Angel Falling Softly - By Eugene Woodbury Page 0,70

but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails. He understood. He was a very understanding man, and she loved him for it.

Walking back to the house, his arm firmly about her waist, she felt the weight lifting off her shoulders and rising into the night sky. After all that anguish, she somehow felt better about the world and her place in it. And much worse about Milada.

Chapter 37

Hell is paved with good intentions

Milada had never before asked herself why she had never wanted a child.

She’d never asked because the answer was so obvious. Because the hands of her biological clock turned no more quickly than she aged, no more quickly than a year every century. Because by the most precise measurement Kammy could devise—the length of their chromosomes’ telomeres—she was twenty years old, and twenty-year-olds did not quit power-suit careers and empty out their savings accounts at fertility clinics. Because it was impossible for a twenty-year-old to believe that she’d ever turn forty and that at forty she would give anything to have gotten knocked up at twenty.

And because she could not. Simple as that. Because her eggs were all dead. Dead as doornails. Dead for centuries. The virus had seen to that.

She could adopt. Michael had no opinion on the matter, if only because the matter never came up. She’d informally adopted Jane. Jane was almost a member of the family. When Milada first hired her, they had looked the same age. Now Jane was in her late thirties, an older sister. Soon, she would become like Milada’s mother, then her grandmother. Duffy, Michael’s manservant, was heavily into late middle age, graying, paunchy. And because she saw him and Michael less often these days, with every encounter came that shock of realization that humans changed so much over time, grew old, and eventually died.

It was a hard-enough fact to face between employer and employee. Between immortal parent and mortal child, it would be intolerable. So what explained her attraction to this little girl?

The elevator doors opened on the transplant unit. Milada approached the nurse’s station. “Good evening, Doctor,” the nurse said.

Milada smiled. She hadn’t said she was a doctor but had allowed a casual touch and a practiced air of authority to dissemble for her. “The charts for Jennifer Forsythe?”

The nurse delivered them to her. Milada flipped through the folder. She had studied up on the subject enough to know what the numbers meant: FDP up, ANC down. She nodded and returned the charts.

The nurse offered hopefully, “Dr. Ingebretsen still thinks there might be reason to hope.”

Milada nodded. Rachel was right. They were all quietly hammering nails into her coffin.

She sat in Jennifer’s hospital room feeling enormously depressed. What was the real reason Kammy would not see patients? She wouldn’t risk accidentally exposing children to the virus in her blood. No, not by accident. The dangers of infection were simply not that great. Or perhaps she felt the tug of the same temptation—the temptation to do what Rakosi had done and what Milada now thought of doing.

Milada turned Jennifer’s gene survey over in her hands. The single-page printout was worn and wrinkled from being repeatedly taken out and stuffed back in, but she read it yet again: Jennifer was positive for the CCR5-D32 mutation on both alleles. Milada knew she had to destroy the printout and forget it existed. But she held onto it like a talisman, as if the paper and cardboard would speak to her and tell her what to do next.

Her faith in the intangible was as foolish as Rachel’s.

If I’d only acted upon this information the first time, Jennifer might have been strong enough—

She shook her head. No. That was Rachel’s sense of desperation insinuating itself into her rational mind. Milada knew what it was like to act in true desperation.

And yet—Jennifer was going to die anyway. I cannot change the past, but this child’s future I could. Milada ran her hand lightly along the child’s fragile arm, her fingers coming to a rest at the bend of her small elbow. She had never infected another human being, but she knew how it was done, having observed Rakosi’s failed efforts often enough: drive the tip of her fangs down into her gums, wait for the capillary action to draw the blood into the hollow channels, then find the vein and—

“Milada.”

Startled, Milada glanced up, her heart pounding madly, tasting Jennifer’s blood on her tongue, mingling with her own. There was nobody else in the room. Her