Saving Cayli

[Jay Carpenter]

For once, the swarm of power was soothing. Jensen did his work, and Jay kept brushing the hair from Cayli's clammy forehead. She was burning up, feverish, ill. He looked to the bags slung from nearby poles, but the labels meant nothing. Fluids and medicine, he didn't care. They wouldn't be needed in a few minutes.

He knew the warmth that pushed through the throes of healing. Vanders' had the same effect. Like settling into a warm bath, something Jay had never done in his life, ever. With candles and one of those jars of colored rocks that dissolved into the water upon dumping a palm full in. The healing was soothing. The body recuperated. Grew stronger. More vibrant.

Only, as Jensen worked, no color flushed Cayli's cheeks. Her eyes were lidded in distant glaze. Jay grew worried. Where was the healing? Was that all? 

Jensen stepped away. 

Jay blinked, straightening. "What do you mean 'there's nothing to heal'?" His throat clenched, anger, frustration built a stone in his gut. "Heal her, Jensen. You healed Ascendancy. You healed Natalie. You can heal anything short of death!" He licked his lips, dancing desperately between pleading and panic. They came all this way. 

His father intervened. 
"Ascendancy?!" Vitriol drenched with hate spat from his tongue. "Explain yourself, boy!" He turned to Jay, eyes wild, an animal protecting its young from predators.

That he imagined Jay as anything but a protector tore out his heart. 

He pinched his eyes closed, frantically working through what was going on. Maybe Jensen couldn't heal her. Maybe she was beyond healing? No. That made no sense. Jensen healed gunshot wounds. He healed Ascendancy from the brink of death. He healed cuts and bruises. He could heal anything. 

More to the point, he didn't say the healing was impossible. He said something entirely different. 

There's nothing to heal.

His mind raced backward in time. The morning his father returned from the casino... 

She doesn't know...
Doctors said there was nothing to do.. 
Can't find the source of it...
We told her she had mono.

Breaths came shallow and quick. He turned away, trying to piece it together. 

She never seemed sick. Thin and pale maybe. Some days were worse than others. She missed a week of school here or there. Doctors couldn't help her. There was nothing to heal.. He paced, shoving out the voices slowly raising around him. They were demanding answers. Demanding to know who Jensen was. Demands he couldn't satiate. Why was he here? Scaring all of them like this? What healing? 

Nothing to heal.

Jay felt the blood drain from his face. His gaze, wild and panicked, settled upon Cayli. Her own eyes shared the bright blue of his, were likewise afraid and searching. 

Wetness glossed his eyes as he stared into hers. He now knew. God help him, he knew. 

"No. No no no. No. No. No."