The Healer: A Young Adult Romantic Fantasy (The Healer Series Book 1) (32 page)

“I didn’t watch it. I didn’t know she’d jumped until I heard her scream. It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to listen to. I’ve heard her scream in my mind ever since. It changed me. It had to, right? Having your actions drive another person to end their own life isn’t something you ever want to be guilty of. Not even a selfish god like me wants something like that to happen.”

I was happy he’d learned from such a horrendous mistake, but felt sorry for the guilt he’d been carrying all these years.

“Why didn’t you heal her?”

“I couldn’t. She died before I had time to give her life force the necessary instructions.” He looked like he was fighting back tears. “I did care for her. I think I might have tried to make it work, but my destiny was with someone else, and I knew it. I never touched another mortal woman again, at least, not until you came along, and you were only half mortal.”

“How long after that incident was I born?” I asked.

“A few hundred years. The first time I saw you was at our betrothal ceremony when you were fifteen. I didn’t want to meet you, and I certainly didn’t want to like you. I was still punishing myself for what I’d done to Edana.”

He reached for me again, taking my hand in his.

“But when I saw you…you were so frightened by the throngs of people and by the sight of me. I wanted to whisk you away from everyone. You looked up at me from your incredibly long, dark eyelashes, squared your shoulders, and stuck your chin out. It made me love you.”

“I don’t remember any of this,” I said feeling frustrated.

“You may not ever remember.” He looked relieved at the thought. “It really doesn’t matter now, does it? You’re right here in front of me, breathing in and out and looking just as beautiful as I thought you would. We can fix this now.” He drew me in closer. “We can make this right.”

“Make what right?”

He paused for a moment, clearly hesitant to answer my question. Then he asked one of his own.

“Hope, each time we’ve kissed, have you felt anything or seen anything unusual?”

My eyebrows narrowed at this bizarre question. I opened my mouth to speak, but was interrupted.

“Excuse me,” Angie yelled from the front door.

I stepped away from Victor.

“You owe me some down time, and I am seriously sleepy. We need to talk before I pass out, and I have no intention of passing out until you give me some much needed best friend attention. Honestly, how did I get bumped to the bottom of the list when I deserve so much more?”

“I’m coming,” I called back. I was actually happy Angie had interrupted our conversation. Victor had given me a lot to process, and I wasn’t ready to discuss my future with him as a permanent fixture in it. “I better get inside before Angie comes out and drags me in. She’s scary when she’s pushy.”

“Of course, Hope. We can continue getting to know one another some other time.”

He raised both of my hands to his lips and kissed them. He looked like he wanted to grab hold of me and never let me go, but whatever impulse he felt he managed to resist and merely gave me one of his charming smiles. I watched him walk back to the house and disappear inside.

My conversation with Victor had answered many questions and raised several more. I had no idea what he was trying to fix or how I’d get my memories back. It troubled me that the thought of Victor with a girl like Edana didn’t bother me nearly as much as the thought of Tie with a girl like Edana did.

Was Tie’s flirtatious behavior toward me a way to get even with Victor, and nothing more? He was here to help, but was he also here to hurt? Why would he have led Victor and Ms. Mori to my hometown if he’d been helping my parents at one point?

Nothing about my life made sense anymore.

Chapter Seventeen

Ms. Mori’s second floor was like an elegant looking hotel. I couldn’t believe how many rooms there were. It wasn’t like anybody lived with her. We each could’ve had a room to ourselves, but Angie and I weren’t about to be separated, although I was dreading the inevitable talk we’d have concerning my healing powers.

My father took the room right next to ours. I think if Angie hadn’t been with us he would’ve demanded to stay in the same room with me. He may have been tired, but his parental rights were being threatened by my mythology teacher, and my life had already been endangered twice tonight.

He was very tightly wound.

I made my way up the stairs and walked down the hall toward the first door to my right. I wanted to say goodnight to my father before I faced the inevitable with Angie. I was almost to the door when I heard Tie’s familiar voice floating softly from within.

What was Tie doing in my dad’s room? I stood to the side of the entryway and listened.

“You have to help me get Hope away from here tonight,” I heard my father hiss.

“I can’t do that this time, James. I got you out of Kagami, but I can’t get you out of this. Hope needs our protection now,” Tie responded unhappily.

“I thought you were our friend. Why bother helping Julia and I escape if you were just going to lead Ms. Mori and Victor right to us seventeen years later?”

I held my breath, anxious for the answer.

“I knew the demon god had finally found you.”

“How? How could you know that?”

“I have several unsavory connections. You wouldn’t have survived the attack and Hope would have been taken. And then there are those nekomata who simply want Hope dead. We barely got to you in time.”

There was a pause in the conversation, and I wondered if I needed to leave before I got caught.

“What do you get out of this, Tie? Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the help. Having you on our side makes me feel like the playing field has been leveled somewhat, but why are you doing this?”

A heavy silence followed my father’s question. I waited, impatient to hear more.

“Let’s just say Hope and I share a rather complicated history, and leave it at that.”

“What does that even mean?”

I wondered the same thing.

“Look, when it comes to Hope, I’ll always do what’s best for her. Okay?”

“That still doesn’t answer my question.”

More silence followed, and I couldn’t help but feel frustrated. I was never going to get straight answers from anyone it seemed.

“I’m sorry about Julia,” Tie said changing the subject.

It surprised me to hear Tie mention my mother’s name.

“I had no idea the nekomata suspected Hope so many years ago, and I should have known. I could have prevented that disaster if I had known.”

“Don’t,” my father interjected. His voice was laced with pain. “You say the nekomata took the form of Hachiman?

“Yeah, it left you alone when your daughter couldn’t heal your wife. The way Hope described it, I’d swear Julia knew what was going on and left her body on purpose.”

“To save Hope.”

“To save Hope,” Tie agreed. “That’s what we all want to do, isn’t it? We just want to save Hope.” He sounded like he meant it.

I had to walk away after that. Hearing Tie talk about my mother was, in a word, devastating. It’d been awful, believing that I’d failed to save my mother when I’d had the power necessary to do so, but to think she’d consciously died for me made it worse. The guilt was worse. I tore into the room Angie and I were sharing and tried to forget about the conversation I’d just overheard.

There were two twin beds on opposite sides of the room. I promptly crawled into one of them and listened to Angie while she okayed our slumber party with her mom. She finished her conversation quickly, sat down on the other bed, and stared at me, waiting for me to crack under her intense gaze.

“Go ahead, Angie. Let’s start this already,” I finally said.

“You can heal people.”

She got right to the heart of the matter. I wanted to look down, but I knew I owed her. I matched her gaze and nodded in the affirmative.

“For some reason, I’m not at all surprised. It explains a lot, actually.” She rubbed the back of her neck and stayed silent for a few seconds.

I waited for her to yell at me. Get good and angry. I almost wanted her to. Anything was better than this weird, almost quiet acceptance of a secret that should’ve been shared with her long ago.

“How long have you been able to do this?” she asked.

“Ten years.” I had to choke back a few tears when I said it. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to cry, but I did. I felt like crying for a good, solid week.

“Ten years. That’s a long time to keep such a huge secret from your best friend. However did you manage it?” Venom was seeping into her voice.

“It was hard to keep it from you. I’ve always wanted you to know, but my father told me to keep it secret. He…we were afraid if anyone found out, something bad might happen to me.”

Angie’s eyes burned bright with anger.

“I must’ve seemed like quite the threat,” she spat out.

“Angie, it wasn’t like that.”

“You don’t get to talk right now. You don’t get to call the shots, okay? I’m your best friend, and for ten years you kept this from me when I could’ve been there to help you. I could have supported you. Who else knows besides your father?”

“Kirby.”

“Kirby gets to know, and I don’t?” she yelled.

I got to my feet as Angie shot to hers.

“I had to let Kirby know so I could continue healing him…er, trying anyway. His leukemia is relentless, and it’s not going away. I’ve been doing this for months now, and there was no way to keep him from knowing.”

Angie looked at the floor and started chewing the inside of her cheek. She tended to do that when she had something really nasty to say but was doing her best to hold back. It didn’t happen very often…holding back, that is.

“So you were seven when it first happened?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“What
did
happen? How did all of this craziness get started?”

I felt strangely uncomfortable. It was so hard to come to terms with the fact Angie was no longer a part of that safe haven I’d turned to for so long. She’d been wholly untouched by this part of my life I’d kept secret and hidden. In a world where fiction seemed to play a huge role in my reality it had been nice to have Angie on the outside of all that, representing the kind of crazy-normal I so desperately wished was mine. With Angie involved in all of this there really was no safe haven anymore. No person I could turn to who could help me forget, for just a little while, that I was not your average teenage girl.

“You fell out of our tree house,” I said reluctantly. “Your head hit a rock. My Dad called the paramedics, but I connected with you while we were waiting. I don’t know how it happened or how I knew what to do, but I healed you immediately.”

Angie looked up. She was so surprised her eyebrows were shooting into her hairline.

I held out my hands.

“You were gonna die, Ang. So I fixed you. I should’ve told you sooner, and I’m sorry.”

She startled me by running over and wrapping her arms around me. Then she cried softly into my shoulder. My battered emotions, together with my lack of sleep, and Angie’s unexpected water works began taking their toll, and before I knew it, I was sobbing right along with her. I could feel the tears rolling down my face and nearly laughed when I considered what it had taken to unearth my biggest secret and get a serious moment with Angie.

“Are we okay, then?” I asked.

She nodded and pulled back. Her teary face took on a sheepish expression.

“In all honesty, I don’t have much room to throw accusations at you. I’ve never really been the same since the day of that accident. No one knows that better than you do, Hope, and you’ve stood by me through all of the crazy times without expecting any answers. I guess we were both hiding things from one another.”

“Does that mean you’re going to tell me what you’ve been dealing with for the last ten years?”

Angie let out a shaky breath and nodded.

“I had no idea how close I came to dying that day, but it makes everything else that’s happened since then more understandable. It’s probably what triggered my visions.”

I held my breath, fearing to show my curiosity and spook her into clamming up.

“I can see how a person is going to die if I touch them. When the contact is skin to skin the picture is much more detailed.”

My eyes widened. “You…Angie…you witness people’s deaths…before they even happen?”

She lowered her eyes to the floor and nodded.

“The gloves,” I said. Angie’s bizarre eccentric behavior was so much easier to understand now. “You’re not afraid of germs, you’re afraid of touching other people’s skin.”

“I generally wear them when I can’t take the images anymore. Sometimes I need a break, but I’m constantly bumping into people, and I never know if I’ll accidentally touch a hand or a bare arm. There are other times when I can handle it just fine, and sometimes I’m able to help people who are going to die from stupid accidents. I usually find ways to interfere.”