At last, he smiled and said I was free to go.
By the time the doctor left, Andrew was glaring. “You lied.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Will you keep these?” I handed him the prescription slips and made my careful way to get dressed, including shoes, while my head spun.
I had a long-sleeved, blue blouse along, and carefully pushed my swollen arm into that. I needed help keeping the floppy wrapping in place and dressing with one hand, but I wasn’t about to ask for it. Andrew did help with my jewelry, the clasp of the golden moon necklace at the back of my neck and my silver ring onto my left hand instead of swollen right.
By the time I was ready to go, Andrew having carefully helped fix the sling in place, he informed me Isaac had texted. Isaac was already in the “car park,” having been coming to see me whether I was ready to leave or not.
It was a careful walk out. Corridors were shockingly bright, overwhelming. Though it was a small-town hospital, I felt we were having to traverse Victoria Station with the sun in my eyes. I walked with my head up, looking ahead, focused on Kage, and Andrew didn’t say anything, though he kept a close eye on me, holding my left hand.
As much as it hurt, my right arm felt more stable, less likely to be bumped around, in the sling. And my head wasn’t that bad or I wouldn’t be able to stay awake at all.
Andrew spoke to someone at a nurses’ station, then escorted me down an elevator and out the final corridor to the doors where Isaac and Zar waited in a seating area.
Isaac smiled gently to see me walking, his eyes softening while his lips hardly stirred.
Zar, so dark complexioned, still looked pale, diminished in the glaring light. He stepped forward, reached to touch my left shoulder, but hesitated, scared to hurt me.
“I’m okay, Zar.” I leaned my head into his chest, keeping a gap between us to protect my arm, and he offered a soft embrace, hands gently on my back, nose in my filthy hair.
Then Isaac kissed me. He had a brand new, autumn coat for me. The right sleeve of my rain jacket had been eviscerated. That one had been on clearance a few seasons back. This one was beautiful: nice, non-clearance, waterproof, practical enough for hiking, cute enough to be urban, lightly insulated, full of features like inside pockets and hidden hood. A good color too—a slightly brownish plum shade, pretty but quiet, and neutral enough to go with most things.
He, or they, had gone shopping for me at a time like this? And done a stellar job? My glazed brain was overwhelmed, not making much sense as I murmured thanks, protested that he shouldn’t have, and worried about us being split up and vulnerable—no time for shopping—while Isaac pulled it around me. He didn’t answer. Only kissed me again.
Andrew helped me out. Isaac led the way to the Jeep.
“Kage?” I asked as they got me settled in the front passenger seat.
“No change,” Isaac said.
“He still hasn’t woken up?”
“No.”
My breath tightened and I struggled to swallow and inhale while everyone climbed in and Isaac started the Jeep.
“What does Madison say?” I asked once we were leaving a parking lot at the edge of the ancient market town, or city, of Kendal. All new to me, but I hardly saw, even as the sky turned pink with sunset.
“She’s … concerned. But she doesn’t know what to think. She’s never treated a wolf before. We had to get him out of there before the clinic opened. Now she’s been back to finish this evening, closing more wounds that she couldn’t get to before.”
“So where is he? All of us…?”
“At her place. She lives there alone but we still couldn’t risk him being downstairs and someone seeing. So the office upstairs for now. She wanted him in an oxygen cage at the clinic. We were able to bring tanks and a mask instead.”
I opened my mouth, shut it, and nodded.
As we started out of town, Zar changed the subject. He explained what Jed and Jason had said about the trail we’d all followed out there in the first place. An old wolf track, three or four days at least, never leading to any conclusive results. Exactly like my scrying for wolves in the Duddon Valley: maybe they were there, maybe they weren’t.
It didn’t matter anymore as far as tracking down suspects. Instead, we all wondered if the Mountain wolves of Cumbria had already fallen victim. After Peter had tracked the Traeths only to draw killers to their door, we also could not risk continuing trying to find the Mountain Pack.
Turned out, it took a long time to reach Ambleside. I’d imagined Kendal as the next big town over, but we were on the road for maybe forty minutes, the sky dark, the town glowing with streetlights when we reached Madison’s place. There was no sign of the caravan. Isaac must have been able to park it on the street somewhere.
It was only once we’d stopped that I realized I’d missed any chance at Lake District scenery on the ride, not because of the dark, but because my eyes had been closed. Warm in my new coat, maybe even drifting off. Had to do better than this.
I smiled brightly at Andrew when he opened my door, allowing in the cool, damp night and whiff of coal smoke and sheep and gasoline. A strange combination.
He scowled in return.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I wasn’t. I’m fine.”
He did not offer a hand as I’d expected. The Jeep was tall, with no running board, and I was shaky without my right arm to grab the frame and hop out. No hopping anywhere for a while.
Instead of helping, Andrew sighed at the sight of me, stepped forward, and slid one arm under my knees and the other around my back.
“Don’t be silly. I can walk.”
He ignored me.
The passenger door being on the wrong side of the vehicle, I had my left arm closest to him and was able to put this across his neck.
“I’ve never been carried over a threshold before.”
“We aim to please, darling.”
Zar brought my purse and backpack. Isaac led us around the corner to Madison’s front door.
“We have tea—dinner—for you,” Isaac said. “Vegetable soup? Or Thai noodles? I made a super market stop earlier so we’d have quick snacks.” He reached to tap on the door.
“I’m not hungry. Or … later. I just want to see Kage.”
“Soup it is,” Andrew said.
Madison unlocked and opened the door, stepping back. She avoided looking at Isaac. How one might avert one’s gaze from offensive graffiti. Instead, her eyes went to me, brows creasing.
“I’m okay,” I said for the hundredth time, since clearly no one else would reassure her. “Andrew is being dramatic. How is Kage?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. If he’d been a dog…” She stopped, looked away. She didn’t need to finish. If he’d been anything less than a shifter, he’d already have been dead. Instead, he still hovered, and she had no way of predicting an outcome.
Madison retreated for us to follow into the hall. The entrance came into a corridor, a doorway to a living room with a sofa, two chairs, a TV and fireplace, then a stairway up. The passage let out to a kitchen and back door for a patio and strip of yard—or “back garden” as they said here. The space was narrow, the ceilings low, and the house obviously old, with exposed beams in kitchen and living room.
The guys took their shoes off and Zar pulled off mine while I thanked Madison—feeling incredibly awkward as Andrew continued to hold me—then headed for the stairs while I felt I needed to introduce myself. Among many other things. No, she only backed away into the living room, saying no more, and I was whisked off before I could offer.
The stairs creaked and Jed met us at the top. Like Madison’s reaction, I don’t think it did his spirits good to see me being carried up the steps.
I also assured him I was fine. It smelled of cats and was very warm up here, the heat turned up from the radiator in the second room. This was a small bedroom at the back of the house. A daybed, booksh
elf, desk, and old desktop served as primary furnishings. The carpet was pale, worn and flat, the color of beach sand. Piled on this, beside the radiator on the right wall, was a rug and heap of towels and blankets making up a nest where Kage was stretched out.
He lay with his head closest the window and tail closest the door, his belly toward us and back to the radiator.
I was glad I’d been prepared for the oxygen mask at his nose, a tank standing at the wall. Yet I wasn’t prepared for the rest of him.
Jason lay on his own side, mirroring Kage so his head was by Kage’s, one hand on his neck, but he was sitting up and looking around as we came in. I was glad I couldn’t see all of Kage right away with Jason blocking some of the view and Andrew setting me down. Jed, still watching me, stepped back to the daybed, frowning. Jason got to his feet when he saw me, looking dazed, unshaven and disheveled. He’d probably been asleep just now.
“Cassia? Your arm?”
“It’s going to be okay. Thanks to you and Andrew and Madison last night.”
He stepped over as I found my feet. Andrew was right. Head pounding and hungry, I wasn’t steady on them.
Jason touched my right shoulder with his fingertips only, eyes anxious as he stared at the sling. He kissed my forehead and I reached to take his hand with my left and squeeze.
“I’m sorry,” I stopped, voice breaking, having had no idea I was going to say that.
Jason looked even more alarmed. “You didn’t do anything.”
Kage was only slightly covered by the blankets around him. Now brutally visible with the fur shaved to the skin all across his stomach, down his left side and right hind leg. Rubber wound drainage tubes stuck from his flesh in three places. In patches on neck and limbs and throat were rows of blue stitches or pale surgical glue sealing the dozens of wounds. He looked like Frankenstein’s Wolf, a mutilated, stitched together body of a once living, fully furred animal.
I moved over to him with Jason in the warm, dim room, lit only by a small lamp on the desk. Jason took my arm, helping me as we sank to our knees before him.
Jason gently moved the cone of a mask away from his nose for the moment so we could reach his face.
I bent in to kiss his head, leaving my nose on his fur, smelling antiseptic and skin adhesive instead of his own wild smells, seeing his eyes shut, his whole body unresponsive.
I’d thought getting back to him, touching him, would be a sort of assurance, affirmation that he had made it, that he had not, in fact, sacrificed his life for mine. That the two of us could recover together. That he would hear my voice when I thanked him.
No matter what they’d said, I hadn’t believed until then, when I saw Jason’s eyes and Kage’s patchwork body, that this might not be a thank you, a convalescence, a time to regroup and figure out what had happened. That it might be a goodbye.
Chapter 13
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a spellbook with an index including entries like “saving lives,” “waking from coma,” or “recovery from massive injury, blood-loss, and shock.” I didn’t have a teacher to ask. I didn’t have a plan, or a list, or a map. I had no medical training beyond classroom first aid. I knew little about anatomy or how the body handles traumatic injury and heals.
Yet I knew what had happened on the fells in the dark, and the long ride into Ambleside while Kage had faintly glowed.
I knew what the wisest witch I had ever known had once told me about my own power: that its limits were reached when I created them.
I wanted to remind them of the work we had done together in my apartment in Portland: to bring them together, give them power and focus with my own guiding the mindset into that power that they could share and I could harness. Instead, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even see as tears spilled from my lashes.
I shut my eyes, parted my lips to breathe, and took Jason’s hand in my painful right, my left against Kage’s warm chest.
No thinking about it, no planning or discussion, no options to weigh. I didn’t know what I was doing—and that didn’t matter.
This was all heart, all instinct. It was living in this Moon and making a choice about love and life, about going on and not giving up.
The magic in the room came from us, hearts and souls, intentions and hopes, the energy of the town, the spirit of the fells and Lakeland around us, the faie out there still free and alive, the wolves who once roamed Britain and the world, now hiding and struggling, but just as determined to live.
It came from the hands, breaths, nearness of our pack, who didn’t have to be told—who watched what was happening and came to us. Andrew on his knees with a hand on my shoulder and Jason’s. Isaac behind me, touching my waist. Jed standing to my right while Zar knelt, resting a hand on Kage’s back.
The glow this time was not faint, like a faded firefly, it was shimmering, radiating outward from Kage and myself, filling the small room until it blazed through my eyelids and made my hair prickle with static electricity.
My hand on Kage’s chest burned, painfully hot, blistering, while I still called more and more.
I called on the five elements and six directions. Then on Goddess, God, Moon, angels and guides, gods and guardians.
I called on the love that had shielded him from a quick death in the fells and had moved the ground beneath my feet many weeks earlier to save Isaac.
I called on my ancestors and the magic in my own blood, my past, my future.
I called on the energy of my pack, the will and power that joined us.
Mostly, I called on myself and on the love that made life—which was the gift I demanded of the magic—so worthwhile, so beautiful, so terrible and so perfect in the first place.
I gave this spell to Kage, held it inside him, drew a bubble of it around all of us, channeled into him, and held it, more certain that my own magic had no bounds—that Kage would be awake by morning—than anything I’d ever known. Gave and gave it to him while a white glow expanded through my eyes and into my brain until it was all I could see. My body separated into spirit world, unable to feel anything through nerve endings aside from the flaming of my hand on his fur, skin melting with the heat while his remained only warm: and still gave. Until I passed out.
Chapter 14
Daniel, the coyote shaman, with Si, the young female in her fur, stood on the high ridge above a rolling, silver horizon of water. Neither looked around as I walked up behind them.
I faced into the wind, only waiting. It didn’t seem my place to be the first to speak.
We told her, Daniel said after a long time.
She won’t listen, Si said, moving her furred coyote jaws to talk.
She already knows.
Won’t listen.
This is why it will take eight.
Listen.
I opened my mouth to ask for help. The breeze lifted from the waves, the sea foam solidified, and a creature stepped out onto the grass beside me.
The stag: the great deer that had been the manifestation of the various faie spirits that had approached us in Yorkshire.
My chest ached when I saw it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what is happening to you.
I’d hardly spoken when massive, fanged or beaked heads burst from the stag, bodies following, black and dead and streaked in gore where their eyes had been carved out, lunging for my face, mouths gaping, screaming or hissing.
I jumped back, gasping.
In bed. Bed with Kage and Jason at home. It had all been a dream. All a dream and I was here with Kage. He was okay.
“Cass?”
“Shhh, you’re all right, Belle.”
Those didn’t sound like Kage or Jason.
Someone kissed the back of my neck through my hair. Hair that needed washing. The same someone had his arm around me.
I blinked and tried to shift more onto my back, to look up.
I smelled … cats. Cats and wolves.
“Andrew?” My mouth felt like it had been crammed with dry cotton.
I tried to swallow.
We were in the little office room. It hadn’t been a nightmare.
Andrew lay against my back, his arm around me. We weren’t “in bed”—only lying on the single daybed on our sides, still fully dressed, a blanket pulled over us. Zar sat on the edge against my shins, watching me anxiously. Jed sat on the rug before the daybed, also watching.
Jason looked over, but he was by the heater, stroking Kage’s face.
“It’s only been a few minutes, hasn’t it?” But my mouth was so dry I coughed and could hardly finish speaking.
“Half hour since you took your leave,” Andrew said.
“We’ll have tea for you in a sec,” Zar said, a hand on my leg through the blanket. “Isaac’s getting you something.”
“Kage?”
“No obvious change,” Andrew said.
“But he feels better,” Jason said from the floor. “His toes feel warmer. I can hear his heartbeat better since you touched him.”
“What did you … do?” Zar didn’t sound curious so much as nervous. He’d read about casters and faie and all our kind. I didn’t suppose he’d ever read about anything like that. I certainly hadn’t.
“I don’t—” I coughed.
“Can you sit?” Andrew sat up with me propping against his chest as we heard Isaac’s steps on the stairs.
His face was drawn, though some of the tension in his green eyes eased when he saw me conscious.
He held a glass of water for me to sip, my trembling hand around his, and set a steaming mug of tea on a desk coaster.
“Thank you,” I whispered, the best I could do with my voice just then. “For not rushing me back to the emergency room. I’m okay. It’s just a drain and I guess … my head. I’m fine.”
Except for Kage, every one of them simply looked at me. The room was silent aside from soft voices of a TV downstairs, but even that was set as if to avoid disturbing anyone.
Right … no one had asked. So my flying to my own defense instilled the opposite of confidence.
Moonlight Whispers: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 8) Page 7
