"If you could just try to keep anyone from touching me or talking to me," she whispered, and wide-eyed, the Moffitts nodded.

Morgan stood at Amy's bedside, opening her senses and picking up as much as she could. Right now Amy was on a respirator, but her heart was beating on its own and everything else seemed to be working. There was an incision on her neck with a thin plastic drain running out of it. That was where she could start.

First things first. Morgan rolled her shoulders and tilted her head back and forth, releasing any tension or stiffness. She breathed in and out, deep cleansing breaths that helped relax and center her. Then, closing her eyes, she silently and without moving her lips began her power chant, the one that reached out into the world and drew magick to her, the one that helped raise her own powers within her. It came to her, floating toward her like colored ribbons on the mildest of spring breezes. Feeling the magick bloom inside her, Morgan felt a fierce love and joy flood her. She was ready.

As lightly as a feather, Morgan placed two fingers on Amy's incision. At once she picked up the drug-dulled sensations of pain, the swollen sponginess of inflamed cells, the cascading dominoes of injuries that had escalated, unchecked, until Amy lost consciousness. Slowly Morgan traced the injuries until she reached the last and mildest one. Then, following them like a thread, she did what she could to heal them. Clots dissolved with a steady barrage of spells. Muscles soothed, ten-dons eased, veins gently reopened. Morgan's mind traced new pathways, delicate, fernlike branches of energy, and soon felt the rapid fire of neuron impulses racing across them. Love, she thought. Love and hope, joy and life. The blessing of being able to give. How blessed I am. These feelings she let flow into Amy's consciousness.

The injury itself was complicated, but Morgan broke it down into tiny steps, like the different layers of a spell, the different steps one had to learn, all throughout Wicca.