me think she’d be a sunny person. A cheerful one. So to see her sobbing her heart out? It just felt wrong.
Her jaunty yellow aura was streaked somehow. Dark reds and browns merging with the yellow, creating a murky khaki around her stomach that had me guessing she was in pain, and not emotionally, but physically.
Having never seen that color before, not even on Vinnie or Louisa, two people who were dying, I had to admit to being concerned. I didn’t know the girl, and didn’t particularly want to know her, but her aura had me thinking bad stuff.
Because I didn’t see them all the time, I had to figure that when I did, there was a reason behind it. A reason for that person coming to my attention. I’d noticed this girl from the start, and I figured it had to be fate… even if fate had done nothing but bite me in the ass every time I’d come face-to-face with it.
A sharp gasp escaped her as she curled up tighter, and the flash of pain on her face had me wincing. Slowly, I drew my hands together and began to rub them briskly like they were cold. The noise must have come to her attention, because she blinked at me then blanched, but even as she started to scrabble to her feet, her intent to run off, embarrassment lining her features, the khaki aura around her pulsed to a beat of its own that followed a wave of pain that had her gasping and sinking back to the floor.
Instantly, and without thought for my own safety, I dropped to my knees and grabbed her hand. “Hey, it’s okay,” I tried to reassure her, even as she let out a long, deep moan as our fingers collided. It surprised me when I didn’t feel the same agony as I had with Louisa—nothing worse than a stitch I’d get in my side after I worked out too long and hard.
Her eyes flared wide. “Oh God, it hurts!” she keened as her lashes began to flutter.
Because I didn’t want her to associate me with the pain relief I hoped she’d be feeling soon, I whispered, “Can I take you to the nurse?”
She whipped her head to the side. “She can’t do anything. I have PCOS. When I get my period, it hurts.”
“You shouldn’t be in school,” I muttered, her aura made that clearer than a doctor’s note. Of course, I doubted the faculty would accept my justification.
Her teeth clenched down. “God, your hands are hot,” she muttered, and I realized they were.
I could feel it.
It was like I was holding a hot water bottle filled with freshly boiled water. Heat seeped out of my pores like I was connected to the grid.
A gasp escaped her, and she rocked her head back against the narrow section of wall where she’d holed up. When her aura started to change, the khaki dispersing, I didn’t need to ask her if she was better.
Instead, I repeated, “Can I take you to the nurse?”
She licked her lips, and when her head rolled forward so she could see me more easily, there was a dazedness to her eyes that made me see she was being released from the haze of pain that had obscured everything else.
Even her awareness of who I was.
The second she recognized me, she blanched. When she scrabbled to her feet, I noticed with some delight that her aura was a little brighter than it had been, the yellow definitely overtaking the strange brown and red streaks.
“Um, thank you, no,” she mumbled, even as she began to back off like I had the plague or something.
I was used to that.
In these walls, I was a pariah, and it was a death sentence to be near me.
It was a good thing I didn’t like people and preferred my own company.
It was also a good thing that the blast of cold didn’t hit me until she’d left the corridor. It slammed into me with a sharp hammer blow that had me reeling. Not as bad as with Louisa, and I figured that was because I hadn’t had to do much healing, but still as potent a blow for its length of absence.
Shuddering, I let my hands fall to the countertop and my back rounded, curving as I processed the bone deep shivers that racked me from head to toe.
I’d known I’d get no thanks for helping the girl, but this was definitely worse than her treating