But there was no time to worry about him. Prairie had got the seat belt across Chub, and it looked like it would hold him in for now. She got in the driver’s seat and started the engine, and I barely had time to jump in the backseat with Rascal and Chub before she started rolling across the lawn, accelerating as if she meant to plow straight through the speed of sound, the speed of light, as if she meant to put an eternity between us and the wreckage of my old life.
PART TWO: RUNNING
CHAPTER 12
WE HIT THE ROAD with a squeal of tires. Prairie yanked the steering wheel and the car fishtailed back and forth before straightening out.
Something was wrong with Chub. His cries turned to hiccups and I felt a widening pool of damp along his leg, his corduroy pants warm and wet. When I closed my fingers on his shin, he shrieked in pain.
“Oh my God, Chub’s hit-”
Before I got the words out Prairie braked hard and headed for the shoulder. We had gone only a few hundred yards down the road, but she jerked the car into park and hit the dome light with the heel of her hand, twisting in her seat toward me.
“Give him to me,” she commanded. I was terrified and didn’t know what else to do. I lifted his heavy body feetfirst. He was coughing and crying at the same time, and my muscles strained with his weight, but Prairie helped me slide him onto the front seat. She straightened his leg gently, the bloodstain black in the dim light, and then she did something that stopped my breath.
She skittered her fingers up and down Chub’s leg and then stilled them. Ducking her head, she started chanting. I only had to hear a few words to know that she was saying the lines from the pages I’d found in my mother’s hiding place.
It didn’t take long-just ten or fifteen seconds-and as Prairie murmured softly, Chub snuffled and sighed and finally quieted. She took her hands off his leg and carefully rolled his pants up and ran her fingertips over his skin. Then she rolled the pants down again.
“He’s all right now,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”
She gently handed him back to me and I took him into my arms. His little hands went to my neck and he slumped against me. I could feel his long eyelashes brushing my cheek. I felt along his leg, the sticky hardening blood and the torn place in the fabric-and underneath, where his skin was smooth.
“See if you can buckle him in again,” Prairie said, and eased the car off the shoulder and onto the road, picking up speed as the tires spun gravel. We were headed east, and as I fumbled with the seat belt, we blew past the Bargain Barn, the KFC, the old Peace Angel Baptist church that they’d tried to turn into a restaurant for a while and now was nothing at all.
“What just happened?” I asked when I had Chub more or less secured. “What did you do?”
But I already knew the answer, even as I fought back my hysteria. It was what I had done to Milla. What I had done to Rascal.
Prairie was silent for a moment, the outskirts of town blowing past in a blur of mailboxes and gravel drives and leaning shacks.
Finally she took a breath and slowly let it back out, and when she spoke, she was as calm as she had been when I first saw her sitting at our kitchen table that afternoon.
“I’m a Healer,” she said. “And so are you. It’s in your blood.”
I knew it was true, yet her words still stunned me. I hadn’t yet put a name to it. “I’m… it isn’t-”
“I know you healed Rascal,” Prairie said gently.
I felt my face go hot. I thought about denying it, but there didn’t seem to be much point. Prairie already knew. And in a way, I wanted her to know. I needed someone else to understand.
“Was he your first?” Prairie asked.
“Um.” I looked out the window at the farmland flying by, the barns and outbuildings dark shadows rising from the fields.
I almost didn’t tell her.
And then I did. I told her about Rascal’s accident, about the blood and the terrible damage to his body, about the way it had felt to carry him home, to put my face to his fur. About the rushing, needful urgency of the energy inside me flowing through my fingers into his wrecked body.
I told her about Milla, about how I barely remembered running to her side, about the words in my head, about Ms. Turnbull shoving me to the floor, and the way my senses came back with a prickling abruptness. About watching Milla roll over and throw up-and how she was fine after.
“The gift is strong in you,” Prairie said, a note of awe in her voice, when I finished. “I’ve never heard of anyone being able to do it without someone guiding them. Your mom and I practiced for hours with Mary in secret, so Alice wouldn’t know, but it took us months before we could use the gift.”
“But Milla says we’re cursed,” I said, hot shame flooding my face. “That we’re freaks.”
“No,” Prairie corrected me sharply. “You have a gift, Hailey. You can do something that others can’t.”
That made me feel a little better. Just days ago I’d thought there was something wrong with me, one more difference between me and every other kid, but Prairie made it sound like something to be proud of.
But that didn’t change the fact that we were running from killers, that the kitchen floor was soaked in blood, that Gram was dead. “Who were those men at the house? Were they there because I’m a Healer?”
Was it my fault?
“Those men were… professionals.”
“What does that even mean? Like hit men?”
“More like trained… investigators, I guess you’d call them. They’re killers when they need to be, but I don’t think that was their main objective.”
She was so calm. It made me panic even more. “What did they want?”
“I’m pretty sure they wanted you, Hailey.”
“Me? Why would they want me?”
“Because you’re a Healer.”
“But how would they know that? I only just found out myself.”
Prairie sighed. “That’s a long story. I work for a man. Not a good man, though I didn’t know that until very recently. His name is Bryce Safian. We were doing research, in a lab outside Chicago. Trying to find ways to use my healing gifts, to replicate them so they could be used to fight disease.”
“What do you mean, like turn normal people into Healers?”
“Well, more or less. We analyzed my full genome and compared it with a control population to isolate the element that controls the gift. The next step would have been to figure out how to use a special process to change a person’s DNA to match mine.”
“I thought all that DNA stuff was, like…” I tried to remember what I’d learned in my science class earlier in the year, wishing I had paid more attention. “That it’s still not understood all that well. That it’s mostly a mystery.”
“Yes, that’s true to a great extent, but Bryce is very well funded. We had access to the latest research. We had a laboratory, equipment, a team of scientists. We were at the very forefront.”
“But that all sounds like a good thing.” Not like a reason to kill someone.
“Yes, but… Bryce had other plans. Other ideas about what to do with the research once we isolated the healing gene, to put it in simple terms.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“He… had figured out a way to use the healing gene in warfare. In a battle setting.”
“What, like to heal wounded soldiers? To fix up their injuries so that they could keep fighting?”
“That’s… well, something like that,” Prairie said hesitantly. “The point is that he was willing to sell the research, our results, to the highest bidder. He didn’t care who it was, as long as they paid.”
Her words sank into my mind. “You mean like… other countries?”