15 Kaia #2
“High Alchemist—” I dipped my head, asking permission to speak, and waited for it, and only went on when his glowing eyes flicked to me with annoyance.
“Forgive me. I would never presume to instruct you. I only—” I let it tremble.
“The catechism we’re given in the lower house teaches us that the greatest care yields the greatest healing.
And he’s—Blessed One, he’s so rare. I’ve only seen a few males before this in all my life of service and never worked with one before now. ”
I let the awe back in, real awe, awe at how thoroughly I could lie.
“A sudden extraction in the field, in the dirt, after the trauma he’s already suffered with the beasts—wouldn’t the shock collapse the very thing you’re hoping to draw out of him? A rare vessel like this—if we crack him open out here, don’t we lose the bloom?”
Joss went still. The light wept down his face.
I pressed, gentle, gentle, every word a soft stone laid on the path I needed him to walk.
“He’s frightened half out of his mind and we’ve not yet been able to complete the tests and confirm dormancy.
But at the Retreat Center we have the ward-song.
The proper incubation. The ambient calibration.
” Words I’d said to terrified women a hundred times, said while I held a stylus, said while I helped them up onto the tables.
They tasted of ash now. I smiled them out anyway, soft and certain and reverent.
“Let him bloom under loving care first. Then he will yield everything we hope for, and more. Do I understand that correctly? Or is there another way to ensure proper care of his sickness?”
Tommy, slumped in Joss’ grip, picked exactly that moment. “I would love loving care,” he mumbled. “I would love a ward-song. Is a ward-song like white noise? I sleep with white noise. I have a machine—”
“Quiet,” Joss snapped, and let go of his jaw, and Tommy folded gratefully back against the post.
The Alchemist studied me. The Saint’s cold weight hung in the tent, neutral now, a held breath.
I kept my eyes at his chin and my hands at my heart and I did not let one single muscle in my face know what my sister knew, which was that I had just watched a man propose to gut my mate on a cot and I had answered him with a smile.
“Proper care of his sickness,” he repeated, tasting it.
The weeping light brightened. “You’re right, of course.
A male hasn’t come through the works in years.
We confirm his status first. What if he’s only human?
Then I would have wasted…. We don’t waste him in a tent.
” He turned from us, robes swinging off his burned-down frame, already losing interest in everything but his own appetite.
“Load them. The armored transport, in case the monsters who breached and took our harvest try another attack. Steward.”
He paused at the flap. The green light of the dying fire flooded back in around the shape of the Saint as it withdrew, and the pressure lifted off my skull all at once, leaving me lightheaded.
“You ride with your cargo. You wanted him handled properly. You’ll handle him.”
“Thank you, Blessed One,” I breathed, and bowed over my folded hands until the flap dropped and they were gone.
The fever hit the second the cold lifted.
It came up like floodwater finding a basement, filling me from the feet, and my knees went, and I caught the edge of the cot.
Across the tent Tommy was already moving, hands reaching—and then the guard’s shadow crossed the canvas wall and we both froze, him on his knees with his arms half out, me white-knuckled on the cot frame, two strangers not supposed to have ever touched.
“Up,” the guard said through the flap. “Both of you. Move.”
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
The transport was a black iron mouth and it swallowed us whole.
No window. No seam of green. The doors boomed shut and pressed the air flat. It pressed me flat. Whatever Nadia’s potion was still doing to mask my scent and bank my Heat, the iron was eating it, and I felt the mask thinning like ice over a fast river.
They seated us on opposite benches and strapped us tight into seatbelts that acted more like chains. Two guards rode with us, shapes I could smell but not see, leather and gun oil and the sour edge of men who’d been awake too long.
Then the engine caught—a diesel scream that climbed up through the soles of my boots and into my teeth.
The rig lurched onto a rutted logging road, and every bolt in the iron box rattled at once.
The canvas harness across my chest bit into my shoulders, jerking me back against the wall, and I rode the bucking metal strapped to it like cargo.
Which is what I was. What I had always been. A number logged in someone else’s careful hand.
Nadia’s potion thinned the way river ice thins from underneath, and the fever I’d banked in the tent came roaring back up through the breach, doubling, tripling, a column of heat behind my sternum that had nowhere left to climb but out.
My sister threw herself against the inside of my ribs.
Sweat sheeted down the channel of my spine under the gray tunic and my hands shook on my knees and the catechism rose up in me on reflex—
pathological inflammation, apply cold, quarantine the vector
—and then dissolved into ash, dead words for a version of myself that no longer existed.
Hands, my wolf-sister whispered, faint, the deadness eating even her. His hands. Where are his hands?
A click cut the roar.
Tommy’s harness let go. The rig dropped and he crossed the three feet between the benches without a stumble, going to his knees on the shuddering floorboards right between my legs. The cuff still rode his wrist. The hex-metal had to be drinking the strength out of his arm and he came anyway.
His hands closed over my knees.
The contact detonated through me. The heat of him punched straight up through my legs and cracked open something low in my chest that the fever hadn’t touched. My whole body gasped without making a sound.
“You’re cooking in this suit.” The diesel ate half of it. What reached me came in that low register I’d heard in the tent, the one with no joke in it at all. “I’m not gonna let you burn, sweetheart. You hear me? Not happening.”
His grip tightened on my knees, just short of hurting, and his thumbs pressed slow circles into the inside of each one. “Been watching you hold yourself together.” The transport bucked and his voice stayed level. “You don’t have to do that anymore. Not in here. In here you’re just mine.”
The Order’s voice came up out of a lifetime of training. Unsanctioned contact. Push him back. He is a disease vector. My mouth opened and what came out was a sound I’d never made in my life.
A sound of need.
I needed something only my mate could provide.
He slid one hand up from my knee to cup the side of my jaw, his thumb tracing the sharp line of my cheekbone, and he looked at me.
Just looked. In the dark of the iron box with the diesel roaring, he looked at my face the way no one ever had—like he was frightened of what he saw, and grateful, and furious all at once.
The thumb dragged slowly across my cheekbone and I felt it everywhere, a long deep pull.
Then he pressed his lips to my forehead.
Soft. Certain. The way you press a seal into wax—not asking, marking. His mouth was warm and the truck shook and he just held it there, steady, his breath coming out slow against my skin. Something in me that had been wound tight since I was six years old unwound a single, irreversible degree.
He held still. One count. Two. Three.
He moved down. His lips found my cheekbone, then the hinge of my jaw, gentle, unhurried.
Three beats of contact. Three full seconds of his mouth saying something his voice hadn’t said yet.
A kiss like he was learning the architecture of my face with his mouth.
I felt each one of them in my sternum—a series of small detonations, quiet, inevitable, somehow feeling more dangerous than anything the fever had done because they didn’t ask anything of me. They just gave.
Then his mouth found mine.
Slow and insistent, his lips parting against mine as though the question had already been answered before he asked it.
He kissed me the way he fought fires—deliberate, patient, utterly without panic—his upper lip fitting over my lower one, dragging a shivering exhale out of me.
I went still the way prey goes still, the way a woman goes still the first time she realizes she isn’t afraid.
His tongue traced the seam of my lips, unhurried, asking. I opened.
The taste of him slid in—diesel and clean sweat and something warm and particular that was only him—and the wolf under my ribs made a sound that had nothing to do with fever.
His tongue explored the inside of my mouth, slow, mapping the edges of me, and every careful sweep of it stroked something at the back of my skull that I had no name for and no clinical definition of.
Pleasure like a hand opening in a locked room. Like light coming under a door.
The transport shook. A bolt somewhere in the iron rattled loose and caught again. Neither of us moved.
My fingers found the front of his shirt. I held on.
He made a low sound against my mouth—not a laugh, not quite—and then he pulled back a fraction, his forehead resting against mine, his breath unsteady for the first time.
In the dark I could feel his pulse hammering.
The knowledge that I’d done that—that his hands were trembling now and not mine—was a thing I filed away and intended to keep forever.
Then he pulled back just far enough to look at me.
One hand slid around to cup the back of my skull.
His thumb came to rest at my jaw and tilted my face up, and what he did next he did slowly, so slowly that every part of it arrived and landed separately and I had time to feel each piece before the next one came.