Belittle Me Now And Cry Later

Chapter 10

Marcus straightened up and opened his hand. He looked at the hole in the stone. He looked at his fist, perfectly unmarked, not even a scratch on the knuckles.

“It's real,” he whispered.

Something moved in his chest not the power itself, but something quieter than the power. Something that had been sitting at the bottom of him for a very long time, cold and tired and heavy, and was only now beginning to understand that things were different. That everything was different.

He turned back toward the steps.

The two guards had seen the hole in the driveway. Both of them were no longer standing casually. One had grabbed the radio on his belt, his hand trembling. The other was already moving down the steps, one hand raised in what was meant to be an authoritative gesture, though his face betrayed his fear.

"Hey, stop right there—" the advancing guard called out, his voice cracking slightly.

Marcus did not stop.

He moved toward them and it took very little effort. The movements came to him as naturally as breathing, his body executing techniques that his ancestors had perfected over centuries. It was brief. Controlled. Precise.

The first guard lunged at him. Marcus sidestepped effortlessly, his hand shooting out in a motion too fast to follow, striking a pressure point on the man's neck. The guard's eyes rolled back and he went sideways into the stone pillar at the bottom of the steps with enough force to sit him down hard. He slumped there, conscious but dazed, all the fight gone out of him in an instant.

The second guard barely had time to grab Marcus's arm before Marcus shifted his weight in a way that redirected the grab entirely, using the man's own momentum against him. The guard stumbled forward, off balance, one knee coming down hard on the wet stone with a sharp grunt of pain.

Before he could recover, Marcus's hand flashed out—just a single finger slap to a specific point behind the guard's ear and the man's eyes glazed over. He collapsed face-first onto the ground, out cold.

Marcus looked down at both of them, his breathing still perfectly steady, his heart rate barely elevated. The techniques had flowed from him without conscious thought, as natural as walking.

"I don't have time for any of you," he said quietly to the unconscious and semi-conscious men. "My mother's life comes first."

Then he turned and walked away, his stride steady and purposeful, leaving the Li family estate behind him without a backward glance.

**

St. Mary's Hospital was loud and bright the way hospitals always are—fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the constant beeping of monitors, the shuffle of feet and murmur of worried voices creating a wall of sound that pressed in from all directions.

Marcus came through the main entrance in his ruined, blood-stained shirt, his hair still wet from the rain, and pushed through the crowd in the main corridor. He was moving toward the emergency wing because that was where his mother was that was the only thing in his head now, getting to his mother before anything else happened, before time ran out completely.

He heard it before he turned the corner.

Crying. Raw and uncontrolled, the kind that comes from someone who has passed the point of trying to manage themselves and is just making noise now because the body insists on it. High and desperate and breaking on every other sound, each sob tearing through the air like something being ripped apart.

Marcus rounded the corner into the emergency corridor and stopped.

A young woman in a black dress was on her knees on the floor, both hands pressed to her face, her whole body shaking with the force of her grief. She was beautiful in the way that grief makes some people beautiful stripped down to something essential, every pretense removed, every social mask shattered. 

In front of her, a gurney was being moved slowly toward the far end of the corridor by two nurses who were no longer moving with any urgency. The kind of slow, respectful pace reserved for those who no longer need rushing.

The woman on the gurney was not moving at all.

Pale as chalk. Eyes closed. Hands flat against the white sheet covering her body. Chest completely still, not even the faintest rise and fall of breath.

Marcus stood there and felt it go through him like ice water, because he had just run to this hospital for this exact reason for a mother lying exactly like that—and the terror that he might not have gotten here in time for his own mother seized him. But he was standing in front of someone else's tragedy, and something in the knowledge he had just been given, something in the inherited healing techniques now residing in his mind, was already telling him what it was seeing.

He looked at the woman on the gurney more closely, his newly enhanced senses focusing, penetrating beyond what ordinary eyes could perceive.

Not gone. Not quite.

There was a flicker there. Barely perceptible, the faintest spark of life force still clinging to the body, like the last ember in a fire that's nearly gone cold. The kind that a person with ordinary eyes would never find, that medical equipment might not even register. But Marcus was not looking with ordinary eyes anymore.

"She's not dead."

He said it without deciding to say it, stepping forward into the corridor, the words out before he had consciously chosen them.

The corridor reacted immediately.

Heads turned. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. The two nurses pushing the gurney slowed to a halt, their faces registering confusion and then irritation. The woman on the floor lifted her tear-streaked face from her hands and looked up at Marcus with swollen red eyes, and for one second there was something in them something raw and reaching and terrified to hope.

"Excuse me?" one of the nurses said sharply, and the tone of it was not a question, it was a correction. It was the voice of someone dealing with a disruption they did not have time for.

"He said she's not dead," someone in the nearby crowd of onlookers repeated, and from the way they said it, from the slight laugh in their voice, they found the whole situation absurd.

"Brother, what are you doing?" A man near the wall straightened up and pointed at Marcus accusingly. "The doctors already confirmed it. They declared her dead. Don't go messing with a grieving family like this. Have some respect!"

"This is not the place for whatever this is," another voice added from somewhere in the crowd.

"I'm sorry, but you need to step back right now." One of the nurses moved to block Marcus's path, putting a hand out. "The patient has been declared deceased by Dr. Morrison himself. There is nothing anyone can do. Please, let us—"

"She has a flicker," Marcus said, his voice cutting through the protests with quiet authority. He looked at the nurse directly, his gaze steady and unwavering. "Very faint. But it's there. Her life force hasn't completely left yet. I need two minutes."

The nurse stared at him, her professional composure cracking slightly in the face of his absolute certainty.

"Two minutes," Marcus said again, his voice firm but not aggressive. "If I'm wrong, you've lost nothing."