The Healer: A Young Adult Romantic Fantasy (The Healer Series Book 1) (7 page)

What is going on with him?

I considered getting out of my truck and going back inside to figure out what was really happening here, but the idea of entering my own home made me feel nervous. Without understanding why, I quickly backed out of the driveway and pulled away from the house.

I studied the tree in Mrs. Simmons’ front yard as I passed by. It looked completely unscathed. I pulled over to the side of the road and quickly climbed out of my truck. I had to get a closer look. After reaching the tree in two running strides, I stared up at the perfectly browned bark with its rough and slightly weathered texture. Not a burn mark on it. There was absolutely no sign it’d been torched last night. I glanced around, still feeling like someone watched me.

“I’m losing my freaking mind,” I muttered under my breath.

I returned to my truck and headed for the high school. As I glanced in my rear-view mirror I could have sworn I saw another flash of that very odd looking cat, a cat with two tails.

* * *

I walked through the front doors of Eureka High School and gritted my teeth as a young boy with spiked hair and several rings in his face ran into me. The brief contact gave me enough time to connect with his life force. It happened instinctively, and I was shocked I’d connected to it at all. It usually took a little more time than that.

I sensed he was nursing a fractured wrist and a bad sprained ankle. The injuries felt recent. I wondered if a fight broke out before I’d arrived, then noticed the skateboard in his hand. I did my best to smother the sympathetic emotions stirring within me. Now was not the time or place to heal a fellow student.

I forced myself to move away from him and carefully made my way down the hall. Several other students managed to jar me, one right after the other. Their various aches and pains overwhelmed me. Realizing I’d managed to connect with several different life forces in a matter of seconds I froze in my tracks. I tried to hold perfectly still, not wanting to accidentally connect with anyone else. As soon as a pathway cleared I frantically rushed down the hall and into my first class of the day. I stood in the doorway and leaned against the wall, feeling like I’d just passed through a war zone. My thoughts returned to Sarah’s comments concerning my increase in power.

It’s been such a lovely, abnormal morning
.

I walked over to my desk and nearly slammed my knee into it when I saw Angie sitting at hers with a cat-like grin on her gorgeous face. Not only was she here a full day earlier than expected, but she was early to our mythology class.

Early wasn’t Angie’s style.

“Hey, I can’t believe you’re here. I thought you said you needed another day to recuperate. Are you better already?”

“I still feel a bit drained and achy, but I heard there was a new guy in school and that he’s totally hot. I couldn’t stay home lounging around my bedroom while some slut, meaning Tanya Sedgwick, snatched him up before I did.”

I laughed, feeling relieved and happy to know that I had been right as far as Angie’s illness was concerned. I’d begun to wonder if something was wrong with me. Maybe I was sick. It rarely happened, and I didn’t usually notice if I was because it was so easy for my body to heal itself. Sometimes, I had to force my body to stop the healing process just so I could get sick occasionally like any normal human being. It was not pleasant.

“Hey, Hope. HOOOOOOOOPE!”

Angie was waving her hands back and forth in my face.

“Sorry,” I said. “My brain damage has been especially debilitating this morning.”

“Wow, that word had a lot of syllables in it. I keep warning you that everyone is going to start believing you’re incredibly ancient.” She reached over and gave me an I-haven’t-seen-you-for-two-days hug.

I squeezed her back, thinking that her remarks about being ancient felt spot on. I was exhausted.

My stomach grumbled loudly. Exhausted and hungry.

“Crap! I forgot to eat breakfast.” I sat down in my seat and pulled a three ring binder from my backpack. “So, tell me about this new guy. Wait, why didn’t you tell me about him on the phone last night?”

“After you and I finished talking, I received a phone call from a very reliable source who claims that a new family has moved into town, and one of those family members just happens to be male, our age, and hawwwat!”

“Angie, your reliable source wouldn’t by any chance be your eighty-year-old, next door neighbor, Mrs. Potts, would it?”

“Exactly!” she said as if that statement alone proved the validity of her intel.

That woman’s stamina amazed me. Didn’t eighty-year-old women need to be in bed by a certain time?

“Please, she’s a nosy gossip with absolutely nothing to do all day except make up crazy stories to report to the police. Don’t you remember that one time when she convinced the entire police department a bomb had been planted in her front driveway?”

“That was pretty entertaining. She made like a million éclairs and kept feeding them to all the onlookers.” She moved to the front of my desk. “I think she’s just lonely, personally.”

“She’s also blind as a bat.”

“I know. Crazy how she was able to see a hot guy across the street from her house, don’t you think?”

It was obvious Angie had purposely missed my point.

“What’s even crazier is that she’d care enough to call and tell you. Wait, that means the hot guy lives like two houses away from you,” I said finally putting the pieces together.

“I know!” she squealed.

I tapped my pencil to my forehead in an effort to jump-start my sluggish brain cells. I was really struggling this morning.

She leaned over the front of my desk, looking ready to impart some big, juicy secret. I gave her an encouraging smile, knowing Angie enjoyed having an avid audience, even if it was just me.

“Okay, these are the deets. His name is Tie and he’s hot, hot, and hot.”

I stared at her as I felt the shock register on my face. “That’s all you know? That’s all Mrs. Potts told you? This is completely unacceptable. Your investigative skills are getting rusty, Angie. You usually have a guy’s entire life history memorized within the first ten minutes of him showing up on your hot guy radar, and all you know about this one is his first name? You got a last name floating around there somewhere?”

“Okay, first of all, I’ve been out of commission so cut me some slack here, and second, that was pretty much all Mrs. Potts knew. There really wasn’t much to find, although I did happen to inadvertently get a copy of his class schedule, and I know he has folklore and mythology with us.”

“Ah ha. That’s why you’re here early. I was wondering.” I wiggled my eyebrows at her. “And you got his class schedule how?”

It was Angie’s turn to do some eyebrow wiggling.

“For your safety and security, I feel it’s imperative I keep my sleuthing skills to myself.”

“You totally made out with Mr. Peterson’s office aide, didn’t you?” Her eyes widened innocently.

“It was a small price to pay for life, liberty and the pursuit of hotness.”

“Well, considering the fact you probably just gave him your flu bug, I’d say the only one paying the price in this situation is the office aide.”

“And I know he’ll think it was so worth it!” She let out a naughty little laugh.

I joined in and couldn’t stop as other students started filing in. The bell rang, and the last of the students fell into their chairs while Ms. Chinatsu Mori, our Folklore and Mythology teacher, stood up and began to address the class.

I looked around the room expecting to see someone new and good-looking in one of the back seats, but the same old faces I’d seen since kindergarten stared vacantly past me. I looked to my left where Angie was sitting and raised my eyebrows as if to say,
Where’s the hot dude?
She just shrugged her shoulders, puzzled, and then turned forward pretending that her faulty intel and the price she’d had to pay to get it wasn’t as big a deal to her as it should have been.

“All right folks, since it’s February and Valentine’s Day is right around the corner I thought it would be fun to discuss some folklore and mythology that centers around…love.” Ms. Mori said the word love as if she were some swooning teenager.

There was giggling and grumbling in equal amounts as she picked up her piece of chalk and walked over to the board.

“Off the top of your head who do you immediately think of?” she asked, chalk poised at the ready. “Cupid,” yelled out a freshman.

“Cupid, seriously?” Angie muttered under her breath. “Why do they let the little people in with the seniors? It hardly seems fair to the masses.”

“The masses, meaning us?” I inquired softly.

“Of course I’m talking about us. Who else is as important?”

My lips quirked into a smile, thinking Angie’s statement was all the more hilarious because she was absolutely serious. Other students continued shouting out answers.

“Okay, so we have Cupid, Venus, who else?”

“How about Aphrodite?” Angie offered. “Wasn’t she a goddess of love and beauty or something like that?

“That’s correct, Ms. Bellingham.” Ms. Mori wrote the name, Aphrodite, on the board in big flowing cursive.

“At last. A mythological being I can finally relate to,” Angie said in a relieved tone. I chuckled with the rest of the class.

“Isn’t Eros connected with Aphrodite?” asked another lowly freshman.

“I think you students will find these figures from mythology are all connected in some way. For example, Cupid is the Roman god of love, and his name comes from the Latin term cupido meaning desire. He was a winged creature capable of shooting arrows at people’s hearts in order to make them fall in love with whomever he wished.” “Handy, that,” I whispered to Angie.

She scoffed. “As if you or I would ever need an arrow to make a guy fall in love with us.”

“I’d probably need a few,” I said under my breath.

“Eros, on the other hand was Cupid’s Greek counterpart. He was the Greek God of love, and his legend is pretty much identical to Cupid’s,” Ms. Mori continued.

“If Cupid means desire what does Eros mean?” asked another student who seemed to know the answer from the lewd look on his face.

Ms. Mori leveled her own look at him and continued on as if she hadn’t heard his question. Ripples of laughter erupted throughout the class.

“The most well-known legend of Cupid and Eros involves a beautiful woman,” Ms. Mori began. “She was a mortal princess, and her name was Psyche. She was so incredibly beautiful, men soon began worshipping her instead of the Goddess of love, which could be Venus or Aphrodite depending on whether we are talking about Eros or Cupid. You see how the stories and characters relate to one another?”

There were mumbles of agreement and a few nods as well.

“The Goddess of love and beauty was so jealous of Psyche, she instructed her son to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest creature she could find, but when Eros tried to stick Psyche with his arrow he accidentally stuck himself, saw Psyche, and
he
fell in love with
her
. Soon they became lovers, but Eros forbade her to look upon him. He was afraid his mother would find out about the affair.”

“That is sooooo typical. Guys are always hiding me from their mothers,” Angie said to no one in particular.

“Wait, who is Eros again? I thought we were talking about Cupid!” said another freshman.

“Freshmen are such a disease!” Angie muttered as she picked at her fingernails.

“Cupid is Eros’ counterpart, remember?” I said to the bewildered freshman in the seat beside me.

He looked at me gratefully and sneaked a terrified look at Angie before sinking backward into his seat.

“As I was saying, Eros, or Cupid if you will, ended up leaving Psyche after she unmasked him. Psyche went searching for him, and the Goddess of love tried to destroy her by making her accomplish dangerous tasks in order to find her lost love. Eventually, Eros discovered what was going on and rescued Psyche from a sleep induced coma brought on by an item from the underworld.”

“Huh? When did she go to the underworld?” asked the same clueless freshman.

Angie sighed dramatically. “It was one of the tasks set forth by Venus you tiny worm.”

“Isn’t Venus supposed to be Cupid’s mother? I thought we were talking about Eros now.”

The look Angie gave the kid was close to apoplectic. “Are you still speaking?” she asked in disbelief.

I put my hand on his arm and eased him back in his seat where he was out of Angie’s line of vision. “I’ll give you my notes after class,” I said to the bewildered boy.

He again looked at me gratefully and avoided eye contact with my best friend.

I considered my best friend as she daintily picked at her fingernails. Angie could be abrasive, but I‘d learned a long time ago to cut her some slack. Though she looked put together on the surface, her sarcastic remarks and indifferent attitude hid years’ worth of repressed pain, anger and sorrow. I didn’t understand where those volatile emotions came from, and Angie was never forthcoming during her dark periods when she would call me in tears and beg me to come over and spend the night with her. I was the only one who could bring her out of it, and I was the only one who Angie was willing to have physical contact with during those periods of time. Both of our parents had come to an understanding long ago. Whenever Angie got like that, I stayed at her place until things were better.