Soft Apocalypses by Lucy Snyder Page B

smiled. His voice was rough, but it worked. His head had been torn off when he lost control of his motorcycle and wrapped it around a tree up in the mountains. She’d not been sure she’d gotten his vocal cords reconstructed properly.
    “Rest now. You don’t need to worry about a thing. You just need to get your strength back.”
    She leaned down over the antique feather bed and kissed his still-cold forehead. At least the sleet that had slicked the roads that night had also meant he’d been wearing his helmet with the visor down. He hadn’t gotten anything worse than a bloody nose when his head went skittering down into the rocky ravine.
    Shattered bones, punctured lungs, crushed organs and severed spines she could handle; damaged brains were hard. It was like trying to put custard back together. If she’d had to bring him back from a crushed skull, chances were she’d end up with a zombie on her hands that was only the barest revenant of the man she loved.
    “What happened?” he asked, his eyes already fluttering into the sleep of the living.
    She kissed him again, then straightened up and re-checked the position of the I.V. needle in his arm. Her hands were trembling; it was definitely time for breakfast. The saline-and-glucose drip was still three-quarters full. She’d put two units of O-negative blood into him during the night. He needed far more than that, but even if she’d replaced all his blood, he’d still be more dead than alive. It would be several days before his system recovered from the shock. For now, it was most important that she not let him dry out while she slept.
    That the transfusion needle was steel was unfortunate but unavoidable; she’d made sure to put it in his good arm, where the steel’s interference with the life magic would cause the least damage to her work. Nothing else in the room contained inorganic iron; the I.V. stand was aluminum, the furniture put together with wooden pegs, the light fixtures bronze, the wiring copper. That floor of the mansion had its own breaker switch, and she’d turned its electricity off before she’d started work. Electricity had an unpredictable effect on resurrections.
    She snuffed out the candles surrounding the bed and set her tray of bandages, sutures and ceramic surgical instruments up on the vanity. In the old days, she’d had to use instruments made from wood, ivory, and glass. Her mother had taught her how to chip scalpel blades from broken windowpanes, which Mary had always found a deeply tedious task. Modern ceramics were a wonderful invention.
    Mary’s skills as a witch kept her in high demand as a healer, but she’d never hoped to work on Karl. Soon after they started seeing each other, she cast a ward on him to keep him from harm. Dogs would not bite him, bees would not sting him, drunks would not pick a fight with him. But the spell couldn’t protect him from the laws of physics, so she added a divination element to warn her when he was getting into danger.
    She’d been downstairs reading a potboiler mystery when she had a vision of Karl sliding sideways on the icy highway. She sped out to Pineytop Road to try to intercept Karl before he crashed ... but she couldn’t get there quite fast enough. At least she was able to get his body into her trunk before anyone else passed by and saw the wreck. The bike was a total loss, and far too heavy for her to lift; she rolled it down out of sight in the ravine.
    Mary pulled the covers up to Karl’s bandaged neck and stumbled to the bedroom door. She locked it behind her to keep her lover from prying eyes and started down the stairs.
    Yolanda, their housekeeper, came through the back door just as Mary got down the stairs. The younger woman’s eyes widened when she saw Mary.
    “My God, are you okay?” Yolanda exclaimed.
    Mary looked down at herself. Her sweatshirt and jeans were smeared with Karl’s blood. She’d been so focused on saving Karl that she hadn’t noticed.
    “I’m