I told myself it was one.
One thread. One terrible, awful accident in a world that was full of them. People looked down at their radios every day. People ran red lights every day. Maybe it would have happened anyway, some other way, some other driver. Maybe the woman in the minivan had been meant to die that morning no matter what I did.
I told myself that over and over, like a prayer. I worked my shifts. I poured coffee. I smiled at the regulars. I didn't heal anyone. Not for nine days. When a man at the counter cut his thumb on a steak knife, I handed him a napkin and walked away, and my hands shook so badly I dropped a plate in the kitchen.
On the tenth day, Hollis Grant came in at seven o'clock and sat down on his stool and unfolded the morning paper on the counter, and Ray's face was on the front page.
* * *
It was a mugshot. Gray background, flat light. His beard was trimmed shorter. His eyes were the same: sunken, wary, the eyes of a stray dog.
But he wasn't wearing the army jacket.
MAN ARRESTED IN COLUMBIA FALLS HOMICIDE, the headline said.
I read it standing behind the counter with the coffeepot in my hand. I read it twice. His name was Raymond Tolliver. He was forty-four. He had been arrested two days earlier for the death of a woman named Christine Harlan, fifty-one, who ran a small motel in Columbia Falls where he'd been staying. The article didn't say much more than that. There was a quote from the sheriff's office about the investigation being ongoing. There was a line near the bottom that said Tolliver had prior convictions for assault in two states.
There was a photograph of the motel. Christine Harlan had planted flowers in two old tires on either side of the office door. Red ones. Geraniums.
"Terrible thing," Hollis said quietly, beside me. He'd stopped working his puzzle. "Terrible thing. My wife and I used to stop there sometimes, years ago, on the way back from the lake. Nice lady."
I set the coffeepot down on the warmer.
I walked into the kitchen. Past Manny at the grill, past the dish station, out the back door into the alley where I had found Ray sitting in the rain. Where I'd brought him meatloaf. Where I had knelt in front of him and held his poisoned arm and pulled the death out of it like a splinter.
I stood next to the dumpster and threw up everything I had eaten that morning.
* * *
Clay found me there. He didn't say anything at first. He just handed me a wet dish towel and stood next to me while I wiped my face, and then he put one big hand on my back, between the scars, and kept it there.
"Manny said you knew him," he said eventually. "The guy in the paper. Said you took him a plate once."
I nodded.
"That's not on you, Eva," Clay said.
"You don't know that," I said.
"Yeah, I do." His voice was rough. "You gave a hungry man a plate of meatloaf. That's all. Whatever he did after that, he did. Not you."
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. It wasn't meatloaf. It wasn't the meatloaf, Clay. He would have been dead in a week, alone in an alley, and that motel lady would be out watering her geraniums right now, and instead—
"Go upstairs," Clay said gently. "Take the day. I mean it. Sari can cover."
I went.
* * *
I didn't come down for the rest of the day.
I sat on the floor of my little room with my back against the bed and my knees pulled up to my chest, and I made myself count again. Not the ones I'd saved this time. The others. Follow the newest chapters on novelping(.)com.
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A woman in a minivan, on her way somewhere on an ordinary morning, with two children in car seats in the back.
A woman who planted geraniums in old tires outside her motel office.
Two. That I knew of.
What about the boy with the cast? What about Lily, bouncing in her booth with her fever gone? What about the old woman who'd left her cane by the door, and Manny, singing at his grill? Were they all threads, too? Was every one of them pulling something loose somewhere I couldn't see? Was there a person in Missoula or Spokane or somewhere on the other side of the world who'd lost something because a six-year-old in Kalispell didn't have to stay home sick for three days?
I didn't know. That was the thing that was eating me alive. In heaven, I'd never had to know. There'd been a Writ. There had been Elders who saw the whole cloth. All I ever had to do was mend what I was told to mend, and trust that someone, somewhere, was counting all the threads.
I'd jumped because I couldn't stand not being allowed to help.
I hadn't once stopped to ask whether I knew how.
I looked down at my hands. My good hands, Sari had called them.
I folded them under my arms, tight, where I couldn't see them.
* * *
It was after midnight when I felt her.
It wasn't a sound. It was a warmth. A brightness at the edge of things, like a candle lit in the next room. I knew it the way you know your own name.
I got up and opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape.
The night was cold and clear, the stars thick as spilled sugar above the old brick roofs. The street below was empty, the traffic lights blinking yellow at nobody. And there, sitting on the edge of the roof across the alley with her knees pulled up and her wings folded neat and high behind her, glowing softly like she'd swallowed the moon, was Aurelle.
"Hi, Eva," she said.
I started to cry before I'd even said hello.
She was across the gap in a heartbeat, settling down beside me on the narrow metal landing, wrapping her wings around me. I'd forgotten what it felt like. The light. The warmth that wasn't heat. It smelled like home. Not like coffee and onions and motor oil. Like nothing at all. Like clean air at the top of the world.
"Shh," she murmured. "Shh. It's okay. I'm here. I'm here."
"How did you find me?" I asked.
"You've been healing." She pulled back to look at me, her eyes wide and worried. "Every time you do it, it rings. Like a bell. We can hear it all the way up. Ithra's been following you since the first one." She touched my cheek. "Eva. Your face is wet."
"It's called crying," I said.
"I know what it's called." She looked at it, fascinated and a little horrified, and wiped one tear away with her thumb, and stared at it on her fingertip. "Does it hurt?"
"Sometimes," I said.
"Oh, Eva." Her voice cracked. "Come home."
I looked at her. She was so beautiful. She was so clean. She'd never been cold. She'd never been hungry. She had never once stood in an alley next to a dumpster and found out that she'd killed a woman who planted geraniums. Read the latest chapters at NovelPing.
"Ithra sent you," I said.
"Ithra sent me. But I'd have come anyway. I've wanted to come since the moment you fell." She grabbed both my hands. "Everyone misses you. The Hall's not the same. I keep turning around to say something to you and you're not there. Please. It's not too late. The Elders say it's not too late. You can still come home, and everything can go back to the way it was."
"The way it was," I repeated.
"Yes!" Aurelle said.
"Standing at the Veil, watching people die," I said.
Aurelle flinched. "That's not fair."
"It's true, though." I pulled my hands away, gently. "Did you know? Did you know what would happen? To the people I healed?"
She was quiet for a long moment. Down the street, a car drove by slowly, its headlights sliding over the brick. The driver didn't look up. Humans almost never look up.
"Not exactly," Aurelle said finally. "Not them. But I knew something would. That's why the Writ exists, Eva. It's not there to be cruel. It's there because we can't see what they see. You pull one thread, and—"
"The cloth unravels. I know." I laughed, and it came out wet and broken. "I know. Ithra told me."
"Then come home. Please. Before you pull any more," Aurelle said.
I looked out past the roofs at the dark shapes of the mountains. I thought about the Hall, the Veil, the endless, patient Writ. I thought about the beige room, the gray-green eyes, the mother's scream. I thought about the cheese on a toothpick, and the little boy with frosting on his face. I thought about Clay's hand on my back. Sari's arm around my shoulders.
"I can't," I said.
"Eva—"
"Not yet. I don't know. I just—I can't, Aurelle. Not like this," I said.
She looked at me for a long, long time. Her glow dimmed, just a little. I'd never seen that happen to her before.
"Then promise me something," she said. "Promise me you'll stop. Healing. Until you've decided. Promise me you won't pull any more threads."
That one, I could promise.
"I'm done," I said. "I swear. I won't heal anyone again."
She kissed my forehead, the way she used to when we were very young, a thousand years ago, when we were still learning to fly.
"I'll come back," she said. "I'll keep coming back. Until you're ready."
And she unfolded her wings, white and gold and enormous against the stars, and was gone, and the fire escape was cold and dark, and I was just a girl in a borrowed sweatshirt, alone on a rusted metal landing above an alley in Montana.
I went back inside. I closed the window. I lay down in my narrow bed.
I meant it. I meant every word.
I didn't know that in less than a week, a man with gray-green eyes would walk through the door of the Broken Antler, and the bell would ring, and every promise I had ever made would go straight out the window.