Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Marcus
I reach Mia before Jessa does.
The child’s whole body is locked and jerking on the trampled grass, her heels drumming, her small hands curled into fists. Bella’s still shaking her by the shoulder, crying out her name. Jessa drops to her knees and gets both arms beneath her daughter to lift her.
The smell hits me a half-second before her fingers close. It’s cloying, wrong, and it climbs the back of my throat. There’s no mistaking it.
“Don’t touch her.”
She doesn’t stop. Her arms are already sliding under Mia’s back.
“Jessa.” I close my hand over her wrist and stop it cold. “Don’t touch her.”
“Let go of me.” She wrenches against my grip, wild-eyed. “What’s wrong with you, let go of me, that’s my—”
“She’s been poisoned with wolfsbane.”
“With what?”
I leave the question where it is and turn to Bella instead. The girl’s face is soaked, her breath hitching in gulps she can’t get ahead of.
“Bella. Look at me. What happened?”
“We went to get the peanuts.” Her words come apart between sobs. “There was a man. He kept watching us the whole time, Uncle Marcus, and he gave us something.”
“He gave you what?”
“It was cotton candy. He said it was free.” Her chin crumples. “Mia ate hers. I didn’t want mine.”
On the grass beside Mia’s slack hand sits a paper cone, pink spun sugar half gone. My stomach turns over.
Jessa rounds on me. “Why would she take candy from a stranger? She knows better than that.” Her voice breaks. “What is wolfsbane, why is she shaking like that, what’s happening to my daughter?”
I look at her properly for the first time since Mia went down. There’s no calculation in her face, no guard, nothing held back behind her eyes. She doesn’t know. The word means nothing to her at all.
Then I look down at the child convulsing in the grass, and a cold realization fills me, my previous doubts now hardening.
One kind of creature reacts to wolfsbane. Only one. A human child eats spun sugar coated with wolfsbane and gets a stomachache, nothing worse than that.
She’s a hybrid.
“She needs a healer.” I get my arms under Mia and lift her against my chest. Her head lolls into my shoulder, too light, too loose.
“There’s a hospital four blocks down.” Jessa’s already up.
“We’re not going to a hospital.”
“What?” She stares at me. “She’s seizing, Marcus, she needs a doctor, she needs—”
“A healer can treat her.”
“A what?” Her voice climbs into the dark. “A healer, what does that even mean, do you mean a doctor?”
“No.” I’m already moving, Mia’s weight tucked close. “It’s something else. A doctor won’t know what’s in her, and he’ll watch her die trying to figure it out.”
Jessa grabs my arm hard enough to bruise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’m not letting you walk my kid off into the dark to some—”
“She won’t survive a hospital.” It comes out as a snarl, low in my chest. “Look at me. Trust me on this one thing. I won’t let her die, I swear it to you.”
She’s caught between her mother’s instinct and the desire to listen to me. I see her frantically trying to decide who to trust in this moment.
“Fine.” The word’s torn out of her. “Fine. If anything happens to her, Marcus, I won’t ever let you off.”
“Nothing will happen to her.”
We rush to my car, ignoring the startled looks of the people around us.
Bella climbs in the front while Mia and Jessa are in the back.
My niece keeps looking toward Mia, silent tears streaking down her face.
I can hear Mia’s shallow and uneven breathing as I drive toward the pack territory.
My wolf is coiled, tense and very focused.
Jessa watches the streetlights thin out as houses give way to pines. “This is your part of town.” Her voice has gone careful, suspicious even through the panic. “Why are you taking us to your house?”
“I’m not.”
We turn off the main road into the lanes that wind back through the trees. I pass the cut that climbs to my own gate without slowing. Deeper in, where the canopy closes over the road and the dark gets thicker, there’s a low compound the pack keeps for its healers.
The windows are lit warm when we pull up. I race out the door and throw open the back, snatching Mia from Jessa and running inside, the others behind me.
“I need a healer now,” I roar. “She’s been poisoned.”
A woman comes through from the back, gray hair pulled off her face, sleeves already shoved up. Zaheela’s been mending pack bones since before I could walk. She takes one look at the child in my arms, and the warmth drops off her face.
“What happened to her?”
I step in close so only she can hear it. “It’s wolfsbane. Don’t say the word out loud, not in front of the mother. Treat her for it.” My voice drops lower still. “She hasn’t shifted yet.”
Zaheela’s eyes snap up to mine. “That isn’t possible.” She backs off a step. “A child reacting to wolfsbane, I have to bring this to the alpha—”
“You’re bringing it to no one.”
I let the weight into my voice, the thing I’ve kept leashed for ten years. It doesn’t bend her will. It presses on it, a hand at the back of the neck that every wolf below a born alpha feels.
“You treat her, and you keep the alpha out of this.”
Zaheela’s chin dips before she’s chosen to do it, her shoulders rounding under the pressure. “Yes.” The word comes out hushed. “Of course.”
“The mother doesn’t know what the girl is.” I hold her gaze. “She doesn’t learn it from you, not a word of it.”
“She hears nothing from me.” She nods quickly. “I understand you.”
She lifts Mia out of my arms and turns for the back room, calling over her shoulder for someone to bring her kit. Jessa lunges after them.
I catch her around the waist. “Stay here.”
“Get off me.” She fights me, all sharp elbows. “That’s my daughter, you don’t get to keep me from—”
“You can’t help her in there.” I hold her still without hurting her. “I can. Stay out here with Bella.”
“You don’t get to tell me to stay away from my own child.” Her voice breaks.
She grabs two fistfuls of my shirt instead of swinging at me. “What happened to her, what is wolfsbane, why is she reacting like that, what’s going on, Marcus, talk to me.”
“Jessa.” I take her face in both my hands and make her look at me. “Snap out of it. I need you calm and out here with Bella, who’s terrified, if you haven’t noticed.”
Her breath shudders out. Bella’s pressed into her side, small and shaking. Jessa looks down at her, and that does what none of my words could.
“I’ll look after our—” The word’s halfway up my throat before I catch it. I bite it off and start again. “I’ll look after Mia. I promise you that.”
I leave her in the front room and go through to the back. Zaheela’s bent over Mia, who’s laid out on a low cot, her color gone, her skin waxy.
“This was a heavy dose.” She doesn’t look up from her work. “Much too heavy. A child who hasn’t shifted shouldn’t react at all unless someone fed her something this concentrated on purpose.” Her hands go still for a moment. “I don’t know that she’ll live through it, Alpha.”
“Don’t call me that.” The correction’s out before I’ve thought about it. “I’m not the alpha.”
She goes quiet. When she speaks again, her voice has dropped. “She won’t last without her shifter parent’s blood.” She straightens up. “The girl’s a hybrid, half ours and half human.”
“How can you tell?”
“It’s in her scent. A grown shifter’s nose would miss it. Mine doesn’t. A hybrid runs different from a pure-blood, even at this age.”
I look at the child on the cot, and my heart thunders in my chest as I whisper, “What if she’s mine?”
Zaheela’s head comes up slowly. She studies my face for a long moment. “Are you certain?”
“I think she’s mine.”
She crosses to a cabinet and comes back with a needle, a length of tubing, a stand.
“Then we test it while we treat her.” Her hands move while she talks, swabbing the inside of my elbow.
“If she’s yours, your blood will clear the poison out of her.
She’s young and half-formed still, so your blood will override whatever’s in hers.
” The needle bites in. “If she isn’t yours, you’ll start reacting to the wolfsbane instead.
You’ll know inside a few minutes which way it falls. ”
“Do it.”
I sit. The line runs warm out of my arm, down the tube, into the small, still figure on the cot. Zaheela watches the girl, watches me, watches the clip she’s fixed to Mia’s finger.
The minutes drag.
My own pulse holds steady. No burn climbs my throat, no swelling, no reaction. Then Mia’s chest lifts on a deeper breath, then another. The pallor washes out of her cheeks by degrees. Her fists, locked tight since the grass, ease open against the blanket.
She’s stabilizing.
Relief hits first. Under it is a joy I shouldn’t be feeling with a poisoned child in front of me, wild and stupid, impossible to stop. My blood is fixing her. Only one thing on Earth could make that true.
She’s mine.
I put my free hand over my eyes. The tears come before I can stop them, and I let them fall. For ten years I didn’t even know her name.
“Do you need a moment?” Zaheela asks quietly.
“No.” I drag my hand down my face. I look up at her. “Jessa doesn’t know that I know. You don’t tell her any of this, not what the girl is, not whose she is, none of it.”
Zaheela holds my eyes.
“No one else hears it.” I let the pressure slide back into the words. “Not another healer learns of it, not the alpha himself. This is an order.”
She lowers her head, and there’s a deference in it reserved for an alpha and no one else. “As you wish.”
She checks the line and slows the flow, watching Mia’s breathing settle into a steadier rhythm. “She’ll need a few days of rest, and she’ll need you close.”
“Why does it need to be me?”