Wild Invitation

she could sense, she bade him to lie down flat on his back. He resisted until she raised an eyebrow in a silent threat. They both knew she outranked him.
    “I’m going to have to straighten this,” Lara said once he was in the position she’d requested, then punched in a strong painkiller through his skin before he could argue against it. The dominants—young or old—were always the worst. The last time Indigo had been injured, Lara had had to threaten to bringthe lieutenant’s mother into it before the long-legged woman would cooperate.
    Riordan winced at even the slight pressure of the dermal injection, which told her exactly how badly he was hurting. Conscious of his pride, she used her abilities to further dampen the lingering pain. Only when the tension leached out of his body did she run her hands over the arm again, confirming the position and seriousness of the break.
    “Is it like seeing a scan inside your mind?” Riordan asked, sounding more like his normal self.
    “Hmm?” This was an unusual injury—almost as if the bone had been crushed. Had Riordan not been changeling, with their race’s greater bone density, she’d likely have been dealing with a mass of splinters instead of pieces of solid bone.
    “I always wondered, when you do your healer thing, what do you see?”
    “It’s not like a scan,” she murmured, fixing the damage points in her mind, “not that visual.” M-Psy, by contrast,
did
see things in that fashion—Lara knew because she’d had the chance to have long discussions with a number of them in med school.
    It was largely as a result of those interactions that she’d had a more nuanced view of the Psy even before the Lauren family defected to SnowDancer. The Psy students she’d known might have used strictly technical language rather than emotive terms, but they’d all had a dedication to helping the sick and the hurt, a dedication that meant the M designation was the most well-known and accepted of all designations among non-Psy.
    “It’s more a ‘sense,’ I suppose,” she continued. “Hard to describe, but it’s almost as if I become part of your body for an instant, able to pinpoint every fragment of hurt.”
    Riordan looked down as she straightened his arm. “Whoa, that is so weird,” he said, happily buzzed from the meds, “how it doesn’t hurt, even though I know that’s my arm.”
    She kept a constant eye on his veins and fine blood vessels as she performed the maneuver, not wanting to nick or otherwise cause further damage. “This is a very severe break, Rory.”
    He made a face. “Shh.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “My friends have forgotten that baby name. Mostly.”
    Lips twitching, she said, “I won’t remind them if you tellme how on Earth you managed this.” Riordan wasn’t one of the more accident-prone people in the den.
    Color kissed his cheekbones, his gaze darting to the doorway. Lara went over and shut it before returning to work on him. As she did so, she counteracted the more heady effects of the medication, so he could think clearly but without pain.
    It took him almost five minutes to speak.
    “It was a dumb mistake,” he muttered. “Nothing spectacular. I was in the smaller gym, doing some weights. Strength training.”
    She kept her tone easy, nonjudgmental. “Okay.” Larger bone pieces in alignment, she worked at repairing the worst of the damage, which included removing any bone chips so that the shards wouldn’t turn into shrapnel in his bloodstream. Her ability allowed her to coax those chips to the surface, but she had to use fine surgical tweezers to pluck them out.
    Riordan groaned.
    “Don’t look.”
    “I can’t help it.” It sounded like he was gritting his teeth. “So will I be missing pieces of bone now?”
    “No, I’ll stimulate your body into fixing itself.” Not quite correct, as she was the primary source of energy, but close enough. “It’s why you’ll be hungry after. Make sure you eat a high-calorie meal.”
    “Okay.”
    Satisfied every tiny, dangerous fragment was out, she moved on to the task of healing the most severe breaks. “You were telling me how you did this.”
    Another heavy silence before he finally said, “I decided to up the weights a level, except I must’ve pressed the wrong button and suddenly the thing weighed a ton. It tilted sideways at a really bad angle—I had the choice of letting it crush my chest or my arm.”
    Lara frowned as she realized he was