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She resumed her pacing. At this rate she would wear a hole in the expensive carpet.
His heartbeat matched her footsteps. For the first time in a long while, Tristan dared to hope, not just for his mom, but for his foolish heart. Lillian had stayed to help him when she could have run.
“I’ll be tired afterward and may need to rest. If that happens, I’ll need a place to recover.”
He moved a hand around the room. “Plenty of space here.” And he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight until he knew she was safe. Last night, he’d ordered additional security to ensure Lillian and her family would be under surveillance at all times.
“I won’t stay here longer than necessary. You must promise not to follow or contact me after I leave.”
He nodded his head in agreement. “Understood.” He would let Lillian leave if she insisted on it, but he had every intention of convincing her to stay.
“There’s one more thing you should know. A healing like this is dangerous, not only for the patient and the healer but…for the donor.”
“Donor?” He frowned. What donor? “What exactly happens when you heal?”
She finally sat on the bed, twisting her hands in her lap. He settled next to her and waited.
She cleared her throat but didn’t look at him, her voice so low he had to strain to hear. She had probably never explained her ability to anyone else before.
“If you remember from high school science class, every living thing contains energy, right?”
He nodded but kept his mouth shut. Now she was finally talking, he didn’t want to interrupt for fear she’d quit.
“Albert Einstein said the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant. It cannot be created or destroyed but is converted from one form to another. Energy that’s stored in the body is potential energy, but when the energy is set in motion, it becomes kinetic.”
She paused and fidgeted, fingering a fold in her dress. He stilled and waited for her to continue.
“When I’m near people, I sense their potential energy—whether it’s high, low, or in between. When a person moves, their potential energy becomes kinetic energy. My cells automatically absorb the kinetic energy, which is then stored in my body as potential energy. When I capture enough of this stored energy, I can transfer it to the person I want to heal.”
He hardly breathed. “Is the donor aware this is happening—that you’ve absorbed their energy?”
“Not usually.”
“You steal it then.”
She turned to him, her wide eyes sparking with indignation. “I don’t steal energy—I only absorb and store the energy people give off when they move. It doesn’t hurt them. Like I said, they don’t even know it’s happening.”
“You said ‘not usually’.”
“Yeah.” She nodded and returned to looking at her hands, which she still clutched in her lap. “A few rare people produce an extraordinary amount of potential energy. They’re called burners. I’d never actually met a burner until…recently.”
Secrets hid in her voice. She got to her feet and strolled to the bedroom window. The sun had risen, and there was plenty of light for her to see outside, although he suspected she was not looking at the landscape but considering what to tell him.
She turned, smoothing her hands down her dress, but he noticed she didn’t meet his eyes. “Usually, I have to wait until I have enough potential energy stored in my body to heal a patient. But with a burner, it’s different. They give off so much energy, I can channel it directly when they’re near me, without trying to store it.”
She paused, expectant, as if she waited for him to decipher a complicated computer code.
Tristan was beginning to feel like he was trapped in a bizarre sci-fi movie. He moved toward her. Now he was the one who felt like pacing. “What exactly are you trying to tell me?”
She blinked once, twice. “Tristan, you’re a burner.”
Hadn’t he known she was leading up to this? His pulse quickened—his gut clenched and spasmed. “Is that why you begged me to visit your…Hannah the other night?” Had it only been two days ago?
“I had no choice. You were the only one who could save her.”
“You should have told me what you were doing.” To her credit, she didn’t flinch at the bitterness in his voice.
“You wouldn’t have believed me, and I couldn’t take the chance you’d say no. Hannah would have been dead by morning.”
