Sometimes, Raphael regrets not going off to college early. She resents being seventeen and smart and capable and stuck in a dead end spiral with dead end people.
Other times, she’s holding her older brother’s leg together in the back of a stolen car while screaming at her younger brother to drive faster.
Michael’s leg was hemorrhaging blood from a long, ragged cut just below the knee. She had tied a strip of her shirt around his thigh and had another pressed to the wound. He was panting and pale, clutching the seat of the car with one hand and trying to help her hold the makeshift bandage on with the other.
“Drive, Gabriel!”
“I’m trying, God damnit! They’re-fuck!” The car jolted and she looked up just in time to see one of the werewolves from moments earlier bounce off the hood and onto the windshield. “Get fucked, motherfucker!” The engine whined as he stepped on the gas, and Michael let out a strangled whimper as he moved with the car.
“Hang on, Michael, we’re almost out…” She pressed down harder as a spurt of blood shot out from the cut, vibrant red and hot. Arterial. Shit. Finally, Gabriel managed to fight his way through the last of the crowd, running over a wolf with a sick crunch. They hit the open road and Gabriel stepped on it, whooping and laughing as they roared down the interstate.
She fumbled her phone out of her pocket and handed it to Michael. “Dial Dad and tell him we’re coming in hot. I want to get you to a hospital, but if he says no, I need him to set up my suture kit and the disinfectant. “
Michael struggled for a moment, trying to get the phone to react to his blood-slick fingers. When the line picked up, she felt him tense up. Right now, that was okay. Tension was good when blood was flowing.
“Dad.” Michael’s voice was weak but steady as he tried to convey their current predicament. “It’s Michael. I got caught with a claw. No bite, but it’s bleeding bad. We’re about ten minutes from the hotel and Raphael says-”
“I want to take him to the hospital.” She leaned over to speak into the phone.
“No. Michael, you know that. No hospitals. We can’t risk it.” Her father’s voice was hard and sure, a strong point where usually he played the weakling, stepping over the last of Michael’s authority to take control of the situation in the worst way possible. “How did you get hit? I thought we talked about this.”
Michael’s eyes had slid closed during Father’s interjection, and Raphael caught a glimpse of them rolling and unfocused as he tried to rejoin the conversation. “I don’t know, we were getting caught, we were behind the…” He trailed off, eyelids fluttering, and Raphael pressed harder on his leg.
“Michael, you have to stay awake. Come on, dude.”
“Michael, I need you to tell me what happened.” If there was one thing Father was good at, it was keeping people alert. He would get Michael talking and everything would be fine. Everything would be fine and they would get to the hotel in time and Raphael would be able to stitch him up. No one was dying tonight.
“We were behind the door and… no, they were behind… I don’t know. Raphael, I don’t-” Michael’s eyes rolled back in his head and he was gone.
“ Shit!” Her voice cracked as she reached up to slap Michael across the face, trying to get a reaction. Nothing.
“Raphael, what’s happening? Is everything alright?” The phone fell in front of the seats as Michael’s hand went limp.
“Raphael? What should I do?” Gabriel’s voice came shrill and panicked from the front seat.
“Gabe, change of plans. We’re going to the hospital. Michael, we’re going to the hospital.” She shifted to put her full weight on his leg with her knee and squeezed his hand. His face twitched and he groaned weakly, but didn’t wake up. His hand was cold as ice. Fuck fuck fuck fuck how long till the hospital?
“Raphael, you can’t take him to the hospital. There are too many questions. Turn around and come back here this instant.” Father was getting agitated.
She nearly falls off the seat trying to grab the phone. “Dad, there are going to be more questions if we get found with the exsanguinated body of a twenty-four year old in the trunk of our car. We’re going to the hospital.” She hangs up and hears Gabriel swearing under his breath in the new silence. “Gabriel, give me an ETA.”
“From the ER we went to earlier? Five minutes tops. I can make it four.” The engine changes in sound again and Raphael feels the pull of the acceleration in her gut.
“Awesome. Just keep breathing, Michael. Five more minutes.”
The car goes quiet again and everything suddenly takes on a very surreal feeling. She’s sitting in the back of a stolen car while her fifteen-year-old brother drives. Sunlight is filtering in through the windows because it’s a gorgeous August afternoon, occasionally interrupted by trees and other cars. No one is talking, because what is there to say? Their father had once again proved that he can and would condemn any of them to death should it become convenient for him.
Time seems to warp and bend around her, highlighting things in bright technicolor and making her dizzy. Michael’s ragged breathing stops a few times, but she doesn’t do anything about it. Why doesn’t she do anything about it? Why does she just stare and wait for him to start up again? She’s frozen, and then she’s not, because she’s suddenly remembered to call ahead to the ER.
“Hi, um, I’m en route to the Gate Creek Memorial Hospital E.R. I have a critically injured twenty-four year old male suffering acute blood loss from a leg wound.” Her hands are shaking.
“Okay. I’m going to alert them to your arrival and have a team meet you outside the waiting room. Can I have your name?” The woman who picks up has a cool, calming voice, and Raphael takes a deep breath before responding.
“Jessica Harbor. The patient is my brother, Keith Harbor.” Those are the names on their current outfit of fake cards. She and Gabriel are minors, so this should be pretty easy.
“Okay, Jessica. There are people waiting for you right now.”
“Thank you, thank you so much.” She hangs up the phone just as Gabriel manhandles the car around the last corner and pulls into the drop off lane. As promised, there are nurses running out with a gurney and a triage kit. She sobs in relief as the car stops and she throws the door open.
They take Michael out of the car. Before he’s even strapped to the gurney, they have an oxygen mask on him and a nurse checking his vitals. She doesn’t notice him coming around the car, but Gabriel’s there as they wheel Michael through the doors, leaning against her and burying his face in her shoulder.
“Is he going to be alright?” Gabriel’s voice is barely there, a tearful whisper reminding her that, for all his bravado in the moment, Gabriel is still a child, the youngest of them all, and he’s scared. Scared of losing his big brother, the only father figure he’s ever known and the best example he has of what it means to be a man.
She wraps an arm around his shoulders and hugs him tightly. “He’s tough, Gabe, and those nurses and doctors know what they’re doing. It’s gonna take more than an ambitious werewolf to bring him down.”
They stand there like that for a long time, just holding each other, until a nurse comes out and asks them to fill out some paperwork.
They were allowed in to see Michael an hour and a half after he was admitted. He was groggy and confused and probably wouldn't remember any of it later, but they managed to get through the whole thing without any major slip-ups or suspicions. Just a normal family with a normal older brother who had cut his leg on a normal jagged branch on a normal hike. Perfect.
Now, Raphael was sitting in the hallway staring at the twenty missed calls and texts piled up in her notifications. She knew there were some on Gabriel’s, and she shuddered to think how many Michael had.
Briefly, she allowed her mind to drift back to the last steady housing they’d had in a while. It was a little month-long stint in a rented house in Ohio, and she’d had a friend named Kelly. Kelly’s mom had loved her, thought she was a good influence or something, and she and Kelly had passed many happy hours in her kitchen, reading and watching Netflix and baking things with her mom. Kelly’s mom had never called more than twice in a row when Kelly was late. She didn’t have two entirely different personalities. She didn’t shout or get that horrible disappointed look on her face when things went wrong, and she didn’t leave for weeks at a time, leaving Kelly in the care of a still-too-young sibling with a gun and an anxiety disorder. It was pretty cool.
Unfortunately, the time had come when Raphael had to do some work, and Kelly had accidentally seen her rip a guy’s head off. In her defense, it was a vamp. In Kelly’s defense, she had never even seen Twilight, let alone a real vampire, and she thought Raphael was a murderer. It was just as well that they left the next day.
That was beside the point, though. The point was, Kelly’s mom was a good parent, and good parents did not stalk their children or leave vaguely threatening texts on their phone at odd hours of the night instead of coming to the hospital. Actually, Raphael thought, it was probably a good thing he wasn’t here. He was good at faking being normal, but he would make Michael all nervous and that would make Gabe all nervous and then the whole thing would start to fall apart and CPS would get called. They’d been down that road before. They’d also been down the subsequent road, the one where Lucifer points out that getting CPS called on you after fifteen minutes in front of other adults probably isn’t a good thing and then gets screamed at by Michael, a few times. It wasn’t fun.
Speaking of Lucifer, he might actually want to know what was happening. He’d left to meet up with some old friends that needed help with a ghost infestation in Texas at the beginning of the week, and wasn’t expecting to be back for another few days. Honestly, it was a relief, a welcome time of respite in what Raphael had started to refer to as the Hiroshima family. Nuclear, but with all of the explosions and none of the closeness.
For all that they’d fought lately, Lucifer still cared about Michael, and Michael definitely cared about him, so she figured it couldn’t hurt to give him a call. He’d be another ally in the fight against Dad, too. She loved Michael, but he had all the backbone of a soggy washcloth when it came to their father, and while Lucifer’s views were a little more… extreme than hers, it was better than nothing.
She clicked over to her contacts and glanced over her shoulder before pressing call. Gabriel was on his phone and Michael was asleep. Perfect.
Shockingly, the call didn’t go to voicemail on the first try. It didn’t even ring for that long before Lucifer picked up.
“Hey, Raphael, what’s up?”
“Well, I’m in a hospital right now. Not like, me in the hospital bed, but Michael got hit and-”
“ Shit. Is he okay? How bad is it? What happened?” Lucifer’s voice shot up an octave and she could hear clattering on the other end of the line like he’d moved quickly or dropped something.
“He’s fine, Luce. If you’d have let me finish, you’d know he got tagged by a werewolf and lost a lot of blood, but it was just the claw, and he’s stable now. I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to stitch him up fast enough, so we brought him in.”
“Who’s ‘we?’”
“Me and Gabriel. Dad’s not happy.” Lucifer scoffed. “Yeah, exactly. We’ve only been here about two hours, and he’s already left me like twenty messages. He didn’t want me to bring him in at all.”
Lucifer growled. “That motherfucker. He’s gonna get Mikes killed one day, you know that? And Michael will let him.”
Yeah, well, that was Michael’s problem, wasn’t it? “Hence why I brought him in. But I need to know you’ll be available for the next day or so if I need you to call and talk to Dad. I don’t want to deal with this on my own, and Gabriel’s pretty shaken up right now.” She didn’t particularly relish the idea of having to interact with both Lucifer and her father in the same timeframe, but, well. Necessary evils. And besides, his recent departure had given her some time to cool down from “viscerally angry” to “moderately pissed.” Hmm. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.
“Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I’m about half-done out here, but we’ve hit a bit of a snag and it should be quiet enough that I’ll be able to be at the phone.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” There’s a weird moment of dead air in which she can hear a woman speaking and the soft, rhythmic hush of waves on a shoreline. He did mention he’d be by a big lake. “Alright. Goodbye, Raphael.”
“”Goodbye, Lucifer.” She sighs, setting her phone down and rubbing her eyes. It feels like midnight, like she’s been awake for days, but when she looks out the window, the sun is just setting, and she woke up at five this morning. She gets up and goes back into the room.
Gabriel glances up as she opens the door, but doesn’t say anything. She sits in the chair next to Michael’s bed and takes a moment to adjust his IV, which he’s somehow wrapped around his arm.
He frowns, twisting his face up and mumbling something, then his eyes crack open and dart around for a moment before focusing on her. She sees the moment the lights come back on and grabs his hand, ready to act if he should get aggressive. It’s happened once or twice when he was waking up from injuries, like some kind of switch flipped and he just… lost it. Completely out of his mind.
“Hey, Michael. You’re in the hospital. Everything’s fine. Do you remember what happened?” Gabriel looks over then, and moves to join her at his bedside.
Michael shakes his head minutely, as if to clear it, and then mumbles, “Yeah. Yeah, werewolves gone psycho, right?” Raphael nods. He starts to sit up and she helps him, grabbing his shoulders and pulling him upright. “How long?”
“Not long,” she assures him. “We came in maybe three hours ago, tops.”
“Gah,” he moans, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Feel like I’ve been hit by a bus.”
“Yeah, that would be the bloodloss,” she tells him. Gabriel’s hit the call button, so it’s then that a nurse comes in and Raphael leans back from the bed.
The nurse has a kind smile and pink scrubs, and something about her puts Raphael at ease. She gives them all a once-over like a concerned mother before descending on Michael.
“Well, Mr. Harbor, I see you’re up and at ‘em pretty quickly, hmm? Not too often I get patients waking up this soon after getting a full bag of blood put back into them.” She checks his vitals and jots them on her clipboard before pulling out a penlight. “Open your eyes for just a moment, dear, I’ve got to check your pupils.”
Michael complies, eyes watering. “Yes, I’ve heard that one before. I don’t tend to stay out for long.”
The nurse straightens up. “I figured you must have had quite an experience with hospitals when I saw some of those scars. What happened there?”
Michael shrugs. “I used to box, you know?” Leaving it vague like that tends to be all he needs to get people to back off. Contrary to what the movies will tell you, random strangers don’t usually want to hear about your potential past as a prize fighter.
“Ah. I understand. By the way, my name is July Ringer, you can call me Nurse Ringer.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Michael gave her a little half-smile and Raphael rolled her eyes. July may be twice his age and Michael may be spectacularly uninterested, but few people were immune to the Shurley charm. It must be something about the eyes.
“Ah, a gentleman,” Ringer chuckles. “Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions.
Ringer was in and out in under fifteen minutes. Everything went smoothly, every lie passed undetected. Couldn’t have been better, really. Michael even got to sign out AMA before they could get to the real gnarly stuff or, God forbid, Dad showed up.
Now, they were en route to their motel room to regroup and, unfortunately, meet up with their father. Which reminds her, she actually has to call him now. It’s nine at night and she’s surprised he hasn’t risen up like Christ from the grave but between the seats of this crusty-ass Subaru. Her phone, of course, isn’t connected to whatever poor soul they stole this car from’s Bluetooth, and Gabe is asleep in the back seat, so she has Michael do the honors.
The dial tone makes her physically nauseous and, judging by Michael’s face, she’s not the only one. Between calling Dad and the earlier blood loss, he looks undead.
“Father.” He refused to turn speaker phone on, and she’s too focused on driving to hear whatever he says in return. “Yes. We’re coming home now. I’m sorry.... No, I passed out. I don’t know what happened… I know. I’m sorry. We’re about ten minutes out, I think… I’ll be okay to fight tomorrow, I promise… Yes, the kids are alright, just a bit shaken, I believe. Everything went fine at the hospital… Alright. Goodbye.” He hangs up and hangs his head. Quietly, he says, “I’m sorry about earlier.”
“What do you mean?” She knows what he means.
“Sorry I got hit. It was… a lapse of judgement, and I’m sorry it happened. I’m sorry you two had to witness it, and I’m sorry I put you in danger.”
No, you’re not, she wants to say. You’re not sorry we could have gotten hurt, you’re sorry you failed some sort of test you set for yourself, and you’re sorry you’re not as good as Lucifer. You’re sorry you couldn’t fix everything by doing one thing right, she thinks about yelling. It’s too late and you should have taken us and ran when you had the chance. But that’s not fair, so what she says is, “It’s okay.”
Then they just keep driving. You can’t stop in the middle of the road, after all.