Words of Power (Alice Gray Book 3)

31

Lucas performed mouth-to-mouth on Emily in the middle of the busy, tourist-ridden streets of York, right outside the Minster. Street performers and artists provided some cover, distracting passers-by with their floor pictures and oversized bubbles, but our drama was bound to win out in the end.

Our Beta was fading fast and there was no time to find cover.

Emily was human. She hated to admit it, but her constitution wasn't as strong as the rest of us. That didn't mean I couldn't use a little extra something to bring her back.

Laying my hands on her heart, I willed my magic to uncoil itself from my aching organs. Energy lighted at my core, fusing with the platelets in my blood, multiplying as it ran through the channels of my veins. The moment that it reached my skin, I felt the heady release when the first droplets of silver emerged like pinpricks from my pores.

Something deep inside, something strong and solid and warm throbbed through my blood, through my magic, telling me that I was good, that what I could do to help Emily was good.

The pack bond flowed through me now, fusing with my silver magic, helping me do what was right for my pack, as well as for me.

I sought that connection with my conscious mind, feeling how it changed and strengthened the sequence of my magic. How it gave me a purpose beyond the urge to dominate, to take the vital force of others.

Then, with a certainty that was bolstered by the support of Lucas and Evan, who didn't even need to see what I was doing to trust that it was right, I let my power well at my hands. Silver glowed around my fingers and palms, so bright that the light shone through my skin from one side to the other, showing veins through pink skin that looked too thin to hold flesh and bone together.

The particles travelled out, tiny and disconnected, over Emily's body, surging forward until they reached her pale face. They massed around her mouth and nose like a swarm of tiny sparkling insects.

Emily's head tipped back as her mouth opened wide in a silent scream. Her eyelids flew open, eyeballs rolling back in her head until all you could see were the whites of her eyes, patterned over with thin red lines, bloodshot from the stress of suffocation.

Sirens in the distance registered in my brain.

It didn't matter.

The silver particles plunged down Emily's throat, tearing through the black gunge that blocked her airways.

I felt them, the specks of my life-force. It was my will that made them latch onto the molecules of the dead, heavy, glutinous liquid that formed when the dust particles fused with the moisture in Emily's body.

It was my intention that made the particles of my life-force send out their tendrils to connect with one-another. As they joined, the joyous sound of silver leaves told me the pattern that they'd made was mine.

I couldn't see them inside Emily's body, but I knew.

I knew by the ripples of energy that ran over my skin in dancing waves of silver light. The rightness of it settled into my core with a calming peace, even though Emily still lay un-breathing on the ground, small, frail and crumpled.

I was serene because I believed in the strength of the sequence that the silver particles formed inside Emily's body. I believed in the effectiveness of my magic, of its greatness.

And when I sensed that the web was strong, I willed the strands to contract. They broke apart the sludge that kept the air out of Emily's lungs. I called the silver particles back to me, and as they came, they brought the dark, nasty bits of gloopy matter with them. Out of Emily and back to me, depositing them onto the white jumpsuit that now had little of its original colour visible.

Emily's first breath was raspy and shallow. Her body relaxed onto the pavement but her eyes didn't open. Worry exploded through the calm complacency that the arrogant silver magic had left in my brain.

I'd been so sure that my magic would save her, that I didn't realise it would take more than clearing her airways to restore her health. I should have known that it would require real medical knowledge and equipment to help a human who had been deprived of oxygen for more than a few seconds.

I was an idiot.

As I watched the paramedics check Emily's vitals and then load her into the ambulance, I'd never been so grateful for human technology. I stood back as Lucas got in the ambulance with her, answering their questions.

Left alone, we stood in the centre of York on a busy Wednesday afternoon. Two bedraggled young men and a woman in a prison jumpsuit covered in black slime.

Not suspicious at all.

As the ambulance's siren faded into the distance, the glances of countless human tourists told me what a spectacle we were. Two escaped cons and their friend, who had now been seen by a load of witnesses aiding and abetting.

We had to move, and right now.

Got that right, Alice. Get out of there now!