only response was to lick Gunnar’s finger, he stood with a sigh and headed across the street to hunt down Welles. What good was having an intern if not for sending him to the Drunken Moose to pick up the chief’s breakfast? After, that is, the kid ran to the mercantile for kitty litter and cat food.
“So, Tux,” Gunnar drawled as he sauntered up the station driveway. “Could you at least tell me if Katy’s lips are as soft and sweet as they look?”
* * *
* * *
Once she was out of sight of town, Katy surrendered control of both her horse and the turbulent emotions swirling inside her. Quantum took advantage of the freedom by instantly surging into an energy-efficient gallop, and the tears Katy had been holding at bay finally burst free to splatter across her face and hair like wind-whipped raindrops. She let them come, knowing they carried the heartbroken energy of this moment and so many others of the past month, and knowing that, no matter how much she just wanted to run to her mum and let it all out, this was her only option. There was just too much she couldn’t risk sharing.
Honestly, for all the times she had tried to create a miracle, why had she succeeded this time?
And of all the people who could have witnessed it, why Robbie and Gunnar?
Timmy hadn’t been dead, but he’d been close. Hearing his tiny, oxygen-starved heart struggling to beat when she’d pressed her ear to his chest, Katy had immediately sent her mind’s eye racing through his limp body to find the most immediate area of trauma. Two of Timmy’s neck vertebra were broken but miraculously hadn’t severed his spinal cord. Several crushed ribs were pressing on his tiny lungs, restricting his breathing, and one of his hind legs was shattered.
But Angus had obviously known what he was talking about when he’d shouted that Timmy wanted to live, because as Katy raced through the cat’s battered body, swirling tendrils of white light reached out from each wound, trying to grab her, seemingly pleading for her to stop and help. The ferocity of his need outsized his tiny body.
It was then Katy realized she’d had the missing piece of the puzzle since she was seven, when she’d snuck out of bed late one night to hide the last two cookies from Brody so she could have them the next day after school. As she’d crept to the stairs, instead of her parents being asleep in their own bed like she’d thought, she’d heard them talking in whispers in the living room below. So, of course she’d sat down on the top step to listen, because everyone knew whispering meant secrets. For hadn’t she overheard Papa just the week before telling Robbie in the barn that knowing a man’s secrets gave you power over him?
Except she hadn’t been able to grasp the secret her parents were whispering about. All she’d heard was her sobbing mother complaining that it wasn’t right she could heal a cranky old man dedicated to plaguing his family, but she couldn’t save a teenager who, because he was too young to see past his present circumstances, had tragically given up on life.
Katy hadn’t understood then, but she did now. Whoever—or whatever—she was trying to heal had to want to heal. That unless the determination to live was there, she could do nothing more than ease their final moments.
Sweet little broken Timmy had desperately wanted to live, and that had made all the difference. Katy smiled ruefully. Maybe he hadn’t known he was supposed to have nine lives.
The day after she’d overheard her parents, the talk at school had been about a really bad accident just outside of town where a pickup truck crammed full of teenagers slammed into a tree at eighty miles an hour. A bunch of ambulances and fire trucks and police and sheriff cars had been there with all their lights flashing, according to a third grader who lived right across the street from the tree. The girl had noticed Katy listening with the other kids and had announced she’d seen Doc Libby there, too, but apparently not even a big-time doctor from some big-time hospital in California could save that poor boy.
Katy had wanted to shout that it wasn’t her mum’s fault, that the boy had given up. But she’d merely turned and walked away, remembering her papa telling her that trying to reason with a bully or explain