The Healer (The Witch Hunter 0.5)(15)

Absurdly, I start to laugh.

She looks at me, her unsmiling face expressionless, then thrusts the cup back into my hand. I watch her eyes drift from my face down to my shirt, which, God’s nails, I realize now is wrinkled and, worse, buttoned wrong.

I turn away from her, from her unrelenting stare, and walk back to Nicholas. Feel his forehead, his wrist. He’s cool, but his pulse is quick. His symptoms are beginning to shift again.

“Not too long, all right?” I look at her. “That goes for you, too.”

She raises her eyebrows. Skeptical.

“He’s very strict,” Nicholas says, nodding to me.

“Like a priest on Sunday,” chimes in George.

I flick my first two fingers up in a V, then immediately regret it. I can’t make obscene gestures at patients—or in front of them—but George and Nicholas laugh. I barely notice, focused instead on the smile that drifts across Elizabeth’s face then disappears, the first time I’ve seen her smile since she got here.

“I’ll check on you both tomorrow morning.” I walk to the door, half my mind on Nicholas, the other half on the girl in the bed.

“You don’t have to do that,” Elizabeth says. Her voice is soft but clear, with a bit of a lilt to it, a hint of the country. The way she says you comes out as yew. Do as dew.

“Why ever not?” George says to her. “He’s only been checking on you every hour since you got here. If we’re down to twice a day now, that’s a vast improvement.”

Color floods her cheeks, the same way it does mine. I scowl at him but he either doesn’t see me or is pretending not to.

“It’s not necessary, that’s all. I’m fine,” Elizabeth says, and I can feel her looking at me.

I turn back to her and manage a smile. “Don’t argue with the clergy,” I say. Then, before I say anything else equally stupid, I turn and leave, closing the door quietly behind me. I lean against the cool polished wood and huff a sigh—of relief, of an odd sense of embarrassment. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

“Well?” Fifer pokes her head out the door of her room down the hall. She must have been awake this whole time, waiting for me to come out. “Is she okay? What’s she like? Did she try to throw something at you? Hit you? Did she drink your medicine?” She steps into the hall.

“She seems fine,” I say. “A little scared, but that’s to be expected. No, she didn’t throw anything at me, she didn’t hit me, and yes, she drank it.” I hold the cup up for emphasis.

“So, what now?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess we wait and see. But I think things are going to be different now.” I say this without thinking, as if it’s a given.

Or as if, like healing, it’s just another thing I know without knowing.