by D. Levesque
As we watch, the water lenses appear to move on their own. Bridget’s trying to get them calibrated, I’m sure.
“All right, avert your eyes. Alex, I will need your power. Is that all right?”
“Yes, go for it,” I tell her, holding my breath.
I had told Bridget she didn’t need to keep asking me to use my power, but she said when it came to considerable amounts, she had no choice. It worked like a contract between the Mage and the Elemental, where permission was required.
Abruptly, I feel a large pull of power being drawn from me. And I mean an enormous amount.
Your Elemental has used a Sophisticated Spell Command. You have used 50,000 points of power.
My eyes bug out at the notification. Holy fucking Hell! 50,000? Then I hear a loud crackling noise, as if I’m standing too close to a lightning storm, and the air smells of ozone. I look over at Bridget and almost turn away immediately, but then I shade my eyes with my hand instead. We are behind her, but I can see a very large bright beam leaving her face and hitting the first large water lens. It get smaller as it goes through the lens and hits the second one, and so on and so on until it’s going through the last one, and the beam is more concentrated. Then I watch as the beam hits the hill and disappears into it. I can see lots of smoke rising from the hill, as the beam penetrates it.
Suddenly I feel a pain in my chest, as if I was just kicked, hard. “Shit,” I say in pain, putting my hand there.
“It’s happening?” Leeha asks me worriedly.
“Yeah, but it’s not intense yet. It feels like someone kicked me in the chest. At least I can still breathe,” I tell Leeha with a grimace.
“I am almost done, Alex,” Bridget says, and I can hear the strain in her voice. “I need more power to punch through,” she continues, almost sheepishly.
“Take it,” I tell her, nodding. I know she needs to use as much of my power as she can get, but I’m not going to lie, I’m also worried about what will happen to me.
Your Elemental has used a Sophisticated Spell Command. You have used 50,000 points of power.
Immediately, that kick to the chest turns into something worse. Imagine standing in front of a cannon. You know, the old kind that they used to use to fire off large cannonballs about the size of a grapefruit? Yeah, one of those. Now imagine it going off while you are standing in front of it and having that cannonball hit you right in the upper chest. But then, add something worse. Add the fact that it feels like your skin is gone and all your nerve endings are on fire. It feels like that time I got bitten by a fire ant, but imagine being bitten by thousands of them, all over your body.
“Alex!” cries Leeha, and even in my state of pain, I can hear the utter horror in her voice.
Then I hear Bridget scream, “Alex!” through our connection, and she is crying. Why would Bridget be crying?
“Bridget!?!” Leeha screams.
“I’m here!” I hear her voice, but in my daze, I can’t totally understand what is happening. “I need to stabilize him, but I don’t know where to start!” Bridget wails, and she is still crying.
Even in my daze, I remember something I read once. Fix the thing that will kill someone first, and many times, it isn’t the thing that is bleeding.
“First fix the issue that will keep me alive,” I manage to say, but I am cognizant enough to hear it come out slurred.
“Right!” Bridget cries. “Fix what will kill you first. Deal with the rest later.”
“What can I do?” Leeha asks her hurriedly.
“Do you know how you surround those carcasses when we hunt in water? Can you do that now? I need to keep his muscles and tissues wet. Even if it’s water, at least the water is pure.” Why would she want my skin surrounded? What did she mean by my muscles and tissues?
“I can do that!” Leeha says, and suddenly I feel coolness on my body, where I had been burning before. “What about you?”
“I need to do something about his chest. The fourth Chakra opened, and right now his heart is gone. I think my connection to him is the only reason he survived, since I was able to jump-start his system somehow. I moved my heart into his chest cavity for now, but that won’t last much longer.”
“Your heart?” Leeha says in amazement.
“Yes. I need to regenerate his heart that shattered, but it’s not just a normal heart. I am not sure how I know this, but I have the idea of how to create it, using the surrounding magic energy. I’m going to need to put him out for this. Alex, I am sorry love, but this will hurt much worse. I love you,” Bridget says, and there is genuine fear and concern in her voice.
Then suddenly, the pain I was feeling changes. No, wait. It’s not that it changes. It increases, and instead of being just on my skin in my chest, it radiates all over my body. The pain is so severe that it makes me cry out, lifting my head to the sky. I can’t stop, but I know that I am screaming like a bestial thing, wounded and in pain, not understanding. Then, darkness.
Unbeknownst to me, until I heard about it afterwards from Bridget, I died—multiple times. The exact number, Bridget would not tell me. She’d only say that there were four times she almost lost my soul. She said that rebuilding my heart took three days. What really freaked me out was when she said it took her another four days to rebuild my skin. By the end, Leeha passed out from using up all her magic power to keep my skin damp.
Slowly, my eyes start to open as I feel the sun on my skin, and it’s not cool this time, but warm. I look around and realize I am lying on a carpet. Oh, it’s one of the ones I stole from the tent of Brakan. Wait. How did I take it out in my sleep? Wow, am I so dependent on my comforts that I took it out when I was passed out? Gingerly, I sit up and look around. We are still on the beach. Leeha is asleep next to me, but Bridget is gone, and so is Sara.
“Leeha?” I call her, touching her shoulder and shaking her slightly. She moans but doesn’t wake up. I leave her alone, as I’m not aware yet of what’s happened to her.
“Bridget?” I call out through our connection.
“Alex!” Bridget cries in relief. “Thank Gods you’re finally awake!”
“What’s wrong with Leeha? She’s passed out but won’t wake when I jostle her,” I ask her.
That is when Bridget explains what happened to me—from my heart exploding when my fourth Chakra opened, to my skin exploding away from my body, leaving my nerves, muscles, and tissue showing. How Leeha had covered me from head to toe in water, leaving only my ears, eyes, mouth and nostrils uncovered. The rest of me, Bridget says, was submerged in pure water to keep it wet. Leeha had used some of her English to keep it close to my body, and it was almost an eighth of an inch thick.
“Fucking Hell, will she be ok?” I blurt out in worry.
“Yes. She simply needs to sleep. I was only able to finish healing you about a day ago.”
“Wait, are you saying that Leeha used that much power for almost seven days and is now passed out because she depleted all her power?” I ask her in concern.
“Pretty well. Leeha will be fine, though. I checked on her with her Elemental, and it seems her regeneration has increased since meeting you. Her Elemental tells me that Leeha will wake up by tomorrow morning.”
“What time is it now? Early afternoon?” I ask her, gazing at the sun again.
“Roughly two in the afternoon. You are still weak and need to rest.”
“I do?” I ask her, perplexed. “I feel ready to run a marathon.”
“What?” Bridget asks me, sounding perplexed herself now.
“Yeah, I have all this energy. I feel like I can run up and down the beach. I am hungry, though,” I say, as just then my stomach reminds me I probably have not eaten for over seven days. “But I will grab some jerky out of my bag. Speaking of my bag. How did the carpet get out of it?”
“That would be me,” Bridget says. “Because I am your Elemental, I seem to have access to your bag and its contents. I hope you don’t mind? I only took out the carpet.”
/> “No, that’s fine. So,” I say, looking around our little campsite on the beach, “did we lose Sara? Did she freak out when whatever happened to me happened and run away?”
“No, she is with me. We are exploring the tunnel that we created. It’s finally cool enough to walk through. Or at least for you three. I could have walked in it right away. We are about halfway through to the other side.”
“How did she take it?” I ask Bridget about Sara’s reaction.
“Let’s just say she passed out the first time she saw you without skin. You were kind of horrible to look at,” Bridget says with a snicker. “After the first day, she hunted for us and made sure we had firewood all the time. She also tried not to look worried for you, but Leeha and I could see it.”
“Well, I am glad I didn’t scare her away,” I tell her.
“We do have an issue though, with Sara,” Bridget says through our connection.
“Oh shit. What?” I ask her, worried now.
“I think she really likes you,” Bridget says, and I can feel the grin through our connection. “The context I am getting is something called, Florence Nightingale effect.”
I turn around quickly, looking up towards the hill and the new hole that’s there with a frown. Then I think about it. Would that be so bad?
I feel a snicker through the connection. “You want her, don’t you?”
I can’t help it, I laugh out loud and tell her through our connection, “Bridget, she is a catgirl! Of course I want her.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
About an hour later, I hear footsteps behind me. I turn and see that it’s Sara and Bridget. I don’t get up, but I wave to them both.
Sara gets a pensive and nervous look on her catgirl face. “Are you all right?” she asks me as she sits on the large carpet. Bridget comes over and kisses me, and then she sits down next to me. Leeha is still passed out cold.
“Yeah. Sorry if you got a scare,” I tell her with a smile.
“Scared wasn’t half of it. Alex, your skin and clothes literally blew apart in front of my eyes. You should be dead,” Sara says with a grimace of disgust.
That’s when I look down and notice I am not wearing my gray leather outfit anymore. Even my boots are different. Instead, I am wearing a pair of brown leather pants, tied at the waist, with a light cotton shirt that has been dyed red. The boots I am wearing are decent. They are a soft leather, dyed black, and go up to my knees.
“You said my clothes blew apart as well?” I ask her, incredulously.
“Yes. It was something I never want to see ever again. It’s a thing that nightmares are made of,” Sara says, visibly shuddering.
I look over at Bridget for confirmation, and she is already nodding. “I would say when your Chakra opened, it caused your skin to explode, and since your clothes and boots were against your skin, they exploded with it. The force, from what Sara described, was pretty intense. She had to go wash herself off. Both Leeha and her were covered.”
“Ew,” I say, making a face.
“Ew yourself,” Sara says, scowling. “Don’t ever do that again.”
“I’ll try,” I tell her with a laugh. Jesus. The explosion was so powerful it blew apart whatever I had on me?
“Shit!” I reach down quickly for my new bag, but it’s still there.
“Don’t worry. It seems that the bag is attached to you differently and is very strong. Which is a good thing since that how the only reason I got your carpet out,” Bridget says. “Though, hmm. Sara saw me take out the carpet. I had to explain to her a bit of what it was. That one of the Gods gave the bag to you.”
I nod in acknowledgement of her quick save. I just met Sara and don’t totally trust her, not with stuff like this. Leeha, I trust with my life. Bridget is my life, as she is part of me. Sara is the unknown, sexy as fuck, equation I don’t completely trust yet. I’m not sure how much I want her to know. Yet.
I look down at Leeha and ask Bridget, “You’re sure she will be all right?”
“Yes. Like I said, I talked to Leeha’s Elemental. She just needs sleep. And now that you are safe, I can leave you alone. I need to go regenerate as well. I used up a lot of not just your power, Alex, but my own,” Bridget says, and that is when I see the exhaustion in her Elven features. Can Elementals get tired?
“Before you go, I have a question or two if you can answer them?” I ask her. At her nod, I say, “So what is different about my skin and heart now? What’s to say, when I open my fifth Chakra, that this won’t happen again?”
“Well, your skin and heart are different now. But here, it’s better if I show you. Stand up,” she says to me.
I look at her oddly, but I do as she asks and stand up. Bridget stands up with me, but then bends down and grabs the dagger that Leeha had tucked into her boot. A real one that she had found in Brakan’s tent. She holds it up to show it to me. It’s about a foot long, and the tip is sharpened to a point—a throwing dagger. Then, so fast that I don’t have time to react, she throws it at me, hitting me in the chest.
I put my hand there in shock, expecting to feel a dagger in my chest, but the dagger falls to the ground. Rubbing the spot since it’s a bit sore, I stare at the dagger on the carpet in shock. Then I look up at Bridget and give her the same look.
“What the fuck just happened?” I ask her.
“Your skin, with the changes I made when healing you-no, wait. That’s not right. When I was healing your skin, I had what I can only call ‘instructions’ on how to properly recreate your skin. That is the result. Your skin is so tough it can withstand a blade. And Alex, I threw that as hard as I could, which would be harder than any living person on Boromour could do. You could take a sword to the gut, and it would not even nick you.
“You are saying I have skin of steel?” I ask her with a raised eyebrow and a big smile on my face.
“No, tougher. I am sure if you went back where you came from and took a bullet, it would bounce off. Did you notice that you barely felt that dagger?”
“Well, I felt something, but the pain is already gone.”
“I am sure that is your brain telling you that you should feel pain. With practice, I am sure you would not have that feeling. But it’s not as if you don’t feel anything,” she says, and she walks up to me and puts a hand on my chest, patting it.
“Feel that?” she asks me. I nod, and then she puts her hand up my shirt and on my bare chest, slowly rubbing up and down, so that I can feel the smoothness of her hand. “And that?” I nod with a smile.
“So even though your skin is tough, it can still feel sensation. But somehow, it knows the difference between a caress and a blade trying to enter you.”
“Wow.”
I bring my arm up and I grab some of my skin with my thumb and my finger and pinch myself. Yep, I can still feel pain.
“What about my heart?” I remind her of the second part of my question.
“Your heart is also changed. It’s bigger, for one, and is somehow pumping more blood through your body, and also, it’s converting the oxygen quicker. I would guess you could run all day without running out of breath. Though remember, your muscles haven’t been changed. Yet. So you would tire out from that.”
“Yet?” I ask her with a raised eyebrow.
“Your Chakras are causing a transformation to your body. I would say down the road, when you open other Chakras, it will change more of your insides. Last time it was your bones and your throat, this time it was your heart and skin. I’m positive you will have other things changed as well. What? I’m not sure. Maybe your muscles? Blood? Other organs? That’s what scares me, Alex,” she says, and there is anxiety and frustration in her voice now, “I don’t know what I need to until it’s time to use it!”
“I know,” I tell her, bringing her into my arms and hugging her to me. “I am not thrilled about not knowing what will happen to me next either. I mean, I never expected to have my skin blow into a million pieces and to need Leeha to keep me in a wate
r bubble. We will deal with it as we go. Now you go ahead and get some rest. I think I slept enough. I will keep an eye on folks here.”
“You’re sure?” Bridget asks me, looking up at me.
“I’m sure,” I tell her and kiss her lightly on the forehead.
She smiles and nods, and then she’s gone. I look over at Sara, and she is looking at me warily.
“You aren’t human, are you?” she blurts out.
I ponder that question. Then I answer her truthfully, or at least what feels like the truth to me. “I am,” I tell her, nodding. “I am as human as you can imagine. I was born human, died human.”
“Died human?” she asks me, a look of confusion on her face.
I decide to see how much I can trust her. “I was not born on Boromour. I died in my world, but my God said it was a mistake. So he brought me here to live my life as a human. My soul was transferred to this human body.”
“You weren’t born here?” she says with a frown. “Prove it!”
“And how would I do that?” I ask her with a smile.
“I…” she starts, and I can see the gears in her head going, trying to figure out how I can prove it to her.
“Do something that only someone from another world would do,” she says slowly, sounding unsure of herself.
“Well. How about this? In my world, I was shot in the head with a bullet and died there. But while living there, the language I spoke was English,” I tell her, switching to English.
She looks at me with enormous eyes, her ears twitching, without saying anything. Then she asks me tentatively, “What was that? I don’t know how, but I felt it reverberate with power. It felt like I could almost understand the words, but not quite.”
“That is the language of my world. It’s English,” I tell her. But I don’t mention that it’s also a language of Magic on Boromour.
“Is that why you don’t look at her with disgust?” Sara says, pointing to Leeha, who is still sleeping. “Because in your world Elves are not considered disgusting?”
