The Healer (The Order of Intergalactic Peace #1) - Kelly Lucille Page 0,2

her most lonely times to find some danger for herself just so she could see him, but that was a good way to get herself killed, captured, or conscripted.

And she was a healer, seeing the swath of destruction her father left behind the last time she had been under attack had left its mark.

She had been locked in a closet the last time it had happened, but she could still hear everything that went on in that small house where she had been taken prisoner. The man had thought to use her abilities for himself after he had witnessed her heal a child.

There were screams in the night that still haunted her nightmares nearly a year later. Her father had taken her home, still covered in the blood of his prey and lecturing her the entire way about what she should have done differently.

He knew better than to try to stop her from healing. He had tried to forbid her to heal when she first developed the gift as a child, but even then she could no more have ignored someone in pain than she could now.

As he was a hunter, she was a healer. He had been forced to accept her nature, just as she was forced to accept his. It was the reason, she assumed, that despite his many atrocities against evil men, there was no taint of rot to him. He was exactly as he was made, just as she was.

He hunted and killed, she healed. They were as defined by their gifts as they were by the connection they had to each other. Two sides of the same coin. Light and Dark. But he loved her in his own way, ferocious and uncompromising as he was. And since her mother had died long before she remembered, he was all she had.

And when he found out she had gone into Freefall after curfew while a OIP Fleet Destroyer was in orbit he was going to skin her alive.

That worry was for later, she reminded herself. Right now she was here because she owed a debt. One that had been hanging over her head since her sixteenth year. Ten years was a long time to hold onto a life debt. Never knowing how or when it would be called in. She needed it done. Besides, she assured herself. She might not be a hunter by blood and power, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t picked up some of the skills her father taught her. And her healing nature might hinder her in some ways, but it also compensated her well with other abilities.

Killing would never be in her wheelhouse, but the rest? Well, her father’s threat was not the only thing that had kept her free for twenty-six years. It was just the most obvious.

The message had been vague, standing out among the prayers and pleas for help on the last crumbling bits of the old city wall by its efficient wording and precise script.

Ryker’s mark was glaringly obvious even in the dark of night. She didn’t need more than that to know he was in Freefall, and that he was looking for her. After that she just followed the loudest need in a place no one should be.

Serenity had more than a small knowledge of the hidden warrens and outer ring, so the rebels were not difficult to find. Many tiny pricks of need grated across her senses as she walked among the shadows and abandoned streets, but the need was the greatest from one direction. A direction no one should be. And the wounds were bad she realized, feeling the pull of pain like a spike across her senses.

She might live deep in the mountains, in hiding most of the time, but she could only go so long without healing. That need had led her to a firm knowledge of every nook cranny and escape Freefall had to offer. She was never seen here during the light of day when people were on the streets. Night had become her favored time to travel. So the dark, star-filled night didn’t bother her. She moved through it and the crumbling city as easily as she did her own forests at full light.

She made it to the dilapidated house on the outskirts of the revitalized city center unseen and not soon after the midnight hour. She didn’t have heightened senses physically, but psychically, she could read all the heartbeats within the downtrodden structure. She could also see that though