Daddy's Little Healer

Cherry grew up in the mountains and learned to work with needles there. A man of the Gordon family climbed up looking for the living immortal who was supposed to be able to lift the curse that had run in his family for a hundred years. He collapsed on the way and Cherry brought him round. He heard how she was living and took her back down to the Gordon house. On her first day in the city she pulled a Gordon man out of the path of a car. The family took to her after that. When the old head of the house was dying she treated him with needles, and one of the Gordon women accused her of working a fraud on him. The old man woke up, and Cherry's name went around fast. A woman who had been put out by all this listened to that same Gordon woman and hired the head of the beggars' guild to get rid of her. He and his men watched her bring a patient back from the point of death, gave it up, and started calling her their boss. At a seminar on traditional medicine an elder of the field talked down to her until he saw her put the needles in, and he bowed in front of everyone and asked to study under her. She carried a crescent mark, which was the sign the living immortal was said to have. The Gordon she had pulled away from the car had taken her as his daughter, and he spent his time keeping the rest of them, the beggars' guild and the old physician included, away from her.