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Chapter Nine I spend Friday afternoon at Rose’s house. Claire and I promised we wouldn’t say anything about what happened last night but I have to tell Tina. Anna doesn’t know about the hunting, and if I did tell her she’d probably ground me for life, not that she could enforce it the way she’s either at the hospital or sleeping, but it’s still best if she doesn’t find out. Not right now, anyway. Toby hugs me when I walk in the door and I realise how long it’s been since I last saw him. He turned twelve in the holidays and I wrote him a card from Anna and me, but for the first time ever he had a birthday party with his friends rather than his family and Anna and I. I forgot to mention about Rose’s dad, and you’re probably thinking that it was my curse again, but this one actually wasn’t. Rose’s dad left them all after Toby was born and they found out he was deaf. Toby hasn’t ever been able to say something but you could always tell he blamed himself for it. Rose probably blamed Toby for a bit too, because she loved her dad, but once she worked out why her dad left, she stopped visiting him. She hasn’t spoken to him since, and from what she’s told me, she doesn’t plan to talk to him again in her life.

You can see why it’s odd when I walk past the front entrance and he’s standing in there, and Rose is nowhere to be seen, but it’s just Tina and him yelling at each other. I start to think there’s more than one reason Toby hugged me. I hate to eavesdrop on the conversation but I’m too afraid to walk through the middle of the living room with them arguing. From the parts I pick up, it’s about custody, not of Toby, but just Rose. I have to double check that Toby has his hearing aid, which isn’t actually a hearing aid but a bionic ear, turned off, but the large section of it isn’t even in his ear today. I feel bad for him, knowing the way he felt about being unwanted by his dad, but then I’m almost envious of the fact that he can’t hear what’s going on in that living room.

The arguing cuts of abruptly when I hear Tina, who is almost always a calm woman yell at him, telling him to get the fuck out of her house and never come back, threatening to call the cops if he ever comes back. He storms out in a huff, glaring at me as he walks past, then I slink into the living room with Toby and Neve, and Tina looks at me with her pleading brown eyes looking absolutely exhausted and worn out. She looks at me like she always does, but the nice tone in her voice is gone today and she just demands callously that I tell her what I want or go home. Toby hugs her but I can see her flinch at the contact and it scares me a little to see her like this. Now is not the right time to tell Tina but if I don’t say anything I’m only going to irritate her more, so I ask if we can speak in private.

“Rose isn’t here and the only other one who can hear you is the dog. Spit it out,” she orders, so I tell her about the man, and how I summoned Sefira on him and she just looks at me, almost proudly and says well done. Well done, the words keep echoing over and over in my head. It’s like I had come first in a chemistry test and not killed someone. I apologise for interrupting, but as I do she starts to cry into my shoulder, asking me what she ever did to deserve this. I rub her shoulder and try to console her, even though I have no idea how to relate to her.

After I leave Rose’s house, I head back home where I wait out on the couch for Anna to get home. I don’t want Byron or Hunter or anyone else here, I just want to spend time with her. I have to make sure she knows how much she means to me because we haven’t had enough quality time lately. I wait up until eleven thirty, when Anna walks in, covered in blood and absolutely exhausted. She looks at me blankly, takes off her scrubs shirt where she’s wearing a singlet underneath and she holds it out to me, asking if I can soak it for her. She doesn’t have her smile or emotions of any sort when she says it, she just looks bored. “What happened to you,” I ask, worried she might be getting depressed again. She doesn’t answer my question but instead just tells me she’s going to bed.

It’s happened a few times with Anna. For all the lives she saves, there’s one she can’t save because it’s too late, but then after even more lives saved, there’s another one she can’t and they all add up until the amount she’s saved doesn’t mean anything to her. She drove home covered in blood, which isn’t as bad as the last time, when she couldn’t even leave the surgery room. One of her workmates drove her home and she just sat in her bed for days, sometimes sleeping, sometimes staring at the ceiling. Whenever she washed her hands she just couldn’t stop scrubbing them and scrubbing until they became raw and she would just curl up and cry. I don’t like that side of Anna.

I try to go to sleep after Anna does but all I can hear is her sobbing into her pillow and it sounds like her dying inside. I decide I need something to cheer her up, but I know Byron won’t know what to do, so I decide to leave him out of this. I stay up all night, slightly intoxicated from the smell of cleaning chemicals and I clean the whole house, scrubbing the walls and mopping the wooden floors. I find a block of chocolate I had left over from Easter and I cook up some chocolate chip muffins, which are more like chocolate chunk muffins, then around seven in the morning I ring Hunter and get him to drive me down the library. His hazy answer tells me that I’ve woken him up but I explain that Anna’s having a crisis and he drives over in the ten minutes it takes to drive to my house, his normally straight hair resembling a bird’s nest. I rush in and I borrow the entire book series that she read because of Byron, and then Hunter drives me back home, kisses me on the cheek and asks if he can go back to bed.

I get back inside and there’s a new message on the answering machine, and it’s the hospital, asking how Anna is doing, so I ring them back and tell them that she’s probably going to need a few days off to cope. Anna will probably kill me for that, but even workaholics need a break, and she is in dire need of one. I fill up the bath tub so it’s nice and hot and pour in Anna’s bath salts, the smell wafting out through the whole house. I sit down beside her as I wake her up and her eyes are bloodshot and puffy. She looks much more relaxed than she did last night though, so I figure the sleep did her well. She rasps out “Good morning” to me and I tell her that I ran a bath for her, she smiles and nudges my fringe behind my ear and whispers again, “What would I do without you?”

I wait until she’s in the bath to start cooking her breakfast and she comes out, dressed in her jeans and her big brown woolly jumper which we both agreed could only be worn in the house because it looked ugly. I serve up a plate of chocolate chip pancakes made with the remainders of my Easter chocolate and she smiles devilishly as she sneaks one off the plate and starts ripping off bite size mouthfuls, tossing them up and catching them in her mouth. I hug her and then she looks at me and asks if I got any sleep last night. I tell her that I couldn’t, but show her the books and the muffins I got her so that I can sleep all day. She smiles and asks me again what she’d do without me. Sometimes I’m worried about what would happen if I wasn’t here when she got like this, because other than Byron, I’m the only one she’s got.

“One more thing,” she interrupts as I walk off to my room, and I turn back to face her. She holds out an envelope for me and tells me that she found it in her pocket. I thank her and head back to my room before ripping open the envelope. As I tip it up a photo of Claire and I with the drug addict falls out, and on the back in scribbly handwriting it says “The trees have eyes.” I have to clasp my hand to my mouth to stop myself from screaming, but I can’t let go of that photo, and I just hold it even though it feels like its burning in my hand. I ring Tina, and as soon as she answers I demand that she arranges a meeting with my mother immediately. She asks me what I want her to tell my mother, and for the first time, I tell her I want to speak to her myself. Tina’s voice cracks as she answers a weak, “I’ll see what I can do.” I sit in my bed but I can’t do anything but stare at that writing. Who could possibly know about Claire and me, and especially well enough to sneak this note to Anna?