receiving it. It was a startling feeling. Entirely different from the way he usually felt during a healing.
He thought about stopping, right then, breaking the contact, stopping the flow. But he was mesmerized by then, and dying to see what would happen next. Then the ashes began to crawl like microscopic bugs. He thought he was imagining it at first, the movement was so slight, as if each granule had somehow come to life and begun to wriggle, to squirm. Were his eyes playing tricks on him? Or was it real?
“Something’s happening,” Lucy whispered.
Okay, it was real. She saw it, too. And then he knew it was true with even more certainty, because those granules were skittering across the sheet, moving apart, spreading out, forming a sort of oblong shape…and then spreading out more, as he recognized the picture they were drawing.
Ash—flat, one-dimensional ash—painted itself outward from the shape he now realized was a human torso. And it continued moving, growing, expanding, shaping itself into arms and legs and a head.
“It’s like some kind of demon-possessed Etch A Sketch,” Lucy muttered.
James nodded, unable to take his eyes off the spectacle unfolding before him, beneath his hands, which were pulsing now with white heat. He willed the power to keep flowing, even though it was starting to take an incredible effort. He pushed the light outward, and the shape, the drawing, began to rise up from the sheet, growing thicker, taking on three dimensions, filling out. Fingers took form, the features of a human face growing clear. The ash was multiplying itself, there was no question. There was far more now than there had been before.
And now a body lay on the table, an ash-gray body that seemed as if it would disintegrate if he so much as touched it. So he didn’t. He kept his hands hovering just above it, lifting them higher as the body thickened, and still he kept channeling that light. It felt as if the body on the table was sucking him dry, and yet he pushed on.
The ash grew denser, its texture changing now, color seeming to bleed into it from the very room around them. He saw translucent skin, fingernails and deep black strands of hair writhing from the head. And deep inside that conglomeration of ash, James saw the bleached white of bone appearing, then vanishing again beneath the pink of muscle, the blue of veins twisting and swirling into shape like a thousand tiny snakes scurrying to take their places. Organs appeared, purple and healthy. The heart formed, and then suddenly, with a powerful sucking of energy from his hands, that heart began beating.
Beating!
Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump.
“Oh, my God,” Lucy whispered.
James knew without looking that her head came up then. He felt her tearing her gaze from the miracle taking place on the table between them to look at him. He felt her attention, but he couldn’t return it. He was locked on to what he was doing, and he couldn’t stop. What was most alarming was that he tried to. And couldn’t. It was as if he’d grabbed hold of a live wire, and now it was feeding from him, controlling him so he could not let go.
The figure’s skin turned opaque, then pink and then copper, and then eyebrows sprouted, thick and black. Lashes curled from the eyelids. A shadow of beard appeared.
“James, are you all right?”
He couldn’t answer her. He couldn’t speak. He finally managed, with great effort, to rip his eyes from the powerful naked body on the table between them and look into hers. Without the ability to speak, he tried to tell her that he was dying. That this was going to kill him. That this creature was draining the very life force from his body. And that he was sorry for that—sorry for leaving her behind.
Lucy’s eyes widened, and she reached down, grabbed James by the wrists and pulled upward with all her might, grunting with the effort.
The grip of the creature was broken all at once. James flew backward, as if released from a powerful grasp without warning. He hit the wall and sank to the floor, and then he just lay there, gasping for breath, trembling with muscle fatigue and weakness.
Lucy raced around the table, and leaned over him, her eyes searching his face, one hand pressing to his cheek. “James, my God, you’re white as a sheet! Are you all right? Please, say something.”