Still, I don’t press SEND. Maybe Lily’s right—maybe I should wait until morning. I don’t actually have much information for him. Maybe if Lily and I work at it—
That’s when it hits me, a wave of power so all-encompassing that it sends my phone skittering out of my hand and across the table.
“Xandra?” Lily asks, leaning forward, a concerned look on her face.
Before I can answer her, another wave hits. This one actually picks me up and slams me back down into the chair with enough force to shatter the thing into a thousand wooden splinters.
Eight
“What the hell?” Lily scrambles around the table to help me up, but I throw out an arm to ward her off. Whatever is happening to me isn’t good and I don’t want her anywhere near it.
She freezes in place. “Xandra?”
“Give me a minute.” I’m on the floor now, in the midst of the debris from the shattered chair. I have just enough time before the third wave hits to thank the goddess that I don’t have a bunch of splinters in my ass. This one knocks me flat on my back. Then it lifts me up again, arching my back even as it spread-eagles me five feet off the kitchen floor.
“Xandra!” Lily wails.
I hit the ground again, this time even harder than before.
Totally disregarding my warning, Lily rushes toward me. She drops to her knees next to me, her hands going immediately to the back of my head, where she feels for bumps and bruises. “Are you all right?” she demands.
I try to answer her, to tell her to get back because the electricity is still zinging around inside me and I have a sick feeling that this—whatever this is—is far from over. But that last hit was so strong that it knocked the wind out of me. I’ve got absolutely no air, and no matter how hard I try to force my lungs to expand, nothing’s happening.
“Xan?” The alarm on her face turns to full-out panic. “Oh dear goddess. Are you paralyzed? Are you dead?”
I shake my head, try once more to inhale. This time it works, and I suck in huge, noisy gulps of air. After a minute, I ask, “Do I look dead?”
“Kind of.” Lily sags with relief, rests her forehead on my shoulder as she takes a few deep breaths of her own. “Don’t ever do that to me again!” she says finally, her voice so high-pitched she sounds more like Alvin the chipmunk than my best friend.
Before I can answer, I feel the next wave building inside me. It’s welling up, the power growing more and more massive with every second that passes. Alarmed, I scramble backward, away from Lily. Something tells me this is going to be the worst one yet and I don’t want to hurt—
Flames break out on my arms and legs, ripple over my skin in waves. They don’t burn me—at least I don’t think they do—but I’m too busy trying not to catch anything else on fire to pay much attention to what’s happening to me.
Lily screams, then does a fast crawl across the floor to the kitchen sink. She pulls out a fire extinguisher, but before she can fumble the key out of it, I’m being lifted again—this time so high that I can touch the ceiling without much effort. Even with the fire still licking over my skin, the only thing I can think is that this time it’s really going to hurt me when this thing—whatever it is—drops me.
Sure enough, the fire winks out one second before I plummet to the ground. I try to curl myself into a ball in an effort to protect my spine, but I’m seizing before I hit the floor, my whole body jerking and convulsing in the throes of what I’m sure looks like a grand mal seizure, but it feels like something else entirely.
Even as it’s happening, I’m completely aware of everything going on around me. Lily is screaming as she launches herself at the phone to dial 911. She’s got it on speaker, so I can hear the emergency operator giving her instructions in between Lily’s terrified screeches. I want to tell her that I’m okay, that I’m in here and I’m just fine, but my body is completely out of my jurisdiction. Whatever magical force has glommed on to me has got me completely under its control and it’s not letting go until it’s good and ready.
Time passes—seconds, minutes, I can’t tell which—and then, finally, the energy flows out of me in one long, smooth wave. The seizing stops and my entire body just seems to collapse in on itself.
“Xandra?” Lily whispers, crawling back over to me. “Xandra, are you okay?”
My eyelids feel like they weigh a hundred pounds each, but somehow I manage to force them open. Lily’s face is only inches from me and she looks like hell, like she’s aged ten years in the space of the last five minutes.
I try to smile at her, but it must come out looking like a grimace because she squeaks, “Dear goddess. Is it happening again?”
“It’s over,” I assure her in a voice that sounds like I gargled with razor blades.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She collapses, stretching out on the floor next to me. “The paramedics are on their way.”
“You should probably cancel them. I don’t think there’s anything in the medical books that covers what just happened to me.”
“No shit. The 911 operator asked if there was any sign that something was wrong before you started to seize. Somehow I didn’t think telling her you were doing a damn fine impression of the Exorcist would go over well.” She sighs. “Still, I think you should let them check you out. You hit the ground pretty fucking hard.”
“It feels like it,” I grumble. “Declan’s going to kill me. He leaves me alone for a couple of hours and I’m right back to where I was a week ago, covered in bumps and bruises and aching in places I didn’t even know it was possible to hurt.”
“Yeah, well, when he gets back, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind. This is his job, not mine.”
“I think you handled yourself pretty well.”
She snorts. “That’s ’cuz you don’t realize how damn close I came to peeing my pants. You caught on fire, Xandra.”
“Oh yeah. With the seizure and everything, I forgot.” I glance down. “Am I burned?”
“Amazingly enough, no. Like I said. Freaky. Freaky. Freaky. Exorcist. Shit.”
Just then, the doorbell rings. Lily groans but rolls to her feet. “You’re going to need to let them check you out.”
“Are you kidding me?” I gesture to my face. “They’ll drag me to the hospital for an MRI or CT scan or something.”
“Maybe you should let them.”
I growl at her, but she just blows me a kiss on her way to the door.
Reluctantly, I climb to my feet as well. Ignoring the pain in what I swear is every single muscle in my body, I walk into the family room, where Lily is letting two very nice-looking paramedics into the house. Hopefully, if I’m on my feet and lucid, they’ll be more likely to believe that I’m all right.
But I’ve barely said hello to them when a fire truck pulls up behind the ambulance, lights and sirens blaring. Shit. Our neighbors are going to kill us.
It takes the paramedics about ten minutes to check me over. They do their best to convince me to let them take me to Brackenridge, but I think that has more to do with the bruises on my face and the broken chair in the kitchen.
My vitals are fine, and except for a goose egg on the back of my head, the rest of me is also relatively fine. Still, they seemed very concerned about whether I’m safe in my home, and while I really do appreciate it, I’m going to lose my mind if they don’t get out of here ASAP. Because five minutes into their exam, it occurs to me why we might be having so much trouble reaching Declan. While I admit that I still don’t know how this soulbound thing works, it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that if something happened to him, it would definitely affect me as well. Which means that all of that weird stuff that just happened could have been my own magic’s reaction to something going wrong—really wrong—with Declan.