“I have to check his leg again,” she protested. She took the bottle of water and then perched on the bed beside Malichai. Her hands felt hot, the healing energy already pushing out of her, needing to find the fragmenting along the bones, those tiny lines that would spread and widen until his bones would no longer hold up and he would lose his leg.
“You have to rest, Amaryllis,” Rubin said firmly. “You won’t do him any good if you collapse. Drink the damn water and give yourself a few minutes.”
She removed the cap and took a drink. The water seemed to soak into her parched throat. She crawled up on the bed beside Malichai, ignoring everyone, and lay next to him, intending to just take a minute to rest the way Rubin instructed. He was experienced and knew what he was talking about and he clearly regarded Malichai as a brother. Her eyelids drooped but she saw one of the twins go over to Rubin and set up an IV in order to give him fluids.
She jerked awake about an hour later, shocked that she’d been asleep. Rubin was already standing beside Malichai, his face a mask of concentration. She could see that he hadn’t been the only one given fluids. While she’d been asleep, the two GhostWalkers from the other team had been busy giving fluids to her. She slid off the bed and knelt beside Malichai’s leg, careful to keep out of Rubin’s way.
Her attention refused to stay focused on the two men who were moving around the room, pulling shades, changing the bag of blood, checking Malichai’s pulse and blood pressure. Her mind kept straying to his leg, to those horrendous wounds, to the damage Mills had done to him. She’d had episodes in the past when someone was injured where she’d been unable to stay away from them, knowing she needed to help heal them. This was different. This was far more intense. Everything in her seemed completely focused on Malichai’s injuries. She had to help him. She had no choice. The healer in her was becoming much stronger, much more demanding.
“Amaryllis, work on his calf,” Rubin suggested, as if understanding or feeling the powerful energy amassing in her.
He didn’t look at her. He was, like her, seeing a different way altogether. She could tell by his eyes, the way they were crystallized, his vision seemingly turned inward. It wasn’t that at all. Vision expanded outward; she saw the injuries through skin and muscle. His entire leg was stretched out in front of her as if she were a surgeon and that bone was under a bright light and a magnifying lens. She saw every detail in sharp relief.
Amaryllis knew her talent was getting stronger with use. She’d never seen an injury so clearly. The tiny cracks had done just as they had before, moved through the bone like an invasive cancer, spreading out from the points where the bullets had struck and where Mills had landed the worst of his kicks. She could see the impact point and the spreading destruction. His bone was dense. Why was it so brittle and open for destruction?
That made her wonder about his other bones. Had they also suffered similar damage? She would have to remember to check. In the meantime, she had a lot of work to do. She started at the worst point, where the cracks radiated outward like a giant tree with many branches coming off of it. She was patient. She wanted her repairs to be stronger than ever so that if anyone did something similar to Malichai again, there wouldn’t be a recurrence of this problem. Each jagged line was knitted back together with meticulous attention to detail.
Because the lines weren’t even, she had to be extremely careful as she filled in those tiny cracks, to get all the way to the very bottom of each of them. Some of the cracks were extremely deep. The upper surface was deceptive in that the fissures could look shallow, just barely a faint line, but beneath that, on the next layer down, the crack extended at an angle, a much deeper gap. That would make the bone more unstable than ever.
The heat gathering inside her became a laser to work with. The pinpoint of light made it easier to see into the fissures, noting which ones were truly shallow and others that continued farther down at an angle. She had managed to work almost the entire calf when the energy suddenly just left her body. As it did, she found she couldn’t kneel upright any longer. She actually slumped over, hitting her head on his hip.
Mordichai was there instantly, his arm around her, helping her to slide down beside Malichai and then half sit so Trap could push another bottle of water at her.