Lethal Game (GhostWalkers 16)

When she looked up, his gaze was fixed on her face. Watching her. Looking for her to give him a sign everything was okay. Everything was not okay. Her world had crumpled around her. Her sweet Malichai. He’d turned her inside out with his frank confession. He moved her with everything he said or did. Everything he was. He had to live. He had to be saved.

She was terrified for him. Absolutely terrified. She had no idea what to do, how to wield all that power that was inside of her. She felt the power rising the moment she touched his damaged leg, the way it did when she was around anyone hurt. There was only Amaryllis Johnson, who didn’t know anything about healing to do it, and she needed to quit stalling and get on with it.

She focused her sight on his calf and allowed her vision to expand out of the narrow confines of what her mind told her she could see. At once, her hands, now hovering around Malichai’s leg, grew warm. Then hot. She could see the glow coming from her palms, a reddish orange light that caused her eyes to swim with tears. She had excellent night vision, thanks to the large cat DNA. She also had the DNA of birds of prey, which further enhanced her sight. She had to get past that and tap into sight beyond even that.

There was fear in her mind. Chaos even. Malichai meant too much to her and she was very afraid for him—very afraid of hurting him—of damaging his leg even further. She needed to quiet her mind and let all fear drop away, a difficult feat when terror for him was nearly paralyzing.

Amaryllis found she was hyperventilating. She wasn’t actually even healing him and yet she was already screwing up.

“Baby, breathe, you got this,” Malichai said gently. “You were born to do this.”

She knew she was. She knew it absolutely. She felt the heat. The power, the rising need to heal, but this was Malichai, the most important person in the world to her and she didn’t have a clue what she was doing. She gave a little shake of her head.

“Look at me, Amaryllis,” Malichai insisted.

She raised her gaze to his. His gold eyes captivated her. She felt as if she just fell into that deep, mysterious well and would drown in all that gold.

“Breathe with me. In and out. Feel your breath moving through your lungs. Concentrate on that. Don’t think about anything else until your mind is calm.”

Of course she knew how to center herself. It was one of the most basic things taught to them when they were children. Still, it felt different, like caring, when she followed Malichai’s lead. It didn’t matter to him that he was feverish, that he could barely understand what was happening to him or what was going on around him, she’d needed him and he’d found a way to come through for her. She had to come through for him—and she would.

She immediately focused on the air moving in and out of his lungs. He breathed slowly and evenly, but deeply, filling his lungs and letting it out slowly. Once she was breathing with him and concentrating on that, the chaos in her mind quieted.

With new determination, she looked at his leg, her palms once again hovering a scant quarter of an inch above it. She was able to let go of fear for him and just become a healing light. Immediately she focused on that. The lantern. What it looked like, what it felt like, how the light slowly turned away from her and into him.

Her vision changed subtly, became almost opaque, as if she were seeing through a dense, cloudy veil. Behind the veil was a map in the form of pure heat. Lines were bright red, so many of them, cracks in the bone running in every direction, with tiny bubbles of liquid boiling up through those cracks. It looked like she’d stumbled onto a volcano, with the magma spreading out under the ground in all directions, looking for veins to the surface.

She mapped out every single spiderweb crack she could see and then blinked rapidly to clear her vision. Sinking back onto her heels, she looked around his room. “I need something to draw on.”

She should have found that first, but she’d been so worried that she couldn’t do it. “Malichai, honey, I need paper and a pen.”

She was already at the small desk under the window, looking back at him for confirmation. She detested going through his things without his permission, but she really didn’t know how much he was comprehending.

He didn’t respond and she found what she was looking for in one of the drawers, snapped on the light over the desk and drew a map of his bone, numbering every crack. She wanted the healer to see what they would be working with. She was as careful and as accurate as possible. Using Malichai’s phone, she snapped a picture of it and then sent it to Ezekiel with the text stating it was of his bone, a three-dimensional drawing numbering every crack and the infection seeping out of it. It was the best she could do. Now it was a matter of waiting.