Chapter 2: A Hundred Percent
Phoebe leaped to her lover with a whine of despair. The situation was too close to disaster for her liking. Now that Cole was as much as accepted into the family, she wasn't going to loose him. Not now, not ever, "Leo!" She urged him.
Not that she had to, cause the whitelighter was himself already kneeling next to the injured demon, holding his healing hands above the wounded man's midsection. The whitelighter concentrated on his job, veins became visible on his forehead. He suddenly stopped, shook himself as if willing himself to completely start over. His devout powers directed at a half demon were not exactly used as appropriately as they should've been if he went by the rules, but the bright curative light appeared nevertheless.
"Oh thank god," Phoebe heaved a sigh.
Cole strained to open his eyes, "Phoebe..."
"Baby, I'm right here," she kissed him lightly, then searched his features.
Cole had never seen her so worried before. Perhaps because the last time he was injured he was too busy with his own pain to notice. He stared into those compassionate, loving, alarmed eyes as she helped him up. Getting up didn't seem to have been an extremely good plan. He felt light headed and queasy. He certainly had to rest some. Firing that last enormous ball had completely sapped his energy away.
"Are you all right, baby?" Phoebe asked, still very uneasy.
"I don't feel so well," he whimpered, "I feel sick to my stomach."
"Aw baby," Phoebe cast a troubled look at her brother in law.
"Let me make it easier for you," Leo transported them back to Phoebe's room, where they gently helped Cole onto the bed.
The reformed demon sighed as the queasiness receded. He closed his eyes and remained motionless for a while, making sure the sick feeling will not return.
"Leo?" Phoebe questioned him vexed about the state of her lover.
"You know I can't heal him completely."
"I was trained at how to block the energy coming at me from fireballs so that it doesn't cause much damage. In fact, I can redirect that energy into my next own fireball," Cole assured them, especially that Phoebe was so nervous.
"Is that possible? How?" Phoebe still had enough to learn about demonkind.
"If your mother send you to school with the cream of the crop, yes. In a closed system, a system that isolated from its surroundings, like in there, the total energy of the system is conserved. Energy can exist in various combinations of kinetic, potential, flow, and internal energy."
"Was that demonic? Talk English, Cole," the witch reminded him she wasn't all that much of an expert in science class.
"Although energy has many different forms that are interconvertable, when one form of energy disappears, some other form of energy of equal magnitude must appear, and vice versa. In other words, the total quantity of energy you have, or a demon has inside themselves is constant. If I let go of a large fireball, I loose my energy, I get drained. If I get hit by a fireball, that normally converts into heat that would harm me and at the same time I would use some of my own energy to try to heal myself. But if I don't try to heal myself and use those particles that move very quickly in me for the heat and send them to my palm, I can reuse them, and the same time remove them from the site of injury, not allowing them to cause any more damage. Otherwise, at that state of exhaustion, I wouldn't be able to produce a fireball at all. For the practised demon, it is actually better to get hit by fireballs than not."
"Ah, really. Didn't seem like that to me."
"Phoebe, the problem occurred earlier, when I fired too many fireballs without being given any back. I'm not saying this way is not overly painful, I'm just saying there's no reason for you to freak out. I'll be okay. Leo, tell her."
"We have no reason to doubt that Cole," the whitelighter put his hand on Phoebe's shoulder, "come on, let the man sleep. He really needs it."
tbc