Excerpt: Aura

His hands are wrapped around one of mine. I can feel the buzz of his aura ripping shreds in the walls that are too close around us, claustrophobically close. He’s sending tingles up my arms—maybe on purpose but maybe not—and it’s making the blue nail polish on my fingers chip and peel. Suddenly everything narrows into watching flakes of paint flicker in the air as they crinkle in the heat he’s making, and hit the floor as glittering ashes.
He feels like destruction, but he’s clinging onto my hand as if it were the last thing in the world he could really feel properly anymore; it probably is the only thing he can feel except for the heat and the shuddering of his anger felling the four walls that were meant to be holding us in. I keep my eyes open even though I can’t see much through the dust and wait until he’s looking back at me again and the destruction has ended.
Then we pick our way out, slowly because he’s shaking like a child, a skinny child hanging on the end of my arm, and grinning hugely, intoxicated and heady on the buzz of the aura power flooding through him, in too far. I have to lead him down three or four corridors totally lost. Far enough in one direction and we hit a dead end which he turns to rubble in seconds, but even he isn’t fast enough. There are shouts behind us now, and people are running at us so I drag him behind me as I try to run.
“I could burn them, Mara. Just burn them all no problems; bring the roof down right over them. See them burn, Mara; you want to see them burn, right?”
His eyes are on me, intensely bright, and his body’s twitching with the power and the heat. I take a look back through the heat haze and the dust and see the future.
“Yeah,” he’s like a devil, grinning through the flames, blue-green eyes staring straight into mine daring me to let him jump off the edge. “Burn them Jass,” I say. Right over the edge, no hesitation. Burning, the roof comes down. One of them brings the rain, some power right there, but it’s too late.