Healing Hands (The Queen of the Night series Book 2) Read Online Free

squealed and Mom smiled sweetly, the pocket of my sweatpants vibrated. I’d received a text from Evan. He said he’d successfully escaped participation in the Horned Men dance and did I want him to join us. I texted back, Not yet .
    I’d been given a lot of awesome presents as well. Mom gave me a textbook on human physiology I’d wanted for months. Fiona gave me a new notebook computer she said I would need for school. Rose gave me gift cards for downloading music, movies and e-books. Finally, they pulled the big present out from behind the tree. It was a pamphlet.
    Huh? 
    I looked at the title which said, ‘Eastern Panhandle Driving School’. My heart leapt into my throat.
    “Driving?” I asked, completely caught off guard. In California it was legal to get a provisional license, or learner’s permit, at the age of fifteen-and-a-half, but since car insurance was so outrageously expensive for teenage drivers, and because the Blue bus went everywhere I needed to go, I’d never considered taking driving lessons.
    Rose answered my unspoken question. “If you’re gonna live here, you’ll need to know how to drive.” 
    “Driving…” I said again, this time with awe in my voice. Then, as the idea captured me, and I pictured myself with that much freedom, I squealed. I jumped up and hugged both Rose and Fiona. Mom just smiled.
    Our gifts to Mom were all home-made and hand-crafted. I’d sent Fiona a bunch of family photos which she’d turned into a fluffy picture quilt. Rose had made a bunch of candles scented in Mom’s favorite types of flowers. We placed them in a perimeter all around the bed so the room was filled with fragrance. Corey and I had made food: fudge, gingerbread cookies and brownies, although we knew she’d never eat it all. She’d had practically no appetite for weeks.
    Eventually the celebration was over and we all ended up dozing by the fire together. Corey was tucked in under the new quilt snoring softly, his arms wrapped around Mom. I snuggled into her other side. Rose and Fiona dozed in their chairs. At one point, I felt movement above me. Fi was using her magical healing hands technique to check on Mom’s condition. I used my healer vision to look also. Then I looked at Fi, she nodded her head and increased the pain medicine on the IV drip as high as the governor would allow it to go.
    Just as the first rays of Alban Arthan, the Winter’s Light, came streaming through the stained glass inset on the front door of the cabin, making a rainbow pattern throughout the foyer, the colors in my mother’s aura started to fade. As the jewel-toned light spilled into the kitchen, her light dissipated into a translucent whisper, and disappeared.
    She was smiling, and I fervently wished that it meant she had found my father, and they’d left together.
    I texted Evan. Now .
    Corey must have sensed my movement because it woke him. He took one look at Mom and started bawling.
    I had barely skirted around the bed to envelop Corey in my arms before Evan burst through the front door. The sacred meadow wasn’t far away but still, there was no way Evan had been waiting there. He must have been hiding in Fiona’s driveway. Both of us held my brother, talked to him, rubbed his back.
    Nearly forty minutes passed before he stopped crying. I envied his ability to let it all out. I had no tears. Behind us Rose and Fiona followed the nurse’s instructions. They made phone calls. Eventually, people arrived. She was examined and given an official time of death. All the arrangements had been made in advance, so now the plans were executed. People took my mother’s body away, still draped in her new quilt.
    There was nothing more to do than sleep. I tucked Corey into the camp bed in Fiona’s home office. Rose had set herself up on an air mattress in the sitting room of Fiona’s master suite. That left me in her bedroom. Evan tucked me in then lay on top of the covers holding me. Finally, when it was just the two