The person was male and powerfully built. Something had ripped his clothes into shreds. What was once a pair of blue jeans lay in tatters against his golden skin. His t-shirt was ripped inhalf and lying in shreds around him, deep claw marks pulsing with poisonous magic.
A soft ‘oh’ of horror escaped me at his condition. I reached out and touched his skin, closing my eyes to get a read on his injuries, and almost jerked them away when I realized the male lying before me was no person at all.
He was a shifter. A powerful one.
Our magic stirred against each other, a sense of recognition I didn’t understand. He felt familiar somehow, but I knew I’d never met him.
I could still run. No one would know. I’d go back to the shop and never mention this to anyone. My life would return to normal.
But …
But as my power seeped into his skin and I mentally catalogued the shifter’s injuries, one thing became glaringly apparent.
If I didn’t intervene, he would die.
And it would be my fault.
Not completely. I wasn’t the one who attacked him. But leaving him to die when I was more than able to help felt akin to doing the same thing as his attackers had done, in a more passive way.
Foreign magic beat in the claw marks, a strange poison seeping through the shifter’s body, overpowering his innate magic and preventing him from healing. I’d never sensed it before, but the feel of it made me want to snatch my hand away from him and run.
The rest would have been minor injuries if not for the poison. Several broken ribs, a broken leg, numerous abrasions, a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, and more. The more injuries that assailed my magic, the more empathy I felt for this stranger.
Someone or something wanted him dead and had damn near succeeded.
And that thought made me hesitate. One wasn’t a daughter of the gods without believing in Fate and all its fickle tendencies. A demi-goddess did not believe in coincidence.
Had I been drawn here on this night and for this purpose?
If so, why?
Should I leave him to his inevitable death, or was there a reason I felt the urge to heal him?
The shifter’s heartbeat trickled toward true death. I swore again, did a final sweep for prying eyes, and allowed my magic to rise in full force, something I hadn’t done since the attack.
A gentle wind blew through the trees, sweeping my hair away from my face. Magical, night-blooming, rare flowers sprang from the ground, encasing the shifter and me in a glowing circle. The earth reached for me, yearning for the healing touch of my power. I sank to the ground beside the shifter and kicked off my shoes, ensuring the entire bottoms of my feet were in contact with the ground.
Magic rose from deep within the heart of the world, traveling through my feet and legs, my pelvis and waist, through my heart and head, and swept out through my fingers. I glowed a soft pink and green, the color of watermelon tourmaline mined straight from the heart of a mountain, then reached for the wounded creature.
Healing magic swept through his body, touching every single wound, old and new. Even so close to succumbing, he fought against death with a furious rage.
This power was the secret I guarded with my life, the one that would make me hunted if anyone ever knew. I was a Floromancer, but I was so much more.
My power could heal any wound, no matter what caused it. Divine weapons could not overpower my healing touch. I couldreverse someone’s age, taking them twenty, thirty, or more years in their past, reverting their body to their youth. This was a secret I’d never divulged because it could get me killed.
No one, not even my mother, knew this about my power. I hadn’t even known about it until a few months after the Chimera attack.
But this gift had a couple of fatal flaws. I was completely vulnerable when using it and for at least an hour afterward, and if anyone knew about it, life as I knew it would end.
I’d discovered it by accident when Hazel, the witch who’d saved me after my attack, was mortally wounded. She’d stumbled into her small cabin in the woods and bled out on her wooden floor, and I’d reacted without hesitation.
When Hazel woke, she found me fused to her wooden floor, my body having grown roots to the earth below. She’d asked me a dozen questions, and I pretended not to have a clue what happened.
I hadn’t used the power since.
But something drove me to save this man, and, though I might regret it, I poured magic into his veins, sweeping away his hurts, and forcing the magic out of his body and into the earth, where I destroyed it with barely a thought. And as I did, my thoughts floated, becoming one with the shifter. He had a prior hip injury from what looked like either an attack or fight, something so severe not even his shifter magic could heal completely. I blasted away the arthritis inside the joint and loosened the pins holding him together, forcing them out of his body and onto the ground.
He had a deep scar on his upper thigh, close to the femoral artery, another death blow he’d somehow managed to survive. I cleaned up the scar tissue and moved on.
