Coven of Mercy by Deborah Cooke Read Free Book Online

I hate the month of March. It’s an indecisive month, hovering on the cusp between winter and spring. Indecision drives me wild.
    I like clear-cut strategies, battles that are victories or failures. Nothing in between.
    March hovers, indecisive whether it should herald warm and sunny spring, or more winter – cold and overcast, the skies thick with falling snow. It ends up in that mucky zone, somewhere in between. Freezing rain and relentless grey, dampness and dull days, are followed by teasing intervals of sunshine. It’s unreliable, untrustworthy, despicable.
    Give me black or white. Give me winter or spring. Give me February or April. You can keep March.
    My mother died in March; maybe that’s part of it. Diagnosed early in the month, gone by the end of it, hers was a chaotic and whirlwind departure, a roller-coaster ride of triumphs and setbacks. That journey to death – the one no one wanted to take, the one that changed everything forever – is echoed for me every year in the weather.
    March makes me restless and impatient, sharp and irritable.
    That year was no different.
    My hospital was a research hospital. That gave me the option of working in the labs, researching instead of practising. There are no mucky grey zones in the labs – a new drug is effective or it isn’t – and that polarity always worked for me.
    I had a bit of a reputation on the wards, where I would be called in as a specialist on the tough cases. ‘Icicle’ Taylor cut to the chase, took risks, won more than she lost. Each case, for me, was an array of statistics, a flotilla of blood test results, and I chose the armaments with which I would engage based upon experience and the sum of results to date. I never wanted to know the patient – that was just extraneous detail. I never wanted to familiarize myself with the territory in dispute.
    I just wanted to win.
    But that March, one patient wasn’t having any of that. Mrs Curtis was in her forties and had a wry smile. She refused to let me slide in and out of her life without making a connection. She continued to insist that I call her by her first name, for example, even though I never did. She always wanted a conversation when I slipped in to check her charts or progress. She introduced me to her family and friends. There are many points of contact in an aggressive routine of chemotherapy and radiation, and Mrs Curtis put every one to work in her effort to charm me.
    In a way, she waged her own campaign against my clinical detachment while I fought the disease that had invaded her body.
    She had one advantage she never realized and it was the one that made the difference – she looked like my mother. She was taller and more buxom, but that glint in her eye, that ability to see right through my carefully composed lines to what I really meant, was my mother back from the grave. It caught at my heart, ripped a hole in my composure, and exposed a small vulnerability.
    So, I was even more determined than usual to ensure that Mrs Curtis was a triumph. My mother, you see, had lost her battle right before my eyes. Mrs Curtis was my chance to prove that I wasn’t some helpless twelve-year-old forced to stand aside and watch while her life disintegrated before her eyes.
    Mrs Curtis was a territory I intended to win back from the enemy, one cell at a time.
    And that’s why I was back at the hospital close to midnight that night, on the way home from a date that I hadn’t wanted to keep. It had been a double date, set up by a friend despairing of my “perverse affection” for solitude, and it had been a disaster. They all were. He’d been nice enough, but not nearly as fascinating as the mutating opponent I met in the lab every single day. And he didn’t understand what it was to be passionate about anything – other than football and sex. I’d tapped my fingers on the table and smiled thinly throughout the meal.
    We were probably all relieved when the cheque came.
    I’d immediately gone