CarnalHealing

by Virginia Reede

  He must have been able to see, or sense, Lenore’s hesitation, because he spoke.

  “This isn’t over, witch,” he said, but his voice no longer held menace, only peevishness. Finally, the magic ball felt solid in Leonore’s hand, and she prepared to throw another missile, confident that her aim would be true this time.

  It was, but too late. Agile as a cat, the man vaulted up and over the edge and into the blackness beyond, moments before the barrier exploded into fist-sized chunks of concrete and a cloud of gray dust.

  She ran toward the spot where the man had disappeared and looked down, fully expecting to see a dark and broken form on the ground eight stories below. But the sidewalk, illuminated by streetlights, was empty. Her gaze raked the side of the building, looking for some ledge or outcropping that might have snagged the body, but there was nothing. Then there was movement on the ground below, and she just had time to see something dark and fast disappear around a corner of the building on the opposite site of the street, like a black cat running away from a pack of wild dogs.

  Leonore screamed in wordless frustration. She realized she knew how he had escaped—in that split second when her own magic had risen to deflect and then envelop the Draíodóir’s missile, she had understood his power. He would have used his ability to move objects to slow his own fall, just enough to land on his feet without injury.

  She turned away from the rubble of the barrier and, suddenly, her gaze was riveted on the dark figure on the opposite side of the garage floor. Jeff.

  The knowledge that he was dead, and that he’d died to save her, and that, in her lust for revenge, she’d momentarily forgotten about him, hit Leonore like a blow.

  “Jeff!” A sob caught her, hard, and she ran toward his lifeless form, the last of the Draíodóir’s loathsome magic draining away.

  As she got closer, something was different. Leonore still saw the bright end of the cable coming through the chest, but now one of Jeff’s hands was wrapped around the protruding wire.

  It wasn’t like that before.

  An enormous bubble of something—hope, she realized—pushed its way up through her despair as she skidded to his side and fell to her knees.

  Impossibly, Jeff’s eyes were open and he looked at her, blinking.

  “Le-Lenore,” he said. “Need…emergency.”

  “Hush, Jeff. Let me see.” She put both hands on him, palms pressed against his chest on either side of the protruding cable.

  “Call the E.R.,” he gasped.

  “No time,” Leonore told him, and it was true. As her magic—hers, not the foul, borrowed magic of the Draíodóir—flowed down and into the wound, Leonore could see the cable’s path. It had missed his heart by a fraction of an inch, but had nicked some sort of tube or artery—Leonore didn’t know its name—and was partially plugging the tear it had made. Jeff’s life blood was leaking around it, filling his chest cavity.

  As if reading her mind, Jeff said, “It’s the subclavian artery. Got…the lung too, I think.” There was blood on his lips and Leonore saw that he was right—one lung had been nicked as well, but that wasn’t what was killing him.

  Leonore had never tried to repair a rapidly bleeding wound before—had never had to, even if her magic had been strong enough. But she knew with absolute certainty that she could do it now. Her magic simmered around the ragged edges of the wound, eager to stitch flesh together, to build cells, to join severed ends. The nick in the lung seemed to almost patch itself, and Leonore saw the rise of Jeff’s chest and the surprise in his eyes as the lung suddenly reinflated.

  But she couldn’t repair the artery with the cable in the way.

  “Jeff, I’m going to lift you off the cable,” she said, and he immediately started to protest.

  “No, Leonore, I’ll bleed out,” he gasped, trying feebly to push her hands away. “You have to call the emergency room.” Even though Leonore could feel the strength leaving his body along with that precious blood, his voice was stronger now that both lungs worked.

  “You have to trust me!” she said, willing him to understand, and she felt the magic flare around her, surrounding her in a glamour, giving her words authority. Jeff’s hands, which had moved from the cable to Leonore’s wrists, relaxed, and she read and felt the absolute trust in his eyes. He nodded.

  She moved her hands under his arms and rested one beneath each shoulder blade. He was heavier than she was, and her normal strength would never be enough to lift him, but she reached for the last of the Draíodóir’s magic, which she now realized had been leaking away like fog under a hot sun. But there was still enough of that power to bolster her strong muscles and, in one smooth movement, she lifted Jeff up and off the twisted coil that had impaled him, then laid him carefully on the floor of the garage, so that his head rested on the fallen barrier. She knelt next to him and laid her hands back on his chest, close to the wound.

  The moment the obstruction was removed, the flow of blood leapt from a trickle to a gush, and Leonore hurried to plug the leak with her power. After a heart-stopping moment of hesitation, the blood and tissue bent to her will, and the torn edges of the artery began to knit and reform. The blood stopped leaking out and began to pulse strongly through the artery and into the network of veins beyond.

  She turned her attention outward, along the channel that the cable had cut, first through the skin and strong muscles of Jeff’s upper back, scoring the top of one rib and the bottom of another, along the edge of the lung and out between the same two ribs in the front. It had then traveled through two layers of chest muscle and come out on the skin above and to the right of his nipple. Inch by inch, Leonore repaired skin, bone, muscle and sinew, as the magic whirled and flashed and shimmered around her.

  She took the blood that had leaked into Jeff’s chest cavity, cleansed it, energized it, and pushed it through the walls of the organs and back into the veins where it belonged, and it seemed to sing with joy at regaining its home. As Leonore’s magic answered, it was as if she were running through Jeff’s veins, floating along the blood like a raft over rapids, spinning and bouncing and splashing in exhilaration. She entered his heart, and felt the rush as the huge throb of that muscle propelled her along, even faster. Then she wasn’t just in his veins, she was everywhere—in his muscles and organs and skin. She heard his gasp—or was it her gasp, articulated through Jeff?—and then finally burst free, back in her own body.

  She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. She was still on her knees on the concrete, her palms against Jeff’s chest. The last shimmers of magic seemed to fall around them, like the dying sparks that fell to earth after the last burst of a fireworks display.

  * * * * *

  Jeff opened his eyes, then closed them again when the light streaming through the window blinds hit him full in the face. Something was odd about the light. The bedroom of Jeff’s condo faced west, which was why he seldom bothered to pull the curtains. The morning light in the room was gentle, which meant—

  He looked at the clock. Four fifteen. How long had he been asleep?

  Jeff sat up and immediately looked down at his chest. Had he dreamed it all? No, there was something on the right side, near the top of his pectoral muscle. He got up and went into the bathroom, hitting the switch that turned on the fluorescents on either side of the mirror.

  It was faint, but it was real—a line, about two inches in length, slightly lighter than the surrounding flesh. It looked like a long-healed scar.

  He positioned the bathroom door so that its full-length mirror was behind him, then turned to face it, so that he could see the reflection of his upper back in the more brightly lit mirror over the sink. There was a scar there, too, shaped like a crooked asterisk. He stretched, expecting soreness. There was none.

  He turned and faced the mirror again, almost expecting someone else to look back. But, no, it was just his own familiar face—a little more tired than usual, perhaps, and in need of a shave.

  “So, Jeff. Anything ne
w with you?” he asked his reflection.

  Well, Jeff, old buddy, I got skewered by this evil sorcerer on the roof of the hospital parking garage. Luckily, this witch I’ve been fucking was there at the time, or we’d be having this conversation somewhere in the vicinity of the pearly gates. Other than that, no, nothing new here. How about you?

  He stared at the mirror for another few seconds, then shook his head, as if that would make everything clearer. It didn’t.

  He heard voices downstairs, and recognized Leonore’s. Another voice, also female, was unfamiliar. He went back to the bedroom, got a pair of jeans out of his closet, and put them on. Leonore was sitting at his kitchen counter, opposite an African-American woman in a Boston Police Department uniform.

  The stranger saw Jeff first and nodded toward him, which caused Leonore to turn her head.

  “You’re awake,” she said, then smiled. “Jeff, this is Tish—Letisha. She came by to say that the thing with your car is all taken care of.”

  Letisha, who had stood while Leonore was speaking, came around the counter and extended a hand. Jeff shook it automatically.

  “Taken care of?” he asked, stupidly. The last he saw his car, it was an upside down wreck.

  “I made sure I caught the call,” Letisha explained. “A flipped car on the roof of a parking garage isn’t something you see every day.” She grinned. “It took some creative writing, but I managed to prevent anyone from opening a case file on you. Your insurance company might be another matter, though.”

  “I, uh, thank you,” Jeff replied, not knowing what else to say. Then he remembered something. “What about the cameras?” There were security cameras all over the garage, at least on the floor where he parked.

  “It seems that something was interfering with the signal. The last thing that showed was Leonore getting out of the elevator. After that, it all goes blurry.”

  “The Draíodóir must have done that,” Leonore said.

  “The what?” Jeff asked. He felt like someone else was having this conversation.

  “The sorcerer who was trying to kill me,” Leonore said. “The Draíodóir are—well, it’s a long story.”

  “Something to do with you being a—” He couldn’t quite make himself say it.

  “A witch,” Leonore replied. “Yes, they have something to do with it. Ancient enemies who, up until last night, we hoped were mythical. We don’t know much about them.”

  “And,” Letisha supplied, “from what Leonore told me about them, they seem to know everything about us.”

  “About you—Leonoreans.” The word still sounded strange to Jeff, but Leonore and Letisha both nodded, perhaps thinking that because he had used the word, he was accepting the situation.

  Well, he was still working on that. Weirdly, the stuff that had happened after the bizarre happenings on the roof—the attack and the subsequent healing—seemed more like a dream than the magical events. Leonore had helped him to her car, although he’d hardly needed her support. His injury, which should have killed him, had seemed to be—absent. They’d driven out of the parking garage and come back here as if they were returning from a night at the movies.

  Except that Leonore was covered with concrete dust and grime, and his bloody shirt had a couple of ragged holes in it. She’d calmly pulled her cell phone from a pocket and called Letisha, explaining briefly what had happened, and asking for help with the police report. Jeff had listened in silence, still too stunned to react.

  Once back at the apartment, his tongue had finally started to work again. Leonore had patiently answered his questions, sometimes the same ones over and over, until he was too tired to ask any more. Then she’d coaxed him into the shower, persuaded him that he should call the hospital and explain that he wouldn’t be in the next day, and put him to bed like a child. He’d thought his swirling thoughts would keep him awake, but he’d slept like the dead.

  He came out of his reverie to see that the cop—Tish, Leonore called her—was talking to him.

  “I gotta get back to the station. See you tomorrow, okay?” Letisha gave Jeff a sideways glance, then, shrugging, took both of Leonore’s hands. The two women quickly chanted a few words in what sounded like Latin, then the policewoman released Leonore’s hands, nodded at him, and walked out the door.

  Jeff sat down on the barstool Letisha had just vacated opposite Leonore, and they stared at one another for a moment.

  “You must still have a million questions,” she said.

  He looked at the counter, then at her. “Yeah. But you already answered most of them. I just can’t seem to process the whole thing.”

  Leonore got up and poured a mug of coffee, then returned to the counter and slid it in front of Jeff before sitting back down. Such a typical domestic scene, Jeff thought. A woman has spent the night at her boyfriend’s apartment and, when he wakes up, they have coffee.

  Except that it’s late afternoon, the woman is a witch, and the man should be dead.

  A new question did occur to him.

  “Why were you at the hospital, anyway?” Jeff sipped the coffee, surprised that it tasted totally normal.

  Leonore was silent for an instant before she answered. “I was…healing someone. A child.”

  He thought about that. “Do you do that often? Lurk around hospitals and heal people?”

  “Sometimes. Not as much as I’d like.”

  “Why not?”

  She sighed. “I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of saint. I don’t do this all the time. I might if it was possible, but it’s not. It takes too much out of me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Leonore took a deep breath, as if marshalling her thoughts. She stood up and started to pace.

  “When I first found out I had the ability to heal,” she started, “I was still pretty young. A teenager. I thought it meant I was destined to be some sort of healing angel—that I was supposed to become an Army nurse, and save wounded soldiers, or maybe join the Red Cross and swoop in after a natural disaster and reattach limbs or something.” Her smile was rueful. “I was naïve. And I didn’t understand my gift—I thought it would get more powerful. But—”

  She stalked back over to the barstool she had abandoned. “It turns out that every time I heal someone, it drains my magic. I have to recharge in between healings. And that can be…complicated.”

  “How do you recharge your magic?” Jeff asked.

  Lenore looked up at him, and he thought her cheeks looked pinker than usual. He hadn’t imagined Leonore would blush at anything. “I, um, have sex. To the point of orgasm.”

  “Do you mean that you masturbate?” Jeff asked.

  Leonore shook her head. “No, that doesn’t really work. I—we—haven’t ever really figured out why. No, there has to be another person involved. Something about drawing on their sexual energy.”

  The full implication hit Jeff. “You mean when you met me in that bar—when you said you were out to get laid—you were telling the truth? You were just, like, recharging your battery?”

  This time, Jeff was sure that the deepening of the blush on Leonore’s cheeks was not his imagination. But, mortified or not, she looked him in the eyes. “Yes,” she admitted. “That’s exactly what I was doing.”

  Jeff wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “Then, when you ran into me at the hospital…”

  Leonore shook her head firmly. “No, that was different. I’d never actually done that before.”

  “Done what before?”

  Leonore shrugged. “You know…gotten together a second time with someone I’d previously, um…”

  “Used as a fueling stop?” Jeff could see Leonore was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, but he wanted to understand.

  Leonore nodded again. “Right. Exactly. And I have to tell you, I really surprised myself when I agreed to go on an actual date with you.”

  To Jeff’s surprise, Leonore’s last statement made him feel a little better. She’d used him, sure. But he b
elieved her when she said that her decision to accept a date with him had been an unusual step for her.

  “Okay,” he said. “That explains what you were doing at the hospital the other day. But, what I meant was, why were you looking for me last night?”

  She took another deep breath before replying. “I was there to see Lucy.”

  It took a moment to register. “Lucy? As in my patient Lucy?”

  She nodded. “I wanted to make sure she was still…healed.”

  Jeff stared at her, trying to comprehend. Then, light dawned. “You mean it was you who…who made Lucy well? You healed her cancer?”

  Leonore’s voice was soft. “Yes.”

  The world reeled and, if Jeff hadn’t been sitting, he would have staggered. “It wasn’t the treatment,” he said, and his voice sounded strange in his ears. Dead. “It was you and your…your magic. The experimental treatment—”

  He stopped talking, afraid he would choke on the bile rising in his throat. He got up and walked to the sink and poured the still-warm coffee down the drain. Suddenly, he couldn’t imagine drinking it.

  Leonore stepped behind him, and Jeff felt hands on his back, massaging. It felt good, but he pulled out of her grasp and took a couple of sideways steps, putting distance between them. He crossed his arms, waiting to see what she had to say.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” she said, no hint of apology in her tone. “When I…healed her the first time, I had no idea she was part of a study. I just felt all that cancer and I had to get rid of it.” She searched Jeff’s face and must not have like what she saw because she went on, “Surely, you’re not angry that I healed her. The cancer would have killed her, Jeff. I felt it. I wasn’t trying to sabotage your treatment—I was just trying to save her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Leonore. Of course I’m not sorry you healed her. I’m a fucking pediatric oncologist, for god’s sake. How could I not want you to heal a child?” He still couldn’t believe it. “Jesus, I’ve been totally deluding myself. I thought I was saving her—that the new treatment might save a lot of kids. And, all the time, it was you.”