Chapter 8 #2
“I’ll take him downstairs,” said Jack, lifting Amory’s body off the floor with a low grunt. “As long as she didn’t bite or lick him, I know what to do.”
Willow followed behind Jack, but Darcy stood dazed for a minute, unable to look away from the newly bound lovers.
Lela growled, biting Julien’s neck with small fangs, which made him scream and prompted him to cup her ass, lifting her off the floor with a sudden, torrid urgency.
Lela locked her legs around his back, moaning in French, and Darcy’s face flamed hot as Julien thrust without further ado into a screaming Lela.
Darcy forced her feet to move back downstairs.
Jack laid Amory gently on the guest room bed that Darcy had been using as Willow quickly gathered Darcy’s work into a messy pile and put it on the floor.
Jack ran to his room to put on a pair of jeans, and when he returned, Willow was patting the long scratch with a wet washcloth until it was a neat red line.
Jack leaned over the wound, inspecting it.
Willow’s hand was on Amory’s forehead.
“He’s so hot, Jack.”
“She didn’t lick him or bite him. So she didn’t directly transfer her venom. But there were probably trace amounts on her claws. It’s not enough to turn him, but the next four or five hours are going to be very uncomfortable as his body purges whatever it absorbed.”
“Should I go get antibiotics?” asked Willow.
“Human antibiotics won’t help.”
“What will?” asked Darcy from the doorway, her cheeks bright red.
Jack’s erection, which had been calming down as he helped Willow situate Amory, sprang back to life at the sight of her so flushed and ready for sex. It killed him that he was about to add a delay to their lovemaking.
“Aconitum,” he answered softly in a hard voice. He hated the thought of even bringing the stuff into his house.
“Wolfsbane!” Darcy exclaimed, her eyes clearing.
“Wolfsbane,” confirmed Jack. “It’s the only thing that suppresses a shift.”
“It what?” Darcy gasped, and he heard the hope in her voice.
“It suppresses a shift in a Roug and will draw out the venom from a human.”
He turned to her and saw the hope in her eyes.
“But Jack! Then you can just take wolfsbane at the full moon, and it’ll keep you from—”
“It’s poisonous. For me. For my body. More than a little would kill me. It killed Julien’s first mate. It killed my father.”
“He’s right.” Willow nodded. “Julien told me about it. Sorry, Darce.”
“No. Don’t be sorry.” She smiled at Jack, looking just a little sheepish. “I love you just the way you are.”
But she didn’t, and he knew it. She was accepting him just the way he was, but it was clear she wished that the shifting part of his nature could be controlled. He wished it could be too. He smiled at her sadly. I love you too.
“Do you know what it looks like?” he asked Darcy aloud.
She nodded.
“We only need a tiny bit. If we put a little in the wound before Willow dresses it, it will draw out any rogue bits of Lela’s toxin. It’ll make the fever go down faster. He’ll still be uncomfortable, but it won’t be as bad.”
Amory murmured in his sleep, and Jack turned to him, feeling sorry.
Amory’s cheeks were blotchy red, and his hair was saturated with sweat.
His eyes rolled back in his head in a state of discomfort in his unconsciousness.
Still, Jack knew this was nothing compared to the process of turning a human to Roux-ga-roux.
He shuddered, blocking out the upsetting images of the two times he’d witnessed a full turning.
“One of you has to go,” said Jack. “I shouldn’t touch it.”
“I’ll go,” said Darcy. “I know exactly where it is. In the garden at the Second Congregational Church.”
Figures, thought Jack to himself, thinking of the history between his kind and that church.
He hated to see her go and let her know as much.
I’ll be fine, she insisted, flicking her glance toward the ceiling where they could hear bumps and crashes and loud growls and groans. The danger’s gone now. Please stay with Willow and Amory. That’s more important to me.
She grabbed her jacket out of the closet, and he watched her go, telling her where to find the keys to his car as she headed out the door.
“Maybe we should still take him to the hospital,” said Willow uneasily, sitting beside Amory, pressing the rinsed and wrung washcloth to his head.
“I promise you don’t need to,” said Jack. “I’ve seen this before. He’ll be fine.”
“You’re right. He’s strong. He should be okay. I’m just worried,” mumbled Willow. What she said next surprised him. “I read all about this.”
“What?” Jack moved off the bed to sit on a chair in the corner of the room, facing Willow, who sat against the headboard of the bed beside Amory.
“Le Livre de Magie,” she said. “When you came back on Saturday night, Julien and I talked for a while on the swing. He’s the one who mentioned the word Enchanteresse, and though I’d never heard it before, something about it stuck with me.
I called my Nohkom, and she admitted that yes, she’s an Enchanteresse as well.
My father wasn’t, of course. He’s just a run-of-the-mill horse’s ass.
But he must have passed the gene down to me.
It was a relief to find out. I’ve always felt…
different. I think I went into medicine to give legitimacy to the skills that came naturally.
“My Nohkom sent me the Book of Magic on Sunday, special delivery, and I got it this morning. I basically read through it all day. But the first chapter I flipped to was ‘Shifters.’ You’re not alone, you know.”
Jack lifted an eyebrow.
“Roux-ga-roux. Altamaha-ha. Fouke. Letiche. Memphré. Peluda. Waheela. Wendigo.” Her voice was soft, faraway, as she rattled off the names of the known shifter groups in eastern North America, from the swampy bayous of Louisiana and Florida to the cold wilds of Nunavet on the Quebecois border.
Her voice eventually stilled. He watched as she pressed her lips to Amory’s forehead, whispering endearments as he whimpered in his sleep. Finally, she looked back up at Jack.
“And you’re one of them. A shifter. You’ve turned her life upside down, her brother’s lying bleeding beside me, and I know far more about any of this than I ever wanted, or needed, to know.”
A low groan turned her eyes back to Amory’s face. She pushed the reddish hair off his brow and leaned down to press her lips on his feverish skin again as he quieted.
“You’re okay, Brat,” she whispered tenderly. “Je suis ici. Je t’appartiens. Vous n’avez pas à attendre plus longtemps.”
Jack looked away, trying to give them a moment of privacy.
She had whispered, I’m here. I belong to you.
You don’t have to wait anymore. Jack was touched by the quiet certainty of her words, and it occurred to him that, in a manner of speaking, he was watching a sort of binding.
He was watching Willow Broussard commit herself to Amory Turner. An Enchanteresse to a human.
While Willow wasn’t a skinwalker, his kind regarded her differently from a human. She was considered mystical by his people, a superior sub-class set of humans, feared and respected at once.
As for him? Yes. He was a shifter.
He didn’t know what to say to her about the others.
Did he know they existed? Of course he did.
His mother had known a displaced Memphré family when he was young, but they’d lost touch once the Memphrés had resettled by a lake three hours north of Portes de l’Enfer.
Since their small population shifted to the waters of northern Quebec, and the Roux-ga-roux generally steered clear of large bodies of water, they didn’t have a whole lot in common geographically.
Sure, he knew about other shifters, in the way that the Canadian Métis might know about the Alaskan Inuit or Australian Aboriginals.
They were nothing more than faraway beings with whom you had something in common, but almost no crossover in real life.
He watched Willow in the moonlight of the small guest room, the only other light filtering in through the crack under the bathroom door.
He had a vague sense of intimacy with her.
Nothing attractive or sexual, not at all, just the feeling that they shared something genuine and sacred in these quiet moments, waiting for one sibling to ease the suffering of another while his siblings made love for the first time above them.
Willow took a deep breath. He sensed she had more to say.
Now she raised her head to him, and he caught the reflection of light in her dark eyes.
“If things had turned out differently, I wouldn’t have liked you, Jack.
I would have helped her abjure you.” She paused, turning her attention back to Amory and running the cool cloth over his lips before kissing them gently.
“But she chooses you. Not just because of the binding. Her heart chooses you.
“And I know something about waiting for the one you love. And I know how it feels when the wait is over. Finalement.” She took Amory’s hand and pressed it to her lips before returning it to his side, threading her fingers through his.
“We have that in common,” said Jack quietly.
“We do. But we have something important not in common. I’m a human who loves a human, Jack. You’re a Roux-ga-roux who loves a human.”
He breathed in, staring at his folded hands in his lap.
“And as far as I can tell,” she continued, “that’s not sustainable. As far as I can tell, the Roug needs to be human or the human needs to be Roug for it to work.”
“I refuse to turn her,” muttered Jack, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “Don’t worry.”