Wood Sprites

“He tore out his IV,” someone cried, and Louise realized that her hands were covered with blood. Louise stared at her bloody fingers. How did this keep happening? Up to today, blood was something that she half-expected after a great deal of planning and debate and risk assessment. It never came as a surprise. Other than Jillian’s, she had never even seen someone else’s blood, and here it was, all over her, again and again.

Jillian started to whimper, a prelude to real crying. Fake crying would have been loud and instant. With her sniffles, the day proved too much for Louise, and she felt hot tears filling her eyes.

“Oookay.” The police officer was shaking his head. “I have not a clue what the hell that was all about.”

“We need to put the boy under,” the doctor murmured as he pressed his hand over the machine’s microphone. “None of our translators are loaded with Elvish. Can you help us explain to the children what’s about to happen?”

* * *

It was stressful to watch them apply the anesthesia and see Crow Boy become totally helpless. Louise hugged Nikola tight, trying to find the inner calm that she’d experienced just moments before. It had been as if she’d stepped out of herself, shedding all fears and worries along the way.

After they wheeled Crow Boy away, she realized that Joy was rummaging through medical supplies, tearing open plastic wrappings to taste the contents. The girls were out, scurrying about in their mice robot bodies.

“What are you doing?”

“Hungry!” Joy cried. “Candy! You promised!”

“Bored,” Chuck Norris said.

“Scared,” the Jawbreakers squeaked.

Nikola pressed up against Louise, nodding silently in agreement with the Jawbreakers.

“We need to feed her now.” Jillian went to the door and peeked out. “They said it would be hours for them to set the leg and him to fully wake up from the anesthesia.”

In other words, if they waited, Joy would only get more uncontrollable.

“I thought I saw some vending machines near the waiting room.” Louise scooped up Joy with one hand and plucked up the mice one at a time with her other, depositing them on her shoulder. “We’re getting something!” she cried as Joy squirmed. “Just be patient.”

They waited until the nurses at the station across the hall were distracted and then slipped out. The other rooms were all dark; the patients asleep. The twins walked quickly through the deserted hallways to the waiting room. There was an entire wall of machines. The first offered hot coffee. The second was water and chilled juice and milk. The third was fruit and veggies.

“Oh God,” Jillian whispered. “Of course a hospital would only have healthy snacks. What about grapes? You like grapes.”

“Feh,” Joy muttered from Louise’s arms. Then she spotted what was in the next machine. “Oooooh!” She leaned far out of Louise’s hold to press her paws against the glass. “Candy!”

Jillian sighed and pointed out the ones they knew the baby dragon liked the most. “Gummy worms? Snickers? Kit Kat? M&Ms?”

Joy gazed up them with pure delight on her face and nodded.

“Which ones?” Jillian asked.

“Candy!”

“I think she wants one of each,” Louise said. “She’s been really good so far. We owe her.”

“All this can’t be good for her.” Nevertheless, Jillian used her phone to buy one of each type of candy. “We’re lousy mothers, you know. Our mom would never give in to us. She’d give us that look and we knew we’d better behave and we would.”

Louise felt a sudden floodwater of sorrow rise up. “I know.”

“What are we going to do about the babies?” Jillian whispered. “Joy is good at taking care of herself, but what are we going to do with real babies?”

Louise steeled herself against wanting to cry. “I don’t know. We don’t have any way for the babies to be born yet, so let’s not worry about it now.”

“When they’re born, we’ll work hard and be the best mothers ever.”

“How can you be our mothers when you’re our sisters?” the babies asked.

“Oh!” Jillian used one of their parents’ distraction tricks. “We’re going to have to get new phones.”

Louise gasped as she realized that they would need phones to purchase everything from Joy’s candy to new clothes. (They hadn’t been stripped down like Crow Boy, but their clothes were blood-soaked and reeked of smoke.) Ming would be able to track every purchase and chart their movements through the city via their old phones.

“We can order replacement phones and pick them up at an automated kiosk.” It would mean severing ties with everyone they knew as they changed phone numbers. Should they call their Aunt Kitty and warn her? Her last text had her on a plane heading back to California; she needed to keep working if she had any hope of gaining custody.

Louise took out her phone and turned it on to check for recent text messages from Aunt Kitty. There were five hundred and six new texts. The last dozen all from their classmates.