Mary was cut from the same cloth as her husband. She had graying dark hair and laugh wrinkles etched onto her skin. Although from the dark circles under her eyes, it looked like she had not smiled for a little while. There was an easy presence about her as she stood there with a cigarette between her fingers, watching them approach. Her overlay was dark red like almost everyone else, but she had one of those glowing white rings encircling her figure.
Jeremy, Moira, and Caleb huffed and puffed to a stop. They carried all their stuff because Jeremy was way too paranoid to leave it in some random council person’s car. They also ran all the way here since the truck was nearly a mile away, and Mary said she only had an hour-long break. Jeremy wanted to spend as much of Mary’s hour-long break as he could learning from her. Moira managed to keep up, but as soon as they got to the meditation garden, she laid out on a bench and put an arm over her eyes.
“Dizzy.” She groaned before any of them could ask. “Just gonna rest my eyes.”
Jeremy had tried to get her to stay with the stuff at the truck and take a nap, but she balked at the idea of being left alone. And he had not wanted to spend any extra time arguing with her.
The meditation garden was a large spiral of paths with flower beds, patches of grass, and benches spread throughout. It looked a little like a maze, somewhere to get lost in your thoughts. Caleb dumped Atticus out of his arms and let her sniff around. Jeremy went up to Mary. He rubbed his hands on his jeans to wipe away the sweat from running over here and stuck out his hand.
“Jeremy.” He said, “Nice to meet you.”
“Mary, likewise.” She had a firm grip, and she did not smile. “Let me take a look at your back.”
He grabbed his collar and dragged the damp shirt over his head. When he saw the back of it, he chuckled. No wonder everyone had wanted to get him checked out. The entirety of the fabric was stained red. He did not think he’d bled that much, but the water made the red spread all over the fabric.
“They aren’t too bad.” Jeremy said as Mary turned him toward one of the lights so she could see better, “They just aren’t getting a chance to heal.”
“You mean, you aren’t giving them a chance to heal.” Mary corrected.
“I’ve been a little busy.” He admitted.
“Haven’t we all? That’s what magic is for.” Mary stood back and looked between Moira sprawled across the bench and Caleb prowling around after Atticus. She pointed the fingers with the cigarette perched between them at Caleb, “You. Come here.”
Caleb tugged Atticus over. Mary took a drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke away from them.
“So, they already started putting together a manual of different spells for different things.” She stubbed the cigarette out on the metal side of the lamp post they stood beneath. Then she reached into her scrubs and pulled out several pieces of paper. “I don’t have anything super complicated like the ritualistic stuff they are doing in surgery, but here are some of the basic spells making the rounds. Take them. I can pick up more.”
“This is so fucking crazy.” Caleb shook his head and took the papers. Jeremy watched as he unfolded them to reveal a series of runes. He made a noise of surprise. He recognized one of them as the rune he labeled ‘manipulate’ in his notebook before it was ruined. It was the same one he saw when Caleb created the little whirlwind of leaves and papers the other day. An unfamiliar rune took the place of air in this case. Jeremy figured it must be whatever type of magic healing was based on, something other than the elements.
“Who wrote the spells?” He asked.
Mary shrugged, “I don’t know, but they work. At first, it was a mess. A few people managed to cast healing spells just flying by the seat of their pants. They envisioned it, and it happened. But then there were incidents where it went wrong. Stuff like trying to remove the fluid in someone’s lungs but ending up removing all the fluid from the lungs, including the organs themselves, and killing the patient.”
Jeremy rubbed his chest and felt a little queasy.
“A lot of the injuries coming in are substantially worse than they were at first because someone tried to heal them.” Mary shook her head, then continued, “Anyway. These spells started making the rounds. Standardizing treatment for minor stuff like clean breaks and cuts and bruises. The docs in surgery are still figuring out more complicated internal injuries.”
“Anything for treating infections?” Jeremy asked.
Mary’s eyes shot to his back, “Your cuts don’t look infected, sweetie.”
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“Just call me paranoid.” He said, “Plus, it would be good to know. I imagine antibiotics are going to be hard to come by in the future.”
“Maybe, but we won’t need them.” Mary nodded at the papers, “There’s a spell in there for that. But let’s worry about closing up those cuts. Like I said, I can’t perform the spell, but I can make sure you are doing it properly.” She looked at Caleb, “You think you got it?”
Caleb looked up from the papers, “Sure. What do you need me to do.”
“It’s not that complicated.” Mary got him on the right page and pointed at the runes. There were what appeared to be three of them combined into one circular sigil, none of which Jeremy recognized. “Just visualize these runes with the intent of healing his cuts. It’s easier if you touch him.”
Caleb shrugged and put one hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. He eyed the runes for a little while like he was trying to will the paper to burst into flame. His brow furrowed. The bug buzzed against the light overhead. Moira shifted on the bench.
Then Jeremy felt the strangest sensation. It was not quite pain. His back was already one big upset nerve ending. It was more like when he scratched a bug bite and dug into the skin a little too hard and ended up making it hurt instead of itch. Except in reverse.
Caleb was getting red in the face. Mary watched him with amusement. Her lips twisted into a little smile, and her eyebrows slightly raised.
“Breathe, honey.” She encouraged him. He gasped in a breath and glanced toward Jeremy, who gave him a little thumbs up even though he felt like he had an army of fire ants crawling all over his back. Then it stopped and Caleb’s eyes lit up.
“I did it!” He threw his arms in the air. The papers crumpled in one fist, and Atticus dragged along the ground as her leash pulled taught. She stood up all arched and offended, then curled back onto the sidewalk as though nothing had happened.
Jeremy’s back still felt strange. But it was more of an echo of pain. The way his skin still stings a little after he scratched it, but there wasn’t really any damage, and the pain would go away as soon as he stopped thinking about it. He craned his neck to look over his shoulder, but he could not see anything.
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing, honey.” Mary said, “Now, don’t get too confident with this. Stick to small injuries. One thing we are learning is that if you are not practiced at these healing spells, there is a chance of them going wrong. That chance seems higher the more complex the injuries you try to heal.”
“Do you know how many healing spells you have cast?” Jeremy glanced at her overlay again. She was the first person he had seen a ring around. Considering the level of power that the multi-ringed dryad and kelpie had, leveling entire city blocks, rerouting rivers, and such, the fact that she had even one was impressive.
“Well, let’s see.” She closed her eyes and sighed, “At first, I could do about five spells before needing to take a break, and I worked a 72-hour shift. I’ve been here for…” She trailed off, whispering to herself while she did her mental math. Her eyes popped open, “I’ve also been able to do more and more spells at a time as I practice. Now I can do about twelve. I’m not sure about the total number of spells, sorry. More than a hundred. Probably not as many as a hundred twenty. I couldn’t tell you exactly.”
“Around a hundred healing spells.” He looked at the ring. She had gone from being able to do five spells to six spells without exhausting herself. As well as having a lower chance of something going awry with the spells, she also was more efficient at casting them. He was willing to bet that the ring was some type of visual cue for a level-up. The overlay’s colors shifted up the ultraviolet spectrum until they hit a certain point where a person leveled up. He looked at the dark red color of Mary’s overlay. Then, apparently, the colors reset.
“Did you, um…” He wasn’t sure exactly how to ask his question, so he went for the simplest way, even though it might sound strange, “Did you meditate about the spells you cast?”
Mary gave him a strange look, as was expected. She checked her watch, tapped another cigarette from her pack, and said, “No, I didn’t.”
Jeremy frowned. From his conversation with Sean, it seemed like you not only had to practice the spells, but also internalize it somehow. He held up his bloodied shirt and considered whether or not he should put it back on.
“I’ll tell you this, though.” Mary said, “When it is as bad as it has been for the past few days and when you’ve been working the hours we have, you enter a kind of fugue state where you are both hyper-focused and running on auto-pilot all at the same time. You could consider that a kind of meditation, I suppose.”
Jeremy had no idea, but it made sense. “Do you have a pen?”
“Sure.” Mary plucked one from the pocket of her scrubs and held it out. Jeremy grabbed the papers from Caleb, who’d been sorting through them with interest.
“Turn around.” Jeremy told Caleb, then he put the papers against his back and started making a new set of notes. Mary had cast between 100 and 120 healing spells.
“I’m assuming the spells you cast were a variety, not just healing cuts the entire time.” He glanced over at her.
“Yes, healing cuts, bruises, burns, breaks.” She pointed to the papers, “All those simple spells. The ones that have more components, I have not practiced.”
“Got it,” Jeremy noted that the spells cast had been a variety of simple healing spells. He put down that Mary was able to cast five spells at a time, and then over time over double that. It seemed like efficiency went up as the colors of the overlay changed, not just when a ring appeared. He still was not sure where the runes in people’s overlays fit into this, but his guess was that they somehow indicated their individual skill or affinity, or as Sean and company called it, their gift. He squinted at Mary’s runes, but they were unfamiliar to him.
“Do you think as new spells get passed around, you could send them to us?” Jeremy asked her.
“Sure.” She puffed one last drag from her cigarette, stubbed it out on the light post, then tossed it into a nearby trash can. There was a sign right above it prohibiting smoking. “I have your number, right?”
“Oh, no, actually, this isn’t my phone.” Jeremy patted his pocket, then nudged Caleb, “Hey, can you give her your number?”
“We’ve got to get you a phone, buddy,” Caleb told him, then he turned to Mary to dictate his number to her.