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 andwove, 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 ofher.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 underdeal 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.
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.Theytore, 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 washisand 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.
