Blood of Life: Cora's Choice 1-3 Bundle Read online

  “Maybe we’ll go later.” She shrugged and tossed her blonde hair over one shoulder. “So, what did the doctor say? Your texts didn’t tell me anything.”

  I flopped onto the couch, kicking my feet up on the coffee table. I buried my chin in my jacket. “It didn’t work.”

  “What?” Lisette’s smile froze on her face.

  “The alemtuzumab. It didn’t work,” I said. Saying it aloud seemed to make it more real. More hopeless. “The cancer’s getting worse.”

  “Oh, Cora,” Lisette said, her face crumpling. “What’s she going to try now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Cora?”

  Dammit. I blinked hard. I hadn’t cried the whole trip from Baltimore to College Park. I wasn’t about to start now. “She told me to call hospice.”

  “Hospice?” Lisette’s voice rose. “But you’re not—”

  “Right,” I said, cutting her off, not wanting to hear the word. “But she gave me another number. To a...” I hesitated, not sure how to describe it. “...a clinic.”

  That wasn’t too much of a lie, was it? I wasn’t quite able to explain the truth—I wasn’t even sure what the truth was. I wanted to tell her more, but I didn’t know what to say. Certainly nothing that would make her feel any better. Lisette saw black and white, right and wrong, and all I had for her were shadows. I tried to reach into the strangeness and pull out the facts.

  I said, “They’re working on a—a trial of sorts, I guess. The doctor drew some blood. They’re going to run some tests, see if I’m a good candidate.”

  I realized I didn’t have the name of the drug or the procedure. So much for Google.

  “Gosh, I hope that you are!” Lisette said. She never swore.

  “So do I.” The significance of it all came crashing down on me all of a sudden, and I struggled to breathe against the weight in my chest. I wished that my Gramma was there. I wished I could put my head in her lap like I was a little kid again and have her pet my hair until I felt better.

  But Gramma was gone, and it was selfish of me to want her here, to see me lose everything she’d worked so hard to give me as the cancer took it all away.

  I took a deep, shuddering breath, and Lisette’s face creased in deeper concern.

  I stifled a groan. She deserved to deal with my illness even less than I did.

  Lisette glanced at the door, then back at me. “You up for Hannah’s place?”

  I recognized the offer for what it was—a distraction—and I seized upon it.

  “What’s the plan for tonight?” I asked.

  “They snagged Mike’s Playstation again and have Netflix hooked up to the flat screen. Movie marathon. 1980s high school classics. Everybody’s supposed to wear leg warmers and frizzy hair, but I think most of us are just going to show up in pajamas.”

  Hannah and Sarah lived in an apartment just down the hall. They threw a movie marathon at least once a month, and it always lasted well into the next day.

  “What’s showing?” I asked.

  “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Risky Business.”

  I grinned. “Yeah, I think I’m up for that.”

  “Honestly?” Lisette lowered her voice in mock confidentiality. “I’ve only ever seen The Breakfast Club.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Finish your dinner, and then we can go and party like it’s 1985,” Lisette said.

  I groaned and pulled the foam container over to myself, popping the lid.

  “Philly cheesesteak. You like it,” Lisette said encouragingly.

  “I do, I do, and I swear I will eat every bite.” I knew she’d stand over me until I did. I gave a half-shrug. “Well, now that I’m off the alemtuzumab, at least I’ll be able to enjoy my food again.”

  “Maybe put some meat back on your bones.” Lisette’s voice was light, but she couldn’t hide her worry.

  “Sure thing,” I said around the first bite of the only slightly soggy sandwich. “No problem.”

  ***

  An hour later, I sat in Hannah and Sarah’s darkened living room, nibbling on a piece of pizza they’d bullied me into taking and leaning against a beanbag chair, wrapped in a hideous but surprisingly soft afghan that Sarah’s grandmother had sent her.

  And I felt normal again, if only for a little while.

  Sarah was curled up in Mike’s lap on one of the bland institutional chairs, not-quite-making-out and playing with the diamond ring on her finger. The rest of the girls and a couple of guys—boyfriends and wannabes—were sprawled around the room in various boneless poses.

  I was suddenly, intensely glad that I was there and that I had them to be around me. If I’d stayed home that night, I would have probably cried and maybe puked and maybe cried some more. And at some point, Chelsea and Christina would have stumbled back in, probably drunk and almost certainly with at least one guy between them, and then I would have had to listen to them all night through the thin apartment walls.

  It wasn’t that I’d forgotten my grief. I was still dying, and I knew it. It was that, right now, I wasn’t alone.

  I dropped the greasy slice of pizza on the paper plate and let my eyes sag shut. For the moment, I was watching corny movies with my friends, and that was enough.

  It was all I had.

  Chapter Five

  “So, remember—Spence says that school’s primary value isn’t to make you smart or even well-trained but to signal that you already have the qualities of intelligence that an employer is looking for,” the professor said, summing up. “See you next week.”

  “So, basically, she’s saying that what she teaches us doesn’t really matter,” said a guy two rows below me. His friend snorted.

  I gathered my coat and shoved my notebook into my bag. I thought of the distance to my next class with a sick feeling in my stomach.

  It was Thursday, six days since I had left Mr. Thorne’s office bewildered and confused. Six days since the doctor told me that I had five months—maybe five months left to live.

  I had tried very hard to keep all thoughts of that day out of my mind, and now that I didn’t have to go in for an intravenous injection three times a week, I found that it was just possible to pretend, most of the time, that nothing was wrong.

  Most of the time. As the one-week mark approached, though, I waited for news of the test with mounting anxiety. My last chance. As strange as the meeting with Mr. Thorne had been, and as much as I suspected a hidden agenda, I still believed he might be able to save me.

  “Spence’s job market signaling is only the first type that we will cover as applied to economics,” the professor continued, raising her voice as we all clattered to our feet. “Next week, expect to cover the other applications discussed in Osborne, and don’t forget to check the course site for the links to relevant online content. You will be responsible for all the material. Thank you!”

  I slung my backpack over my shoulders, the weight dragging against me, just as my phone chimed, signaling that I’d missed a call during my preset no-ring for class. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and unlocked it. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the number.

  It was the same one that I had dialed when I was first brought to Mr. Thorne.

  I braced myself and stepped into the corridor, leaning back against the wall. Other students surged past me, laughing and joking about their plans for the weekend.

  Setting my jaw, I hit the button to return the call. The phone connected, and again someone picked up on the first real ring.

  “Ms. Shaw,” the pleasant tenor said.

  Not Mr. Thorne, but the same man who had answered the phone before.

  “Yes?” My voice shook slightly, and I swallowed, trying to calm it. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for the final disappointment.

  “Your lab results are in. Good news. You are an excellent candidate for the procedure.”

  “What?” I hit a high note that I hadn’t intended. “I mean—I’m so...so
pleased,” I stuttered, still not certain that I had heard correctly.

  After two months of bad news, to have something, even this small, seem to go right.... I half-considered pinching myself. Did people really do that?

  The man on the phone continued coolly. “I can tell, Ms. Shaw. A car will be sent around to your apartment this evening. Six o’clock.”

  “I—I have to make the decision now?” I asked.

  “No, Ms. Shaw. This is in the interest of full disclosure. Mr. Thorne will explain the procedure in detail, and you can decide how—and if—you wish to proceed.”

  If. A welter of emotions hit me at that word, and I remembered again the strangeness of our first meeting, the compulsion, the weird discord between what he presented to me and what he seemed to be. The light in his eyes, my blood a red smear across his hand.... I had kept all those thoughts clamped down, shut tight, because I had no choice. There could be no choice.

  Not if I wanted to live.

  “Okay,” I said, ignoring the tightening in my center that I did not care to name. “I’ll be ready, then. Six o’clock.”

  “Excellent. Goodbye, Ms. Shaw.”

  “Bye,” I said, but the man was already gone.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Six o’clock. A car would be waiting.

  Okay, then.

  ***

  “Can you explain to me again why you’re wearing your interview skirt?” Lisette asked, frowning at me from the door to my bedroom. “And the blouse? To a doctor’s appointment?”

  “It isn’t an appointment, exactly,” I said. “More like a...consultation, or something.”

  “Isn’t that like a British word for a doctor’s appointment?” she said.

  I adjusted the chignon at the back of my neck one more time. The one good thing about alemtuzumab was that unlike most chemotherapy, it didn’t make your hair fall out. I still had the same ash brown waves that I’d always had, which, though not the most striking hair color, was a far sight better than being bald.

  The bad thing about alemtuzumab, I thought, is that it didn’t work.

  “Look, the last time I showed up to a consultation or appointment or whatever there, everybody was in business clothes.” I dabbed concealer generously over the dark circles under my hollowed-out eyes.

  “At a clinic,” Lisette said flatly.

  “I think the initial meetings are held at the corporate office,” I said. “Anyway, if I’m going back there, I don’t want to stick out again.”

  It was more than just being out of place. I had felt exposed in Mr. Thorne’s office wearing my jeans and sweater. He had gotten under my skin, into my head. No one ever did that.

  I wasn’t dressing up for him. Not exactly. I was dressing up against him, hiding my sickness under cosmetics and fabric.

  Hiding my weakness to him.

  My Gramma used to break out her heels and her full palette of makeup whenever she had an important meeting at work or with the school. If it was really important, she wore the only suit she owned. She’d called it putting on her war paint.

  “You don’t have to look prettier or younger than they do,” she used to say. “But if you look more put together, that’s half the battle.”

  Well, I certainly wasn’t going to look either more attractive or more put together than Mr. Thorne. But I hoped it would be enough.

  “And that’s the other thing,” Lisette said. “The car. That’s just weird.”

  “I think it’s some kind of super-rich corporation. They really need volunteers for this drug trial.” I swiped a light peach over my eyelids. It seemed to be successful in bringing some warmth back to my brown eyes.

  “It’s got to be crazy dangerous then,” Lisette said.

  Four quick brushes, and the mascara was on. Just my upper eyelashes—I looked tired enough already. “Probably. I’ll find out tonight. But even trying something crazy dangerous is better than being declared terminal, which is all I’ve gotten so far.”

  “Well, you do look great,” she said, almost begrudgingly.

  “I feel like I’m playing dress-up.” I rolled my eyes at myself. I’d had an internship in an office the last year, but I’d never really gotten used to the business clothes, and even there, I hadn’t bothered with cosmetics beyond mascara and lip gloss.

  I’m not really sure this is working for me, I thought, trying out the blush.

  “Oh, God,” I said. The rouge looked garish against my washed-out features. I reached for the washcloth.

  “No, let me fix it,” Lisette said. She grabbed a handful of toilet paper and dusted at my face. “Much better.”

  It was. “Thanks.”

  “Are you sure you’ve got enough energy for this?” Lisette fretted.

  “God, Lisette, you’re like the mother I never had. And never wanted,” I said, but I smiled as I shook my head. “I napped for three hours this afternoon. I’m going to be fine.”

  “If you’re sure,” she grumbled.

  I grabbed a safe peach lipstick and put it on. With my coral blouse, the cosmetics managed to bring some semblance of liveliness back into my face. Did I look stronger, too? I hoped so.

  If I survived this, I decided, I would make a darned fine mortuary cosmetologist.

  “Could I take your swing jacket?” I pleaded. “All I’ve got is my Columbia Sportswear coat, and it’s not exactly businessy.”

  Lisette had been a couple of sizes larger than I was even before I got sick—with curves in all the right places, of course—but we could share coats and accessories. Not that there was much in my closet that she had an interest in, though she pretended otherwise.

  “Sure thing,” she said. “And you’re taking a real purse?”

  “Already put everything in it.” I snatched her swing jacket from the sofa and grabbed my clutch and waggled it at her.

  “You’d better head down now, then,” Lisette said. “You’re going to be late.”

  I paused at the door. “Don’t wait up for me,” I warned, knowing that she would, anyway.

  She laughed. “Of course I will. Who else is going to get me through our game theory homework tonight?”

  I smiled back at her, then hurried out the door.

  The elevator down was crowded with other students I didn’t know who eyed me curiously but didn’t interrupt their conversations as they headed down. On the third floor, Geoff Nowak stepped in, all golden hair and bronze skin. He was in most of my classes—had been since freshman year.

  “Hey, Shaw,” he said, treating me to a dazzling smile. He always called me Shaw because his stepmother’s name was Cora, and he said it freaked him out to use the same name for me. “You look a bit dressed up for a date.”

  “It’s more a business thing,” I said, returning his smile.

  “An interview?” The doors opened on the ground floor, and we all spilled out. “Who’s interviewing now? If you’re holding out on me....” He treated me to a patently fake threatening glare.

  “Not an interview,” I said as we went through the double doors. “Tell you later.”

  Like most of my friends, he didn’t know I was sick. I wondered what exactly I’d tell him.

  The Bentley was at the curb when we stepped out onto the sidewalk. The chauffeur swung the door open as I approached. Unable to resist, I gave Geoff a jaunty little wave before climbing in.

  “Oh, snap,” he called out after me, standing frozen on the sidewalk. “Shaw, you’ve got a lot to explain....”

  The chauffeur shut the door and I settled back against the seat with my coat in my lap, feeling a little guilty. Geoff deserved a little teasing, but I had no idea what kind of excuse I was going to give him. Probably not a very good one, I thought.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked the driver, worried that I would be whisked away to Baltimore again. That would make for a long evening, even if the appointment was short, and I had class in the morning.

  “Mr. Thorne has made arrangements in the Distri
ct,” the chauffeur said.

  Vague but good enough, I supposed. I set my phone on silent and settled back against the seat to watch the lights of the city through the window, a yellow blur in the cold outside the car’s heated cocoon, each block running into the next in an endless repetition of cement, asphalt, and brick.

  I didn’t realize that I had fallen asleep until the sound of my car door opening and the sudden breath of cold air roused me. I blinked a few times and surreptitiously wiped the drool from the corner of my mouth.

  “We’ve arrived, Ms. Shaw,” the chauffeur said helpfully.

  “Where am I?” I ducked out of the car and stood on the sidewalk in front of a nondescript beige rowhouse, stretching my stiff muscles.

  “The restaurant,” the chauffeur said patiently. “Mr. Thorne is waiting for you.”

  I looked up, and I saw the sign: Komi. I swallowed. Even I had heard of Komi. One meal cost about the same as two weeks of dorm food. It was the current food mecca of the capital, impossible to score reservations unless you called at noon exactly one month ahead.

  The chauffeur was already pulling away, so I had no choice but to mount the iron steps to the front door. I was desperately grateful that I’d decided to dress up. If I’d arrived in denim and sneakers, I would have died of humiliation right there and spared the cancer the trouble of killing me.

  I swung open the door and stepped inside to be greeted by a black-clad host.

  “You must be Ms. Shaw,” he said, relieving me of my jacket. “This way, please.”

  I stepped forward after the host, my head still muddled with sleep and disbelief, not quite certain that I could trust any of this to be real. The narrow dining room was dim and intimate, with twelve tables that I counted as we passed.

  There was a movement in the shadows of the farthest corner, and I raised my eyes as the host led me onward, knowing who it was even before I saw him—feeling him, somehow, in the darkness. And there he was, standing, watching me with his hungry eyes, wearing another impeccable three-piece suit and a black silk tie.

  Mr. Thorne.

  Chapter Six