Page 50 of Bad Blood Alpha

Chapter 19

Flynn sensed the seizure coming before he saw it. Kira’s body arched out of her chair, Ashley’s hands glued to her shoulders, blue magic with spikes of white crackling around them.

His lion roared. “Bring her back!” he shouted. “Dammit, Ashley, bring her back!”

“She can’t!” Israel yelled. “That damned Al-Maddeiri magic has them both. They’re trapped in there…”

He was out of his chair, running around the table, but the magic knocked him back. Ashley’s hands began to smoke.

Fuck it all. Flynn lunged for Kira. The magic grabbed at his, pulled him in, roaring around him. He felt himself sliding into darkness…

Oh hell no.

He held on to her, held onto himself. “Kira! Kira, get out of there. Come back. Come back now!”

He could feel her stirring, trying to go toward the sound of his voice, but she couldn’t fight her way through the pain. Flynn did the only thing he could think of. He seized the back of her neck and his lips crashed into hers, beseeching and demanding.

Kira gasped in a breath, her mouth opening under his. She seizure released her and she slammed back into her chair. Ashley jerked her hands away from Kira, stumbling back, and Israel was there, wrapping his arms around her.

Flynn was still holding Kira, blue fire crackling around them both. There were wounds in her arms, her upper chest, bleeding through her shirt. As he watched, they closed up, healing over, even the blood burned away by the magic.

He heard Israel cursing, and turned to see him holding Ashley’s hands. The palms were burned, and Israel covered them carefully with his own hands, light streaming out of the Dragonstone in his palm.

Fuck. It took a lot to burn a fire dragon.

As he watched, the burns healed over.

Israel glared at Flynn, as if this were all his fault. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.

“That,” Flynn said, “is what we’re dealing with. Whatever magic the goddamned Al-Maddeiri bound up inside her his trying to break out. She can’t control it. And it’s getting stronger.”

Kira said, “I thought us being together was helping control the magic.”

“Yeah. We can all see how well that worked out.”

Fuck it all to hell. He should have followed his first instinct and left her alone. Being with him wasn’t helping her. It was just feeding the magic.

Israel echoed his thoughts. “It’s not controlling it. It’s amplifying it.”

“That’s what it’s designed to do,” Harrison said. “The two of them together, their union amplifying the magic, until they bond for good and the sorcerer who bound the magic unbinds it, and it goes out into all the Al-Maddeiri.”

Flynn snarled, “Except we don’t know the bonding ritual, we don’t have the fucking sorcerer, and the Al-Maddeiri are all dead, so there’s nowhere for it to go.” He looked around the room. “Anyone have any useful fucking thoughts on that?”

Kira said, “Why don’t we all sit down and have a drink?”

Flynn was fuming, but he got out a bottle of whiskey and poured shots all around. It did calm him down, a little, and it gave everyone else time to calm down too.

Israel said, “Did you have a vision? Did you see anything useful?”

Flynn didn’t fucking care if they saw anything useful. He cared that the two of them had almost burned up in a maelstrom of magic.

But Kira cared about the vision. He held her hand while she talked, because she needed him to, even though he really wanted to kick everyone out, wrap her up in soft cotton padding and put her somewhere where she could never be hurt again.

And he knew she wouldn’t be the woman he cared about if she let him, which made him want to throw fragile things at the wall and hear them smash.

“It wasn’t a vision this time, exactly,” she said. “I found the woman. I was in the lab. Except…I was inside her body.” Her voice grew hard. “I felt what she felt.”

Damn it all to hell. That’s what those wounds were. The places all those tubes and wires were attached to her.