Eye of the Tempest Read Free Page A

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    Connecting each and everyone of us , I thought, as I went down deeper into my power, until I was my power…
    And then I searched out the strings of beads connecting me to my attackers. Finding them, I reached, again…
    And then, seeing no other alternative, I did exactly what I’d been told not to do. I pulled.
    Focused on the man who was going to shoot out Anyan’s brains, I only saw what I did to him. Despite the circumstances, and never regretting my actions, what I saw—what I did—still haunts me.
    Apparently, people remember their first kill.
    He was just setting his eye to his site when he jerked hard. Thankfully, he didn’t have his finger on the trigger at that moment, or he may well have shot Anyan. Instead, his arm holding his assault rifle dropped uselessly to his side as he spasmed. I saw, in my peripheral vision, similar movements from his fellow attackers.
    My assault lasted only seconds, but it felt like hours.
    I called to the water in all the men’s bodies, and it responded to me with the alacrity of a squadron of eager retrievers. I watched, cold, as the man upon whom my eyes were pinned began to shrivel, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop when he fell to his knees, and I didn’t stop when he fell to the ground.
    I didn’t stop even when I saw that the fingers protruding from his leather half-gloves were desiccated like those of a long-dead mummy.
    True guilt about my actions would never set in—I knew what I did was right. Those men made their choice when they took money to murder strangers, and—somewhere between the Alfar Compound and the Healer’s mansion—I’d become hard enough by what I’d seen of evil to understand that fact. But visions of the bodies would still appear to me in random nightmares. At that moment, however, all I felt was power … The men’s lives came to me through their body’s water, and I tasted what it was to take another person’s life by stealing, quite literally, their essence….
    The water in me answered the water in them, and I felt my magic’s channels open wide, inviting, receiving, until I was as full as I’ve ever been of elemental force.
    Still, I couldn’t stop.
    Full to bursting with magic, I kept soaking up more. It was like I’d opened up some internal pair of floodgates. I’d never felt so full, so strong… until it began to burn. Pain suddenly seared through my system hotter than a thousand suns.
    Screaming, I fell to my own knees as the power stretched me to my limits. Just when I thought I’d pass out from the pain, the tide of my power turned. Just as all that elemental force had rushed into my open channels, it now all rushed out. I felt myself emptying, and suddenly I knew that what I’d hoped would save Anyan’s life would probably end my own.
    On the night I’d found my love Jason’s body in the Old Sow, I was totally untrained and ignorant of my true magical inheritance. So I’d unwittingly used my magic— all of my magic—to pull him from the giant whirlpool off the coast of Rockabill. I’d almost died that night, so I knew that draining a supe of all of his magic killed him as effectively as draining him entirely of blood.
    “Anyan,” I whispered, reaching out my hand toward the barghest. I was prostrate on my stomach, the gravel digging into my belly. Feeling my heart flutter, I figured I was done for. Everything seemed a bit hazy, however, and I now reckon that the only reason I wasn’t panicked was that my brain wasn’t entirely cognizant of what was happening. Instead I was quite calm; I just wanted to know Anyan was alive before I went.
    Which is why I was so very, very pissed when someone had the audacity to roll me over like I was a side of beef. To be fair, Blondie looked almost as miffed as me when she finally settled me on my back.
    “I told you not to go there, babydoll,” she mumbled, as her tattooed hands stroked down my face.
    I wanted to protest, to tell her to see to Anyan before