“I was trying to read the directions on how to spray the thing,” he says with a grim laugh. “I don’t know if I would have figured it out in time.”
“Our fault.” I sink down so I sit on the rocky ground near his feet. “We stopped talking.”
“Right.”
I don’t know what he heard, what he thought.
“I’m thirsty,” I say, trying to buy myself some time to come up with an explanation.
He slips the canister back into his backpack and retrieves a bottle of water, opens it and kneels beside me. He holds the bottle to my lips, his expression still tight with fear, his movements so jerky that water spills down my chin.
“You did warn me about the bears,” I stammer after I try to drink a few swallows. “We were lucky.”
“Yeah.” He turns and gazes down the trail in the direction that the bear went, then back at me. There’s a question in his eyes that I can’t answer.
“We were pretty lucky, all right.”
We don’t talk about it. We hike back down and drive into Jackson for breakfast. We go back to Tucker’s house later in the morning for Tucker’s boat and spend the afternoon on the Snake fishing. Tucker hooks a few and throws them back. He catches a big rainbow trout, and that one we decide to eat for dinner along with fish he caught the day before. It’s not until we’re standing in the kitchen of the Avery farmhouse, Tucker teaching me how to gut the fish, that he brings the bear up again.
“What did you do today, with the bear?” he asks as I stand with the fish at the kitchen sink, trying to make a clean incision up the belly the way he showed me.
“This is so gross,” I complain.
He turns to look at me, his expression hard the way it always gets whenever I try to get something past him. I don’t know what to say. What are my options? Tell the truth, which is against the only absolute rule Mom has really given me about being an angel-blood:
“I sang to the bear,” I try.
“You talked to it.”
“I sort of hummed at it,” I say slowly. “That’s all.”
“I’m not stupid, you know,” he says.
“I know. Tuck—”
The knife slips. I feel it slide into the fleshy part of my hand below my thumb, slicing through skin and muscle. There’s a sudden rush of blood. Instinctively I close my fingers around the gash.
“Okay, whose brilliant idea was it to give me a knife?”
“That’s a bad cut. Here.” Tucker curls back my fingers to press a dish towel over the wound. “Put pressure on it,” he directs, letting go. He dashes out of the room. I press for a moment, like he said, but the bleeding’s already stopped. I feel suddenly strange, light-headed again. I lean against the counter dizzily. My hand starts to throb and then a flare of heat like a tiny lick of flame shoots from my elbow to the tip of my pinkie finger. I gasp. I can actually feel the gash closing itself, the tissue knitting together deep inside my hand.
Mom was right. My powers are growing.
After a moment, the sensation fades. I peel back the dish towel and examine my hand. By now it’s only a shallow cut, little more than a scratch. It seems to have stopped healing itself. I flex my fingers back and forth gingerly.
Tucker appears with a tube of antibiotic ointment and enough bandages to fix up a small army. He dumps it all on the counter and crosses quickly over to me. I pull the dish towel tight across my palm and tuck my hand into my chest protectively.
“I’m okay,” I say quickly.
“Let me see,” he orders. He holds out his hand.
“No, it’s fine. It’s only a scratch.”
“It’s a deep cut. We need to close it.”
I slowly lower my hand to his. He takes it and gently turns it so my injured palm faces up. He tugs back the dish towel.
“See?” I say. “Only a minor flesh wound.”
He stares at it intently. I’m holding my breath, I realize. I tell myself to relax. Just act normally, like Mom says. I can explain this. I have to explain this.
“Are you going to read my future?” I say with a weak laugh.
His mouth twists. “I thought you were going to need stitches for sure.”
“Nope. False alarm.”
He sets right to fixing me up. He cleans the cut with water, smears on a bit of ointment, then smoothes a bandage over it carefully. I’m relieved when the cut’s covered by the bandage and he finally has to stop staring at it.
“Thanks,” I tell him.
“What’s going on with you, Clara?” His eyes when he looks up at me are fierce, full of so much hurt and
