a hand on his shoulder. “Lay her back down and step away. Let me take a look.”
“It’s t-t-too late. She’s…”
“Please,” James urged. “Let me try.”
The boy stilled and lifted his head slowly, staring at James and perhaps finally sensing that he was different. Not vampire, not mortal, not one of the Chosen, as Lucy was. He was something else altogether.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“James Poe. You?”
“Jeremy,” the kid said. “Why is your name familiar?”
“I’ll tell you later,” James said. “Lay her back down. I think I can save her, if you just let me try.”
The boy frowned, but he obeyed, lowering the girl’s body to the grass once more. He remained kneeling beside her.
James knelt on her other side and pressed his hands to her body. And in spite of herself, Lucy moved closer, dropping to her knees right next to James, riveted as she watched the light begin to pulse from his hands. That soft white-gold glow that was unlike any light she’d ever seen, natural or manmade. It suffused the young body, the poor ravaged, charred body.
“Please, let it work. Let it work. Let it work,” she whispered, not even aware she was saying the words aloud. The boy was looking at her, and then at James again and then his eyes returned to his beloved.
It seemed to Lucy that the girl’s charred skin began to smooth itself out, the blackened parts to fade to brown. Difficult to be sure in the darkness. Surely she was wishing for it hard enough to play tricks on her mind. But no, it was happening. The burns grew even lighter, gold, then orange, and then slowly muting into pink. The hair on the girl’s scalp came twisting and writhing from within, and it was like watching time-lapse footage. Only it wasn’t. It was real. This was real.
And not for the first time since she’d been lying on that sidewalk, watching her life bleed from her body, Lucy saw the pure beauty of James Poe, and of his gift. He became, once again, an angel in her eyes.
The girl’s body was restored and whole. Her eyes blinked open, then widened. And then Jeremy yanked her upright and into his arms, and the two clung, sobbing and crying and laughing and holding each other as if they would never let go.
James rose to his feet, moving away from them, and before she knew what she was about to do, Lucy rushed to him and wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him hard to her. He grasped her around the waist as she buried her tear-damp face against his neck and whispered, “You’re amazing. You’re a miracle, James. You are so incredibly special.”
One of his hands stroked her hair, and he bent his head to whisper back, “We’re not alone, Lucy.”
Sniffling, she pulled back from him just far enough to wipe her eyes dry and take note of her surroundings. The rest of the vampires had gathered, every one currently on the island, and they were standing around in a semicircle, apparently alerted by her earlier shouting. They’d seen it all. And they looked at James now in such intense awe that she thought they might all be about to take a knee. To genuflect.
She didn’t blame them, but she felt instinctively that adoration like that was the last thing James needed. She tugged on his arm. “We need to talk, James.”
“We will. On the way back to the mainland.”
She blinked in shock. “James, you can’t leave them. They need you, don’t you see that?”
“They need me to go do what I’m supposed to do.”
She stared up at him, her rejuvenated hero-worship already beginning to fracture, a tiny hairline crack opening in its formerly crystalline surface. “To find Utanapishtim? To try to raise a man from the dead after five thousand years?”
“It’s my purpose.”
“No,” she whispered. “This is your purpose. Don’t you see that now? This, these people, they’re your true calling. You need to be here, to heal the innocent, to save the wounded, to ease their pain and, where it’s still possible, restore life to those who’ve had it snuffed out unfairly and before their time. Not to try breathing life into a tiny mound of ash and bone.”
“Look at them,” he said to her.
Unwillingly, she turned her gaze to the sea of faces, all of them looking to James as if he were their only hope. And she realized that there was hope in those faces now, where before there