Elise’s brow shone with a thin sheen of sweat, furrowed and focused. Her hands held over the body of yet another suffering from the recent catastrophe. The light that echoed off her palms flickered and went out.

She redoubled her efforts and the body lain out beneath her jolted as if struct with electricity. The gasp of air was enough to know she’d brought them back but how many more times could it work before it failed to work at all?

“Ow!”

Across the room, a young woman she’d treated for a nasty gash across her hand cried out.

Elise looked up and over, seeing the wound pulled open anew and blood leaking across the woman’s hand, dripping slowly onto the floor.

Checking the temperature of the person on her table, noting their breathing was steady even if they had not yet gained consciousness, she allowed herself to step away and treat the woman again.

Carefully, she cleaned the blood and held her hand up, willing the skin to pull together and knit itself back into place. As the light faded again, a new gasp for air came from the female beside the one with the now healing again cut and she crumpled to the ground.

Bending down, Elise hurried to bring back the crumpled woman just as she had the male laying across her table only moments before. As light faded a third time, the body on the table went into convulsions, jerking and constricting as if being asphyxiated until finally stilling.

Elise froze and looked between the three people in the room, one now permanently dead and her mind flit to pull the pieces together.

This was more than a domino effect.

Elise’s hands dropped from the newly resuscitated woman and covered over her nose and mouth in horror as reality struck her. For every healing, the damage had to go somewhere and in a room like this, the circuit was a closed one. Three people, two injuries, only one that could give their life-energy to heal the others but the cost for a gaping wound and the other had pulled from the third.

Slowly, her hands lowered and she looked at them. She wasn’t gifted. She was the pied piper that never paid the price. Others did. And there was nothing….NOTHING…that would bring back the man on the table now.