Page 87 of An Invocation of Monsters

“Calm down. They’re not going to pull your apprenticeships because I was asking questions.”

“They will,” Kase hissed. “You don’t know them like I do! You. Can’t. Fuck. Up. Or you lose. You get kicked out. And there’s no coming back from that.”

“What does it matter, Kase?” Willow called down from above. “Elle is further than we’ll ever be—”

She said something else, but it was lost in the sharp crack of a branch.

For the next seven seconds, Kase and I stood frozen, watching as the branch she’d shimmied onto snapped, sending Willow plummeting twenty-five feet to the ground.

She hit the next branch down with her stomach, letting out a sharp gust of air.

Then she kept falling. There was another snap as her flailing leg hit the tree, followed by the loudest crack of all when she hit the ground on her back, limbs sprawled in crazy angles, the sclera of one bulging eye going completely scarlet.

“Willow,” Kase whispered, sounding nerveless. Like a ghost. “Willow!”

He dropped the basket, rushing to her side. I followed, feeling numb, an observer outside my own body.

His cherry-stained fingers were almost the exact same shade as her ruined eye.

Strange, the things we notice when the first fingers of panic wrap around us.

Kase touched her arm, his hands shaking.

That arm was twisted in a sickening shape. The sharp ivory points of her snapped femur jutted through her thigh, her white dress stained crimson.

“Willow,” he breathed again, eyes locked wide. He was pale, freckles standing out like paint on his face.

She took a thready breath, her chest struggling to rise. Her rib cage looked wrong; even worse, her skull was misshapen.

She was going to die.

“Kase,” I said, peeling off a glove as I made a decision. “Move aside.”

He didn’t. He cupped her face, repeating her name over and over in a sluggish monotone.

So be it.

I ripped off my other glove and dropped to my knees beside her, and bodily shoved Kase away.

First things first were to make sure she could still breathe and to keep any bleeding in her brain under control. I tore her dress open, and put one hand on her stomach and the other on her forehead, and then closed my eyes.

I tore at my power, driving it through my hands. There was no time to let it creep out; I had to push it all into her and pray for the best.

Even though I had mentally retreated into the place I went while the power was flowing, I still sensed the horrendous physical sensations.

There was a sickening movement under my left hand as her ribs reknit themselves, her bruised organs healing.

I felt the softness of her skull against the ground become firmer as the pieces came back together.

Then there were the sensations that my power fed back to me. I felt the blood leaking into her brain retreat, the veins and capillaries healing.

The grotesque, pressurized squelch of her eyeball moving back into its proper place.

I let this go on until I was sure she wouldn’t die, then opened my eyes. I was sweating through my shirt, my hands shaking.

But I forced myself to look at her leg. I’d pushed so much of myself into her that the skin was starting to knit around the exposed femur.

“This is going to hurt, I’m so sorry,” I thought I said aloud, but I wasn’t entirely sure. My brain was lost in a fog, halfway between the reality of the here and now, and the sensations flooding me.

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