The flower was wilted, the stem bent. It horrified me. “Is it dead?”
“No. Just not at all well. Now I want you to reverse the process. Push energy back into the flower.”
“What I did with Matt—it was like when I heal. Is that what I do?”
“Give it a try. I will let you know if and when it works,” she said. “But do it now. There is a time limit. If you wait too long, it won’t work.”
I nodded and closed my eyes again. I could sense how sick the little plant was, and I imagined myself pushing life energy to it...
“That’s it, Anna. Open your eyes.”
I did so. The flower’s stalk was standing fully upright, the leaves unfurling as I watched. But the petals dropped off the flower, drifting to the ground.
My heart froze. “It lost its flower.”
“There is always a price to pay for such things,” Cara admitted. “But the plant lives, and will push out new blossoms.”
I stared at her. “But what about Matt? Does that mean he’ll never recover from what I did to him?”
“His energy was dangerously low for a bit there,” Cara admitted. “But he certainly seemed full of it today.”
He had, it was true. “So he recovered?”
She tilted her head. “You didn’t feed him more energy?”
I started to shake my head—but then I remembered. “I had a dream...”
“Matt was in it?”
I nodded.
“Did you—”
“Yes. But it was just a dream.”
Her eyes sparkled. “In the shifter world, dreams are not always as they seem.”
That was damned mysterious, and I said so.
She laughed as she pushed herself to her feet. “Shifters have what we call living dreams—where fated mates participate in each other’s dreams.”
I gaped at her. “But we’re not—” I broke off, my mind spinning. Matt had called memate. Twice, now.
No bloody way.
Mine, my heart insisted.
My mind raced as I stumbled to my feet. I was a tiny bit dizzy, but not bad.
Cara reached out to steady me. “Manipulating energy will drain you. What happened between you and Matt might be part of your connection, I’m not yet sure. But you need to resist him until we know you have some control.”
Trix trotted along with us as we regained the path. I had a question dancing in my head, but I really didn’t want to know the answer.
Because if I couldn’t physically touch Matt, the only release left to us were dreams... and they might not be as carefree as they seemed.
* * *
Kitani and the twins were on the back steps to the academy. They’d somehow managed to ditch Cody.
