The Healer Read Free Page A

day.
    Suddenly, it stopped in mid-chew and lifted its head, sniffing the air. Its ears suddenly flattened against its head, and a low, warning rumble came up its throat.
    The man was awake within seconds. He rolled out from under his covers and stood abruptly.
    “Easy, boy,” he said softly. “I hear it, too.”
    The cougar hissed.
    The man turned and stared straight into the big cat’s eyes. For the space of a heartbeat, he and the cougar were as one.
    Go. Now.
    The cat grabbed the deer leg it had been eating and disappeared into the darkness.
    The man turned back around and fixed his gaze on a small opening in the stand of trees in which he’d taken shelter. His nostrils twitched once as scents were carried to him on the air.
    One dog. One man. One gun.
    He smelled skunk on the dog, filth on the man and gunpowder. The gun had recently been fired.
    He kicked dirt onto what was left of the coals, then stepped back into the shadows.
     
    Chock Barrett paused beneath a stand of pines to catch his breath. As he did, he pulled a small penlight out of his pocket and checked the compass on his watch. It was hard to stay true to a direction when going uphill through such a heavily wooded area. Not only was this part of the Appalachians wild and brushy, but the population of the mountain that walked upright was definitely in the minority.
    Still, the last decent bit of information he’d had on the man known as Jonah Gray Wolf was supposed to be good, and the bounty would be worth all the crap he had to go through to get it. The only problem with bringing the man in was that the authorities would view it as kidnapping, which meant staying under the radar, because it wasn’t the law that wanted Jonah Gray Wolf. It was a man named Major Bourdain.
    Bourdain—the only man Jonah regretted healing. But he’d done it, and Bourdain had been after him ever since, shelling out money to anyone willing to hunt for the man who dispensed miracle cures through his hands.
    Barrett dropped the penlight back into his pocket, shifted his gun to the other hand and started forward, then suddenly caught a whiff of something completely out of order.
    Wood smoke. The dog beside him whined.
    He grinned, revealing a mouthful of tobacco-stained teeth. Maybe he was about to get lucky. He shifted the backpack off his shoulder and felt through a side pocket for the tranquilizer darts he was carrying, then slipped one into the rifle before pocketing the others in his coat. His step was softer, his stride slower, as he started forward, guided by stray beams of moonlight filtering through the tree limbs onto the forest floor.
     
    The intruder was close now. Despite the chill of the night, Jonah Gray Wolf could smell sweat from the man’s unwashed body. Seconds passed, and then he heard a twig snap a few yards to his left. His nostrils flared slightly. It was his only reaction to being stalked.
    A leaf shifted somewhere above him.
    The cougar.
    It had sensed trouble and come back.
    Jonah didn’t understand the connection between himself and animals, but he had long ago accepted it; it was as odd and complicated as his ability to heal others.
    The cougar huffed once—a soft, almost undetectable cough—as a message to Jonah that it was there. To the untrained ear, it would have sounded like nothing more than wind shifting the leaves on the floor of the forest.
    Jonah glanced back at his camp. In the dark, it still appeared as if he were in the bedroll, asleep. If whoever was on the mountain turned out to be just a hunter who’d smelled the smoke of his fire, he would most likely pass by the camp without revealing himself. But if it was one of Bourdain’s men…
    A few more seconds passed, then Jonah saw a shape emerging from the shadows on the far side of his camp. From where he was standing, he could see the man, as well as his rifle. But then, any hunter would be carrying. It remained to be seen exactly what it was that this man was hunting.
    Jonah saw