Banished

“Please,” I whispered hoarsely. “Don’t keep things from me, I have to know.”

“I think… we are safe for now,” Prairie said carefully. “The injury… I wouldn’t be surprised if Rattler loses that eye. The blood loss alone will be enormous. He won’t be able to do much of anything until he gets some help. Even if he tries to just rest and wait until he’s well enough to travel, it’s not going to be tonight.”

“Your aunt, she describe… what you do.” Anna made a stabbing motion with her hand and I flinched, the memory of the hairpin going into his flesh more than I could bear. “She say it went in far, to eye? Is possible there is damage to brain. Possible he gets much worse after you are gone. You are very brave girl,” she added quickly.

I knew what she was worried about: that I would fall apart if I thought I’d killed Rattler or even disabled him. But that wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t grieve over him. I hoped he was lying on the floor even now, his blood leaking out until he was too weak to say his own name.

And I also felt, deep inside where instinct worked against reason, that he wasn’t dying. That whatever damage I’d managed to do to him, it wasn’t enough. That after he healed he would be as strong as ever, and as determined, and that when that happened he would come after us again.

But I had bought us some time. For now that would have to be enough.

Prairie allowed me to help her stand up. Kaz rushed to her other side and together we helped her down the hall, Anna in the lead. Anna opened the door to her bedroom, where a pretty comforter was turned down on the wide bed.

“I will help Prairie freshen up,” she said. “I have nightgown and robe. Now you two, go to bed.”

Kaz offered to take Rascal out for me while I brushed my teeth and washed my face. They weren’t gone long, and Kaz gave Rascal an odd look as he said goodnight. I closed the door, glad for the solitude. All the tension from the day welled up in my heart and I knew I was close to breaking down.

Instead, I climbed into Kaz’s bed and patted the mattress next to me. “Come, Rascal,” I said, and he jumped up and lay down.

It felt good to put my arms around his warm body, to feel his heartbeat strong and regular under his fur. It almost didn’t matter that he’d lost his personality, that he didn’t ever play anymore. I closed my eyes and remembered the way he used to be, and as I stroked the soft ruff of fur around his neck, I felt a little better.

Until my fingers touched something that shouldn’t have been there.

I worked my fingertips through the dense fur and found a small, hard object embedded in the skin. Anxiety raced along my nerves as I rose up on one elbow and switched on the bedside lamp. I parted Rascal’s fur and looked closer. A little bit of black metal protruded from a swelling where the skin was growing over the object. I felt its outlines with my fingers. Small. Knobby.

A bullet.

I jerked my hand away and sucked in my breath, scrambling away from him. My legs were tangled in the sheets and I half fell, half crawled out of Kaz’s bed. Shock mixed with disgust as I wiped my hand against the carpet, hard, making my skin burn. “No, no, no,” I heard myself whispering, and when I closed my mouth and tried to stop, the words became a desperate moan.

I remembered Rascal waiting in the yard at Gram’s, with blood on his back-he must have been shot when Bryce’s men first came to the house. They must have tried to kill him to keep him quiet.

Maybe it had been a superficial wound, just a minor injury that Rascal was healing from on his own. I clung desperately to that thought, even though I knew it was unlikely, as I forced myself to look at him. He hadn’t moved; he was lying still and indifferent on the mattress. I had to know. Nausea roiled through me as I approached the bed on my knees, staring at the place in his fur where the bullet had entered, trying not to look at his expressionless eyes. I gritted my teeth and reached with a shaking hand and touched him, and when he didn’t respond, I felt like I was touching evil itself and my entire body resisted, my heartbeat pounding a crazy tempo.

I almost couldn’t do it. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt hot tears leaking down my face, and still I couldn’t stop making sounds, quiet little sobs of desperation and horror. But I made myself trace my fingers through the fur around his torso, finding two more dented places where bullets had gone into him. One I could barely feel, lodged deep in the muscle, but one had entered his body far enough that I couldn’t feel it at all, right over his heart.

Rascal had been shot three times. He should be dead. But he wasn’t.

Bullets couldn’t kill him. Because he was already dead.

Because I had made him into a zombie.

I was cursed. I was no Healer-I was a zombie-maker.

I’d known it all along, deep inside. The accident came rushing back and images freeze-framed through my head in rapid succession: all the blood, his organs spilling from his body, the way his eyes rolled up a final time.

Their emptiness when I brought him back.

I brought him back. From the dead.

And now he couldn’t die. He’d been shot and the bullets were in his body as proof; they’d ripped through skin and bone and his very heart, and yet he soldiered on, a robot of a dog.

A zombie of a dog.

I screamed and pushed him from the bed, as hard as I could. His body fell to the floor with a thud, and he got up slowly and stood there unblinking, staring at nothing.

I scrambled to my feet and started backing toward the door, and when the wailing didn’t stop I realized I was still screaming.

The door pushed open and strong arms circled me from behind, practically lifting me off the floor. I fought and kicked and tried to break away as Kaz dragged me down the hall to the living room.

“Stop, Hailey,” he commanded, but he didn’t try to protect himself. Slowly, I ran out of energy and stopped fighting him, and my screams turned to sobs and he held me tight against him.

I heard a door open and Prairie’s and Anna’s voices.

“What happened?”

“Is Hailey all right?”

“He’s not healed,” I cried, letting go of Kaz and running to Prairie. I wanted to throw myself into her arms but I knew how fragile she was, so I just hugged myself, shaking all over. “I turned Rascal into a zombie.”

CHAPTER 20

“YOU HAVE TO TELL ME the truth,” I said as Anna tucked an afghan around me and Prairie. We were sitting together on the living room couch. “All of it.”

Kaz had taken Rascal out to the yard after I insisted I couldn’t stay in the house with him for another second. He put water on for more tea, and the four of us huddled in the living room. Chub, thankfully, slept through the whole thing.

“We never… I don’t know if zombie is really the right word,” Prairie began hesitantly.

“That’s what Rascal is!” I burst out. “He can’t be killed. He came back from the dead.” I was struggling to control my breathing, and my hands were shaking so badly that I jammed them together. “Just, please, tell me how it happened. Tell me what I did.”

Tell me Milla won’t end up like this

Tell me I’ll never do this to Chub

“This won’t happen again,” Prairie said carefully. She exchanged glances with Anna, who’d said little since I woke everyone up.

They both looked so worried that my anxiety threatened to bubble up again. I felt the scream building inside me, so I squeezed my hands even more tightly together, the knuckles going white. “How can I be sure?”

“It’s only… you must never heal someone who has died. That’s the one rule. Mary taught us that from the start, me and your mom, before we ever healed anything, even a lizard. She wouldn’t even let us heal a dead squirrel or mouse-she made us promise.” Prairie reached for my hands and tugged at them gently until, like a chunk of ice thawing, I relaxed my grip and let her lace her fingers through mine. “I am so sorry you didn’t have anyone to teach you, to explain it all to you.”