“What's what like?” Seth opened his eyes.
“Healing people.”
“It's draining,” Seth said. “I get hungry and tired.”
“But how does it feel, knowing you can do that?”
“It feels like I'm a freak.”
“That's all?”
“No, it's not all!” he snapped. “I have to worry about people finding out.”
“Would that be so bad? You could heal lots of people—”
“—until someone like you comes along and wants to lock me up somewhere so you can study me. Then I couldn't help anyone.”
Heather was quiet for a minute. “And what about Jenny killing those people in your town? How do you feel about that? You think that's okay?”
“You weren't there,” Seth said. “It was a lynch mob. They were trying to kill her. They killed me.”
Heather looked at him.
“I got better,” Seth said. That was Jenny's usual comment, when she talked about how she and Seth had died and come back the night of Easter. “They didn't kill me enough. I was able to heal. Then I had to heal her, because she was dead by then.”
“You brought her back from the dead? Like your friend at the hospital, with the zombies?”
“Not exactly. And he's not a friend. I have no idea who he is.” Seth was only lying a little bit. He suspected the zombie master was the reincarnation of his own great-grandfather, a scary and evil man. “There are others like us, you know. And you may think we're evil, but they're truly evil.”
“What others?”
“There's a guy whose touch makes you feel fear,” Seth said. “I think he might have started the riot in Charleston. And there's a girl who can make people feel love. She's the one who sent the mob against Jenny—she had the town in the palm of her hand since she was a kid. The preacher's daughter.”
“One who can make you feel love?” Heather's eyes grew distant, as if she were thinking of something. “Do you mean love, or lust?”
“That depends on how high she turns it up.”
“What's her name?”
“It doesn't matter. She's not using it anymore.”
“What does she look like?”
“She's...” Seth thought of Ashleigh, but Ashleigh's old body was dead, destroyed by the Jenny pox. Somehow, her spirit had possessed Darcy Metcalf, but now Ashleigh had left Darcy to pick up the wreckage of her life. Ashleigh might still be out there, in another body, but Seth wouldn't know what that one looked like. “I don't know,” he said.
“Are you trying to protect her, too?”
“Hell, no,” Seth said. “You can put her in a lab cage if you find her. I don't care.”
“What are you, exactly?” Heather asked.
“I'm a freshman at Charleston, a pledge at Sigma Alpha Theta, an endless source of disappointment to my parents—”
“You know what I mean.”
“I only got a glimpse of that when I was dead,” he said. “And it's hard to remember the pieces I saw. Your mind kind of works differently when it's not attached to a brain.”
Heather just stared at him.
“I can't answer the question,” Seth said. “We're born with these abilities. We reincarnate.”
Heather shook her head. Seth closed his eyes, leaned back, and listened to the NPR reporters interview the children of laid-off sweater makers.
***
Heather's daughter was at a children's hospital in Atlanta, called Egleston. She didn't say a word as they walked down the hall of the cancer ward. Seth looked into some of the rooms they passed, seeing pale, sick children slowly wasting in their beds. He felt terribly sad at the sight of them.
“Here,” Heather whispered.
He followed her into a hospital room shared by two little girls, their beds separated by a curtain. Heather's daughter Tricia looked tiny and pale in her bed, dwarfed by the monitoring machines around her. Her little head was shaved bare. Her eyes were closed.
Seth reached out a hand. His first instinct was to touch the girl and heal her right away, but he stopped himself, folded his arms, and stepped back from the hospital bed.
“I'm not doing this for free, you know,” Seth said. “I don't owe you any favors.”
“You want money?” Heather asked.
“I want you people to leave us alone. Me and Jenny both.”
“I don't have that kind of power,” Heather said. “Homeland Security is involved. The White House is involved. If you've ever seen an alien-invasion movie, you know that the guys with guns don't usually listen to the guys with microscopes.”
“I expect you to help us,” Seth said.
“I would. I will. I just don't know what I can do.”