“You didn’t marry a shoe salesman,” Kaz muttered angrily.
“Your father was warrior. You know that. He was hero in Iraq.”
“And Prairie is a leader. An innovator,” Kaz said. “She can’t help it if her boss is crazy.”
“Thank you, Kaz.” Prairie cut in. “But I made mistakes and I have to make up for them. Terrible things are happening because I was stubborn, because I refused to see what your mother tried to tell me. Now I have to fix them.”
“This is conversation for tomorrow,” Anna said. “Now is time for everyone rest. Tomorrow is Sunday, salon is closed, everyone get some sleep.”
“What about … ?” I asked. As welcome and safe as I felt in Anna’s house, as relieved as I was that Prairie was going to be all right, I couldn’t stop thinking about Rattler, seeing him holding his hand to his face, blood streaming through his fingers. “What if Rattler comes after us?”
There was a brief silence. Anna and Prairie glanced at each other. I could tell they were troubled, that they weren’t saying what they were thinking.
“Please,” I whispered hoarsely. “Don’t keep things from me, I have to know.”
“I think … we are safe for now,” Prairie said carefully. “The injury … I wouldn’t be surprised if Rattler loses that eye. The blood loss alone will be enormous. He won’t be able to do much of anything until he gets some help. Even if he tries to just rest and wait until he’s well enough to travel, it’s not going to be tonight.”
“Your aunt, she describe … what you do.” Anna made a stabbing motion with her hand and I flinched, the memory of the hairpin going into his flesh more than I could bear. “She say it went in far, to eye? Is possible there is damage to brain. Possible he gets much worse after you are gone. You are very brave girl,” she added quickly.
I knew what she was worried about: that I would fall apart if I thought I’d killed Rattler or even disabled him. But that wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t grieve over him. I hoped he was lying on the floor even now, his blood leaking out until he was too weak to say his own name.
And I also felt, deep inside where instinct worked against reason, that he wasn’t dying. That whatever damage I’d managed to do to him, it wasn’t enough. That after he healed he would be as strong as ever, and as determined, and that when that happened he would come after us again.
But I had bought us some time. For now that would have to be enough.
Prairie allowed me to help her stand up. Kaz rushed to her other side and together we helped her down the hall, Anna in the lead. Anna opened the door to her bedroom, where a pretty comforter was turned down on the wide bed.
“I will help Prairie freshen up,” she said. “I have nightgown and robe. Now you two, go to bed.”
Kaz offered to take Rascal out for me while I brushed my teeth and washed my face. They weren’t gone long, and Kaz gave Rascal an odd look as he said goodnight. I closed the door, glad for the solitude. All the tension from the day welled up in my heart and I knew I was close to breaking down.
Instead, I climbed into Kaz’s bed and patted the mattress next to me. “Come, Rascal,” I said, and he jumped up and lay down.
It felt good to put my arms around his warm body, to feel his heartbeat strong and regular under his fur. It almost didn’t matter that he’d lost his personality, that he didn’t ever play anymore. I closed my eyes and remembered the way he used to be, and as I stroked the soft ruff of fur around his neck, I felt a little better.
Until my fingers touched something that shouldn’t have been there.
I worked my fingertips through the dense fur and found a small, hard object embedded in the skin. Anxiety raced along my nerves as I rose up on one elbow and switched on the bedside lamp. I parted Rascal’s fur and looked closer. A little bit of black metal protruded from a swelling where the skin was growing over the object. I felt its outlines with my fingers. Small. Knobby.
A bullet.
I jerked my hand away and sucked in my breath, scrambling away from him. My legs were tangled in the sheets and I half fell, half crawled out of Kaz’s bed. Shock mixed with disgust as I wiped my hand against the carpet, hard, making my skin burn. “No, no, no,” I heard myself whispering, and when I closed my mouth and tried to stop, the words became a desperate moan.
I remembered Rascal waiting in the yard at Gram’s, with blood on his back—he must have been shot when Bryce’s men first came to the house. They must have tried to kill him to keep him quiet.
Maybe it had been a superficial wound, just a minor injury that Rascal was healing from on his own. I clung desperately to that thought, even though I knew it was unlikely, as I forced myself to look at him. He hadn’t moved; he was lying still and indifferent on the mattress. I had to know. Nausea roiled through me as I approached the bed on my knees, staring at the place in his fur where the bullet had entered, trying not to look at his expressionless eyes. I gritted my teeth and reached with a shaking hand and touched him, and when he didn’t respond, I felt like I was touching evil itself and my entire body resisted, my heartbeat pounding a crazy tempo.
I almost couldn’t do it. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt hot tears leaking down my face, and still I couldn’t stop making sounds, quiet little sobs of desperation and horror. But I made myself trace my fingers through the fur around his torso, finding two more dented places where bullets had gone into him. One I could barely feel, lodged deep in the muscle, but one had entered his body far enough that I couldn’t feel it at all, right over his heart.
Rascal had been shot three times. He should be dead. But he wasn’t.
Bullets couldn’t kill him. Because he was already dead.
Because I had made him into a zombie.
I was cursed. I was no Healer—I was a zombie-maker.
I’d known it all along, deep inside. The accident came rushing back and images freeze-framed through my head in rapid succession: all the blood, his organs spilling from his body, the way his eyes rolled up a final time.
Their emptiness when I brought him back.
I brought him back. From the dead.
And now he couldn’t die. He’d been shot and the bullets were in his body as proof; they’d ripped through skin and bone and his very heart, and yet he soldiered on, a robot of a dog.
A zombie of a dog.
I screamed and pushed him from the bed, as hard as I could. His body fell to the floor with a thud, and he got up slowly and stood there unblinking, staring at nothing.
I scrambled to my feet and started backing toward the door, and when the wailing didn’t stop I realized I was still screaming.
The door pushed open and strong arms circled me from behind, practically lifting me off the floor. I fought and kicked and tried to break away as Kaz dragged me down the hall to the living room.
“Stop, Hailey,” he commanded, but he didn’t try to protect himself. Slowly, I ran out of energy and stopped fighting him, and my screams turned to sobs and he held me tight against him.
I heard a door open and Prairie’s and Anna’s voices.
“What happened?”
“Is Hailey all right?”
“He’s not healed,” I cried, letting go of Kaz and running to Prairie. I wanted to throw myself into her arms but I knew how fragile she was, so I just hugged myself, shaking all over. “I turned Rascal into a zombie.”
CHAPTER 20
“YOU HAVE TO TELL ME the truth,” I said as Anna tucked an afghan around me and Prairie. We were sitting together on the living room couch. “All of it.”
Kaz had taken Rascal out to the yard after I insisted I couldn’t stay in the house with him for another second. He put water on for more tea, and the four of us huddled in the living room. Chub, thankfully, slept through the whole thing.
“We never … I don’t know if zombie is really the right word,” Prairie began hesitantly.
“That’s what Rascal is!” I burst out. “He can’t be killed. He came back from the dead.” I
was struggling to control my breathing, and my hands were shaking so badly that I jammed them together. “Just, please, tell me how it happened. Tell me what I did.”
Tell me Milla won’t end up like this
Tell me I’ll never do this to Chub
“This won’t happen again,” Prairie said carefully. She exchanged glances with Anna, who’d said little since I woke everyone up.
They both looked so worried that my anxiety threatened to bubble up again. I felt the scream building inside me, so I squeezed my hands even more tightly together, the knuckles going white. “How can I be sure?”
“It’s only … you must never heal someone who has died. That’s the one rule. Mary taught us that from the start, me and your mom, before we ever healed anything, even a lizard. She wouldn’t even let us heal a dead squirrel or mouse—she made us promise.” Prairie reached for my hands and tugged at them gently until, like a chunk of ice thawing, I relaxed my grip and let her lace her fingers through mine. “I am so sorry you didn’t have anyone to teach you, to explain it all to you.”
You know you’re the future, Hailey
Gram’s words, the dozens of times she’d given me that strange, hungry look—they chased each other around my head, trying to take hold, to grow into full-blown terror. I fought back, focusing on the feeling of Prairie’s warm hands on mine. After a moment, I realized something—the bandages were off her arm, and the wound that Anna had stitched closed already looked better.
Healers can’t help each other, but we’re strong. That was what she’d told me.
I was strong. I grabbed that thought and held it tight.
“So explain it all to me now.”
“There’s not much more to tell. Just the one rule: you must never heal someone who has died. Their body will come back, for a while anyway, but their soul is gone. They don’t feel love, or pain, or any emotion at all. They respond to basic stimuli and will eat and even sleep, though they don’t dream. They can’t make decisions for themselves, though they can hear and process instructions and will do whatever they are told.”
“Rascal does what I say. If I tell him to come, or stay, or—You knew, didn’t you?”
“I … yes, I was pretty sure from the moment I saw him. That’s why I went looking for scars on him.”
“How could you not tell me? How could you know what I had done to him and, and let me keep him in the car with us, let me keep touching him—”
“Hailey, I’m so sorry, but I didn’t know how to tell you without upsetting you—”
“Without upsetting me? I’m so far past upset, I can’t believe—”
“I had to keep you calm,” Prairie cut me off. “I truly am so, so sorry, Hailey, but you weren’t ready to know.”
We were silent for a moment, and I realized it was true. I had been so close to falling apart these past few days. One more thing might have tipped me over the edge.
“How long have you known about … what happens? If you heal, after?”
“Mary used to tell us stories,” Prairie said. “Horror stories, I guess, meant to scare us so we wouldn’t be tempted. When she was a little girl, one of the other Healers couldn’t help herself and she brought back a cat, a pet she loved, and it was just like Rascal. It frightened all the children, the way it just sat on the porch, not moving. People wouldn’t walk by the house.”
“What happened to it?”
Prairie bit her lip. “Mary said it started to … well, its body began to decompose. The bodies of the healed dead can’t sustain life forever.”
“Oh my God,” I cried, fresh horror surging through my brain. Would Rascal start to decompose? Was his body rotting already?
“One day someone—they never found out who—broke the cat’s neck. It was a blessing, Mary said.”
“But I thought they couldn’t be killed.”
“There are a couple of ways—the brain stem has to be destroyed. A … decapitation would work. Crushing of … that area of the brain … A sharp break of the vertebrae could accomplish that, if … Well, you get the idea.”
“It was good person, compassionate person,” Anna cut in.
I noticed Kaz in the doorway and realized he’d been listening, a pair of steaming cups in his hands. He came forward and set the cups down. His eyes met mine and there was sadness in them.
“I’m sorry about Rascal,” he said quietly, “but it’s not your fault.”
“It is. I did it. No one else.” I didn’t add that at some level I had known that what I was doing was wrong, when I felt the energy rushing from me to Rascal’s lifeless body. Even before I knew I was a Healer.
“How … long?” I asked when nobody spoke.
“The decomposition takes longer than it would in a normal death,” Prairie said carefully. “Depending on the health of the person—or animal—it can take up to two or three times as long for the tissues to fail. And other conditions affect it too, of course.”
Heat, I thought, and humidity and insects, all the things we’d learned about in science. I felt like I was going to throw up. I hadn’t noticed anything yet, except the bad smell, and Rascal had been a young, healthy dog, but how long until his fur began to fall out and his body filled with gases and his skin began to break down?
I pulled my hands away from Prairie’s and covered my face, trying to keep the tears at bay. “I can’t stand to see him,” I whispered. “Don’t make me look at him.”
“He’s outside,” Kaz said. “You’re here, with us. It’s all right.”
I wanted to believe him. He knelt in front of me and Anna leaned in and we all huddled together. Their hands comforted me, patting my shoulders and squeezing my fingers, and it helped. I felt closer to Anna and Kaz than to people I had known my entire life. And as for Prairie—I couldn’t imagine life without her now.
But I knew I was still alone in one important way. I’d done the thing that must never be done, the thing Prairie and my mother had been warned about since childhood. I’d done the unforgivable. And I couldn’t help wondering how many ways I would suffer for it.
I thought of Prairie when her face clouded over with private grief. I recognized the solitary pain at her core. She carried a secret with her too, and I wondered if I would be like her someday, marked with a kind of suffering that other humans couldn’t understand.
“What did you do?” I asked her. I had to know if it was connected to the things that had happened, to the thing I had done. “Why did you leave Gypsum?”
Her face went pale, but it wasn’t surprise I saw on her face. Almost the opposite—a kind of resignation. “Not tonight,” she said, exhaustion making her voice husky. “There’s been enough to deal with tonight for all of us.”
“Stop putting me off,” I protested. “You owe me the truth.”
“I’ll tell you in the morning. I promise. After we’ve all had a chance to rest. The sun will be up in a few hours, and we won’t be able to do what needs to be done unless we get some sleep.”
I wanted to fight her, but fatigue was winning. Despite the shock of learning about Rascal, despite having a whole new nightmare to worry about, I was desperate to close my eyes and let sleep steal in and erase everything, if only for a few hours.
“Promise,” I begged in a whisper.
“I promise.” She looked directly in my eyes when she spoke, and in the pale green depths I saw reflected a shadow of myself.
She stayed in Kaz’s room with me for the rest of the night. I insisted that she take the bed, and when she protested, I curled up in the nest of blankets with Chub. I was asleep before she finished telling me not to worry.
CHAPTER 21
IN THE MORNING she was gone, the bed neatly made and sun streaming through the window when Chub and I woke up. I found her in the kitchen, after I’d taken Chub to the bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth.
Before I could demand that she keep her promise and tell me the story, she handed me a travel cup of coffee.
�
��There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said. “Grab a bagel and you can eat on the way. Anna will watch Chub.”
Anna came into the room just then, her face pale and tired, but she gave me a smile that looked like it took some work. There was no sign of Kaz in the house, and it seemed smaller without his presence.
“Go, go, you two,” she said, giving my arm a little squeeze. “I’m making gulasz, we’ll have big lunch when you get back.”
I wasn’t hungry, but I took a bagel from the platter Anna had set on the table. It had been split and spread with cream cheese studded with dried apricots. Anna pushed a paper napkin into my hands.
“I don’t want to go out there,” I said, hating the way my voice went high and thin, but the horror of last night was stirring and threatening to return. I was desperate to keep the panic under control, but I knew if I had to walk past the creature that used to be Rascal, I’d lose it all over again. “I can’t see him, I just can’t.”
“It’s all right,” Prairie said gently. “He’s gone. He’s … at rest.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “What did you do to him?”
“I did it,” Anna said. She stepped forward and placed a hand on my shoulder and gave me a look that was kind but firm. “It was humane, Hailey. I am nurse, I know what to do. Kaz is burying body in park, a place where there are trees, nice place, forest. When you come back, it will all be over.”
I started to shake, and tears dotted the corners of my eyes. I put my hand up to Anna’s, covering it, trying to find a way to say thank you, but I was afraid my voice would betray me. “All right,” I managed to get out.
“Anna is letting me borrow her car,” Prairie said. “Let’s go, and we can talk on the way.”
We didn’t talk much, though. Anna’s car was only slightly newer than Kaz’s, and it sputtered at every intersection as though it was about to die. Prairie fed it gas, revving the engine, as we made our way through the neighborhoods, away from the lake, back to the cloverleaf and onto the highway.
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