Chapter 24
Bastian
She fit in.
I hated to admit it to myself, but as Rowan walked into the dining hall, members of our horde greeted her with wide smiles, all of them happy to see her.
Her honey blonde hair was in a haphazard ponytail and she was wearing casual clothes, unapologetically herself.
Despite having only been here for a week, she’d quickly ingratiated herself into the lives of our group. Everyone adored her.
Then again, she wasn't exactly hard to adore. Rowan had a way of doing that. Plus, she had helped several of them with medical issues that Jenkins hadn’t bothered to give any attention to.
People appreciated that. I appreciated that.
I was just waiting for her to turn around and ask for something, anything.
Yet, she hadn't. Her only requests had been annoyingly reasonable. Some herbs, maybe a different kind of food to help one of her patients, but she hadn’t demanded money or property or anything of that sort.
When Jenkins had qualified as a healer, he had insisted on the best possible room, high-tech everything, and good financial compensation.
It was his right as a healer. There were so few with significant healing knowledge that they could demand a lot.
I wasn't an idiot. Jenkins wasn’t exactly a good healer—far from it, in fact.
He was friends with my father, the previous Alpha, which was how he’d gotten the position.
A small part of me had wanted to run checks on him to see if he had actually graduated from that fancy university.
He displayed his degree proudly in his office.
But something about it all felt wrong to me.
I had discussed it with my clan, but we had agreed not to risk angering Jenkins.
If he left us for another horde, we would be in an even worse position.
Then again, now that Rowan was here, I was starting to think we would actually be better off if he went.
Finally, Rory was on the mend. The last time I’d checked on him, he had been sitting up and eating normally.
His parents had hugged me and cried over how well he was doing.
With the way Rowan was starting to be adored, I was fairly certain the horde would beg her to stay if she tried to leave.
Anytime I thought about her going, my stomach clenched uncomfortably, and there was a buzzing in my ears.
The dull, hollow ache in my chest was a reminder of how much her leaving the first time had hurt.
I knew my clanmates were pissed at me, but I had to be skeptical.
Nix was acting like everything was right in the world now that she had returned.
He was welcoming her back without a single explanation of where she’d been.
But her claims that she had no memory somehow rang false to me.
I wanted nothing more than to know exactly what had happened.
The lack of information was painful.
At the same time, I didn’t want to scare her away.
Rowan was a lot stronger than Emmeline. The mate we’d met six years ago was one who would need protecting, worshipping, and guiding.
Rowan, on the other hand, would need all those things, but she had this steel to her, which was frankly impressive.
Emmeline never would have gone toe-to-toe with a dragon, yet I had seen Rowan yell at grumbling dragons without a second thought.
She had a commanding presence about her that demanded respect, despite her small stature and being human.
She had even given me a good dressing down, and even though I was still mad about it, a small part of me respected her because of it.
It wasn’t hard to see why she was a greatly respected healer.
I had subtly asked a few of my friends from the clans she had healed before; they all had nothing but glowing praise for her.
She had helped deliver babies and treated any elderly horde members who were sick, all while asking for nothing other than a place to stay and some food.
She had a love and passion for healing that was unmatched, according to everyone I’d spoken to.
Under any other circumstances, she would have been a tremendous gift to our horde, but the complication of our past made it that much trickier.
Rowan was known to travel around, except the idea of her leaving made me want to wail.
Even if I didn't believe her words, I couldn’t allow her to leave me.
“She doesn’t fit in,” my father said as he shuffled next to me. The once-mighty dragon Cyrus was succumbing to old age and ill health. While in my childhood, he had stood tall and dominating, now his power was waning.
“I don’t know. Everyone seems to like her,” I replied, frowning at him.
He glared in her direction as she ate her breakfast, talking with Griffin.
I supposed it wasn’t that shocking. My father really did like Jenkins. They had been friends for decades. In fact, I was pretty sure that my father, as his Alpha, had funded his trip to medical school.
“She’s trying to use archaic medicine that doesn’t work.”
“You can’t deny Rory is getting better,” I pointed out.
“What’s that rubbish your mother used to say? Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Anyway, it’s probably all the medications Doc gave him finally kicking in. You should have asked me before approving her coming here.”
I turned to my father, trying to keep my face placid. “It was a clan decision.”
My father shook his head. “It never should have been a clan decision,” he grumbled. Cyrus hated that I wasn’t the sole Alpha of the horde. As far back as I could remember, my father would talk about me inheriting the horde and leading them, like he had, for years.
After Emmeline went missing, and he started getting older, he’d tried to insist that I take over the horde on my own, not with my clan.
That had been the first time I had really butted heads with my father. I had stood my ground, and I had won. My clan and I ruled as a unit. Though, if what Rowan had been saying was true, then we had been ruling pretty badly.
“There’s no way a human can heal a dragon better than a fellow dragon,” my father sniped, crossing his arms.
“Maybe so, but we want to see how this goes.” I didn’t want to tell him, but my father’s judgment was clouded by his friendship with Jenkins and his belief that a human female couldn’t be more knowledgeable than him.
His belief that dragons were superior in every way was ludicrous. I had met dragons who were complete idiots and couldn’t be trusted with a glass of water, and I had met humans who were highly intelligent.
Rowan being one of them.
My father was silent for a moment. “I heard a rumor she shouted at you,” he muttered finally.
I resisted the urge to groan. That was the last thing I wanted my father to know. Under his strict rule, I should have assaulted Rowan and thrown her off the grounds for her insolence.
“We had a heated discussion, and I encouraged it.” I wasn’t going to tell him Rowan had given me a dressing down.
Even though her words had pissed me off, I couldn’t deny there was a kernel of truth to them. After I had left her, I walked around the horde lands and the den, and it struck me just how much everything had fallen into disrepair.
Many of the cabins needed serious refurbishment.
The quality of life for our horde members was nothing like it used to be.
My stomach sank when I realized, in part, why that was.
After Emmeline went missing, we seemed to have lost our ability to care.
We tried, but our efforts weren’t enough.
One Alpha who was present could run a horde, and yet, between my three clanmates and me, we had been failing.
As for the poorly maintained architecture, most of our budget had gone toward Jenkins and his rare moments of effectiveness. We had decided to put as much funding as we could into the health of our people.
The idea that we had fucked up so monumentally and invested our money into an inadequate healer, while everything else fell to the wayside, made my head spin.
Even though a small part of me knew that was the case, I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Admitting it was a weakness, and Alphas weren’t supposed to be weak.
I was going to help the horde, and I was going to do it my way. I didn’t need to listen to Rowan’s shouting to do that.
My feelings for her, or inability to look away from her when she entered a room, had nothing to do with her healing abilities.
I couldn’t let her cloud my judgment.