Healer's Choice Read Free

tell whether she’d given herself to Daivat willingly or not.
    The blood on her clothes and skin belonged to the dead man. Her death had been as quick as her companion’s, but not as messy, a snapped neck instead of a throat ripped open.
    Both killings happened more than a mile away in a tangled stretch of wild grapevines. And like the burial place, the attack was on Coyote land. It was forbidden territory to any Jaguar except those sent for the purpose of gathering information about the humans who’d arrived in a caravan of heavy trucks.
    Their encampment was guarded by uniformed men anxious to send bullets into live targets. The rattle of machine guns cut across the valley daily, scattering predator and prey alike with random bursts of violence and the senseless brutality that was the hallmark of the only-human race.
    Aryck rose from his examination of the female. He wondered what Daivat’s explanation of events would be.
    Entering the forbidden area alone was enough to warrant punishment. Killing the humans without sanction, then hiding the deed rather than coming forward and explaining the necessity of it, made what he’d done worse.
    Weres were three-souled. Man soul and beast soul living harmoniously and perfectly entwined in the physical world while the eternal soul resided in the shadowlands with the ancestors.
    In another Were, killing and hiding the deed might signify the beginning of a rogue state, an imbalance or separation of the man and animal souls. Aryck didn’t think that was the case with Daivat.
    This challenge had been a long time in coming. It was inevitable, but only a fool blinded by arrogance would issue it now, and under these circumstances.
    Pure jaguars were solitary creatures by nature, with males fighting to establish and defend their territories against other males. In Weres the animal need of their beast soul was tempered by their human one. It drew them together into communities, for fellowship and safety and to keep from losing themselves in beast form and beast mind. Even so, an alpha couldn’t afford to show weakness or he would find himself challenged by another male.
    Aryck’s fingers flexed in jaguar reaction, instinctively preparing for a fight as he reached mentally for the pack’s alpha, his father, Koren.
    The ability to communicate telepathically was rare among Weres, but it ran strong in his father’s bloodline. You found something? Koren asked without preamble.
    Yes. Aryck transferred images and perceptions to his father, starting from where he’d come across Daivat’s scent and traveling to the kill site, before ending with what he’d discovered in the shallow grave.
    Prostitute , his father said at the sight of the woman’s tattoo. There are settlements in the San Joaquin still following many of the laws enacted during The Last War.
    Though he didn’t elaborate further, Aryck knew his father hadn’t lain with one of the prostitutes, but had seen the tattoo in the days when he himself was an enforcer hunting Weres who fled a death sentence. The mating bond between his parents had been so strong that even though his mother died giving birth to him, his father had never sought another female, much less a human who sold herself.
    Do you want the bodies brought back to serve as evidence?
    No. Dispose of them as you see fit. Daivat remains away from camp. I will summon the pack to the challenge circle and confront him with his crimes once you’ve both returned .
    Aryck’s fingers flexed and phantom claws emerged. Inherent in his father’s words was a warning he should be ready to serve as the pack’s enforcer.
    The mental connection fell away, leaving Aryck to contemplate the corpses he’d unearthed. Jaguars carried their dead high into the trees in a place deemed sacred by a shaman. They left them for the carrion birds and insects to pick clean, then for the sun to purify. Later, those bones that could be gathered by the elders were placed in the ancestral cave dug