He Stole My Life, So the Moon Gave Me Back novel · Chapter 5 of 27

Chapter 5: The Healer Takes the Table

The guard's chest was still smoking when Noah put both hands on it.

Under his palms the burn was not a wound. It was a map. Charred skin from the collar down, the gold light's fingerprint pressed into the muscle, still warm to a touch that had no business being warm.

The man was dying. Noah could feel it moving under his hands like water going out of a cracked bowl.

"Keep your weapons up," Adrian said from behind him.

The four attendants at the door did not move. Their swords stayed drawn, pointed at Noah's back while he worked. He filed that. He filed all of it.

"He has minutes," Noah said. "If you want him alive, tell them to sheathe."

"They stay."

"Then he dies, and you explain to his family why a sword needed to be out."

He did not turn around. He kept his hands flat on the ruined chest and let the room decide what to do with his back.

The burn was deeper than the skin. He had to go under it. He had never done this with an audience.

He closed his eyes and reached.

The light came the way it always came, not at his call but at his need, a slow gold rising up through his wrists and into his fingers. It did not flare this time. It pooled. It moved into the man the way water moves into dry ground, and the charred skin began to knit from the outside in, black going grey, grey going pink, pink going whole.

The guard coughed. His eyes opened. He looked up at Noah and did not understand anything he was seeing.

Noah took his hands off and sat back on his heels.

His arms were shaking. He had not given them permission to shake.

"Get him water," he said.

Nobody moved.

"Get him water," Adrian said, and one of the attendants went.

So that was how it worked in this room. Noah stored the fact where he kept the rest.

He stood and looked at the second body on the next table. A woman, older, one arm wrapped in linen that had gone through. The smell off it was wrong. She had been here longer than the first man and no one had come.

He crossed to her table.

"That one is not yours," Adrian said.

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