Éléonore emerged from the bathroom, leading Tulip by the hand. The girl’s face was a sea of hard red bumps buried under the skin. Cystic acne. The precursors to scarring were already there.
“Sit,” Charlotte invited.
Tulip obediently sat on the stool. Éléonore put a small mirror on the island. “Just in case.”
“Look at your sister for me, okay?” Charlotte slid her fingertips over the hard bumps on Tulip’s left cheek. Magic coated her hand, a steady stream of glowing golden sparks.
“It’s pretty,” Tulip whispered.
“Thank you.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No, it won’t hurt at all. Now look straight ahead for me. Just like that.”
The sparks penetrated the skin, finding the tiny infected hair follicles. The magic pulled on Charlotte. It was a curious feeling, as if some of her vitality were being sucked away, converted into the healing current. Not painful, but alarming and uncomfortable unless you were used to it. Charlotte closed her eyes. For a moment all she saw was darkness, then her magic made the connection and the cross section of Tulip’s skin appeared before her. She saw the pores, the hair shafts, the ruptured follicle walls spilling infected fluids into the dermis, contaminating the nearby follicles, and the severely inflamed sebaceous glands.
Charlotte pushed slightly, testing the flesh. Her magic saturated the tissues of the cheek completely. She opened her eyes. The inner workings of Tulip’s face remained before her, almost as if she were looking through two different sets of eyes at the same time, choosing what she wanted to focus on next.
Charlotte numbed the nerve endings reaching into Tulip’s skin. “Look straight ahead for me.”
The flesh of Tulip’s check contracted. The pus spilled out of a dozen tiny lesions.
Tulip blinked, surprised. “It didn’t hurt.”
Charlotte tore open an alcohol wipe, plucked it out, and swiped it across the cheek. “See? I told you.”
She concentrated on restoring the injured tissue, purging the infection. The bumps on Tulip’s face shivered and began to melt, dissolving into healthy, pink skin.
Daisy gasped.
The last of the acne vanished. Charlotte let the current of her magic die, picked up the mirror, and held it up to Tulip.
“Oh my God!” The girl touched her clear left cheek. “Oh my God, it’s gone!”
This was why she did it, Charlotte reflected, brushing Tulip’s hair from her face. The spontaneous simple relief when the disease was gone. It made everything worth it.
“It’s not gone forever,” Charlotte warned. “It will probably be back in six to eight weeks. Let’s do the right cheek now. We don’t want you to be lopsided—”
A vehicle screeched to a stop in front of the house.
“Who in the world could that be?” Éléonore rose of her chair.
“Let’s see.” Charlotte strode to the screen door and out onto the porch.
At the edge of the lawn, Kenny Jo Ogletree jumped out of a beat-up Chevy truck. Sixteen, broad-shouldered but still lanky, Kenny had been one of her first patients. He’d climbed a pine to chainsaw a branch off so it wouldn’t crash on his mother’s house, and fell. Two broken legs and bruised ribs from the chain saw’s dropping on top of him. Could’ve been worse.
Kenny’s face was pale. She looked into his eyes and saw fear.
“What’s wrong?” Charlotte called out.
He ran to the truck back and dropped the tailgate. “I found him on the side of Corker’s road.”
A man lay in the truck bed. His skin was alabaster white against the dark leather of his clothes. Blood pooled around him in a viscous puddle.
Charlotte dashed down the path, past the ward stone, and into the truck. Her magic swirled from her hands, into the body, and back into her hands. The interior of the body flashed before her. Anterior abdominal stab wound, laceration to the right hepatic lobe, severe loss of blood, hemorrhagic shock. He was dying.
Charlotte leaned over the body, pouring her magic out. It wound about her, binding her and the dying man in a glowing whirlwind of sparks. Her reserves began to drain, as if the magic funneled her very life force out. She directed the current deep into the liver. It flowed through the portal vein branching like a red coral inside the fragile organ tissues. The golden sparks lit the blood vessels from within. She began regenerating the walls, sinking bursts of magic into the liver lobe to mend the damage.
His temperature and blood pressure dropped again.
She pushed more magic into the injured tissues, trying to pull the body out of shock. It fought her, but she anchored it to life with her magic and refused to let go. He would stay with her. He wasn’t going anywhere. Death wanted him, but Charlotte had claimed him, and he was hers. She couldn’t create new life, but she could fight for the existing one with everything she had. Death would just have to do without.
His heart fluttered like an injured bird. He was in danger of cardiac arrest. She wrapped her magic around his heart, cradling it with one loop of the current while feverishly mending the tears in his flesh with the other. Each heartbeat resonated through her.
Pulse.
Stay with me.
Pulse.
Stay with me, stranger.
The lesions in the liver closed. The blood pressure stabilized. Finally. Charlotte knitted together the injured muscle and accelerated blood production.
I have you. You won’t die today.
The man’s breathing steadied. She encouraged circulation and held him, watching the internal temperature creep up. She was burning through what meager fat reserves he had to generate blood cells. There wasn’t much—he was practically all muscle and skin.
The internal temperature approached normal levels. The heart pulsed, strong and steady.
She held on to him for a little while longer just to make sure he was past the danger point. He had a powerful, healthy body. He would recover.
Charlotte disengaged, slowly, a little at a time, and sat back. Her head swam. Blood stained her hands. Her nose itched, and she rubbed the back of her wrist against it, dazed and disconnected from reality.
The man lay next to her, his pulse even. She gulped the air. She was out of breath as if she had run some sort of crazy sprint. The familiar post-healing fatigue anchored her in place. Her muscles ached. The weariness would let go in a minute. During her time at the College, a difficult emergency healing like this was usually followed by a daylong bed rest for the healer, but she was no longer healing someone every day. She wasn’t near her limit.
She’d beaten Death again. The relief flooded her. That’s one life that didn’t have to end. One man who would survive to see his family. She had made it happen, and seeing his chest rise in an even rhythm made her deeply happy.
His hair was very dark, a glossy, almost bluish black. It fanned around his head, framing his face. He was no longer pale. He probably never was as pale as she perceived. Years of practice attuned her senses to react to specific signs of distress in her patients, and sometimes her magic distorted her vision to produce the diagnosis faster. The man’s skin had a pronounced bronze tint, both from a naturally darker tone and sun exposure. His face was precisely sculpted, with a square jaw, a strong chin, and a nose that must’ve been perfectly shaped at some point but now was too wide at the bridge, the result of an old injury, most likely. Short, dark stubble dusted his jawline. His mouth was neither too wide nor too narrow, his lips soft, his forehead high. His body was in superb shape, but the gathering of faint laugh lines at the corners of his eyes betrayed his age. He was at least as old as she, probably a few years older, mid to late thirties. His skin and clothes were stained with mud and blood, his hair was a mess, and yet there was something undeniably elegant about him.