Chapter 12 #4
“There was nothing to tell you that would have helped.” He cut across me, low and tight. “It kept its distance. Stayed in the deep forest. Never came this close to the cottage until you came into the forest. You attract him.”
I gripped the rim of the basin until my knuckles went white. “Is it coming back?”
“Because it found what it wanted.” His mouth tightened. “And it didn’t get to finish.”
My stomach turned over. I pressed my forehead against the cold rim and breathed through the nausea and tried to think past the horror to the practical question underneath it.
“Then what happens now?” I could hardly get the question out.
“I find it.” He stood and crossed to the hearth. His back straightened with a resolve that looked like armor being strapped on. “And I kill it before it gets close to you again.”
“How?” I pushed myself to my feet, one hand braced on the wall.
“You walked into that clearing with empty hands and told it to go and it went. You didn’t just scare it off, Dietrich.
It changed. I watched it change. Its bones cracked and it folded in half and dropped to all fours like you’d forced it back into a smaller shape. How is that possible?”
He stared into the fire. The flames reflected in his eyes, turning the amber to molten gold.
“Dietrich.”
“It doesn’t matter how.” Low. Final. The same locked door he’d shut on me in the clearing.
“It matters to me. That creature stood on two legs. It had hands. It was taller than you. And you made it shrink with a word. So either you tell me what you are or you tell me what it is, because one of those answers explains the other.”
His jaw tightened. The tendons in his neck stood out. For a long moment I thought he was going to break, thought the silence alone would crack him open the way my questions couldn’t.
“It matters that it worked,” he said at last. “And it matters that you’re alive.”
The questions stacked up behind my teeth. About the creature obeying him. About the wound that healed overnight. About the musk and the growl I’d heard deep in his chest when he’d pinned me to the floor. About how a man with empty hands could force a monster back into a lesser shape.
He wasn’t going to answer. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
I swallowed them. Let them sink back down to where I kept the things I wasn’t ready to know.
“Let me see your back.” His tone shifted. Quieter, practical, the tone of someone moving from one task to the next because standing still wasn’t possible for him. “The scratches need cleaning.”
“I can do it myself.” I pulled away.
“You can’t reach them,” he countered. “And if they get infected out here, there’s no physician to save you. Just me and whatever’s left on that shelf.”
He was right. I hated that he was right.
I moved to the bed and sat with my back to him. Heard him gather supplies from the shelf. Water, cloth, one of grandmother’s jars. Felt the bed shift as he sat behind me.
“The shift needs to come down,” he said carefully. “I need to see the wounds.”
I pulled the fabric down to my waist, baring my back. The cold air raised goosebumps across my shoulders and I held the shift against my chest and stared at the wall and tried not to think about the last time his hands had been on my skin.
The wet cloth touched the first scratch and I hissed through my teeth. The scratches burned where he cleaned them. Long lines of fire running from my shoulders down to my lower back where the creature’s claws had torn through fabric and flesh.
“Hold still,” he murmured.
He worked with steady hands, cleaning each scratch with an attention that would have been tender if I’d let myself call it that. The water in the bowl turned pink. When he’d finished cleaning, he stood and crossed to the hearth, poured water into a pot and set it over the flames.
He came back with a cloth that steamed in the cold air and pressed it against my back.
I flinched at the sting, my fingers curling into the furs beneath me.
But after a moment the heat sank deeper and the burning eased, the tight muscles around the scratches loosening despite my best efforts to stay tense and guarded.
He worked in silence, reheating the cloth and applying it again and again until my back felt warm instead of torn.
Then he spread salve over the scratches.
A salve that smelled of herbs and honey and reminded me so painfully of Grandmother that my eyes burned.
He wrapped clean bandages around my torso with practiced hands, efficient and impersonal, his fingers never lingering anywhere they didn’t need to be.
“There’s a clean shift in the trunk.” He finished and stood, moving away from the bed.
He crossed to the chest, came back with worn linen, and held it out to me without quite meeting my eyes. Then he turned his back while I pulled the clean fabric over my head, wincing as the movement tugged at the bandages.
“Done.” I tugged the hem straight.
He turned around. We looked at each other across the small room and neither of us spoke. The mortar. The clearing. The creature. His hands on my wounds. All of it pressing against the walls of the room.
“You should rest.” He crossed to the hearth. “Your body needs time to heal.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll keep watch.” He moved to the chair by the fire and sat down, stretching his legs toward the warmth.
I looked at him. The healed wound, the amber eyes, the steady hands that had cleaned my wounds and wrapped my bandages and never once touched me with anything other than care. The man who’d run through a frozen forest with a cracked skull to save the woman who’d cracked it.
“Stay,” I heard myself say. The word came out before I could stop it. “Don’t sit over there. I need to know you’re close.”
He hesitated. I watched him wrestle with it. The set of his shoulders, the way his hands tightened on the arms of the chair.
“Please,” I whispered. “The floor. Just stay close.”
He stood slowly. Lost an argument with himself and knew it. Crossed to the storage area and gathered extra furs, laid them out on the floor beside the bed without a word. A makeshift pallet between me and the door.
I lay back and pulled the furs to my chin. My body ached in places I hadn’t known could ache, and my mind kept circling back to the grimoire. Killing is not always the first thing they do.
“Dietrich.” His name carried into the quiet.
“Hmm.” The sound came from below me, close, the rumble of it vibrating through the floor and into the bed frame.
I wanted to ask how a man scares off a werewolf with empty hands. Wanted to ask why his wound had healed overnight. Wanted to ask what he was, because the answer was sitting right there at the edge of my mind, a shape I could almost see, and all I had to do was turn my head and look at it straight.
I didn’t ask. I wasn’t ready. Because if the answer was what I thought it was, then the man lying on the floor between me and the door, the man who’d fed my fire and cleaned my wounds and run through a frozen forest to save my life, was the same kind of creature that had just tried to pin me in the snow.
And I’d asked him to sleep beside my bed.
“Thank you.” The words were all I could manage. “For coming after me. Even after what I did.”
He was quiet for a long time. Then. “Go to sleep, Talia.”
I closed my eyes. The last thing I heard was his breathing. Steady and even and close.
I didn’t understand him. Didn’t understand what he was or why he was protecting me or what he was hiding behind those intoxicating eyes.
But lying in the furs with my wounds bandaged and his breathing filling the silence, I realized what should have terrified me.
I felt safe.
And that was the most dangerous thing of all.