All Wounds Read Online Free PDF Page B

what’s become of me, what you have to endure day after day.”
    “Nana—” Rebecca began to protest.
    Nana held up a hand. “Please. Let me talk and don’t interrupt.” She took a sip of tea and swallowed hard.
    Rebecca sat down in her own chair, cradling her hands around her mug in a futile effort to warm them.
    “I should have told you all these things long ago, but after Helene died—” Nana closed her eyes for a moment, then smiled at Rebecca.
    “No matter what I might not want you to know about things, I still know about them. I just can’t quite remember everything. This happens, when Healers reach the age of sixty. While Syd’s here I’m able to use his power to clear my mind, but he won’t be here long enough for me to tell you all I need to,” Nana said. “I’m sorry for not telling you these things before.
    Syd’s right. I’ve likely done more harm than good trying to protect you from your birthright with ignorance. I should have expected the war to start again, but the peace has held for so long... I forget that mortal time means so little to Ethereals. I suppose I was hoping you’d be grown and gone before—” Nana stopped herself and shook her head before going on. “But, you’re not, so now we must deal with that.”
    “Before...what?” Rebecca asked. She bit her bottom lip.
    Nana reached across the table and took one of Rebecca’s hands in hers. “Rebecca...you’re a Healer.”
    Well...that didn’t sound so bad , Rebecca thought. In fact, something inside her leapt at the word, and a kind of heat spread through her limbs. Her cold hands were suddenly warm, and she smiled. Still—
    “A Healer? Like...a doctor?” Rebecca asked.

    “In a manner of speaking,” Nana replied and released Rebecca’s hand.
    “You were born with the gift to channel power to your own use...that is, to share your life’s force with those who are in need, and to heal those beings thought to be immortal. ‘Immortal’ does not mean ‘invulnerable’, little dove.
    Your friend was bitten, very nearly lethally, by a hellhound, who no doubt attacked Syd’s clan. Vampires are a delicacy to hellhounds because they have no soul. It was only Syd’s bite, the final bite of a vampire, that saved Ryan.
    I don’t agree with it, but it saved your friend’s life.” Rebecca tried to process everything her nana was saying. It was like talking to someone else, someone completely different than the grandmother she had grown up with.
    Nana was a...a what? A healer of vampires? And I’m supposedly one, too?
    “So...” Rebecca said slowly. “We’re a family of...vampire healers?” Nana laughed and took another sip of her tea. “More or less,” she said after a moment. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. It’s not just vampires. We help the hellhounds, too. Goblins, ghosts, specters, shades, werewolves—demons are really the only ones who shun us and refuse to ask a mortal for help.” Goblins? The word brought a flash of something to Rebecca’s mind, and she recognized it as what she’d seen that afternoon peeking in the door to the girl’s bathroom at school. Those...were real? All the things she’d been seeing...those had been real things? She thought back over the past few...how long had she been seeing things? Months? A long time, anyway. First little weird things in the garden that she dismissed as birds, then spiders behav-ing strangely—looking like they were waving at her and so on, then stuff with huge eyes peeking out behind shelves and bushes and even people’s pet doors. What were they?
    “We observe neutrality,” Nana went on. “We don’t take sides. We have the gift of healing those who cannot heal themselves—those who need power and the force of life that comes from a living soul like ours. Unfortunately, by using our life force in this way, it’s depleted quickly. It gets used up by the time we reach sixty. If we reach sixty. A lot of us don’t.”
    “You keep saying