Chapter One
Sneak Peek
Healing the Orc Healer
Theron
Theron was out of bed and halfway to the door before the sound finished echoing off the mountains.
His hands were already moving—grabbing the medical kit he kept packed beside his bed, checking the contents by touch in the dark the way his mother had taught him.
Gauze. Sutures. Splints. Painkillers. Antiseptic.
The orc remedies his father had perfected over decades, sealed in clay vials that clinked together like teeth.
The settlement alarm sounded three seconds later. A deep, resonant horn that Theron had heard exactly four times in his life. Each time, someone had been dying.
He ran.
The night air hit him like a wall—cold and sharp, carrying the acrid smell of chemical smoke that had no business existing in the Cascade wilderness.
The explosion had come from the eastern ridge, near the access road the government had built five years ago over his uncle Krag’s furious objections.
The road that was supposed to make Ironpeak accessible.
The road that had made them vulnerable instead.
Theron’s legs ate the distance between the medical dwelling and the eastern perimeter in under four minutes.
He was fast for a half-orc, leaner than Koroth, less bulky than Drake, built for endurance rather than force.
His mother said he’d inherited her runner’s frame and his father’s stubborn refusal to stop.
She said it like a compliment. Most days, it was.
Tonight, he wished he were slower. Because slower would have meant arriving after the worst of it was over, and the worst of it was very, very bad.
The water treatment plant, the settlement’s primary source of clean water, built with a federal grant three years ago as a “gesture of good faith”, was gone.
Not damaged. Gone. A crater smoked where the building had stood, the concrete foundation shattered into fragments that littered the surrounding forest. Pipes jutted from the earth like broken bones.
Water, contaminated, now, with whatever accelerant had been used, pooled in the depression, reflecting firelight in sick, rainbow patterns.
Two orcs were down.
Theron dropped to his knees beside the first. A young scout named Asha, who had been on perimeter patrol. Burns on her left arm and shoulder. Shrapnel embedded in her side. Conscious, eyes wide with shock, making no sound. That worried him more than screaming would have.
“Asha. Look at me.” He kept his voice steady.
Calm. The healer’s voice, the one his father had spent twenty years teaching him to maintain even when his hands wanted to shake and his heart wanted to race and the orc in his blood wanted to roar at whatever had hurt the people he was meant to protect.
“I need you to breathe. Slow. Follow my count.”
She breathed. He worked. Shrapnel out, wound packed, burns assessed. Second-degree on the arm, third on the shoulder. She’d need grafting. He had the supplies for a field dressing, not a surgical suite.
The second casualty was worse. Garen, one of the older guards, one of the orcs who remembered the time before the treaty, before the humans, before the settlement had a water treatment plant to blow up.
He’d taken the blast to his chest. Theron could hear the wet rattle in his breathing that meant fluid in the lungs.
Could see the way his green skin had gone gray at the edges.
“Garen.” Theron’s hands moved with the brutal efficiency his father had drilled into him. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. The ABCs of field medicine, identical in orc and human practice because trauma didn’t care about species. “Stay with me.”
Garen’s hand closed around his wrist. The grip was weak, frighteningly weak for an orc who had once arm-wrestled Krag to a standstill.
“Boy,” Garen rasped. “Your father, ”
“Is on his way. And he’s going to be furious if I let you die before he gets here, so you’re going to keep breathing. That’s an order.”
A ghost of a smile. “You sound like him.”
“I know. It’s horrifying. Breathe.”
Garen breathed. For now.
Fenris materialized from the tree line with two scouts, his face set in the particular expression Theron had learned to read as controlled fury. Fenris didn’t do panic. Fenris did calculations.
“Accelerant was military-grade thermite,” Fenris said, crouching beside him. “Shaped charge. Placed at the structural weak points. This wasn’t amateurs.”
“This was the fourth one,” Theron said, not looking up from Garen’s chest wound. His hands knew the work. His brain could hold two conversations. “Fourth ‘accident’ in six weeks.”
“I know.”
“When do we stop calling them accidents?”
“Drake’s working on that.” Fenris’s voice carried the specific tension of a man who trusted his cousin’s diplomacy but was running out of patience with it. “Harper’s article bought us sympathy. It didn’t buy us safety.”
Theron’s father arrived forty seconds later, moving through the darkness with the unhurried certainty that had defined Throk’s medical practice for decades.
He was older now, slower, his dark hair shot through with iron, his hands marked by arthritis that he treated with the same herbs he gave his patients.
But his eyes were the same. Sharp. Assessing. Missing nothing.
Throk knelt beside Garen and looked at what his son had done. Assessed the field dressing, the airway management, the improvised chest seal. Said nothing for three seconds. Then:
“Good work.”
Two words. From Throk, they were an ovation.
They stabilized Garen together, father and son, working in the silent shorthand of two healers who shared blood and training and the bone-deep understanding that every patient was a universe.
Zoe arrived minutes later with the clinic’s portable equipment, his mother, still sharp at sixty, still the best trauma nurse in the Pacific Northwest, still capable of making an IV insertion look like a religious act.
Dawn came. Garen lived. Asha would heal. The water treatment plant would not.
Theron stood in the gray morning light and looked at the crater where clean water had been twelve hours ago, and felt something shift in his chest. Not the mate bond, he’d never felt that, had begun to wonder if he ever would.
Something else. Something that felt like the last thread of his patience fraying to a single filament.
Four “accidents.” Twelve casualties. One death, old Vessa, the weaver, whose dwelling had been closest to the transformer that “malfunctioned” three weeks ago.
His father had held her hand while she died, and Theron had watched the cost of it settle into Throk’s shoulders like a physical weight that would never fully lift.
Theron healed. That was what he did. That was what he was for.
He healed broken bones and bleeding wounds and fevers that would have killed humans.
He mixed his father’s remedies and his mother’s protocols and produced results that medical journals would have called miraculous if anyone outside Ironpeak had bothered to study them.
But he could not heal a crater. He could not heal a conspiracy. He could not heal the slow, deliberate violence of a government that had decided his people were an inconvenience to be eliminated one “accident” at a time.
The rage that stirred in his chest was unfamiliar.
Theron was the gentle one. Everyone said so.
Gentle like his father, kind like his mother, the healer who couldn’t stand to see anything suffer.
He’d nursed injured birds back to flight.
He’d sat with dying patients through their final hours because no one should cross alone.
He’d built his entire identity on the principle that healing was the highest calling and violence was its opposite.
But his people were being hurt. Systematically. Strategically. By enemies who wore suits instead of armor and wielded legislation instead of swords. And healing what they broke without stopping them from breaking it felt less like compassion and more like complicity.
His communicator buzzed. Drake’s frequency.
“Emergency response team from FEMA is being deployed,” Drake said.
His cousin’s voice carried the carefully controlled tension of a man juggling seventeen crises and a mate who kept trying to publish all of them.
“Official story is industrial accident. They’re sending a team of eight.
Medical, engineering, environmental assessment. ”
“We don’t need their assessment. We need them to stop blowing up our infrastructure.”
A pause. Drake and pauses, the diplomat processing, recalibrating, finding the angle. “I know. But we need them to see what’s happening. Firsthand witnesses from a federal agency carry weight that our testimony alone doesn’t. Play nice, Theron.”
“I always play nice.”
“You play nice with patients. With bureaucrats, you play your mother’s version of nice, which involves a lot of smiling and a terrifying amount of competence. Just, don’t intimidate the humans.”
“I’m the least intimidating orc in the settlement.”
“You’re six-foot-four with tusks and the ability to set a broken femur without anesthesia. The bar for ‘intimidating’ is lower than you think.”
The FEMA team arrived that afternoon.
Seven of them were exactly what Theron expected. Clipboard carriers. Box checkers. Government employees doing government jobs with government efficiency, which was to say slowly, carefully, and with one eye on their liability exposure at all times.
The eighth was not what he expected.
She came off the transport last. Small, at least a foot shorter than him, maybe more.
Asian American, her black hair pulled back in a practical braid that had seen better days.
She wore SAR gear instead of FEMA standard issue, and the boots on her feet had the kind of wear that came from actual mountains, not office hallways.
A medical kit hung from her shoulder, not a government-issue first aid kit but a real field trauma bag, battered and heavy and clearly packed by someone who knew what mattered.
She looked at the crater. Her expression didn’t change. No shock. No horror. No performative concern. Just assessment. The calm, methodical gaze of someone who had seen worse and survived it and come out the other side with steady hands and a clear head.
Then she looked at him.
Theron felt the ground tilt.
Not literally. The Cascades were tectonically stable and he was standing on solid rock.
But something in his chest, something deep, something ancient, something that lived in the part of his blood he’d inherited from generations of orc healers who had bonded and mated and built families from the ashes of impossible circumstances, recognized her. Not her face. Not her name. Her.
Oh, he thought. Oh, no.
“Lily Park,” she said. She didn’t extend her hand. She extended her medical kit. “Combat medic, two tours. Now wilderness SAR. I heard you have casualties. Where do you need me?”
Theron looked at the woman the universe had just pointed at and said yours, and felt his carefully constructed, gently maintained, impeccably controlled life crack right down the middle.
“The clinic,” he said, because his voice still worked even if his brain had stopped. “Follow me.”
She followed. And behind them, the crater smoked, and the conspiracy tightened, and the mate bond, patient as the mountains, relentless as the dawn, began its ancient, inevitable work.
Healing the Orc Healer, Coming Soon