your cancer is gone?” Cassie asked.

  “She’ll tell us if we let her talk,” Elisa moaned.

  “So far all the tests show no signs of cancer anymore,” I explained.

  “How many more tests do you have before you can come home?”

  “Only the two crappiest ones, bone marrow and spinal,” I sighed.

  “Just think about all the fun we’re going to have once you get back,” Elisa encouraged.

  “We miss you, girl,” Cassie added.

  “Hang in there, Britt, we love you,” Trish said.

  “I love you guys too. Thanks and see you soon. Bye.” Hitting ‘end’ on the phone, I handed it back to Mom as she stood with tears in her eyes.

  “What?”

  “I’m so happy you can share your life with friends like them,” Mom sniffled.

  “Me too, they’re the best.”

  Dad sat quietly in the corner, smiling. That was enough for me.

  A different dream came that night, replacing the happy ones. Blurry images at first, it gained clarity as it went. A woman screaming in terror ran from something unseen, unable to escape. Pain gripped me, threatening to tear the heart from my chest as her life was ripped from her.

  The guilt of being alive washed over me as I woke with a feeling of dread. The woman’s death felt so real it weighed heavily on me. The thought of seeing each morbid detail of her demise terrified me. Her last moments played out before my eyes; something not meant for my eyes, the feeling of intruding almost as strong as the horror of witnessing her final breaths. The strange odor of lilac permeated my senses. Gasping for air, I looked around the room for its origin, but the room was empty of any kind of flower. With a hand to my breast, my heart finally slowed enough that I wasn’t afraid it might pound from my chest. I slid back against the pillows and stared out the window at the pre-dawn blackness. How could a dream feel so real?

  Depression threatened to win when they wheeled me down to the bone marrow procedure. Lying as still as possible while they drilled a needle into my bone, I fought to keep the image of the dying woman from washing over me, consuming me. Pressing hard, I brought forth the images and voices of the angels. As they came into focus it gave me something happy and promising to concentrate on.

  Arriving back at my room, my strength drained from me, I slid into bed in a heap. It was late evening when I woke, having slept the entire day.

  “Welcome back,” Dad said, sitting off to one side in an overstuffed chair.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Nearly eight hours. You obviously needed it.”

  “Where’s Mom?” I looked around the room.

  “She went to get something to eat.”

  “You could have gone with her. I’m a big girl.”

  “You’ll always be my little girl, no matter how old you are.” Dad smiled as tears glistened in his eyes. “I hate sitting by and watching them hurt you.”

  “Doctor Morgan said I needed to do it.”

  “Knowing you need to do it doesn’t make it any easier, does it?�
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  “No, not really. Does it for you?” I asked.

  “Not in the least.” Dad shook his head. “What the hell happened up there, Britt?”

  The question caught me so off-guard that I gasped and held my breath as my mind raced to figure out how to answer him. Exhaling, I shrugged.

  “I don’t know. One minute I was going over the falls, and the next I was in an ambulance.” I couldn’t tell him the truth. Even Dad would think me certifiable if I started talking angels.

  “I’m so sorry I couldn’t get to you.” He choked up and the words came out in a weak rush.

  “I know, Dad. It isn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have insisted on going in the water so close to the falls. It’s my fault.”

  Our eyes met and in that split second, he reconciled his uncertainty about the truth of what happened. A spark of realization twinkled in his eyes and he knew. He knew I did it on purpose. His face lost all expression and he gave me a curt nod as he stood. Walking over, he bent down to kiss me on the forehead. He backed away just far enough for our eyes to meet again.

  “I will never, ever, stop loving you until the day I die. And I will do everything in my power to keep you safe.”

  “I love…” I began, but he interrupted me.

  “Don’t you ever, I mean ever, try something like that again. Do you hear me?” The tone of his voice and the intensity in eyes left no doubt how deeply he meant it. “Not on my watch.” He straightened and walked from the room as I gave an uncontrollable shiver. I’d never seen him like that before. It was the closest he had ever come to losing control with me. Note to self: never get him any closer.

  After eating a late dinner I fell asleep again, completely forgetting about the nightmare from the night before until the next nightmare had me.

  A man sat in his recliner watching the Twins when he came into focus. He dosed lightly and turned in my direction just as his eyes shot wide. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but only cries of pain came out. The pain in his eyes turned to distant a stare as his lungs heaved once more and then went still.

  I woke with a gasp, sitting up straight, looking around the small room. My parents slept on the two couches, undisturbed by my abrupt movement. Leaning back I felt the sweat, cold and wet against my back, had soaked the sheets and made me shiver. My nose crinkled at the residual smell of lilacs. Moving the bed to a sitting position, I searched the room for the lilacs but again, they weren’t there. I sat staring at the sun coming up through the window, another day of testing and another life taken with me as witness.