Read Kissed by Smoke for Free Online Page B

little sibling spat.
    I blinked. “What?”
    Trevor looked equally baffled, but Inigo
just shrugged. “Your abilities have been doing the freaky lately.
Maybe you can sense something where I can’t.”
    He wasn’t wrong about my abilities. It
seemed like every other day something new and weird popped up. I
guessed it didn’t hurt to try. As long as I didn’t start raising
the dead.
    I had no idea what I was doing, so I just
sort of held my hands a few inches from the body, palms facing
down. I’d seen Cordelia Nightwing do something similar when working
with the Tarot. I figured it couldn’t hurt.
    At first there was nothing. I reached down
to that place where the Darkness lived. I could feel it there like
a tight little ball of blackness and next to it, a tiny flame.
Neither seemed interested in the body on the slab.
    Strands of violet red hair danced in the
breeze, tickling my face. Nothing. I was getting nothing. Wait.
What? Breeze?
    “Did one of you leave the outside door
open?”
    “No, babe.” Inigo was a warm presence beside
me. “Trevor shut it.”
    “And the door to the room?”
    “Shut,” Trevor confirmed.
    “And you don’t feel anything weird?” I
didn’t open my eyes to look at them, but I could almost feel them
giving me dubious looks.
    “Weird like what kind of weird?” Inigo
again.
    “Weird like the fact there’s wind inside
this room.”
    “Uh, Morgan?” Trevor cleared his throat.
“There’s no wind.”
    Freaking fantastic. So, only I could feel
this mysterious wind. Just fabulous. “So neither of you felt any
sort of breeze?”
    They both assured me they hadn’t, which
didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, it was freaking me out
just a little. I would have liked to have brushed it off as an
overactive imagination, but with all the bizarreness in my life
lately, brushing things off wasn’t an option.
    I reached down again. Down into that place
where the Fire and the Darkness lived. Still they didn’t respond,
which was weird because they did like to get out and cause a
fuss.
    So, I went a little deeper. There.
Underneath the Darkness and the Fire was something else. Something
new. I’m pretty sure my heart stopped beating.
    It looked like smoke, swirling in ribbons of
pure white, pale gray, and shimmering silver. It wound itself up
and over and around the Darkness and the Fire like strands of
glitter, making itself at home.
    But it didn’t feel like smoke. It felt like
…
    Without warning it rushed up and out of me,
whipping my hair around like I was standing in a hurricane. Inigo
staggered back a couple steps, clothes plastered to his body while
Trevor very nearly went ass over teakettle, unprepared for the
blast. Sheets whipped wildly as though lashed by … wind.
    Holy crap. The new power inside me was
freaking Wind!
    The Wind was a visible thing, swirling
around the room as it had swirled inside me. It circled around
until it hovered over the body of agent Vega, creating a tiny wind
funnel that sparkled in the dim light.
    I felt heat on my chest and glanced down.
The sapphire in the center of my amulet was glowing again, bright
light turning the smoke-like wisps of wind into rich, blue
clouds.
    Then out of the curls of smoke a figure
began to form. It was shaped vaguely like a man, but I got the
impression it was bigger, meatier.
    The image grew sharper. Reddish skin drawn
tight over bulging muscles. Inky hair spilling over broad
shoulders. The image turned toward me, almost as if it were alive
and could see me. Its eyes were twin pinpoints of sapphire:
Reflections of my amulet.
    It definitely looked human. Well, other than
the coloring. Not a lot of people with skin the color of a tomato
running around.
    I watched as the man, for lack of a better
word, leaned over the body of Daniel Vega. Only it wasn’t the body
lying on the table I was seeing, it was a superimposed image. The
background looked like the hotel room, and living Daniel Vega was
being held down on the