Chapter 6 #3
“That’s …” Ani glances at me, then angles her body in an attempt to cut me from the conversation. “We discussed this. We don’t want to get involved.”
“You can feel me too?” I say. “My pain?”
Ani’s shoulders stiffen. “It’s none of our business. But yes, you’re broadcasting it loud enough.”
I meet Isaiah’s warm gaze. “You’re both healers.”
“We are … but we’re unique.”
“Pops …” Ani sighs, then rubs her face. She’s still clutching her purse.
Their clothing is well maintained, shoes polished. Everything practically pristine, nary a frayed hem in sight. But I catch the careful repairs with a closer look.
“Sit down,” Isaiah says, his tone verging on sharp.
Ani drops into the booth next to him, perching on the corner of the bench seat. She softens her own voice. “Please, I’ll sort it all out. I’ll take care of you.”
“Healers of your caliber —” I say.
“What do you know about it?” Ani snaps, momentarily forgetting that I scare the fuck out of her.
“Rudeness will not get you what you want in this world,” Isaiah admonishes.
“I don’t need anything except for you to be safe,” his granddaughter counters.
“I won’t let you build your life around me,” Isaiah says firmly.
“So you throw yourself at imminent danger?”
“The Healers Institute,” I say, trying to shortcut the conversation as the itch to start moving again — to stride ever forward, always enduring, as Isaiah put it — shifts through me.
“What about it?” Ani asks caustically. She doesn’t look at me.
“They have in-residence healers —”
“You think we don’t know that?”
“I’m old,” Isaiah says.
I squint at him affectedly. “Really?”
He graces me with a smile.
“I’m …” Ani hesitates. “I’m not good enough.”
I feel her lie, or at least an equivocation, slide over me. “You can feel pain radiating from me … through all the energy I carry. Not a single other healer has ever stated the same.”
Ani looks a little sick, still not looking at me. A smile ghosts over Isaiah’s lips.
“So … your power is unique in some fashion,” I say. “Unique enough that you’d like it to remain hidden?”
“Of course not,” Ani says.
“Where is the main wound, Zaya?” Isaiah asks, apparently done with the digging-into-each-other’s-secrets portion of the conversation.
I tug my T-shirt away from my neck and shoulder, pulling back the bandage just enough to expose the top of the seething bite mark marring my skin.
“What the fuck …” Ani whispers, horrified. “That’s … is that infected? With what?”
“Venom of some kind,” I say.
“But that …” She leans forward, clearly engaged now despite herself. “The surrounding tissue is dead. That’s necrosis, isn’t it?” That last question is directed at Isaiah.
He nods, looking serious but not overly concerned. “Yes.”
“But that would have to be removed … how the fuck is it not … is it still bleeding?” Ani shakes her head in disbelief, sending all her dark curls flying again. “But there … there isn’t any blood on your clothing … how are you walking around like that … it must be excruciating.”
“The universe needed me moving,” I say simply, allowing the bandage and my shirt to fall back in place. “Blood seeping through my clothing would have been a hindrance.”
Ani blinks at that.
Isaiah chuckles, pretending I’m joking.
“We … we can’t fix that,” Ani whispers to him.
“We wouldn’t be here if we couldn’t,” he says.
“We …” Ani glances at me, then quickly away. “We can’t owe her. And we can’t pay her price.”
“An even trade,” I say, though I still have doubts as to whether they actually can heal me.
Isaiah, still gently cradling my hand in his, leans toward me.
“How do you feel about a Mercedes-Benz 280 SE?” he asks, nodding out the window toward the metallic-green beauty that’s already caught my eye.
“1970. All original parts, single owner. I paid extra for the custom color. Opted for the sunroof, though. I never did think a convertible made any sense.”
“What!” Ani squeaks. “That’s your pride and joy!”
“Why do you think I brought it out for our drive today?”
“To sell it?”
“A trade,” Isaiah says.
Ani clutches her purse tighter. “I won’t let you do it. I’ll find another job, enough to take care of us. The local clinic —”
“Enough,” her grandfather says. “Zaya is eager to get moving.”
I smile at them both. “The car isn’t quite an even trade though. Do you have a phone I could borrow?”
Ani blinks at me. “What?”
I hold out my free hand. “And remind me of the name of the head of the Healers Institute?”
“The … the …” Ani stutters. “Of the California branch?”
“No, that will take too long.”
“Let us heal you first, child,” Isaiah says. “Your wound aches through these old bones. Ani?”
Looking a little lost, Ani lays her hand on Isaiah’s forearm. She drops her gaze, staring at the table. Essence shifts where they’re touching skin-to-skin, then pools in the palm of Isaiah’s hand.
He meets my gaze steadily. “When I was just a boy, a purple-eyed seer passed through with a carnival that came around yearly. I didn’t have the money for one of her readings, but two of my brothers and I snuck into her tent one night … just for a look, you know?”
His hand warms under mine, essence tickling against my skin. “Completely understandable.”
Isaiah chuckles quietly. “She caught us, of course. Though we’d watched her leave before risking the intrusion.
She made a great fuss and shooed us out, but caught me by the shoulder and held me back.
She set those purple eyes on me, many shades darker than your own, and told me that many, many years from then, I would come across another like her, but nothing at all like her.
That I would be given a choice by the universe itself, to give myself over to fear or to embrace my power and use it without doubt.
I have waited nearly eighty years to make that choice, Conduit. ”
Ani is crying, her gaze fixed to her grandfather’s face.
I’m having trouble not doing the same myself.
Our paths were destined to intersect for decades before I was born, and even though I’ve lost so much since then.
Even if that path has been altered again and again.
Isaiah knew who I was. He knew and still slid into the booth with me.
“You never told me,” Ani whispers, wiping her free hand over her face.
He clucks his tongue. “Now why would I? I couldn’t have you impatiently waiting with me.”
She laughs wetly.
“Give me everything you’ve got, granddaughter of mine,” Isaiah says. “We’ll need every last drop for Zaya. Divinity can’t be left to wander the world wounded. Imagine the ramifications.” He shudders playfully.
But I realize he’s not wrong — on so many levels. My aunt wandered wounded, her rejected soul-bound mates wandered wounded …
More energy pours from Ani, twining through Isaiah’s essence, then slowly filtering through to me — up my arm, over my shoulder. It knits and weaves more than just the obvious wound, as if I have internal tears and breaks as well.
Ani opens my glasses case and plucks my sunglasses out of it with one hand, awkwardly sliding them over my ears. “Your eyes,” she murmurs. “They’re glowing.”
I smile at her, straightening the glasses with my free hand. “No one is watching us.”
She glances around to confirm that not a single person is looking our way. We’re in one of those protected pockets that I either subconsciously generate, or that the universe randomly drops me within.
More essence pours into me. Ani starts to sway in her seat, but she keeps her attention on her grandfather as he gives me every last drop he has without faltering.
The wound on my shoulder hurts as it knits together, then smooths out. I can feel my skin shifting, blood infusing the dead tissue.
Ani tightens her grip on Isaiah’s forearm, looking pale.
The essence under my palm, in Isaiah’s palm, sputters. His fingers twitch, then go limp. But before he can pull away, before he can sever the connection between us — a connection I cannot forge on my own — I latch my fingers around his wrist.
I give him back everything he gave me and just a touch more.
Ani gasps. But before she can react more strongly, I press my other hand over hers where it still rests on Isaiah’s forearm.
We hover like that, in that moment, leaning toward each other over the table — completely connected on an essence level.
When my own energy starts echoing back to me, I slowly slide my hands away from them. Isaiah looks tired but at peace. Ani flexes her fingers, looking at her hand in wonder.
Before I can settle back against the seat, Ani hooks the collar of my T-shirt, pulls off the bandage completely, and exposes the skin where the Cataclysm fed from me. It’s too pale, like the rest of me, but is otherwise unblemished.
She looks shocked, then utterly pleased.
“Now,” I say, slightly shaken by the intimacy of the moment. “Give me that phone and a name.”
Ani laughs, pure joy threaded through the sound.
It takes one utterance of my name, one transferred call, and thirty minutes for the Healers Institute to eagerly offer a placement at their California facility, including housing, wages, an expense account, and the assurance that Isaiah and Ani can work in tandem and have their pick of patients.
I also get the director to cover our lunch bills, along with a generous tip, because I once again have no other way to pay.
He was rattled enough by the conversation that he had to get his assistant on the phone with the diner’s manager to figure out how to do that.
I had interrupted his golf game, but it was the director who remembered the favor and why he owed it to me.
He thanked me again, so profusely that I was worried it might reinforce the favor owed rather than letting him pay it off.
Apparently, I’d found his runaway niece, through Coda.
She was in the wrong place — Indonesia — at the wrong time, embroiled in a drug ring. And I redirected her path.