Chapter 5 #3
She crouched, the motion bringing her level with the stone slab, with the child’s dulled amber eyes, and with the black-veined wound that pulsed with slow, deliberate wrongness.
Her fingers hovered over the injury without touching it, close enough that the wrongness of it registered against her palm like a change in temperature–cold where there should have been heat, still where there should have been the ordinary living warmth of flesh trying to repair itself.
That was not poison.
Kara turned the sensation over carefully, the way she turned unknowns over, methodical even when everything else in her was reacting.
Poison had a logic to it, a direction, a relationship to the body it was damaging.
This was something else, something with the texture of intention to it, a deliberate quality, a sense of purpose that was entirely incompatible with any natural illness she’d ever encountered.
It moved against the grain of living things the way a current moved against a swimmer, pushing and pulling the person at its own whim.
It felt like the pulse from beneath the stone. The same quality. The same cold signature. It felt like something that had come from below.
“Nick.” She kept her voice level.
“Kara.” His came back taut and compressed, warning and pleading occupying the same syllables, the gold of his eyes in her peripheral vision bright and fixed on her hands.
“There’s corruption in this wound. The same kind—” She stopped. Recalibrated. “I’m not going to do anything dramatic.”
From somewhere behind her, Aphid made a sound that managed to convey, without words, that he found this statement to be statistically optimistic given the available evidence.
The child turned his head. His amber eyes found her face with a slow, searching focus.
The pain she saw in those eyes punched Kara in the gut.
As a healer, her natural instinct was to fix it as quickly as possible.
As a future mother, she wanted to wrap him up in her arms and tell him that it would be okay, that he would be okay.
Torvik looked at her the way children looked at things they hadn’t decided about yet. Measuring, direct, without the social performance that adults layered over genuine attention. Finally, after several minutes of quiet while he took her in, he asked, “Are you an angel?”
This time there was more than one covered laugh.
She refrained from rolling her eyes, barely.
“No, little one,” Kara said, gently. “I am probably as far from an angel as a human can get. But, I’ll take it as a compliment that you asked.”
“You’re glowing, like an angel,” Torvik said, his weak voice filled with awe.
“Nick, am I glowing, like when I used my gypsy healer magic?” she asked him through their bond. She didn’t feel like she was glowing. Though, she could feel her power pulsing under her skin.
“No,” Nick said, his voice a sharp growl. “Could be his innocence, or illness is allowing him to see something the rest of us can’t see.”
Kara’s heart squeezed tight in her chest as she continued to look at the young child.
And then he whispered, rough and small and perfectly, devastatingly honest, “It hurts.”
That was it. Two words. The entire and complete sum of what he had to offer on the subject, and it was enough. Kara’s healer instincts didn’t wait for her permission. They never had.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Her palm pressed over the wound, and Kara felt the healer power rise up in her like a tidal wave.
It flowed from somewhere deep inside of her, down her arm and through her hand, which began to glow a soft light.
She tried to control it, but it didn’t want to be controlled.
It wanted to fix whatever awful thing had made this child sick.
Suddenly, magic burst from her so powerfully and quickly that she couldn’t have stopped it.
Gold-white and blazing, it was wild in the way that things were wild when they’d been building pressure without an outlet.
Her witch blood and her healer blood had always been two rivers running parallel, close enough to see each other but traveling their own channels.
Under her palm, pressed against that corruption, they stopped running parallel and wove, braiding together with a force that drove the breath from her lungs and very nearly shoved her knees to the stone.
The combined current of them enormous and rushing and singing with a frequency that vibrated her very bones.
She tried to bite back the shout of pain that radiated up her hand and arm, instinctively with her other hand she covered her abdomen.
She’d never felt pain like this when healing someone; then again, she’d never healed a troll child before.
The corruption hissed. Hissed. As though it had a voice, and was something with enough self to object to what was happening to it, and it objected loudly, a sound that wasn’t entirely audible and wasn’t entirely felt but lived somewhere between both, registering in the teeth and the back of the skull and the hollow of the chest all at once.
She could feel it attempting to search inside of her. And then it recoiled.
“What the hell was that, Kara?” Nick’s voice was sharp in her mind. “It felt dark, evil. Take your hands off the troll.”
There was no way she was going to do that. “He’s just a child, Nick. Troll or not, he’s an innocent child. I won’t let whatever this is kill him.” She could feel his anger and desperation.
“And what about our babe? What about how this might affect her?”
Kara didn’t take her eyes off of Torvik as she addressed her mate.
“You know I love you. And normally I’d not want to hit you with a brick bat.
However, imply again that I don’t take the safety of our child seriously, and I will hit you with the first heavy object I can get my hands on, even if that object is a troll limb.
So—,” her words cut off abruptly as another sharp pain shot through her body.
Kara imagined a ball of protective light wrapping around their unborn infant, as she continued to work on the troll child.
She heard multiple gasps around the cavern, sharp, involuntary sounds, the kind ripped out of people who had not expected to be surprised. But she continued to stare at Torvik.
Beneath her palm, the disease that had been wreaking havoc on Torvik’s small body began to retreat.
Slowly at first, then faster, peeling back from the center of the wound like something recoiling from fire.
The veined threads of it shrinking and dissolving as the gold-white of her power moved through the flesh in its place.
She felt the wound closing under her hand, the complicated, layered work of it, tissue and sinew and the slow, deliberate correction of bone, and she fed the magic forward.
It took immense concentration because she couldn’t only think about healing the child.
She had to protect herself and their child from whatever it was that had contaminated him in the first place.
Kara had a strong suspicion it had something to do with the power, magic, or whatever you wanted to call it, that she felt running beneath the troll realm.
Suddenly, Torvik screamed.
The sound cracked through the cavern and several of the trolls moved toward him on instinct before stopping, no doubt uncertain, held in place by the gold-white light pouring from beneath Kara’s hand.
The scream peaked and broke and dissolved, and in the silence that followed it, the child drew a breath, long, shaking, as if he’d been bracing against pain for so long that the absence of it was its own kind of shock.
Whole. Alive. The leg straight. The wound closed. The black gone as though it had never existed, the skin beneath Kara’s palm warm and ordinary and simply, unremarkably, healed.
Kara sat back on her heels. The pain she’d experienced left as quickly as it had come.
Her hands were trembling faintly, her heart beating a little faster than normal.
Later, she would catalog the way her magic had responded to the child, and whatever the heck was causing the issue, but for now Kara was setting it aside, filing it under deal with this later when the cavern isn’t full of stunned trolls.
The silence was the deepest the cavern had yet produced.
Torvik blinked at her from the stone slab, his amber eyes wide and clear and, she was startled to notice, slightly luminous now, the way amber went luminous when light moved through it from behind.
He looked at his own hands. Then at his leg.
Then back at her, with the focused, solemn attention of a child processing something they didn’t have a vocabulary for yet.
“You’re warm,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been cold for so long, and you’re so warm. And now I’m warm. Like you put me in an oven and heated me up to just the right temperature. You’re like an angel oven.”
Kara laughed a short, breathless, thoroughly undignified sound that she made no effort to contain, because the alternative was considerably less composed and she had a reputation to maintain, because breaking down into a downpour of tears was not the look she was going for in front of the King of the Trolls.
“That might genuinely be the strangest compliment I’ve received this week,” she said, “and this week has been very strange.”
Then everything happened at once. Kara turned as she heard the rumble from her mate and felt his fear and anger running through their bond.