Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(34)

Glain’s skin felt cold, as if the essential fluids of life had withdrawn into the core of her; Morgan called on a tiny trickle of power, and her friend’s body came to shimmering life in front of her, mapped in flows of reds, blues, golds . . . and a steadily expanding darkness deep inside her.

Glain was dying. Fighting it, the way Glain fought all her battles—an absolute, unyielding struggle. But she was on the losing side of this one, resources depleted, allies gone. She fought alone.

No. Not alone. Not anymore.

But a little chill went through her, a vibration, a discord. And another voice whispered, The damage is too great. You should not do this. Sometimes, death is inevitable.

I can, she thought. I will.

Morgan looked at Wolfe, who stood nearby. “A chair,” she said. “This will take time.”

“Can you save her?” The physician seemed curious. “How?”

“I can’t really explain if you can’t see what I see,” she said. “But I may be able to help her save herself.” She smiled at Wolfe. “Don’t worry, Scholar. Have you ever known Glain to give up?”

“Never,” he said. “I’ll get the chair.”

She was settled in just a moment, and put her hands directly on Glain’s bare shoulders. Took a deep breath and let herself feel.

The shock of pain nearly drove her back. The damage done inside of Glain was considerable, and growing worse as free fluid inside her crowded her heart and lungs. Her body was working too hard to survive, let alone heal. Glain’s army needed reinforcements.

Morgan began by concentrating on the tears within two of the major vessels damaged by the bullet’s strike; one was small enough to be closed with a relatively minor amount of urging. But the other was a gaping hole, half the vein torn away, and that was going to be difficult. Morgan tapped the vital energy flowing all around her and channeled it through the matrix of the ring; tiny amounts of quintessence were trapped in every cell of every creature, even in inanimate objects. Anything that came from the earth held quintessence. She felt the ring feeding her in a thick amber flow . . . and then guiding her to extract more from the human bodies standing in the room, and then the ones outside of it. Careful draws, light ones, nothing that would damage them in the least.

But it wasn’t enough. She had fixed some of the damage, but it only slowed Glain’s defeat; it couldn’t prevent it. She sculpted the power, manipulated it into a tiny structural matrix and guided the tissues to build around it. The torn vein sealed. Morgan began breaking down the blood that had leaked into Glain’s chest cavity, burning it into energy and feeding that energy back into the ring. Once that was done, and Morgan could see that Glain’s heart was laboring strongly again, she went to the next challenge.

The damage to Glain’s liver and lungs seemed grave, and so she set to work again, bit by bit. She hardly felt it when her own connections began to fail, when the energy she pulled began to flow more slowly. When its character began to shift. She did feel the ring pulsing on her left hand, a steady warning that grew in intensity as she ignored it and kept working, had to keep working because she could feel Glain’s body sliding into shock from the effort to heal.

Morgan had a strong flash of her nightmare, of drowning, of darkness blotting out the sun, and she poured reckless amounts of energy through the ring, accelerating the knitting together of Glain’s wounded organs, until she felt a sharp, agonizing stab of pain lance up her arm and into her brain, and broke free with a cry.

She was shaking so badly she almost pitched off the chair to the floor—would have done, if Scholar Wolfe hadn’t been there to catch her. And she was cold, so cold, and his brightness shone like a torch to her.

She put her hands on his face and breathed him in like a gasp of pure, fresh air.

She took life.

You will not.

The ring caught fire on her hand, burned so painfully that she flung herself away and hit the wall. She sank down to a slumped sitting position, unable to do anything to prevent it. Wolfe had stumbled, too, and was now clinging to the bedpost for support. He looked wide-eyed and wild. Terrified in a way she couldn’t remember ever seeing him. “Morgan, stop!”

She was still reaching for his brilliant energy, even at this distance. Trying to consume it. And the ring was preventing her from doing any more damage.

She forced herself to stop, though it felt like falling into the deepest pit in the world, and leaned back against the wall to sob. She cried for the sin she’d just committed, or tried to commit, because now that she came back to herself she knew it was a wrong as great as anything she could have ever done. As the ring had warned her.

On the bed next to her, Glain let out a low, soft groan, opened her eyes, and whispered, “What happened?”

For a moment no one moved, and then Morgan stumbled to her feet. She looked down at the ring she wore. She could tell the glow was dim, the blood spot darkened. It needed recharging. It needed more than she could give.

Calm down, the ring whispered. Breathe. Power flows around you. Power will come. Do not demand it.

“I have to go,” she told Wolfe. She felt sick and weak, but she didn’t want to stay here. There was something about Wolfe, something shimmering inside him that wakened a hunger inside she didn’t like. He was the child of two powerful Obscurists, and though he’d never manifested power of his own, there was a potential energy inside him that she could almost taste. It made her thirsty for the relief of it. “Thomas needs me today. I can’t keep doing this, Scholar. Don’t ask again.”