Feral Heart: A Witch Hospital Romance (The Witches of White Willow Book 2)

by Angela Addams

  As if she conjured him, the cat appeared, jumping up on the couch to peer at Croft.

  “Whoa! Zeus is out of the cage?” Croft’s eyes were wide with concern.

  “No worries. He’s bonded with Bas.” Mina lifted her hand and brushed down the wild fur sticking up on Zeus’s head. The cat tolerated her touch ever since he’d healed her arms. “He’s such an amazing animal. The power he has… Yeah, incredible.”

  Zeus purred for her. The cat did love a good compliment.

  “That’s remarkable! The last time I saw Zeus he was trying to rip my hand off.”

  Mina chuckled. Yeah, Bas had learned that the hard way. “So, maybe you’re right. Bas could take over here. At least while I sort through all the Saviors.”

  Can’t keep him forever, Mina. She pushed that thought away and replaced it with a question. Why not? Not that she wanted to revel in his punishment but Mother Stone didn’t seem to be too keen on releasing Bas from working in the Dungeon.

  Croft was smiling again. “I’m sure we can present a solid case for that argument. I’m glad it’s working out with him. I was worried…you know…with his reputation as it is.” He looked over his shoulder. “I have to go, but we’ll be back soon.”

  “Okay, Croft, take care. See you soon!”

  The scry ended and Mina felt dizzy. Not because of the magic at play, or that Zeus was nudging her for more petting, but because it was possible that Bas would be in her life longer than she’d imagined…working together, enjoying each other, really getting to know one another.

  She’d have to tell him about her heritage. Her heart leaped to her throat.

  Now. She had to tell him right now.

  21

  While Bas could shave with some magical help, he actually liked the sensation of a razor blade on his flesh. It kept things real.

  Like how things were going with Mina. Very fucking real.

  There were no barriers with her. When they had sex, she was open to everything he had to give her. And yeah, that meant emotionally, too. Everything he dished out, she took and gave it back threefold. He’d never been with a woman like that before. Not someone so selfless and passionate, not in such a complete and all encompassing way.

  He gave his head a shake and then resumed his shaving, dragging the blade up his neck.

  The mirror was outlined in fog, the bathroom still holding some steam from the marathon shower they’d shared. He rinsed the razor then positioned it on his jaw.

  “Looking good there, stranger.” A familiar voice wafted through the mirror. It shimmered, Bridget’s face fading in.

  Bas cursed under his breath and put the razor down. “Violation of privacy.”

  “Yeah, but I couldn’t resist.” She laughed. “How are things going there, Worm? Still angry with me?”

  Bas glowered at her, then put the razor on the side of the sink. “What do you want?” Was he still angry? Well, she wasn’t exactly someone he was excited to hear from. She’d left him behind, working in the Dungeon, out of rotation and losing ground in his internship. They both knew a word from her would have fixed it all.

  Bridget didn’t seem to notice his tone. “Well, I’ve got some good news for you.”

  “Oh yeah?” He wasn’t interested in anything she had to say to him. He tapped the razor on the side of the sink then resumed shaving, using the small side mirror to make sure he wasn’t about to razor his cheeks off.

  “I think I can get you out of your punishment.”

  He glanced her way. “Why now?”

  Bridget chuckled. “I’ve been hearing things about your work down there. Mother Stone is impressed. She’s willing to consider cutting your punishment short and getting you back in rotation.”

  “Under your service?”

  “Of course, Bas, I want you with me. We make a good team.”

  Bas continued shaving, his mind spinning. He wanted back in the game—he wanted it so badly that it ate at him constantly. Okay, maybe not constantly. Maybe when he was with Mina, he was focused on her. Maybe she was a distraction. A distraction from the shit punishment that he didn’t deserve. His heart thudded.

  It had been weeks and it felt like a minute had passed. He hadn’t noticed that the time had gone quickly. He hadn’t missed working his spells to heal as much as he thought he would. He frowned. That was no good.

  He was made to be a Healer. It was what he was born to do. While he got some level of fulfillment from working with the animals, it wasn’t a permanent life for him.

  He winced, the blade nicking him a bit.

  Mina would understand. She knew his passion for healing. She knew that he was meant for bigger things. Besides, it’s not like they’d never see each other again.

  Bridget cleared her throat. “I can guess how well you’re getting along with Healer Knox. She’s a beautiful woman.”

  Bas didn’t respond. What could he say?

  “I’m not going to lie, the thought of you and her working together… Well, I know what your tastes are like. I know what a woman like that could offer you.”

  Bas kept shaving.

  “Bas, I miss you.” Her tone was vulnerable. Sincere.

  He flicked his gaze to the mirror. “Get over it.”

  “Ouch!” She laughed awkwardly. “Okay, fine, you’re still angry with me. I get it. So let me make it up to you. I promise it’ll be worth it.”

  Bas finished shaving, then turned to face her in the mirror. “And you’re certain you can get me out of here and back in your service?”

  “Consider it done.”

  “What?” Mina stood at the door, her face looking ashen, her expression crushed. “I didn’t realize…sorry…” She closed the door as she left, her face a mask of shock, embarrassment and—yes—pain.

  Fuck! How long had she been standing there? “I gotta go.”

  “You’ve already slept with her, haven’t you?” Bridget asked, then waved her hand. “Never mind, doesn’t matter. Take care, Bas, I’ll see you in a few days.” Then she was gone.

  Bas cleaned the rest of the shaving cream off his face then went out to find Mina.

  He didn’t get far into the next room before Mina launched a cold fury at him. “This is what you do, right? You fuck your boss and get your jollies to avoid whatever misery you’ve created for yourself and then you blow the scene at the first opportunity.”

  “What the f—”

  “No, you don’t get to speak, not yet.” She wasn’t yelling but she was sparking…literally, her power was arcing over her skin, showing her feelings, her agitation. Her body was shaking slightly and he could see that she was restraining herself, or trying to anyway. She wanted to launch at him.

  “Mina, I know how that must have sounded but you’ve got to—”

  “I don’t have to anything.” She rubbed her hand down her face. “I’m the idiot who fell for it. I don’t blame you. You were just being you.”

  He flinched.

  “I knew what your reputation was before you even stepped foot in my Dungeon. So this is my own fault.”

  “Mina, come on.” Her words stung more than he wanted to admit. He tried to reach for her but she swatted him off and took more steps back.

  “So you’re leaving? Healer Rose beckons and you’re gone. I thought—” Her voice broke, her face crumbled. “I thought you’d stay longer and help me here.”

  “I’m not leaving yet,” Bas said, still trying to get close to her.

  “Not yet,” she scoffed.

  “Mina, I don’t know why you’re acting this way. It’s not like I was going to stay down here forever. I’m a Healer. I belong upstairs. You know this.”

  “With Bridget.”

  “Are you jealous, is that what this is? Because I told you that things with her are over.”

  “No, you never actually told me that. You have never really told me anything when it comes to your relationships.” She put her hand up to stop him from speaking. “I didn’t think what was happ
ening between us was going to go on forever, but I at least expected you’d stick around long enough to help me finish the sanctuary. I heard you in there. You’re so eager to go.”

  “Mina, come on! I need to get back to my healing practice but I’ll still come here and help you. Besides, you’ll have Croft with you all day to deal with the workload.”

  “No, I won’t. He’s going, too.”

  Bas frowned. Okay, so Mina was going to be on her own, working with all the new Saviors? How was that even possible? “Mother Stone will have a plan. She’ll make sure you have help.”

  “No, she won’t. She thinks that I can do this all alone. That’s my reputation, in case you didn’t know. Lone wolf, Mina Knox, working her tail off to help all the wayward familiars. She can’t afford to release her staff or her interns to devote any time to my projects. She wasn’t anticipating the degree that I was planning on going with the sanctuary either. She hasn’t even seen it, remember?” Mina huffed out a breath. “When she sent Croft down, I was totally surprised but grateful. I needed help to get things going. And then you came and I realized that she was only going to send me the misfits that she didn’t have time to deal with upstairs.”

  Bas’s anger rose. Misfit? “Her punishment was unjustified and you know it.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Mina argued. “While she may value the work I do with familiars, she isn’t willing to give me the support I need to be successful. So where does that leave me? Thirty animals on the way with no one to help me. It’s hard not to think of yourself at the bottom of the great Healer chain of being when you’re working in the basement and get sent the scraps of the work heap.”

  “Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Bas snapped. “The sanctuary is done and all you need to do now is set up the cages for the animals who are coming. Croft won’t race off without making sure you’re set up and I’ve seen the work you can do. Once you get a program started, you’re a machine.”

  “I need a real Healer here to bolster my spells!”

  “No, you don’t!” Bas said. “You’ve been underestimating yourself the entire time I’ve worked with you. You have all this incredible innate talent but your negativity about it drowns you. Mina, seriously, I love you but this self-pitying shit has got to stop.”

  Her mouth was open, her eyes wide, shock all over her face. He replayed what he just said. How could she not know that she was so talented?

  “You love me?” Her voice was small, uncertain.

  Panic rose deep in Bas’s gut and he felt his mind back-pedalling so fast he could trip on his own thoughts. Fuckfuckfuck!

  “No, I didn’t…I mean…I meant—” He stumbled over his words. He wasn’t ready to go there.

  Her expression flipped to anger once again. “Never mind, I get it.” She turned her back on him. “You’re a conquest man. I knew that. And besides, all of this.” She waved her hand around. “It was probably just a spell anyway. Something wacky that I did by accident no doubt.”

  “Love spells don’t work.” Bas heard himself saying, disbelief that he wouldn’t just let it go. Let her believe it was all fake.

  She turned back to face him. “It does when you use dark magic a lot. Sometimes spells do funny things and what you really want…it manifests.” Her expression was sad.

  “How much dark magic are we talking about here because—?”

  “As much dark magic as a human would need.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  Um…what? He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

  She was nodding at him, narrowing her eyes. “That’s right, Bas, half-human right here.” She pointed to herself, her head tilted and a bitter smirk on her lips. “You didn’t even realize it, right? The very thing you hate right under your nose the entire time.”

  Anger flashed through him. “You lied to me?”

  “I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you. And why would I? You’re such a fucking bigot. Why in the world would I ever tell you who I really was?”

  Mina was human? How could that be? His thoughts flashed to her spells…to the dark magic she used…to the grimoire on the bookshelf. “You should have told me!”

  “Bas, just get the fuck out of here. I’ll write up your report and recommend that you continue in your internship. You did excellent work down here, but you’re right. You don’t belong.”

  Bas opened his mouth to argue…then closed it again. Shut up. Clean break. Get the hell outta there. He nodded. “I’ll go grab my stuff.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll have it sent up later.”

  She was glaring at him. This woman he didn’t know. He pulled out his security card and swiped it.

  Good riddance.

  22

  Okay, that didn’t go the way Mina had expected. She slumped down on a stool, scanning the empty space around her. She’d gotten used to having someone there with her and now the silence seemed overwhelming. With Bas gone, her heart was racing frantically. She wanted to chase after him. She wanted to take back what she’d said. But there was no way her pride would allow that.

  She’d heard most of the conversation with Bridget. The part where Bridget said she and Bas make a good team? Yeah, that had rattled Mina. She didn’t like it. And yes, she was jealous. Healer Rose was a beautiful and powerful witch. She was confident and proficient and Bas would undoubtedly find her irresistible. She was also pure. Both parents renowned Healers. A linage unfettered by controversy.

  While her words hadn’t hurt Mina, Bas’s reaction to those words had her spinning. Are you certain you can get me out of here and back in your service? Like working with Mina was the worst thing in the world.

  And maybe it was the worst thing. Mina had such blindness to how other people would view her work. She loved it, of course, but it was her passion, one unique to her. There was a reason no care facility existed for ferals and familiars. It was beneath all others to do this kind of job.

  Now Bas knew what she was. He knew she wasn’t like him. The revulsion on his face told her everything she needed to know.

  She was a fool.

  She’d thought up the fantasy of having Bas with her, working side-by-side with the animals and the reality was no one wanted to do that forever. Everyone at White Willow had higher aspirations. Everyone except her.

  She sighed. Feeling sorry for herself was not the norm, Bas was right about that.

  She patted her legs and got up. Better to do some work since there’d be no sleeping tonight. The air was stifling, she realized, so she moved to the big barn doors. She unlatched them before opening them up wide to let some of the night breeze in.

  She moved down the ramp a bit and took in a deep breath. The air was crisp, cool, and soothing. There was only a sliver of moon in the sky and millions of stars twinkling at her. She loved that about country life—seeing all the stars reminded her of the years she’d spent travelling. Working in the field, sleeping under those stars. They were a constant in her life. The stars would guide her. They would offer her consistency that could pull her out of a panic attack. In fact, her anxiety was always minimal when she was working outside in the field.

  Maybe coming to White Willow had been a mistake. Maybe she didn’t belong. Maybe she’d been following her dad’s dream just to make him proud because he was so sad…so damn disappointed in how his life had turned out.

  Noises from the Dark Forest drew her attention there. It was just an outline in the distance. Treetops that reached high, almost as high as the stars—it seemed—with bats and night birds flying up every once in a while. It pulsed with flashes of magic here and there. Some nights, when Mina was really restless, she’d come outside and sit, just watch the Dark Forest, listen to the sounds. It was tempting to stay out there until the sun came up. But she had work to do—lots of work now that she was down a pair of hands.

  She left the doors open to keep the air circulating then trudged back into her suite and hunted down some work clothes, doing everything she could to
avoid touching, picking up, or worse, smelling the discarded shirts and pants that Bas had left behind. How she had gone from feeling total bliss to this was beyond understanding. Fate was fickle. Turning, always turning. Feeling like you’re at the peak of some great happiness only to come crashing down moments later. Checks and balances. Mina knew that’s how the world turned. Especially the witch world.

  She dressed for comfort. The cages were already clean in the back room but she’d need more than what was there for thirty animals. One of the storage areas had lots of cages that had been donated thanks to a charity campaign Mother Stone had started, but they weren’t top quality. Mina had discarded them in favor of the ones that needed little repair in her initial start-up. At the time she remembered thinking that there was no way she’d need all those cages. Now she regretted not spending a little time here and there doing repair work while Croft was available. She was losing even him and once again, she’d be working alone.

  Wasn’t that why she’d left life on the road? At least out there she had villagers who would keep her company sometimes. Now it seemed that Mother Stone was determined to isolate her.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and secured it haphazardly into a ponytail. Time to work. Quit the wallowing, Knox!

  She’d have to sort out the mess of those damaged cages and grade them for fixing. Three days work with only one pair of hands and some mediocre magic. Yeah, good times. She wouldn’t be sleeping much anyway.

  When she walked back out of her suite, she was startled to see Angel there. The Sin Eater was standing in the middle of the Dungeon, her cloak covering her completely.

  “Angel, I didn’t know you’d come down. You startled me!”

  Angel didn’t respond.

  “Is everything okay?” Mina moved farther into the room. “Bas isn’t here, if you’re looking for him. I sent him upstairs.” She felt a pang in her heart. Traitor heart. “The team is on the way back with the Saviors—”