Eve's Rib, page 1
Eve’s Rib
ALSO BY C.S. O’CINNEIDE
Petra’s Ghost
THE CANDACE STARR SERIES
The Starr Sting Scale
Starr Sign
Eve’s Rib
C.S. O’Cinneide
Copyright © C.S. O’Cinneide, 2022
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All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Jenny McWha | Editor: Dominic Farrell
Cover designer: Laura Boyle
Cover image: shutterstock.com/KHIUS
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Eve’s rib / C.S. O’Cinneide.
Names: O’Cinneide, C. S., 1965- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210368934 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210368942 | ISBN 9781459749801 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459749818 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459749825 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8629.C56 E94 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
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For Mom and Dad.
Thanks for not feeding me to the wolves.
Prologue
Eve sat at the kitchen table and waited for the life to drain out of her.
She had called in sick at work, knowing what was to come. The cramps that would start off weak and low, rising to a crescendo that would eventually twist and expel. The spark of life within her had already begun its all too familiar flicker. It would soon go out. A tiny sun gone supernova. It left a black hole inside her every time. Eve could not predict the future, nobody really could, because there was always more than one. But she had been here before and knew the signs. She was, in this way, like any other woman who had suffered similar disappointments.
She knew she should count her blessings. Her career was at a high, her marriage of three years was as solid as the house Richard and she had just bought — a three bedroom with a wraparound porch that hugged them snugly at the edges. But those successes only seemed to mock Eve as she continued to fail in this one regard. She felt as if she were to blame, somehow careless with the fruit of her husband’s seed. A rotten gardener, not deserving of a child.
She rose from the table and went upstairs, stood outside the brightly decorated nursery. Dust had settled on the mobile above the solid wood crib, tarnished the shine of its silver stars. Eve reached out with her hand and sent the mobile spinning without touching it. The dust flew into the air to sparkle in a beam of morning light. She had greater powers than this, was able to move not only objects but circumstances with her will and a practised incantation. Eve could see for miles using only her mind’s eye, whisper suggestions that allowed others no choice other than to follow. She could do all this, but she could not keep a baby inside her for nine months. Despite all the spells she knew, despite medical technology, that magic escaped her. Even IVF, that modern-day womb conjurer, was not an option. Eve had no trouble getting pregnant, only staying that way.
Eve had never asked to be a witch, if that’s what she was. The word was only a close approximation of her nature. Most people, she supposed, did not get much of a say in who they were. The act of becoming was an organic process rather than a conscious choice. What we want has to percolate in the atmosphere along with what was meant to be before it is distilled enough to rain back down on the world as destiny. If you’ve ever stuck your tongue out to catch a raindrop, you know wild things don’t taste the same as the contrived, and fate was a wild thing.
It had been her friend Janet who’d first seen the gifts within her, back in high school. She’d taken her to Nanny, Janet’s Jamaican great-grandmother, so they could perfect their skills together under her greying tutelage. Nanny would sit them down at the base of her frayed green-and-white lawn chair and pass on her ancient wisdom. About the white and the black of magic, and the line that lies in between. Nanny had been the first one to tell Eve the story of the Ragman. That’s what she used to call him, after the tinker who came around the house when she was a young girl, sporting his jacket full of wares. You don’t want what he’s selling, little girl, she’d told Eve late one night as she and Janet sat with her at the old farmhouse Nanny kept at the lake. You got to promise Nanny you won’t answer the door if the Ragman calls. Eve had nodded her ponytailed head that sultry evening and promised. But that had been a long time ago.
Eve closed the door to the nursery and made her way to the bathroom. Sitting down on the toilet, she watched as the first drop of blood fell into the bowl, blooming in the water like a rose. Soon it was joined by others, making the crimson bouquet complete. It didn’t take as long as the last time.
When it was over, she cleaned herself up, showered, and put on a sanitary pad. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen table and got the box of chalk she’d bought that morning. Pulling on the rope that brought down the stairs to the attic, she climbed them with heavy steps, like a woman mounting the gallows.
As Eve drew the pentagram on the floor of the attic, tears mixed with the dust of the chalk. She stood and surveyed her handiwork, trembling. Then she lay down with her flat belly at its chalky apex and bought everything the Ragman had to sell.
One
Eighteen Years Later
Eve tried to rest her book on the rib that wasn’t broken. She looked around the emergency waiting room, saw the cop stationed at the door, the nurse behind the bulletproof glass. A man with one shoe snored softly in the corner, cradling his hand in a blood-soaked T-shirt like a red, angry newborn.
“This is quite the place, isn’t it?” the elderly woman in the plastic chair next to her said. She was well dressed, with salt-and-pepper cropped hair. Eve and the older woman sat in a lineup of grubby orange seats placed against the wall across from triage.
“Yes, it is,” Eve said. She knew the older woman was only trying to be friendly, looking for conversation to pass the time, but Eve was hurting too much for small talk. She returned the friendly lady’s smile while simultaneously attempting to silence her with an incantation of muteness. Unfortunately, the woman’s Coke-bottle glasses were too thick. Eve couldn’t initiate enough eye contact to get the spell to personalize and stick.
“I was in here last week.” Salt and Pepper shook her head. “And it was something, let me tell you. People screaming — and the language.” The woman made a short series of tuts, possibly as a form of Morse code for the language she was too dignified to repeat.
“Hmm.” Eve winced in lieu of another smile as she turned back to her book, hoping the social cue would work better than the incantation. She was usually a kinder person than this, but the pain was making her less of one. Despite looking down at the book, she managed to keep track of what was going on around her with a well-developed mind’s eye. This was one of the few gifts she could still execute with any mastery. Through the window to the triage room, she watched a nurse question a sleepy-eyed prostitute who slouched in a chair. A yellow, viscous liquid that looked like an egg thrown at Halloween had dried on the bulletproof glass. It distorted the nurse’s and the prostitute’s faces, so Eve couldn’t read them for signs.
“Don’t you think I know that!” The prostitute’s raised voice reverberated against the smeared glass. Eve looked up from her book. The woman was perched on the edge of her moulded seat as if she were afraid of catching something nasty from it through her short skirt. When she leaned too far across the desk toward the nurse, a burly orderly arrived, causing her to crumple back into the chair. She cried softly. Eve turned both her primary and secondary sight away, not wanting to pry.
“They shouldn’t have a window like that,” the woman beside Eve said. “People deserve their privacy.”
Eve nodded, but she knew why windows were necessary. The hospital staff were doing their work in a fishbowl so no one would think they were out for a smoke break or getting laid on a gurney somewhere. A wall could hide the possibility that there was no one behind the wizard’s curtain, would prevent them from discovering that they were all waiting for nothing and no one. Such situations tended to breed anarchy. That was why the world developed religion, as well as witchcraft. They were both ways to help punch through the wall to get a better look at what was on the other side.
“I’m here for a urinary tract infection. Can’t seem to get rid of it. My daughter’s got a bad chest cold.” Salt and Pepper indicated a woman a bit younger than Eve in the chairs reserved for those already processed by triage. The woman’s dau ghter managed a weak smile in their direction before coughing into her sleeve.
Eve shifted in her tacky bucket seat of plastic. The slight movement sent a searing pain from her lower rib into her spine. She wished she could wrap it in some healing magic, but she wasn’t powerful enough. She was once. But a witch’s power was only as strong as her spirit, and hers had been broken five years ago.
“I feel like I live here,” the woman beside her continued. “My husband died this spring and then I had a stroke and then this.” She peered over at the book that Eve had balanced on her lap. It was a murder mystery set in Glasgow. A lot of fucks stood out on the page. She wondered if the chatty lady would notice and complain about language again. Eve was a writer. A few years ago she’d quit her tech job to write full-time, with limited success. Her own gritty crime novels had a lot of fucks in them as well.
“So, what are you here for?” Salt and Pepper asked her after a short interval. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
Guessing what was wrong with other people was the only game to play in an emergency waiting room. Everyone tried to figure out the reasoning behind a young healthy-looking man being taken ahead of an ancient Filipina woman in a wheelchair. But judging books by their covers was rarely accurate when assessing other people’s pain. Eve had tried to assess the maladies of other patients as she’d waited, but without using any of her special capabilities. She could open certain people up, but they were rarely pretty inside. She tended to focus on the covers, just like everybody else.
“Rib,” Eve said, indicating her clutched side. “I fell.”
The door opened on the nurse’s bulletproof cage, and the young prostitute walked out with a brave smirk on her face as she tugged at her tube top. She took a seat next to the coughing daughter and pulled out a phone sporting a bright-pink case encrusted with rhinestones and ten-dollar-hand-job spunk.
“Eve Knight!” the triage nurse called through the open door. Eve stood up, stifling a gasp as her rib shifted unnaturally. She tucked the book with the bad language into her large purse, holding it to her left side where the bones behaved better.
“Well, good luck, dear,” said the little lady who lived in the emergency ward.
“Thanks,” Eve said, turning to look back and address her, even as her right side flamed in disagreement. “Good luck to you too.”
* * *
HOURS LATER, EVE WAS LYING prone on an examination table, being yelled at by a doctor working the last thirty minutes of a back-to-back shift.
“Why are you not takin’ the pain medication?”
The doctor had a heavy brogue that made him hard to understand. Scottish, like Eve’s murder mystery. There were faded brown stains on the sheet of the thin mattress she lay on. She hoped it was old blood, rather than something more recent and less sterile. A pretty young med student stood by, shadowing the doctor to learn how things were done.
“They make me sick,” Eve told him. “The meds.” She didn’t like to take pills. Medication, like magic, was uneven in its efficacy and prone to side effects. The Tylenol 3s with codeine had made her vomit. She could still hear the sound of her ribs popping as she heaved.
“A broken rib hurts like hell. There’s nothin’ you can do but take the pain meds.” The doctor’s nostrils flared like those of a charging bull in a lab coat.
Eve wished she had gotten the nice doctor. She had heard him making his rounds behind the curtains earlier, asking a young girl gently if she was sexually active and then kindly explaining to her what that was. But Eve had gotten the mean doctor who yelled, so everyone could hear how pathetic you were. She was glad he didn’t ask if she was sexually active. She wasn’t sure what that was either. After twenty years of marriage, Richard and Eve still had sex, but it wasn’t that active.
“I know it’s supposed to be painful.” Eve held her side. She was afraid the mean doctor would touch her again with his sharp hands. Does this hurt? Does this hurt? He’d dug his nasty digits into her upper abdomen with no mercy before, only stopping when she’d yelled “Shit” at the top of her lungs like a safe word.
“You didn’t see a doctor when this happened? Just got pain meds prescribed over the phone?” The doctor tutted like the elderly woman with the urinary tract infection.
“Yes.” Eve squirmed on the squeaky mattress. “My doctor knows me.” Eve, like her family physician, knew there was nothing to be done for a broken rib. You couldn’t put a cast on it. You weren’t even supposed to tape them anymore because it interfered with your breathing. Eve had wrapped an old, greying tensor bandage around her middle anyway and made the phone call to Dr. Verschuren to ask for painkillers.
People thought witches had all sorts of herbal tricks up their sleeves for healing. But the modern pharmacy grew out of the apothecary of wise women and was the natural progression of it. Only backward amateurs used essential oils infused with horsehair to treat illness and injury. Although there were still some remedies that worked as well as they had back in the Middle Ages, Eve couldn’t get them at the trendy little Wicca store that had opened up on Main Street. She ordered hers off the internet and got them delivered to her front door. More modern magic.
“I was worried maybe there had been some internal damage, you know, to an organ,” Eve said. The pain had been so bad every time Eve reached her arm out or twisted her torso that she was afraid one of the ribs was spearing her liver or perhaps a kidney.
“The ultrasound doesn’t show anythin’ of that nature,” the doctor snapped, consulting his clipboard. He can look inside people too, thought Eve.
“You fell onto some garbage cans, you’re sayin’?”
Eve tried to sit up on the exam table to answer. After a few failed attempts to roll over onto her good side and sit upright, the med student offered her a guilty hand.
“I fell into a garbage can,” she corrected the doctor, trying to make things clear. “I was cleaning it, and I slipped and fell in.” Eve hadn’t slipped. But she had been trying to reach one last piece of grime on the inside of the can with a sponge when it happened. It was a huge bin with wheels on it, so tall the top was well above the waist of the cut-off shorts she wore for housework. Eve had taken the full brunt of the lip of the can on her lower ribs when she fell, caught in a hard plastic–ridged Heimlich manoeuvre. A screech had emitted from her insides rather than the cracking noise one might expect. It had sounded like a taut rope slipped from a rusted metal pulley.
“Do ya drink?” The doctor switched to a different line of questioning. Eve ran a comparison between the screaming drunk three curtains down who’d soiled himself and the recycling bin full of empty red wine bottles she had in her garage.
“Not really. A glass of wine in the evening, maybe.” More like two or three glasses of wine in the evening sometimes, but that seemed like the wrong answer.
“Keep takin’ the pain meds and come back in if you have any trouble breathin’.”
Eve nodded, promising to only come back and be humiliated again if she could no longer draw breath. Satisfied, the mean doctor pulled back the curtain in search of another patient to yell at in the fifteen minutes he had left in his shift.
The med student lingered.
“Why did you fall?” she asked Eve.
“Dunno. Must have slipped on a banana from the green bin.” Eve tried to laugh off the lie, but it hurt too much.
“It’s just, you’ve been in here before.” The med student spoke softly, perhaps she’d been learning more from the nice doctor than the mean one. Maybe she could explain to Eve what sexually active was.
“Is there someone at home to take care of you? Your husband, perhaps?” It was a veiled question, looking for a threat.
“He’s away,” Eve said, shutting down the conversation with another lie. “My daughter’s at home. She’s seventeen. She can help me.” She slid her white-sneakered feet to the tiled floor of the exam room, holding her ribs in place with her hand. She reached over carefully to pick up her purse from the chair.
“I know about your son.”
