Page 14 of Healer Hunted

But I also felt no real urge to go back, good food could be had anywhere, even in a suite room with Luka while I was still trapped. My fingers trailed up my throat again, but the slave collar was really gone. How had he known how to take it off? Weren’t these things supposed to be tamper-proof?

“Hard question, huh?” Luka murmured, “Don’t worry, you can think about it. From what I understand though, the UAR isn’t the best place to live in. You’d be welcome on the Vagabond with my friends. We’ve got five human women living with us by now, you’re practically invading the ship.”

I tried to picture what it would be like to live entirely on a spaceship, but I’d never really seen them up close. For my abduction, I had just gone into a medical center for a mandated vaccination shot and woke up at the Jihari Resort. Luka was right, the UAR had sold me, and that abduction had been staged by someone in power on the planet. I was certainly not the only one taken, and they’d probably done it plenty of times before, and would again in the future. A good way to earn money and control the population growth, I shivered at the unfairness of it.

“You’re safe now Noa, I won’t let any harm come to you,” Luka murmured and I realized he’d been responding to my emotions, while I hadn’t said a thing. Comforting me, drawing the right conclusions somehow to say things that might make me feel better.

He paused in his walking, glanced around, and then he set me down on a nearby smooth rock. His expression was serious as he looked at my, no doubt, suspicious one. He nodded, “Go ahead, ask. I know you want to,” he said with a smirk, a sharply pointed canine teeth peeking out at the left side of his mouth when that lip curled up a little more.

“Are you reading my mind?” I demanded, confused and a little concerned that he might do such a thing. My thoughts were private, and often a little nuts. The baby fantasy for example was definitely not something he needed to know.

He shook his head, one palm curled around the slight bump Pato made beneath his shirt. His hair was going sort of white from the ashes clinging to it, and with how long his hair was, it was starting to look like a mess, yet he still looked gorgeous. It was all in those sharp cheekbones and that killer jawline I bet.

“I’m an empath, much like most Aderians are. We sense emotions, often only to a lesser degree, but my gift is very strong,” Luka explained. He turned his back on me then and stared back the way we’d come. Our footsteps, or rather his as I hadn’t been walking, had already been obscured if he’d even made an on the hard rock.

An empath, so not my thoughts, just my feelings. He was good enough at it that he could make educated guesses on what I was thinking, based on our conversation. I shivered, I wasn’t sure if I liked it when he knew precisely what I was feeling either. But at least it could be said that he was just really good at reading facial expressions. Oh, did that mean he could tell if someone was lying?

Then I wondered about his first part of the statement, that Aderians generally all had some kind of empathic gift. That made zero sense to me. The Dragon had no empathy, and neither had Mikasul, both ladies were the very definition of sociopathic bitch. And what about the Dumb duo? They weren’t the rainbows and flowers type either.

“So what am I feeling right now?” I asked him, curious to see how he’d respond. And why was he looking back at the Resort dome? Why wasn’t he looking at me? I wanted to know what he was thinking and feeling damn it, he had an unfair advantage if this was true.

He didn’t hesitate at all when he answered, “Disbelief, curiosity, a bit of apprehension, am I close?” He was spot on of course, and I was certain he knew it. This could still be an educated guess, what I was feeling now was kinda obvious. I was inclined to believe him, given his earlier eerily accurate responses to what was going on in my head.

“I struggle to believe every Aderian is like you,” I said, thinking of his mother and the others of his species I’d met again. I understood that I hadn’t exactly met prime examples, but still, if the four I’d met could do this, why should I believe the rest wasn’t like that. Didn’t a gift for empathy mean they were more likely to abhor slavery?

Now Luka turned around and looked at me with an expression so mournful that I wanted to leap off this rock and hug him. He probably sensed something like that because he approached, leaning his fists on either side of my hips. We were under a rocky overhang, sort of out of the wind so the ash falling here was minimal. I reached up to wipe a little from his cheek, then rubbed my thumb over his bottom lip.

“My mother was a powerful empath once, with a head for business. Then she and my father crashed with their spaceship when I was sixteen. My dad was instantly gone, my mother sustained severe injuries, including to her head…” he explained it quietly, just the facts, but I could hear the pain, see it in his midnight eyes.

I pressed a kiss to that soft bottom lip, “I’m sorry Luka, that sounds horrible. I lost my mom when I was sixteen and… It’s just horrible. I’m sorry you went through losing a parent at that age as well.” I couldn’t really fathom what it was like to have a father in my life, but it was obvious that Luka had had one as was much more common for the rich and privileged on Colony Four.

He sighed, stole another kiss that I was more than willing to give, and then he pulled back. “No, I’m glad my father didn’t live to see what my mother turned into. The brain damage eradicated her empathic ability. Really, I think it destroyed her ability to feel much of anything. It’s part of why I went into medicine. I thought I could fix her somehow.”

Everything about him said that he no longer believed that, his mother couldn’t be fixed. The person the Dragon was now, that was not his mom, he was saying he knew she didn’t even have the capacity to love him any longer. How terrible was it to lose your father, and then discover your mother had turned into a monster?

I couldn’t think of anything to offer him except a hug, so I curled my arms around him, and when he stepped between my thighs, I curled my legs around him too. A full, monkey-body hug. It was nice, to put my head on his shoulder, and just be with him for a little while.

Chapter 9

Luka

Sharing what had happened to my mother with Noa felt good, she understood, she felt sad for me but she had a similar experience in losing a parent. She knew what I had gone through at that age, and she knew enough of what my mother was like now, to understand why I couldn’t stand to be near her now.

To wish your own mother dead, was practically a crime on Aderia, but sometimes I did think that. If she’d died along with my father, it would have been so much better for everyone, my mother included. To realize that not only had she become cutthroat when it came to business, but she was also doing things downright illegal, like using slave labor. It was all of a sudden not that strange to think she’d been involved in the illegal pet breeding operation up on Jihari’s moon. No wonder my cousins had managed to find and capture me shortly after I’d arrived.

I would have preferred staying entwined with Noa a little longer, but dawn was creeping up along the horizon. In the distance a volcano was rumbling too, preparing to spew another rain of ashes into the sky. She didn’t protest when I picked her up into my arms and started walking into the direction we needed to go.

“How is it even possible there’s breathable air out here? Nothing grows here,” she asked. She was avidly looking around, surveying the desolate landscape around us. I didn’t know, that was one of Jihari’s great mysteries, it was why there was a science outpost, researchers were trying to discover just that.

“We don’t know for sure,” I said, “But from the last papers I read on it, I believe there’s some kind of high heat resistant bacteria that is extremely prolific in these volcanoes. Supposedly it produces the oxygen we breathe.” It was a discovery with a lot of potential applications, possibly even in regards to oxygen creation aboard a spaceship. Imagine if the engine itself could house these bacteria and create clean oxygen as well as power?

I increased my pace, jogging across the rocky terrain. We needed to find a place to shelter for a while, the science outpost was still at least a day out from our position if I’d judged our direction correctly. We’d do well to find a hiding spot so that come morning, we wouldn’t be picked up by the search parties my mother would no doubt send out.

When I spotted the first cave opening I doubted the safety of ducking inside one of those, they were no doubt made by lava flowing through the rock at some point. If a nearby volcano started to rumble, the rock ceiling could cave in on us. I had to weigh our options, how high was that risk compared to the risk of staying out in the open? If we did, I was fairly certain a patrol would pick us up immediately.

I debated whether to share this with Noa for only a brief moment, but it was only fair that she made the choice to take the risk, whichever risk it was she preferred. As I listed our options, she remained calm, nodding along until she pointed at the same cave opening I’d already spotted. There had been plenty just like it along the way so far, but this one looked a little more inviting than the others, mostly because of some purple crystals surrounding the opening; it was sort of pretty.

“Let’s do it, Luka. What are the chances the nearest volcano is gonna go off? They’ve had eruptions more to the west the past few days, pressure has just been released,” she said. She vaguely gestured in some direction that by my calculations was absolutely not west, but her point was still valid.