Succubus Dreams Page 0,85

old man tending the grounds told me that Andrew was off helping some of his parishioners in one of the poorer districts.

I found him there, inside the home of a brewer. The brewer had a large family - eight children - as well as a couple of brothers living with him. The house was small and cramped and filthy. Everyone in it was sick except for the brewer's wife who wearily tried to help Andrew take care of her family.

"Cecily?" he asked in astonishment when he saw me. He was kneeling by a teenage boy. Something inside my chest blossomed with both joy and relief. Andrew was alive. He'd stayed, fought disease, and won.

I strode forward and knelt beside him. The wife, giving water to a small girl, watched me uneasily. I wasn't in silk or anything, but I was clearly from a different class than theirs, and she didn't entirely know how to treat me.

"You're alive," I breathed. "I've been so worried. So worried I'd never see you again."

He smiled that gentle smile of his, and I saw more lines around his eyes than I'd seen before. "God didn't want to separate us quite yet," he said.

I looked down at the boy. I'd figured Andrew was feeding him or something, but I realized then that the priest was actually giving him last rites. The boy wore no shirt, and I could see on his neck and in his armpits the tell-tale dark pustules that had given the plague its name. The plague usually did what it was going to do in about a week, but from his emaciated look, you would have thought he'd been dying for years. His eyes were fever-bright, and I didn't know if he even knew we were there.

Bile rose in my throat, and I averted my eyes. Standing up, I told Andrew, "I'll let...I'll let you finish this and wait outside." I left the house, going out to where it was warm and things weren't dying.

A while later, Andrew found me. I didn't ask if the boy was still alive. Instead, I said, "How many of them live? Out of all the ones you stay and risk your life for, how many of them actually survive?"

He shrugged. "Three-quarters. Sometimes half, if they're very young or very old."

"Half," I repeated flatly. "That's not very good."

"If one more person lives because of me, then that's very good."

I looked at that confident, serene face and sighed. "You're so damned frustrating."

He smiled. I sighed again.

"What can I do to help?"

The smile disappeared. "Don't make light of this, Cecily."

"I'm not. Tell me what to do."

And that was how I found myself playing nurse in a small town in backwoods England. Honestly, there wasn't anything glamorous one could do to fight the plague. It was all about basics, keeping the people clean and supplied with as much food and water as they could take in. The rest was in the hands of their immune system and - if you believed Andrew - God. When my patients began declining past the point of no return, I usually stopped helping. I couldn't stand to watch and left them to Andrew and his prayers.

But sometimes I'd see people come back around, people whom I'd given up on, and then I could almost believe there was a higher power at work. At least, I believed that until Andrew got sick.

It started slowly at first, a fever and aches, but we both knew what that meant. He ignored it and kept working until the symptoms began compounding. Finally, he couldn't fight it. Neglecting my other patients, I devoted myself fully to him.

"You should help others," he told me one day. His skin was pink and blotchy, and he was starting to get the dark spots around his lymph glands. Through all the sickness and fatigue, he was still beautiful to me. "Don't worry about me."

"I have to worry about you. No one else is." It was true. Andrew had helped so many, but no one had come to his side, despite the fact that plague survivors tended not to catch it again.

"It doesn't matter," Andrew told me, voice frail. "I'm glad they've survived."

"You will too," I said obstinately, even though the signs were starting to suggest otherwise. "You have to go on so you can keep doing your annoying good works."

He managed a smile. "I hope so, but I think my time in this world may be drawing to a close. You, though..." He looked