The Night Sister

Suddenly Jason lost all interest in the panther, in Piper’s frantic speech. Margot’s body had started to twitch strangely. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her jaw clenched, and her back arched. She began to convulse, as if she were being electrocuted.

“Margot!” Jason cried, lowering his gun as he ran to his wife. The panther sprang away, into the safety of the woods, the dog bounding behind it. Jason dropped to his knees and put the flashlight down, its beam illuminating Margot’s horrific face: eyes bulging, tongue protruding, everything contorted and all wrong.

Piper was instantly at his side. “Oh my God, is she having a seizure? What do we do?”

Jason pressed his gun into her hands. “Take the gun. Shoot them if they approach.”

“Jason. They’re gone.”

He glanced up and saw she was right. The animals were nowhere to be seen. In the back of his mind, he knew they should stay on guard, though he couldn’t tear his attention away from Margot.

“Take it anyway,” he grunted. Piper complied.

Jason cradled Margot’s head as gently as he could, trying to keep her from hitting it too hard on the forest floor—all he knew to do from his basic training. And timing—he knew he should be timing the seizure to report to the paramedics, but he couldn’t count seconds, couldn’t even think clearly, could only hold her head and murmur, “It’s okay, Margot, it’s okay, just relax, it’s okay,” mindlessly, knowing it was not okay, not at all. She needed to be in a hospital, with equipment and medication and doctors. Now.

When Margot stopped seizing at last—it had been less than a minute, but it might as well have been eternity—her body went limp and still, her breath coming shallow and rapid. Jason scooped her up from the ground, staggering a bit.

“We have to go. We’ve got to get her to the hospital.”

Piper led the way out of the clearing, sweeping the beam of the flashlight through the trees. There was no trace of the panther or the dog. It was almost as if they’d never been there at all.





Piper


Piper paced back and forth in the waiting room, her soaking-wet shoes squishing with each step. Although Margot had regained consciousness in Jason’s cruiser, when they arrived at the hospital it was clear that Margot and the baby were in imminent danger. Jason had radioed ahead to the ER, and she was immediately surrounded by nurses, doctors, and techs. In a flurry of controlled chaos that took only minutes, oxygen was started, an IV was placed, medications were given, labs were drawn, and she was attached to monitors of all sorts. Then they were rolling her down the hall for an emergency C-section. Piper had time to give her a quick kiss and say, “I love you, you can do this,” and then Margot was off, Jason at her side, holding her hand.

Now it had been nearly two hours, and still no word. Piper took a sip of the cold, sour coffee she’d poured herself some time ago.

Jason came in, disheveled but beaming.

“They’re okay,” he said, his voice breaking. Piper ran to him and threw her arms around him.

“We have a healthy baby girl!” he said in her ear. “And Margot’s blood pressure has stabilized. She’s awake and alert—the doctor says she’s going to be fine. And, oh, Piper, the baby is so beautiful.”

He was crying. They both were. They held each other tight. Piper realized, in that moment, how much Jason loved Margot. Everything else fell away: Lou, Amy, all of it. There was only the sweet relief that Margot and the baby were going to be fine—that was all that really mattered.

When they pulled apart, Jason said, “When they were prepping her for surgery, she was saying the craziest stuff. I don’t know if the meds they gave her were making her loopy or what. She said that she saw Lou turn into some kind of monster, and that’s why she ran out into the woods—to get away from her. Then, somehow, Lou became a panther? And she said it was Lou who killed her family. She even said that big black dog in the woods was Rose Slater….”

He trailed off when he realized that Piper wasn’t laughing.