As she made her way to the bottom floor, Cadence pondered everything her sister had just told her. Holland had a demon baby. Sam and Laura were on their way back to KC. They had five missing Guardians, waiting in tiny cells to be terminated, and no way to reach them. Oh, and they were coordinating attacks all over the world, starting in a couple of hours in Japan, to eradicate about seventy percent of the Vampire population. What was there to be worried about?
She made the quick jaunt to Jamie’s office in less than a minute but waited before she opened the door to compose herself, remembering how alarmed he’d been the last time she’d flung herself through his open door. He didn’t look surprised at all to see her, however, once she finally came in. “Hey, how are you?” she asked, hoping to keep her voice cheery despite the fact that she had just listed several enormous problems that all needed solving.
“Peachy,” he replied, a goofy grin on his face the likes of which she’d never seen.
Cadence approached him cautiously, wondering if someone was tampering with his brain. “What’s going on?”
“A couple of things,” Jamie replied without removing the grin from his face. “First of all, I have an endless battery life now, or so I surmise from all of the unnecessary healing I’ve been doing. Walking around taking care of canker sores and blisters, that sort of thing. I haven’t even yawned once.”
“That’s amazing,” Cadence admitted. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like for Jamie to be able to heal people indiscriminately without having to worry about sleeping through the end of a battle. “What else?”
“Well, there’s this.” He raised his hands about a foot apart, palms facing each other, and Cadence watched in amazement as a blue light began to glow between them. It looked a lot like an electric current but then it widened so that it was at least three or four inches high.
“What… is it?”
“It’s my powers,” he replied, his smile somehow widening. “Now I can blast it across the room at people so I don’t even have to touch them.”
“Wait—you can shoot blue healing light out of your palms?” Her strange world was getting odder and odder by the moment.
“I sure can.” He continued to bounce the light from one hand to the other.
“How did you figure out that’s what this is and not some kind of crazy death beam?”
“Well, I tried it out on Elliott, since I figured I couldn’t kill him anyway,” he said with a shrug. “And it worked. Didn’t hurt him.”
“Hmmm.” Cadence folded her arms. “It’s too bad you can’t switch it back and forth, you know, depending upon who you want to jolt. That could come in handy the next time we see a werewolf.”
“True, but I don’t think it works that way. I guess I can test it out tonight.”
“Oh, yeah, that would be great. Your team can sneak into the location where thirty shifter Vampires are hiding, shoot the hell out of them, and then you’ll patch them all up so they can shoot them again,” she said with a wink.
“You don’t think that’s a great idea?” His face was perfectly straight, like he really thought she should consider it.
Cadence punched him lightly in the arm. “All right, Jame. If that’s what makes you happy.” She shook her head, glad that he was on their side. Perhaps they had a chance at knocking out all of those problems after all. “What does Ashley think of it?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t catch her.” He laughed at his own joke, and Cadence giggled, too. “She is glad I won’t be asleep all the time now, that I can heal more people. I think she’s just happy I came through it unscathed. It’s hard to watch someone you love go through something like that. But I guess I don’t have to tell you.”
She nodded. The first time this had happened, when she’d administered the serum to Aaron, they had no way of knowing whether or not it would work; that was a night she’d just as soon forget.
“I was thinking about something that could get me in trouble if I’m not careful.”
“What’s that?” she asked, pulling her head back out of her memories.
“Well, Aaron said he was going to send Margie and Grant to help out in Melbourne. I was thinking, they have a Healer at their headquarters—Sheena. She’s pretty good at her job. She has serum. Maybe….”
“That’s actually not a bad idea. How long is the trip from Perth to Melbourne?”
“Long enough that they should both be changed by the time they get there. It occurred to me that, if Margie had X-ray vision, maybe she could find the seams the others aren’t able to see.”
Cadence remembered Cassidy saying it would be hard to tell where the stairs were once Paul went back inside, but if Margie and Grant could see through the walls, they could find it. “Are you nervous about sending your sister into a situation like that, though?”
Jamie’s shoulders went up and down quickly, but she could tell it did bother him at least a little. “She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”
She wondered exactly what the situation was between the two of them, but she couldn’t ask right now. Maybe that would be a topic of discussion for their next trip to Melbourne, assuming they even needed to go back. “I think it’s a good idea. Have you asked Aaron?”
“Not yet. I’ve been too busy doing this.” He made another blue ball of light shoot out of one hand and land in the other.
Shaking her head, Cadence backed toward the door. “I’m on my way over there now. I’ll talk to him. Of course,” she paused with one hand on the doorjamb, “chances are he already thought of it, and your sis is asleep and on her way across the continent.”
He opened his mouth, as if her words shocked him, but then closed it and nodded. “You’re probably right.”
Cadence laughed and headed for the door a few steps away at the end of the hall. Christian’s door was open, and she could hear him talking to himself, or maybe someone else was in there, and he sounded frustrated about something, but she decided now was not the time to get into a conversation with him, so she headed for the exit instead.
