Page 89 of Phoenix Burn

“You won’t be able to do it, unless you be calm,” he advised.

Calm, I most certainly was not.

“Breathe,” he coached. “Slow your thoughts down. Clear your mind.”

“If this is leading to a discussion about the force, you can stuff it,” I snapped.

“This isn’t about force,” he stated.

“Make a note to add a class on popular fiction to the roster,” I snarled.

“Anna.” His voice was calm as he chided me like an errant child.

I ground my teeth together. “All right, all right. This is me. Breathing.”

“Do we breathe too?” Mari asked.

“I would advise you to,” the Bellati said. “Otherwise, you will faint.”

“Wiseass,” Matt growled.

Sebastian ignored him. “Focus, Anna,” he coached. “I want you to sense the life energies around us.”

Life energies? His gruff tone kept little green Jedi Master comparisons to a minimum. I strove to push all the snarky thoughts away, but I did feel as though I was in a popular sci-fi movie as I attempted to regain a state of calm.

Don’t embrace the dark side, Anna.

That was my own counsel, not Sebastian’s. On the tenth slow, deep breath, I sensed something. I closed my eyes and tried to trace it—and realized it wasn’t a single entity, but many. Multitudes, in fact.

“This bog is filled with life.” Sebastian’s voice rose and fell rhythmically. “If you open yourself to it, you will see patterns. If you dip far enough into it, you can determine where the life collects or clusters.”

I did sense that. “Are most creatures here aquatic?”

“Many are. What you must determine be those which are not, and stay to those areas. It will keep us out of the mud.”

Okay then. Sounded simple, but it was far from it. I had many false starts, and he pulled me patiently out of the muck each time.

Follow my lead.

The words dropped into my head as he bent to the base of the dry hillock between the surrounding boggy bits. From above, it looked no different from the marsh grasses that kept trying to suck me in. But Sebastian parted the coarse strands and revealed a squirming creature burrowing away from the light.

“Can you sense its energy?” he asked. As I tentatively cast my awareness outward, he swirled me up in his own, and carried me to the tiny mote of life essence from the creature. Then he expanded along the hillock, finding others...

“They only live on the drier ground,” he said. “You can track their life essences through the bog.”

Now that I was aware of them, Icouldtrace them. My heart raced as I moved between the dry hillocks, and the others followed.

We emerged at the end rather nibbled upon by some kind of biting bug, but with most of us relatively dry. I was the only one with thick, stinking mud up to my thighs.

Flushed with my success, I regarded Sebastian with some degree of awe. “How did you haul me out of that muck without getting a single speck on you?”

For just a second, I thought I’d broken through. That I was going to get a human response from him. His eyes gleamed—and I glimpsed something in them—

Then he turned away, his fingers working on the knot tying him to me. “My hair sheds dirt.”

I rolled my eyes. Again.

“Hey, Angel, that was pretty coool,” Matt said, moving up on me. He glanced at Sebastian. “But hoow are the oothers going to get throough?”

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