Paxton released Bibi’s limp hand and circled the hospital bed in time to see the abrasions finish spreading across the helix and antihelix and lobe of her left ear, tiny beads of blood forming in the wake of the injury, which seemed to have no cause, appearing as magically as stigmata. The crimson drops swelled from the damaged tissue and, with impossible acceleration, thickened into the gooey coagulum of first-stage healing. As that occurred, with it came a bruise originating at her left temple, at first the watered red of a cheap vino on the darker end of the blush-wine spectrum, seeping through the flesh along her jaw line. Nancy said, “Ohgod, ohgod,” and shuddered with dread, no doubt thinking the same thing that had alarmed Pax: that this bruise and worse wounds would develop across Bibi’s face until before them would lie a woman afflicted with some bizarre disease, the effects of which mimicked a brutal beating. As the bruise reached her chin and spread no farther, as it darkened to burgundy and then to plum, and as the sticky clots of blood began to dry into a crust on her ear, a small cut bloomed crimson at the left corner of her mouth, and the flesh swelled slightly. This new wound would have bled down her chin if it had not, as the injuries before it, progressed in mere seconds from fresh laceration to first-stage healing. With that, the stigmata ceased forming, and the injuries stabilized. At least for the moment.
Paralyzed by the spectacle of Bibi’s transformation but then stung into action when the changes stopped, Petronella snatched up the call button that was looped by its cord around the bed railing, and she connected with the fourth-floor nursing station. With an authority born of years of patient crises successfully resolved, she told the responding nurse that she needed to see the shift supervisor urgently in Room 456. “We’ve got a situation here.”
“What just happened to my girl?” Nancy demanded of the nurse with uncharacteristic and unwarranted accusation. Reason had been frightened out of her, and anger rather than unreason had replaced it. “What the hell happened to her poor sweet face?”
Murphy put an arm around her and, in a voice pressed thin by anxiety, said, “Easy, honey, easy, she doesn’t know what happened.” When Nancy tried to throw off his arm, he held her tighter. “Nobody could know what that was. That was fully crazy. But Bibi’s going to be all right.”
“Look at her, look at what’s happening to her. She’s not all right, damn it.”
“No, but she’s going to be. She’ll walk the board as good as anyone, better than you and me, like always.”
Nancy held fast to her anger, bristled with it, and it seemed that her short shaggy hair responded to some electrical charge in the air. If her eyes did not actually flash, they appeared to flash, and the muscles bulged along her clenched jaws. But it was useless anger in that it had no target, human or otherwise, and was in fact less real than it was a desperate defense against the despair that a surrender to fate encouraged.
Regarding the traveling lines of light spiking left to right across Bibi’s cardiac monitor, Petronella said aloud but mostly to herself, “Her heart rate never changed. Or her blood pressure.”