by Audrina Cole
“Is the guilt starting to kill your buzz?”
I cocked my head and opened one eye to see River standing over me, arms folded across his chest. Ugh. Stupid Healer empathy. If I didn’t put up some kind of shield, it was almost like advertising my thoughts.
I nestled deeper into the couch. “Go away, River.”
“I’m part of this family, too,” he whispered, crouching down beside me. “I have a life here. Why do you always have to go around doing stupid stuff that could get us all locked up in some government lab somewhere?”
“What do you mean, ‘always’?” I mumbled with a sigh. “I’ve only done it once before. If I waited for permission, I’d never heal anyone.”
“We’re not supposed to heal anyone completely,” he hissed. “You know that.”
“What’s the point of having abilities if you can’t ever use them? If I can’t heal, then healing isn’t a gift. It’s a curse.”
“Don’t let Mom hear you say that.”
“Why not? It’s true.” I crossed my arms and flopped back on the sofa. “And look what happens when we do cure someone—we put other people at risk. It’s not fair.”
“Well if you did it the right way, you wouldn’t have gone into bloodlust.”
“That’s a cop out, and you know it. Mom would never let me do it the ‘right’ way. She doesn’t want me to cure anyone at all.”
“She’s protecting the family.”
“Yeah, but what kind of people does that make us?” I sat up, looking River in the eye. “If we hide in the shadows, when we have the ability to save lives, doesn’t that make us cowards?”
River shifted his gaze away, picking at the seam of his jeans. “It just means we want to survive. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” I sighed. “I just…I hate this. I feel so powerless. If I don’t heal people, then I feel like a selfish coward. But if I do? I’m putting the lives of everyone else around me in jeopardy. I end up feeling like a monster.”
“You’re not a monster. None of us are. It’s not our fault that we crave blood after a major healing, any more that it’s our fault that we crave a burger when our stomachs are empty. We just choose the more humane path, and feed off blood bags after healing, just like we choose to be vegetarian rather than chow down on a burger.”
“Which is fine, except Mom never wants to let us do it at all—proper way, or not. She does it herself at the hospital, but you and I aren’t allowed to heal anything more than the flu. So yeah, maybe I screwed up. But I just feel like…I don’t know…like sometimes I need to heal.”
River stared at me in horror. “You aren’t saying you like feeding on people, are you?”
“No!” I snapped, annoyed with his assumption. Yet I knew that wasn’t a completely honest answer. “I mean, I don’t want to hurt people, but if I go into bloodlust, I’m not exactly thinking straight. It’s like I shift into this primal survival mode. So…yeah, as much as I hate to admit it, in the moment, when I’m in bloodlust, I enjoy feeding. But outside of that, no, absolutely not. I don’t go around wanting to feed on people. I want to help them.”
River sighed. “If this is what growing up means, I’d almost rather stay a kid. I mean, I want to drive a car, get out of the house more, and all that. But the urge to risk everything in order to heal? That I can live without.”
“Believe me, sometimes I wish I was still a kid. I remember when healing a friend’s cold, or my own skinned knee, was thrill enough for me. It seems to me that if my body is going through these changes, and it’s making me want to heal this much, then shouldn’t I listen to it? Shouldn’t I start transitioning into healing more serious illnesses?”
“You know what they say about that.”
“Yeah, blah blah blah, it’s like sex, just because you hit puberty and have the drive to do it, doesn’t mean you’re supposed to go out and have sex like crazy.”
“If you ask me, I think that’s just what parents say, so you don’t do what they did as teenagers.”
“Eew, River!” I whispered. “Can you please avoid putting images of our parents having sex in my mind? Gross!”
“Oh great, now I’m thinking about it. Thanks a lot.” He gave an exaggerated shudder. He glanced up toward the kitchen. “I think they’re winding down. I’d better go. Hope you’ve thought of a way to talk yourself out of this one.”
“I wish,” I whispered to his retreating back as he hopped up and crept upstairs.
6
The high was definitely wearing off, and the guilt seeping in like water at high tide. I thought about the woman I’d fed off of. What if she was anemic? What if I took too much, and she passed out in the parking lot on the way to her car? The remorse ate away at me, as worse and worse possible complications piled up in my brain. I never have been able to cope well with the necessity of drinking blood. Not from the moment Mom first told me about it.
“Why do we have to drink blood? Can’t we just have a protein bar?”
I was twelve, sitting on the porch swing beside my mother. I’d been excited that she wanted to have a “grown up talk” with me. But the thrill faded quickly when my mother tried to explain the consequences of healing in more detail. I remember having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept.
Mom laughed. “No, honey. It’s…well, it’s sort of like yin and yang. I’ve explained that to you before, right?”
I raised my eyebrows, wrinkling my nose. “Yeah…but…what does that have to do with drinking blood?”
“Well,” Mom said, “in nature, there is always give and take. You can’t have light without darkness, or sadness without joy. When we give of ourselves, eventually we need to feed.”
“Yeah, but why blood?”
Mom sighed. “I don’t know, sweetie. I wish I did. All I know is that if we only heal people a little at a time, our bodies can regenerate the lost energy naturally. If we space out small healings like that, we can avoid the need for blood altogether. If we do a lot of smaller healings close together, the drain of all those small healings will add up, and then we need blood—but only a little bit. The problems arise when we give a massive dose of healing, like for a really sick person who is dying. Then our bodies’ resources become depleted too quickly, and we need a lot of nourishment, immediately—otherwise, we risk falling unconscious, or worse. For whatever reason, only blood can give us enough nourishment and replace the life force energy that we lost by opening up our energy centers so wide.”
“Wait,” I said, zeroing in on the singular moment of discomfort I detected from Mom during her explanation. “You said we can fall unconscious, or worse. What do you mean, ‘or worse’?”
“Uh…that’s a story for another time.” She stood abruptly, and held her hand out to me. “How about we go make some tea?”
The “worse” was what scared me. Mom put off having to tell me about that, until I was almost sixteen, and she realized that my drive to heal was even stronger than Meadow’s had been at that age. When she finally told me, I thought I was going to lose my mind. I felt like a monster—like a loaded gun waiting to go off.
Berserk, she called it. When a Healer goes so deeply into bloodlust that they lose control and just go crazy. People get hurt. It’s not a good thing.
You know those stories you hear on the news about someone going on a killing spree? Not the premeditated situations, where the killer brought multiple guns and ammo, and goes looking for revenge at his former workplace. I’m talking about the times that some mild-mannered Joe Schmoe loses it, grabs the nearest weapon (usually a knife) and kills someone. Then they wander around in a daze until they find someone else, and kill them. And so on. The kind of situation that often ends up in “suicide by cop”.
When I’d felt so weak and shaky in the bathroom earlier that night, it was hard to believe I could have been a danger to anyone. I felt more like curling on the floor and throwing up. It didn’t feel like I could chase someone down and tear their throat out. It�
�s not like I have fangs, or anything.
But Mom and Dad had warned us often—even though we might feel fragile during bloodlust, the moment we cross from bloodlust to going berserk, our survival mode would kick in, and we’d have strength and speed greater than any wild predator. Not faster-than-a-bullet speed, or King Kong strength, but it would take a whole team of cops to pin a berserk Healer down. And though we couldn’t outrun a bullet, our enhanced agility would give us a good chance at dodging it.
A berserk Healer with a sharp object could do a lot of damage before a SWAT team arrived.
And if it got bad enough, a Healer could potentially rip out someone’s throat even without fangs—even a normal human bite is more dangerous than people would assume, especially if the biter in question had lost all control.
Or if the biter was a Healer gone berserk.
Hack and slash. Crazy, delirious rants. Blood everywhere. That’s what happens when you heal someone who is at death’s door, and you’re not prepared. To make it worse, in a berserk state, you don’t just sit around and drink the first victim dry. You’re out-of-your-head crazy, thinking everyone is your enemy—and everyone is your dinner. It’s your own little demented buffet, and you simply must sample a little here, a little there.
Chaos. Bloodshed. Mass murder. Sometimes you might walk around in a catatonic state and take a single victim on at a time, or you might go for a room full of people all at once. You never know what can happen when a Healer goes berserk. But in the end, there are almost always a number of victims, whether they were left one at a time in the Healer’s wake, or strewn about a single room.
Of course, with so many victims, and only a little blood taken from each, the authorities often don’t realize that someone has drained those victims’ blood. If they’ve ever made a connection, they’ve held it back from the media. Which wouldn’t be too hard. It’s not like they find two puncture marks on the victim from the attacker’s enormous canines. That’s just fiction.
Vampires.
That’s what storybooks call us. I hate it. It’s such an ugly word for a group of people who only want to help others. We call ourselves Healers. It’s true that sometimes mistakes are made, and a Healer chooses to heal someone when they’re not prepared, risking bloodlust and going berserk. But no Healer ever intends for that to happen. All they really want to do is help. They are compelled to help. Bloodlust is just an unfortunate consequence of the rare, unplanned healing.
Bloodlust. That’s what happened to me that night. And the trouble had just begun.
7
“Ember?” My father’s voice called from the kitchen. “Come in here, please?”
“I’ll be right there!” I sat up, running my fingers through the crazy mop of curls that I could feel sticking up everywhere. I wished I had my purse—my stones were in there, and I could really use their soothing energy. I looked around and spied it on the floor by the living room door—River must have brought it in for me. I’d have to remember to thank him later.
I stuck my hand inside the denim hobo-style bag I’d made from an old pair of jeans, and pulled out the velvet pouch that I kept my stones in. Stretching open the drawstring, I stuck my fingers inside and pulled out three stones.
The tumbled stones were smooth in my palm, gleaming in the light of the living room lamp. Rose quartz, citrine, and bloodstone. Ironic, I thought. The first three stones I pull out are the three I need the most.
I slipped the stones into the pocket of my sweater and walked into the kitchen, my voluminous skirt swirling around my feet as I went. I paused at the kitchen door, took a deep breath, and let it out as I crossed the threshold.
Dad sat at the rustic wooden table he had made with River’s help. His arms were crossed, and he eyed me with consternation. I met his glare briefly, then sat across from him. My parents rarely got angry with me. They were pretty lenient and laid-back—at least about anything that wasn’t related to health or healing—so having my father glaring at me was disconcerting.
Mom stood at the wood cookstove, pouring water from the kettle into three mugs. Dad must have gotten the fire going at dusk. Most people walked into our house and felt like they’d stepped back in time. We used woodstoves for heat—one in the kitchen, which we also cooked on in the winter, and another in the living area, which had a stovepipe that ran up through the second floor and out the roof.
I loved the kitchen, with its wood floors—except around the woodstove where it was slate—and the ceiling striped with huge timbers above our heads that supported the second floor. Hanging from those timbers hung handmade baskets from nails, as well as hanging upside-down hand-tied bundles of flowers and herbs from my mother’s garden, drying for use in future herbal tea blends.
I sat down at the table, avoiding my father’s glare by looking at the log walls beyond his head, and the home sewn curtains that flanked the window. To his right—and my left—the wall by the kitchen door was studded with many nails, from which hung a hand-cranked egg-beater, a potato masher, a wire whisk, and several other hand-powered kitchen gadgets. They were handy visual distractions when you wanted to avoid eye contact during a scolding.
We weren’t Amish or anything like that. My mom just believed in living as natural a life as possible, so we avoided using any electrical gadgets that weren’t truly necessary. People always thought we were weird. Even other Healers sometimes said my mother took things too far. I understood her motivations. I just wished it didn’t make us look so odd to other people.
Mom brought the mugs over to the counter and plunked an organic hemp reusable tea bag in each one. She looked tired. I felt bad. My mother was a great mom. She was laid-back, she trusted me, wasn’t over-protective, and she didn’t nag—except about health stuff. She was like a New Age version of a hippy flower child. She never yelled at us, and was always patient. Sure, she drove me crazy sometimes. But I know I drove her crazy too. She didn’t deserve the kind of stress I had brought on, when I healed Alex.
She sat at the table and set the mugs down, sliding one over to me, and another to my dad. The pungent smell of Valerian wafted up in the steam.
“Uh oh, you went straight for the Valerian.” Normally she gave us Chamomile when we were stressed or having a hard time getting to sleep. Valerian was the “big gun”, saved for insomnia.
Sometimes, if we let stress get the better of us, our healing didn’t work as well on things like insomnia. The wheels of our minds would just keep turning, keeping us awake and counteracting our attempts to soothe ourselves. We can’t heal when something blocks our energy channels.
“I think we’re all going to have a hard time sleeping tonight, don’t you?” she sighed, leaning back in her chair.
If Mom looked tired and defeated, Dad was just revving up. He sat forward, his hands steepled under his chin, eyes still riveted on me. Dad wasn’t as patient and laid-back as mom, but compared to most parents, he had the patience of a saint. But Mom’s routine of making tea had already calmed her down a bit. Dad was going to need a while to get to that point.
“What were you thinking?” Dad’s voice was calm and even, but I felt the anger simmering beneath it. He was good at controlling his temper, and I was more grateful for it in that moment than I had ever been.
“I—”
“You could have lost control.”
“I know—”
“You could have killed someone!”
“Dad, I’m sorry—”
“Sorry? Your mother almost had a heart attack when Jenna pulled up—she could feel your suffering—it felt to her like you were dying! And now she has to find a way to replace four pints of blood! Do you know how long it takes for her to squirrel away that much blood from the hospital, without being noticed?”
Mom was the head operating room nurse at Sacred Heart. Whenever a surgical patient didn’t use as much blood as they had expected, Mom would mark that the surgical team had used one more pint than had actually been used, and somehow smuggle i
t out of the hospital. It was risky business, and she could lose her job for it, but she hadn’t been caught yet. She’d come close, once, but so far, she was safe.
I could sense Dad’s anger rising, then pulling back. He lowered his voice. “Ember, how many times do we have to explain this to you? Yes, there are a lot of people suffering out there. But you can’t save them all. You have to be very careful. It’s bad enough that you put yourself at risk—and everyone in downtown Spokane, for that matter, if you had gone berserk. But Ember,” he leaned forward, “you put your own family at risk. Your mother. Me. Meadow. River. How could you do that?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had no defense.
“Ember?” He wanted an answer, but he wouldn’t understand.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“That’s not good enough!” Dad pounded the table with his fist, causing the mugs to jump.
“John, ssshh.” Mom laid a hand on his arm. “River’s upstairs.”
My father glanced toward the living room door, then back at me. He sat back in his chair, and folded his arms again. Waiting.
I fiddled with my mug, feeling its heat even through the handle, and dipping the tea bag repeatedly. “He was really sick, Dad.”
“They all are, Ember. You’re just one girl. You can’t heal the world.”