The Healer (The Order of Intergalactic Peace #1) - Kelly Lucille Page 0,21

them. She had no problem with people hunting for their meals in the forest, but cruel and unusual punishment was beyond her ability to ignore. This fox was close to gone and, from what she could feel from the wound, lucky the leg was still attached at all. Apparently the animal had tried to escape the only way he could besides death.

She sucked in a slow quiet breath and looked around her. Sending out her senses she felt an absence of life beyond the fox that was as disconcerting as heartbeats would have been.

A trap then, she mused, slowing her heartbeat and making sure that her body temperature was still too low to be picked up by sensors, or a hunter’s sensitive ears. The only way they would know she was there was if they had eyes on her, or someone with hunter senses close enough to hear that small thump. But then they wouldn’t know how close they needed to be, and a good hunter would stay far from the trap until it was tripped. She should be able to get to the fox and release it before they realized she was there. Once she healed it though, they would know.

If she healed it here.

It sounded like a good plan, free the beast, quietly take him far enough away that her healing of him would not be sensed by whoever hunted her. Only she had never tried to soothe a hurt beast without her powers before. She knew even as she approached that the smart thing to do would be to walk away. She almost did, until she got another look at the fox and realized it was gestating. Which meant fox kits somewhere slowly starving to death.

She argued with herself as she crept closer, but no matter how logical her reasoning was, she couldn’t make herself run away from the dying fox and her babies. When she saw the near feral look on the animals face she knew her plan was never going to work.

She couldn’t even heal it from a distance as long as the metal teeth were still embedded in its leg. She cursed herself silently, then Mal Ryn and finally the hunter she knew had hurt this fox with the sole purpose of calling her out.

Then she let it all go and ran on silent feet to the fox. She dropped to her knees beside it ignoring the hissing spitting thing that snapped sharp teeth at her. She pressed her hands around the dangerous metal teeth on his leg and pulled, freeing the beast and taking more than one bite on the arm closest to the beast because of it.

She ignored all of that, whipping her power out with the precision of a scalpel, she caught the beasts mind, soothed it, even as the flesh and bone knit back together beneath her hands so fast if she had blinked she would have missed it.

Serenity released the beast from her thrall and was up and running so fast she made it into the trees before the scrambling fox did.

A sting against the back of her arm told her she was hit. The flow of drugs into her system told her they wanted her alive and unconscious. Her power swirled around the invading drug and chomped it. It didn’t even slow her down.

She yanked the dart out of her flesh and dropped it without a hitch in her step. She could feel the hunter gaining on her and she picked up speed. It proved to be her downfall.

The hunter wasn’t alone and if she had thought about that she might have managed to avoid the shield erected in her path. If she hadn’t been running flat out the way she was, the invisible shield she slammed into wouldn’t have knocked her cold. But hindsight and all that.

Serenity woke with a gasp still on the ground where she had fallen. The sound must have alerted the hunter and his shield friend because she heard cursing close behind her. She jumped up and thrust her hand forward but unfortunately the barrier was still there.

Her head she could feel already knitting closed, the pounding pain a memory. The bones in her nose slipped back into place with a snick, the blood absorbed into her skin. She was near fully healed and showing no sign of injury when she turned to face what hunted her.

The hunter she recognized as Commander Jas. Not good. The Shield she vaguely recognized as being one