Healing Hands (The Queen of the Night series Book 2)

Healing

Hands

Book Two in the
Queen of the Night
Series

Laura Emmons

ISBN-13: 978-1497537309

ISBN-10: 1497537304

HEALING HANDS

Copyright © 2014 Laura M. Emmons

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any storage  or retrieval systems is forbidden without the express permission of Laura M. Emmons. Contact through Facebook at www.facebook.com/lauraewrites.

All characters in this book are a product of the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to any persons alive or dead. All incidents described in the book are also pure inventions of the author.

DEDICATION

This story is dedicated to my inspiring sister, Dia. Her work in hospice care, palliative care and as a shamana has brought light into many, many lives.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to all of the aspiring authors on Authonomy.com who offered comments and advice on this novel. Special thanks to my beta readers: Chris, Karen, Mindy and of course, my ever-patient husband, Jim.

The cover on this book is comprised from several photographs, two of which are reprinted through an agreement with Shutterstock.com. The photograph of the mated eagles in flight is copyrighted by Gregory Johnston. The photograph, ‘Holding Hands’ is copyrighted by
gurinaleksandr
. The background was photographed by Dia Emmons at Prospect Peak in Morgan County, West Virginia and is reprinted by permission.

Prolog

The Suspect Moon

Six years earlier…

The man shivered. He’d been conditioned to endure all kinds of physical discomforts but he still felt the cold. This Afghani canyon was inhospitable in more ways than one. After almost baking to death mere hours ago in the arid, cloudless climate, he now found himself near frozen. He paused, hanging from the side of the cliff, pulling his army-issue flak jacket tighter around his middle and scoping out his next moves.

Finding solid footholds and handholds in the craggy cliff side took all of his concentration; the porous rock crumbled to dust in his hands and under his feet. Not wanting to lose purchase and plummet to the jagged rocks below, he considered his next handhold carefully and searched for the target.

He’d seen this location in a vision. He knew that in one of the many caves hidden amongst the eroded and misshapen rock, the enemy built IEDs, but the terrain looked a lot different in person. His gift of premonition didn’t allow him to sense his own future, but it helped him become an important intelligence asset to the U.S. military. His magical lineage gave him unprecedented athleticism and enhanced senses so he’d been able to become one of the elite members of the Special Forces.

Scuffling noises came from the rock in front of him. He froze. A desert hedgehog, no bigger than his fist, scoured the rock for insects. The tiny rodent would have been cute, if not for the sharp quills covering its whole body. All of the indigenous animals were predators.

Most of the people belonged to a radical sect bent on killing Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Koreans and Australians. They would probably have liked to kill more people, but there were only so many hours in the day. He didn’t bother disguising himself with traditional garb. His pale skin and blue eyes, hell, even his light brown hair, made it obvious he didn’t belong here. Plus, he spoke lousy Pushto. His best option for survival on this mission was to not get caught. He counted on the cover of darkness and his dark clothes to help him stay out of sight.

They’d chosen this night to execute the mission because the new moon, completely hidden in the Earth’s shadow on one day each month, guaranteed absolute darkness.

The home-made bombs made mincemeat of his fellow soldiers. As a Special Forces operative, he’d been ordered to infiltrate the bomb manufacturing site, plant an explosive of his own, and sneak back out undetected. Twelve men made up his unit, but this operation had been designated a two-person job. His partner hid at the bottom of the cliff with the radio detonator.

He returned to his search along the face of the cliff. There. He found the opening. He used his enhanced hearing and sense of smell to confirm that he was alone in the cave. Then he planted the small but powerful device and retreated.

As he retraced his path back down the cliff to his partner, he saw a sliver of light from the moon cast rays upon the landscape.
That’s odd
, he thought. There shouldn’t be any moonlight at all until tomorrow night. The slice of crescent moon widened as he watched it.
Uh oh
. If the moon grew any brighter; his position would be spotted by the lookout guards posted on the cliff opposite him across the narrow valley. He chuckled to himself, nervously.
This would be a great time for one of those fairy concealment charms
, but he’d given up using magic altogether when he’d eloped with his stunningly kind-hearted and beautiful wife, Shannon. She stayed at home with his nine year-old daughter, Maggie, and his three year-old son, Corey. His marriage to Shannon had been forbidden by the rules of his coven. She was descended from Healers, people able to heal almost any illness with a magical touch. He was a Seer, born with the gift of prophesy. The deities forbid Healers and Seers to intermingle. Their community would have undoubtedly sided with gods and goddesses over two teenagers in love, so he and Shannon left Cacapon, West Virginia and everything associated with it.

He’d climbed halfway down the cliff, lost in memories of his wife and children, when it appeared that the laws of nature were wholly broken. Out of nowhere, the moon rotated until it shone in all its brightness upon his position. This was how it seemed to non-magical humans. The Queen of the Night, the goddess of the Moon, played a trick on the world by using the magical glow off her own sparkly silver visage, from the heavenly realm, to deliberately expose him to danger.
Why now?
  After letting him live for so many years, why did she choose now to exact her revenge for his disobedience?

He heard shouts in Pushto, and saw the unmistakable glint off a sniper rifle scope.

***

November 1
st
, present day…

Evan woke up with a start.
They shot him!
  Still lost in the dream, he reached for the journal and pen he kept by the bed. He’d had the rare gift of having dream visions of past events for five years now. By habit, he recorded the vision in as much detail as he could remember. His mom was part Poet, people who had phenomenal memories, so he had great recall. His visions of the future always came to him when he was awake. Of course, he couldn’t see his own future, no Seer could. Nevertheless, the members of the Cacapon clan chose him to represent all Seers on the High Council because he was uniquely gifted.

In spite of his standing in the closely knit, extremely secretive, and very magical community of Cacapon, in his mother’s eyes he was still just a senior in high school, and he had to get a move on or he’d be late. He tried to place the journal back on the nightstand, but accidentally dropped it. It had fallen open to an old journal entry.

Weird
. He’d entirely forgotten about this vision. The vision described Ewan Stewart capsizing his boat on Cheat Lake nearly twenty years earlier. He remembered how the vision had disturbed him at the time because Cheat Lake was known for being calm, but Ewan’s boat capsized when a freak wave almost eight feet tall crashed over it.

That event had happened at night also, just like the dream vision he’d woken up from today, but today’s vision was about a man he knew had died seven years ago, Matthew Stewart, Ewan’s oldest son.

“Evan,” his mother called, “you’d better get down here. Fiona’s on the phone. It’s about your girl. Her mother’s sick again.”

He trudged down the stairs with his toothbrush still in his mouth, his clothes draped over one arm and his sneakers in his other hand.

“Don’t call her that, Mom,” he grumbled, “you’re gonna get us in trouble. We’re just friends.”  Evan knew better than to break the rules with Maggie. She was a Healer and he was a Seer. If he didn’t want to end up like her dad, exposed to sniper fire while hanging on the side of a cliff, nothing could ever happen between them. No matter how much he might ache for her.