simple twist of fate

by red-starshine

part five: so alive

Chas lightly brushed his fingers against where his skull had hit the bookcase and was rewarded with a driving pain where the skin was beginning to swell. There was a sharp, pounding ache at the bottom of his head, pulsating in time to the beat of his heart, and it didn't seem to be going away.

Until it abruptly did, like someone had thrown a switch inside his brain to turn off the pain.

The absence of pain was enough for him to wince. "The fuck?" murmured Chas.

John blearily wiped a hand across his face. "What?"

Chas pressed down on the spot again, lightly at first and then again harder when there was no pain or even a dull ache. He couldn't feel the bump anymore either.

"My head doesn't hurt anymore."

John's eyebrows lifted. "What?" He stood up, almost empty bottle of beer forgotten, and walked behind Chas. "Sit down."

Chas sat down at the table, tilting his head down. He felt John carefully move his fingers through his hair, feeling for the bump that wasn't there. "This doesn't hurt at all?"

"Nope."

John was quiet for a moment. "Sit tight," he said, and then walked to the collection of cobweb-covered artifacts taking up one wall. Chas saw him select a dagger the size of a bread-knife and pull off the thin scabbard, revealing a long, serrated silver blade. He also grabbed a white dish towel from the kitchen. "I want to see something. Hold out your hand."

Chas did as he was asked, but with a growing sense of trepidation as John held the tip of the knife over his palm. "What are you doing?"

"Relax, I'm just going to make a small cut," said John. "It'll sting, but I won't make it too deep." He frowned, clamping a hand around Chas's wrist to keep him steady.

"Why?" asked Chas, even as the pieces were falling into place. He just didn't like the picture that was starting to form.

John's eyes flicked up to his, and he somehow managed to look both innocent and incredibly guilty at the same time. "Hope you're not squeamish, mate," John said instead of answering him, placing the tip of the knife against the thin skin covering his palm.

Chas grunted when the knife pierced his skin. It hurt even though John did it quick, blood welling from the cut. When he pulled the knife away, a thin red line ran across Chas's palm.

John dabbed at the blood with the towel, cleaning it away from the cut he'd made.

As John and Chas watched in silence, their heads almost touching, the skin on Chas's palm slowly joined back together until the only sign John had made the cut at all was a faint raised line, like an old scar, and a smear of blood on his hand.

Chas wrenched his hand away from John. He pressed his fingers against where John had made the cut.

He didn't feel any pain. Only his nails digging into the skin hurt, and not in the way that a fresh cut should.

"John, what the fuck did you do?" he growled.

John looked down, cleaning the knife with a clean corner of the towel. "What I had to do," he said. "To bring you back."

"So, I should be dead, but I'm not. I should be injured, but I'm not," said Chas. "What the hell is going on with me?" Chas froze as a truly horrible thought occurred to him. "Am I a zombie?"

John looked almost disgusted. "No."

"Vampire?"

"No," John repeated louder. He stood up and grabbed Chas's hands again, "Look, Chas, you're still human. I didn't do anything to change that. You're not going to crave brains or starting drinking blood." He glanced aside, his eyes landing on the scar. "As far as I can tell, this is a side effect of the spell I cast to bring you back to life. It would repair the damage to your body, restart your heart, make you live again, but the magic'd keep going even after you were revived. I think, any injury you get now, your body will heal itself from in short order."

"Then stop it," said Chas, staring at John. "Make it go away."

"Can't, mate," said John. "That spell's the only thing keeping your body going. Even if I thought I could stop the healing, I wouldn't want to risk you dying again if I thought wrong. The magic won't work if I tried to cast it again."

Chas didn't say anything.

John sighed. "The spell I cast on you," he started after a moment. "It's very old, very complicated. Dates back to the Dark Ages. Supposedly Merlin was the one who came up with it, but it's not like I can ask him, so who knows, really? Most mages nowadays think it's a myth, or something important's missing – nobody's been able to make it work in hundreds of years."

"And you could?" said Chas.

"It's not a matter of the spell being incomplete or made up at all. The opposite, actually," said John. "The spell is so complex it's sentient, in a way. You have to be using it for what it deems to be the right reasons in order for it to work. Casting it for bragging rights or because you want to create an unstoppable killing machine won't cut it."

"But," said John quietly. "If you want to bring a good man back whose life was cut short, who died trying to save others, and the magic agrees, it'll work." John looked up at him. "That's why you're the only one I could bring back from the fire, Chas. It could only work once, and I wanted it to be you."

Chas considered what John had said. "What you're saying is that the spell that brought me back to life was...some kind of character test?"

"For both of us. I had to be casting it for mostly unselfish reasons, and you had to be, I don't know, someone who deserved another go-around at life."

Chas stared at John. He shook his head, feeling very, very tired. In the few hours since he'd woken up in a morgue, he'd helped John send one of the other victims of the fire on her way to the afterlife, been transported over eight hundred miles to Atlanta by taking a single step into John's House of Mystery (which still sounded like a cheap tourist trap, like something out of one of the cartoons Geraldine liked to watch), been thrown into a bookcase by an actual angel, and now had discovered that the same spell that'd brought him back to life also made his body heal itself if he was hurt.

"Please tell me you have more booze," said Chas after a moment.

John's mouth split into a grin. "Well, you happen to be in luck," he said. "I've got lots."