Cate set her fork down with a clatter. “Fuck. In that case, no. I never starved myself or scalded myself, if that’s what you’re asking. It doesn’t sound worth it to me.”
Patricia settled back. “How do we know that you have abilities?”
“You’re free to believe me or not,” Cate said, unruffled. “It doesn’t change anything.”
“Then show us.” Patricia spoke casually, but I saw the intensity behind her eyes. She’d been planning to ask this already.
I felt a tug of curiosity mixed with discomfort. I’d never even thought to ask Cate to exhibit her abilities to me. It would’ve been asking her to perform, lift her skirts in a peep-show tent. But I was guiltily curious. After seeing Fiona in the basement—after that night in the parking lot, my own body changing—I craved more. I wanted to see that same impossibility manifesting inside a different body, a grown body, still alive, still here, proving it wasn’t just a fluke—something I could watch as an observer. Not just the little silvery zebrafish, but a human being.
“It’s hard to heal someone when nobody’s hurt,” Cate demurred.
“Oh,” Isabelle said. She grabbed her steak knife from beside her plate and slashed it quickly against the underside of her forearm. It was such an exact yet careless cut, like she was slicing a vegetable for dinner, that I barely registered it until the blood started welling. First just a thin red outline, as neat as if made by a marker tip, and then, suddenly, too suddenly, the blood was pooling. I was frozen.
Patricia half rose from her chair as her daughter’s blood dripped onto the fine white fabric of the tablecloth, each spot spreading rapidly, root-like fingers shooting out as the blood followed the grain of the fabric. Her expression torn between fascination and horror, mirroring my own.
Cate, on the other hand, was calm and focused. Standing, she grabbed a napkin and pressed it to Isabelle’s arm. Isabelle was as unresisting as a doll, watching Cate with those big eyes. Cate pulled the napkin away and examined the amount of blood. After moving her fingers over Isabelle’s flesh delicately, pressing down, she wrapped both hands around the wounded part of her arm and shut her eyes, her face slackening. Cate’s eyelids fluttered shut, the globes of her eyeballs moving side to side underneath the thin skin, like she was trying to take in the whole room with her eyes still shut tight.
How deep had Isabelle managed to get with that one swipe of the knife? It was so practiced. Isabelle was used to treating her own body with a functional recklessness.
Patricia’s expression had settled into a keen wonder. Cate’s skin was draining of color. A ribbon of a vein pulsed at her throat. A fine layer of sweat stippled her forehead. She was gripping Isabelle’s arm so hard that my own stomach sucked in sympathetically, but Isabelle wasn’t reacting. Just waiting. Waiting.
Cate opened her eyes and let go. She held on to the back of her chair, supporting herself. Isabelle grabbed a napkin and scrubbed too roughly at the skin surrounding the cut. Patricia came closer then, reaching down to trace one fingernail over the skin. The deep slit in Isabelle’s arm—it must’ve been two inches across—was gone, even as the evidence still stained the tablecloth and spattered the floorboards. Where the cut had been, a pinkish line lay against her skin. It faded even more as I watched, barely there.
Cate sat, nearly slipping off the chair. She wiped a hand across her forehead and left behind a rusty streak, blood mingling with the sweat over her eyebrows.
“Are you all right, Cate?” I asked.
She nodded, managed a smile. “It’s usually not that fast,” she said, a whisper so low only I could catch it. She looked down at her hands, almost marveling.
“Can you do it again?” Isabelle asked, hard and eager.
“No. God.” There were shadows of fatigue beneath Cate’s eyes that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago. “Please don’t hurt yourself, Isabelle.” But I could hear the echo under it. It hurt Cate too: she hadn’t mentioned that part.
Patricia moved back to her own seat. She clasped her hands beneath her chin, looking at each of us in turn. I kept staring at Isabelle’s arm. It reminded me of my own scar, the skin that surgeons had painstakingly grafted onto me: the scientific breakthrough of that versus the raw, simple magic of what Cate had just done. Maybe they weren’t so far apart. Maybe the skin graft had been a little moment of witchcraft and Cate’s ability to stitch Isabelle’s nerve endings back together was a physiological response, no more inexplicable than a cut healing on her own skin or a heartbeat pushing blood through a body.