I gasped.
There was no flower. No shimmering, shiny plant beckoning me toward a treatment, toward a cure.
There was only…
I pulled my hands away, the image too dreadful to bear, but it lingered in my sight as if burned into my retinas.
A bone-white, gaping skull.
I felt as if the air had been knocked from my lungs. Did she have a tumor? An intracranial hemorrhage? Had a virus taken up residence somewhere within her brain matter?
With trembling fingers, I reached out again, searching for any indication of what I was meant to do.
The skull stared up at me without answer. It hung above my mother’s face, motionless. Though there were no eyes within its deep sockets, I knew without a doubt it was staring at me.
As if the skull read my mind, its jaw shifted, opening, widening.
Was that asmile?
The lipless curve of it reminded me of my godfather: that was his smile, his grin.
“Merrick!”
He was beside me before I even registered he’d entered the cabin.He stooped at a painfully contorted angle, reminding me of the gargoyles that lined the parapets of Rouxbouillet’s temples.
“I don’t understand what this is, what it’s telling me to do.”
“What do you see?” he asked, but I could tell by the wrinkle of concern marring his brow that he knew. He’d always known.
Without answering, I reached to cup my fingers around Papa’s face. He squirmed away in protest, but not before the same glowing skull bloomed across his features.
“How am I supposed to treat them? Why am I seeing a skull? I don’t know what it means.”
My godfather blinked solemnly and a knife of fear stabbed at me, slicing deep into the quivering mess of my body, ripping and rending my soft insides.
“Merrick?” I whispered, and my voice sounded so small, so scared.
He cleared his throat, his voice like gravel. “Last year, you asked what would happen to the people who could not be saved.”
I remembered.
I remembered him sitting in the chair at Kieron’s uncle’s house. I remembered the doubts swirling through me, the fears that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I wouldn’t be able to help the stricken man.
But I had.
I’d done it, and everything else my gift had required of me since.
And I’d been good.
Too good, perhaps.
My record was untarnished, perfect and whole. I’d started to believe that I could cure anything. A god had chosen me, of all the people populating our world, to carry his gift, to bestow his blessing upon. Didn’t that make me as a god myself? Infallible? Unstoppable?
The skulls leering over my parents’ faces suggested otherwise.
“They’re going to die?”
“Everyone dies eventually,” he murmured unhelpfully.
