Chapter 8
“Sometimes surviving together looks less like heroics and more like sitting beside someone in the dark so they don’t have to carry the weight alone.” ~Rachel
Rachel sat cross-legged near the edge of the underground spring, her fingers trailing slowly through the water as soft blue light from the cavern moss reflected across the surface in lazy, rippling patterns.
The trolls had carved this resting cavern deeper into the mountain than the holding chambers, and though the stone walls still carried the same immense, ancient weight, the space felt quieter somehow.
Less like a prison. More like a respite. Like a space to just breathe.
The water was warmer than she had expected.
It felt relaxing against her skin, and she let her hand drift through it while she tried to ignore the low, constant hum she had been feeling beneath her palms every time she touched the stone.
The mountain was humming back. Not loudly or even clearly.
But enough to remind her wolf that nothing in this place was truly still, and enough to prickle along the edges of her healer’s senses like a splinter she could not quite find.
Behind her, the steady scrape of a whetstone stopped. As an act of good faith, the Troll King had agreed to give them weapons, though they had claws and teeth, and it was a gesture they respected. But the sharpness of the blades had been lacking in her mate’s opinion.
“You’re thinking too loudly again,” Gavril said.
Rachel glanced over her shoulder. Her mate sat several feet away on a flat shelf of stone, one knee bent, an old blade resting across his thigh.
He was not actually sharpening it anymore.
He had stopped doing that at least ten minutes ago.
Now he simply watched her with that quiet, coiled stillness dominant wolves carried when they were pretending not to be on alert, the stillness of a predator who had long ago learned that patience was its own kind of weapon.
Rachel sighed softly. “I wasn’t aware that thoughts made noise.”
“They do when they start weighing down the entire room.” He winked at her, his lips turning up into a small smile, one he reserved only for her.
It was a smile she knew so well that she could see it clear as day even when she closed her eyes.
“You need to be careful or you might squash me into a rug, and then Peri would be ticked off that she wasn’t the one who got to make me carpet. ”
“Well, you’re not wrong about Peri being pissy about it. But I highly doubt my thoughts can squish you into a rug.” Rachel chuckled. “Not to mention, you’re in your human form. A human skin rug is just gross.”
“How do you know? Have you walked on a human skin rug? Maybe it’s very smooth.”
“Of all the many conversations we’ve had over the centuries, this might be one of the oddest.” A smile tugged at her mouth despite herself.
Gavril’s gaze softened fractionally when he saw it, and she felt the warmth of it answer along the slender, steady thread of the mate bond between them, a low golden pulse under her ribs.
“There she is,” came his voice, gentler through the bond than it was aloud, though he said it aloud, too. "There she is."
Rachel looked back toward the spring before the warmth in his expression could settle too deeply beneath her skin.
He had a way of looking at her sometimes that felt like he was seeing a version of her that she was not sure she had earned, and she did not know what to do with that on a good day.
She certainly did not know what to do with it on this one–a day when they’d nearly been troll food, and then like a car wreck inflicting whiplash, suddenly they were being treated like guests.
All because Kara was a gypsy healer. And Rachel hadn’t missed the interest in the Troll King’s eyes when he’d mentioned that he knew that Rachel was a healer, too.
“I’m worried about Kara,” she admitted. “Sometimes I wonder why the Great Luna created us.”
“Beautiful females?” Gavril teased. He was trying to ease her fretting.
She’d tried to keep it from flowing through their bond.
She didn’t like him worrying about her. Her mate, who was so stoic and strong, yet could soften in an instant when a child was under his protection.
“I know why she created you, because she knew us males would be Neanderthals without you. Grunting, fighting, acting like rabid dogs fighting over a bone.”
She turned so that she could see him but still run her fingers through the water. “You’re in an interesting mood this evening.”
Her mate shrugged, a casual motion that wasn’t his style.
Gavril’s movements were always intentional with purpose.
He wasn’t one to waste energy on fruitless motion.
Jen had teased him that if he continued to sit so still, he’d eventually turn to stone, and once that happened, she would use him as a coat rack. Rachel had no doubt she would.
“I don’t like it when you’re so unsettled,” he explained. “I can’t fix the situation, at least not yet, but I can at least make my female feel less stressed.”
Rachel knew she wouldn’t be able to appease him with words.
He’d see right through them, especially since he had access to her every emotion.
So, she just went back to letting out the words that were running through her mind.
“She's trying very hard to pretend she isn't terrified. But after what she went through with Ludcarab, there’s no way she doesn’t have some form of PTSD. She hides behind her feisty attitude and bravado. And she does it quite convincingly, unless you know what to look for. As a healer, I could practically feel the fear rolling off of her. I can’t believe Nick didn’t kill everyone in the room the minute his cage opened. ”
“To be fair, Kara would attempt sarcasm during the apocalypse,” he pointed out mildly.
“She absolutely would.” She shook her head. “I blame Jen.”
He inclined his head in agreement. “That’s because most things that have to do with our females are Jen’s fault. And Nick would probably threaten the apocalypse itself if it looked at Kara wrong.”
That earned him a quiet laugh. It was a small sound, a little cracked at the edges, but it was real, and for a moment the cavern did not feel quite so heavy. The sound faded quickly. Rachel's fingers stilled in the water. The reflected blue light moved across her knuckles in slow, glowing bands.
“Something touched the baby.” Rachel had felt it.
The healer bond was something altogether different than the mate bond, but no less intense.
Especially when intense emotions were present.
“It was dark, malevolent. But she protected it with her light, her magic. She’s able to wield her healer magic in tandem with her witch power, and it kept whatever that was from getting near the child.
” She paused and then added, “I think it has something to do with Raja.”
The words settled heavily between them.
Gavril did not immediately answer. Rachel appreciated that about him. He never rushed to fill silence just because it existed. He let her words be what they needed to be, which, in a world full of people who filled every quiet moment with noise, was its own kind of kindness.
Finally, he asked quietly, “You’re sure?”
She nodded. “I felt it when the magic surged through the cavern.” Her throat tightened slightly around the memory of it, the way the air had seemed to bend inward toward Kara, and toward the small, impossible life Kara was carrying.
Her gypsy magic had known it before her mind had, the healer in her recoiling from a presence that did not belong inside a womb.
“Whatever is moving beneath this realm noticed her. Not Kara specifically, at first. The baby. And it very much felt like magic that emanated from the Nushtonia.”
Gavril’s jaw flexed, a slow tightening of muscle along the line of his jaw that she had come to read as clearly as any of her own moods.
“That explains Nick,” he murmured. “I mean, any male would have been struggling to get to their pregnant mate, but he was practically feral.”
Rachel turned on the stone and looked at him fully, drawing her hand out of the spring and resting her damp fingers against her knee. “He’s barely holding himself together.”
“He thinks he failed her.” Gavril shook his head.
“He thinks he’s failed her over and over again.
It does something to a man, something irreversible, when his mate is hurt.
And the way Kara was hurt, that’s a male’s worst nightmare.
Considering when we first arrived, we didn’t really know the trolls’ intentions, his mind no doubt jumped to the worst case scenario.
Unfortunately, it will be a feeling that might take a long time to go away, if it ever does. ”
“But he didn’t fail her,” Rachel insisted, her chest getting tight as she remembered the way Kara had looked when she’d been brought out of Ludcarab’s clutches.
She’d looked like a shell of the person she had been.
Her eyes had been haunted. Slowly, the light in them had returned.
Though she was rarely seen without Nick, Kara had begun to manage being away from him and the light still stayed.
“He knows that here.” Gavril tapped two fingers lightly against his temple.
His mouth pulled into the ghost of something that was not quite a smile.
“But our wolves don’t love logically. You cannot reason a male out of a terror his beast has already decided is going to happen.
His every thought was most likely seeing her in various stages of torture. ”
Rachel’s chest ached at the quiet understanding in his voice, because he understood. The wolf who had found her and claimed her and refused to let the world have her knew exactly what that shape looked like when it fractured.