neck. I didn’t know if I should run back down the hall and take our chances with the window after all, or try to help Prairie.
Before I could decide, Gram pushed her chair back and struggled to stand.
“Stop right there, lady,” the man said. “Down on the floor like your friend here, arms out.”
But Gram lurched toward him, her gray stringy hair plastered to her drool-damp chin, her hands paddling the air at her sides. “But I’m the one who-”
“Down!” he yelled as his arm swung toward her. I could see what was going to happen in the split second before the gunshot echoed through the room, as Gram kept lurching forward, straight for him.
Except it wasn’t a single gunshot-it was two, one right after the other, and Gram flew back through the air, a misting red hole in her back. Then Rattler hurtled up off the floor, the first guy’s gun in his hand.
The shooter took longer to fall than Gram did. Rattler had shot him in the side, but it didn’t look that bad. He stumbled, putting his hands to the wound and sucking air. Rattler didn’t have any more patience with him than with his partner, and he caught him under the chin with the butt of the gun. The man fell to the sound of his own jaw breaking.
There was a second of perfect silence. I took everything in: Gram on her back with her eyes wide and staring, Dun lying next to the two men Rattler had wounded. And in the center of it all, Rattler. If I’d thought his eyes were frightening in the past, they were ten times more frightening now. As I watched from the darkness of the hallway, he slowly lowered the gun to his side, dangling it loose in his hand.
“Ladies,” he said, drawing out the word as though he was tasting it. “That was sloppy of me. What I git for doubtin’ myself. Won’t happen again. Prairie, guess we’ll take your car.”
“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Prairie spat.
Rattler shook his head. “Now, Prairie, don’t you fret. I ain’t gonna do nothin’ besides take you somewhere’s I can keep an eye on you.”
Prairie’s eyes widened and I saw fresh fear there. I couldn’t believe there could be anything worse than this- four people lying in a sea of blood on the floor, Rattler threatening us with a gun-but Prairie looked terrified.
It was her fear that finally made me move. I remembered the kitchen scissors, in a mason jar with the spatulas and spoons next to the sink, and I ran for them. I waited for the slam of the bullet even as my fingers closed on the handles of the scissors and my hip hit the counter hard. There was an “oof” behind me and the gun went off and- Was I hit? Was Prairie hit?-I whirled around and Rattler had disappeared and Prairie was still standing and I was still standing-
“Now Hailey now!” Prairie screamed. I didn’t have to be told twice. Chub wailed in my arms, struggling against me. I dropped the scissors and ran, holding him as tight as I could, and followed Prairie out the door, crunching glass under my feet, slipping on the blood, and then we were in the yard, sprinting for her car.
Rascal was sitting in the center of the yard. His eyes glowed golden in the moonlight. It looked eerie, and I couldn’t figure out why he was so calm when strangers had been breaking in, shooting, trying to kill us. Why hadn’t he come tearing after them, snarling and barking and snapping the way he did when he treed a squirrel or chased a rabbit?
I didn’t have time to dwell on that now, though. “Prairie, I have to get Rascal!” I screamed. I thrust Chub at her and she took him, protesting as I ran and picked Rascal up.
I tightened all the muscles in my back, waiting for the impact of a bullet as I ran to the car, but none came. Rascal was warm and soft in my arms, and he didn’t protest at being bounced around. I almost dropped him as I opened the car, and when he landed on the floor of the backseat, he nearly fell.
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.
