Chapter 8 #3
“I am worried,” she whispered. She kissed Amory’s hand again, then released it, taking the washcloth off his head and heading to the bathroom.
A moment later, she returned, shrugging her small, tan, bony shoulders out of her sweater and laying it gently at the foot of the bed.
She crawled up next to Amory, carefully arranging the cool cloth on his forehead before lying down on her side flush beside him, propped up on one elbow so that she could still see Jack.
And suddenly, he knew where she was going with all of this. Suddenly, it was clear.
“Julien te l’a dit,” he said into the dark quiet of the room. Julien told you.
He barely needed confirmation, but he let his eyes burn so he could see hers clearly. They were full of accusation and sorrow. She knew about the re-binding. He closed his eyes, clenching his jaw. “I just wanted some time with her before—”
“Before what? Before they hunt her down? Kill her? Kill you? Your binding’s an abomination. He said they won’t allow it.”
Jack swallowed hard. Damn Julien for meddling.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Willow continued. “But he didn’t betray you. Not purposely. It slipped out. I asked if he felt your binding was absolute, and he said he did, but he wished like hell it wasn’t because of the, um…re-binding.”
“I won’t let anyone hurt her.”
“As far as I can tell, she’ll get hurt either way.
If you produce her before your…your Council, you’ll prove your binding, but put her in danger.
If you can’t produce her, you can neither prove nor explain your binding, which will raise eyebrows and compel a, um, what’s it called?
Oh. An Inquisition. From what I could gather, Inquisitions don’t go too well for the accused. She loses either way, Jack.”
Jack rested his elbows on his knees and bowed his head, staring down at his bare feet.
“Will you let me tell her?”
Willow took a deep breath, and when he looked up, he saw the compassion in her eyes.
She nodded. “Tell her soon. She might be able to help figure it all out. She’s so smart, you wouldn’t believe it. And there’s us too.”
He looked up at her and gave her a brief, sad smile.
“Oh, you don’t see, do you? She chooses you, Jack. So I choose you too. After what those two”—she flicked her eyes to the ceiling—“put you through, they’ll help too.” She turned her eyes to Amory, gently moving the back of her free hand across his cheek. “Ma chérie aidera aussi.”
My sweetheart will help too.
Jack stared at her bowed head and felt his eyes prick and burn with gratitude for her words.
When she looked up, her eyes were brimming with tears. “You still don’t see? Vous n’êtes pas seul.”
You aren’t alone.
She smiled at him, grim and firm, as a tear trailed down her face. Then she dropped her elbow and nestled on the pillow beside Amory, who shivered and flinched with fever, whispering gently in his ear and carefully laying her arm over his stomach, below the red, angry slash on his upper chest.
After so many years of keeping his binding a secret, the nature of his binding, the nature of his mate…
after so many years of worry and longing and solitude, her words covered Jack like a blanket.
He was grateful for Willow, for the acceptance and sense of community she offered to him.
He had rarely been so grateful for anyone else in his entire life.
And if it meant holding on to Darcy, he’d take all the help he could get.
“Merci, Willow,” he said quietly, his voice low and gravelly with emotion.
She didn’t answer, so he got up quietly, leaving them, closing the door gently behind him.
It hadn’t taken long for Darcy to find the wolfsbane.
She’d seen it many times in the church garden, growing in the shade of a large maple tree.
She snipped off several pieces with her collecting shears and put the specimens in one of several small plastic bags she always kept with her for collecting.
It was a cool and misty evening as she drove back to Jack’s lodge, and her mind circled uncomfortably with the events of the evening: Lela’s attack, going inside to find Jack, seeing Jack shifted, Lela and Julien’s binding, Amory’s injury…
It was a lot to process. But headlining her thoughts, perhaps because it was the most compelling to her intellectually and the least emotionally fraught, was the wolfsbane’s suppressive properties on Roux-ga-roux’s shifting physiology.
She couldn’t shake the idea that it was the first building block toward figuring out a cure for Jack so that he could control his shifting during the full moon.
What she needed was to figure out how to have the appropriate dose of wolfsbane to suppress the shift, ingested with an antidote to the toxic properties it held.
She needed something to cancel out the poison that didn’t hinder the suppression.
A deer suddenly bolted out of the woods, and Darcy swerved sharply to avoid it, driving several yards into the woods before pumping the brakes to stop.
Her heart raced, but she hadn’t hit anything.
Still, she needed to get out for a second and make sure there was no damage to Jack’s car.
She opened her door and stepped out gingerly into the woods, slapping at her neck almost immediately as a mosquito landed for a drink.
She walked to the front of the SUV, and aside from a salad’s worth of vegetation caught in the front grill, everything appeared to be okay.
She pulled the green out, throwing it to the ground before making her way back to the car.
As she tugged at the car door, she realized she still had something stuck to her hand. She turned it over to find a stalk of Lycopodium clavatum, the same moss that Miss Kendrick had drawn her attention to at the greenhouse last week.
“Wolf’s Paw Clubmoss,” she murmured, looking at it carefully. “Healing properties for arthritis, rheumatism, anti-spasmodic, persistent indigestion, and gastritis.”
What part of the Roug body did wolfsbane attack, she wondered, and could Wolf’s Paw reverse the toxins in the wolfsbane?
She brushed the sample off her hand and put the car in reverse, backing slowly out of the dark woods and onto the rough dirt road leading back to Jack’s house, the cogs of her mind still turning.
If wolfsbane suppressed the shift, and Wolf’s Paw remedied the sickness, they’d just need a stabilizer to pull the two together. She arrived at Jack’s house and cut the engine. She needed to get the wolfsbane to Amory…and talk to Will.
“What do you think?” she asked Willow about her Roug cure, sitting in the chair in the corner of the room as Willow extracted tiny bits of the nectaries from the wolfsbane and placed them on Amory’s wound. He flinched in his sleep, and Willow grimaced.
“I think I need to pay attention to Amory now. Plus, I’m exhausted. You may be on to something, but could we talk in the morning?”
Darcy got up and moved to the edge of the bed to look at her brother’s damp pink face. “Poor Amory. You think he’ll be okay?”
“Jack says he will be. And yeah, I agree. He already looks better, and he’s not as agitated. His kidneys are probably filtering out some of the toxin. And this should help with the rest. He’ll have a nasty scratch in the morning, but I think he’s already out of the woods.”
“Hey, Will…the Enchanteresse stuff…have you always known?”
Willow shook her head. “No. I didn’t know until Julien called me Enchanteresse on Saturday night when we were sitting on the porch. I had my Nohkom confirm that she’s one too. She also admitted that the legend she told me about the Roux-ga-roux was based on the truth.”
Darcy raised her eyebrows at this. “You didn’t know you were an Enchanteresse?”
“Listen, I always had an interest in healing, of course. And I never let any of my smart professors turn me off from incorporating Métis techniques into my healing practices. I guess it was always in the blood. Nohkom sent me a Book of Magic. Should make for interesting reading.” She shrugged lightly.
“What did that little bitch upstairs say so eloquently? Ah, yes. I’m like a virgin with a hooker.
I have the equipment, but I don’t know how to… well, you know the rest.”
Darcy shuddered, remembering Lela’s fury, how close she came to ending up dead.
“You saved my life,” Darcy whispered.
“You did okay all on your own, kid,” Willow said softly, gently stroking Amory’s sweaty hair off his forehead. “It was quite a night.”
Willow finished dressing Amory’s scratch and looked up at Darcy.
“You sure you want this? Jack? The life he can offer you?”
Darcy shrugged lightly, offering her friend a sad smile. “I love him.”
“It’s a lot to take on. Seeing him tonight like that.”
“It was still him, Will. I could hear him.” She felt a smile touch her face, an unexpected, almost inappropriate, but totally inevitable joy bubbling up from inside.
“It’s absurd, right? The stuff of fairy tales and legends.
I feel like Belle from Beauty and the Beast…
The bookish librarian who falls in love with a monstrous creature. ”
Willow smiled at Darcy’s movie-trailer inflection. Darcy’s smile faded, and she faced her friend gravely.
“I’d rather die than live without him.” She swallowed, her eyes filled with tears as she felt the true impact of her words.
Willow circled around the bed, reaching out for Darcy’s hand, a worried expression darkening her face. She searched Darcy’s eyes intently, and the moment was heavy, as if Willow wanted to say something important. She finally exhaled and gave Darcy a small smile.
“I love you, kid. You’re like a sister to me. If there’s ever anything, anything, I can do for you, you just ask. I wouldn’t have had much of a family if it wasn’t for you. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do. I just want you to know that.”
She reached out and clasped Darcy against her small body, and Darcy’s forehead wrinkled with the intensity of her friend’s speech. Willow was fiercely loyal, fiercely loving, and fiercely protective, but she wasn’t given to mushy speeches. Was something going on?
Then she recalled the events of the past three hours and shook her head, reaching up to embrace Willow too.
It had been an incredibly frightening, emotional evening, and Amory still needed Willow’s expertise and strength.
She had a right to being a little more emotional than usual.
Darcy leaned back and kissed her friend’s cheek.
“You need anything else? Does Amory need anything?”
“No, kid,” said Willow, sighing, then shaking her head and smiling. “Go find Jack.”
Darcy took one last look at Amory then drew back, nodding at Willow, closing the door gingerly behind her.