Chapter 5 #4
The sound Nick made was not a word or words.
It started in his chest and arrived in the room as something inhuman, raw, and roaring and containing within it the specific, unhinged quality of a wolf who had dealt with his mate being taken, hurt in the worst way a woman could be, and being unable to protect her.
All the self control he’d managed to hold onto was gone and Kara could feel it.
Her male was unraveling. Watching her use her power while carrying their child had terrified him.
“I’m okay,” she said through the bond, attempting to reassure him.
But his wolf wasn’t having it. They were done having any distance from their female.
The iron bars did not bend. They tore, the cage door wrenching free from its housing in a screech of metal that filled the entire cavern and echoed back from every wall–a sound so sudden and complete that several of the nearest trolls flinched backward.
And then Nick was across the space between them with a speed that no human could ever replicate, half-shifted and golden-eyed and absolutely incandescent with every emotion he’d been compressing behind those bars for the last half hour.
He planted himself between Kara and the king with every line of his body broadcasting the same message to every creature in the room.
His claws out. His teeth bared. The growl coming from him wasn’t a warning; it was a declaration, vibrating through the stone floor and up into the bones of everyone present.
Mine.
The word didn’t cross his lips. It didn’t need to.
It traveled the bond and arrived in Kara’s chest like a second heartbeat, fierce and blazing and entirely him.
And it was true with every fiber of her being.
She was his and he was hers as well. Kara understood why he was so upset, she completely got it.
But it didn’t change the fact that nothing could have stopped her from healing the troll child. Not even her mate’s fear.
The trolls surged. Weapons came up, stone and iron and things that Kara was fairly certain had been repurposed from things that had once been kitchen tools. The cavern seemed to brace itself for the coming violence.
“Oh, this is going to be bad,” Rachel said from her cage, the calm in her voice pitched as though she was assessing a situation she was professionally obligated to take seriously.
“Can someone get the cage doors open?” Zara was back at the bars of her cage, her hands around the iron. Her eyes glowed with her wolf as she strained against the bars.
“Working on it,” Gavril said tightly, from somewhere beside her, which meant he was also at the bars, which meant two wolves were attempting to dismantle their respective cages at the exact moment the cavern was deciding whether to erupt into armed conflict.
“Aphid,” Rachel said.
“I’m watching,” Aphid said as if that was going to somehow prevent a battle between Nick and all the trolls. Those odds just seemed pretty crappy, even if her mate was a badass.
“How about not watching and instead help,” Rachel said, her tone that of a parent exasperated with a child.
“Right, yes.” A pause. The sound of something subtle and strange, a fae-flavored magic that didn’t quite register as noise but moved through the air causing the hair on the back of Kara’s neck to rise. “Give me a moment,” Aphid said.
“How about let’s everyone remain calm,” Kara breathed, because she was still on her heels on the stone floor and Nick was a wall of barely-contained wolf between her and everything.
The situation had arrived at the particular intersection of “enraged wolves” and “it hasn’t been a day until someone is maimed or dead” that she was beginning to recognize as the default register of her life.
“There’s no reason to go all crazy. Nick,” she nudged his back leg.
“I’m good, yeah?” She hoped using his favorite word might break him out of his rage, but it didn’t have the effect she hoped for.
He simply snarled at her, and then turned his attention back to those he considered the threat.
Kara’s attention was pulled from her mate when the Troll King moved.
Not toward Nick. He turned, slowly, with complete deliberateness, and he dropped to one knee so that he was angled to be able to see her from behind her mate.
The stone floor cracked slightly under the impact.
One knee, both enormous hands resting on the opposite thigh, his ancient head lowering with the weight of ceremony, not defeat, nothing so simple as defeat, but acknowledgment and recognition.
It was the posture of something vast and powerful choosing, consciously and publicly, to mark a moment.
“A healer,” he said, and the word in his voice was not a title. It was something more than a title. Something closer to a covenant.
“She is,” the fae, who’d done nothing but watch since he’d recommended bringing the child to her, said. “But I will get confirmation.”
The Troll King didn’t look up as he spoke. “And confirm their story about his alpha they speak of.”
The fae disappeared, flashing from the cave.
The silence that followed was different from every silence before it.
The trolls had gone motionless with a synchrony that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with what they were witnessing.
All of them still, and watching. All of them holding the weight of something their king had just said with a gravity that suggested it had meaning Kara could only understand to a certain degree.
She’d been involved in the supernatural world long enough to know that gypsy healers were special.
The power in them was something different from every other supernatural being.
But the way the Troll King was acting made it seem as if she was something to be treasured.
Nick grew still as stone, though his growling continued, albeit lower now.
His head was tilted at an angle that suggested he was a tad confused, the aggression in it complicated by uncertainty.
He didn’t lower his hands, but the claws were less prominent, the half-shift pulling slightly back as the situation stopped matching the threat pattern he’d launched himself toward.
Kara’s brain was trying to catch up, filtering through everything that had just happened and then attempting to formulate a way to respond. She still hadn’t quite determined if the trolls were still a threat, or had moved into the “ally” bracket.
Then the king’s voice, still in that same register, public, sonorous, dropped into the cavern like a stone dropped into deep water, “Protect the mother and the child she carries at all cost. Release her companions.”
There was utter silence.
Not the silence of waiting. The silence of something having just shifted, tectonic and permanent, and everyone in the room pausing to confirm that the ground was, in fact, in a different place than it had been a moment ago.
Nick turned around very slowly and looked at Kara. “What the hell is going on?” he asked through their bond.
She looked back at him. “That is also my question.”
Suddenly movement began. The clanging of cage doors opening filled the space, along with the soft rumblings of Wadim and Gavril’s voices as they spoke to their mates. Aphid simply stood still, eyes watching with a look that still held distrust.
What happened next was the thing that Kara would later describe, in retellings that became progressively more elaborate with time and distance, as the moment the mission became categorically weirder than anything she’d been briefed to handle.
From somewhere in the assembled trolls, a female voice, broad, authoritative, carrying the specific volume of someone accustomed to being listened to and prepared to repeat herself until she was, cut through the stunned quiet like an axe through kindling. “Move.”
Immediately, the crowd parted.
She was broader than most of the warriors, built like something that had decided comfort was a strategic liability and had planned accordingly, her gray braids pinned in an elaborate crown that Kara recognized, on some instinctive level, as a marker of domestic authority so absolute it made royal titles look tentative.
The warrior moved through the assembled trolls the way water moved through sand, not asking permission, not acknowledging resistance, simply proceeding on the assumption that the path would exist when she arrived at it.
She stopped in front of Nick. “Wolf,” the woman said, her voice still stern. “Let me look at your mate. She needs to be cared for, especially after healing Torvik. I mean her no harm.”
Kara waited, unsure of how he would respond, and really hoping he didn’t attempt to rip the old woman’s head off. That would just be a really sucky end to an already spectacularly sucky day, week, month . . . hell she didn’t even know anymore.
There was a brief staring contest, until Nick stepped slightly to the side, though he didn’t drop the female’s gaze because, hello, dominant wolf.
The elderly troll female looked down at Kara with amber eyes that were unexpectedly and entirely warm, and pointed one blunt finger at Kara’s abdomen with the directness of someone who had borne children and had strong opinions about the proper conditions for doing so.
“She needs broth, meat, and vegetables, and I’ll need a few of you to go gather bullrot root, taser flowers, and nettle saliva.”
“Umm,” Kara held up her hand as her eyes widened. “I sort of draw the line at ingesting saliva of any kind. Other than my own, of course.”
Wadim coughed and it came out oddly sounding like, “And Nick’s.”
Kara didn’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledging him to give him the dopamine hit he was looking for. The elderly female troll ignored her completely, continuing to issue orders.
From behind her, another female troll, equally immovable in bearing said, “A bed, with lots of pillows. She will need to be comfortable as her belly size increases.”