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“What was the base compound?” he asked.
“Valerian and oak gall. Ground together in the stone mortar. The iron filings were folded in after. The birch bark was layered last.”
“Delivery mechanism?”
“Powder. Folded into paper packets. Sealed with wax. Three packets per batch. Someone picked them up. I never saw who.”
“How was it introduced to the pack?”
Del’s hands tightened at her sides. “I don’t know. Arrow never said. The packets went out. Someone took them. Someone applied them. I didn’t ask.”
Marcus nodded. Once. His hands stayed on the exam table. “Duration of exposure?”
“Two years. Three batches a week. Steady.”
“Any variation in the formula?”
“No. The list never changed. The ratios never changed. I measured the same components in the same proportions every time.”
The clinic was quiet. The lamp’s flame held steady. Her own breathing came shallow and controlled. Marcus’s questions had been limited to fact: base compound, delivery mechanism, duration. Each one narrow, each one designed to extract useful information without commentary. He was a doctor. This was how doctors worked.
“Elise Alcott came into the shop tonight.” Del’s voice stayed flat until it didn’t. The last word caught. “Nineteen years old. She had a tremor in her right hand. She pressed her palm against her forehead twice while she talked. I’ve seen that gesture from Petra. From Cole. From every wolf who’s come through my door with this thing in their blood.”
Marcus’s jaw tightened. The muscle along his cheekbone moved once.
“I recognized every symptom. The fever. The coordination loss. The inability to shift.” Del’s hands came together at her sternum. Her knuckles went white. “I sent her home with nothing. There’s nothing in my shop that fixes what I helped make. I ground the base. I measured the components. I sealed the packets and handed them over for two years knowing the ratios were wrong and I did it anyway because the coven voted and I lost.”
The lamp flickered, and the yellow light jumped across the stone floor.
Del looked at a point on the floor just past Marcus’s feet. The stone was worn smooth in that spot from eighty-five years of boots. She waited for him to say what she deserved to hear. That she had hurt his patients. That she had supplied the components for a working that was killing wolves. That the blood in his vials, dark and metallic and wrong, had her fingerprints on every cell.
Marcus stood on the other side of the exam table with his hands resting on the surface. His hazel eyes held hers. He didn’t speak.
The space between them across the scarred wood stayed empty. Neither of them crossed it. The lamp burned. The reagents waited on their shelves. Outside, the pre-dawn cold pressed against the windows.
Marcus arrived shortly before sunset with his medical kit and a request Del didn’t want to accept. Elise’s fever had climbed despite the tincture, and the girl’s mother refused to bring her near the clinic after word spread that vampire blood was being used in the tests. If Marcus wanted another tissue sample, he would have to collect it inside the family’s home.
“Why do you need me?” Del asked while she locked the shop.
“Her mother will open the door for a witch.” Marcus took the key from her after she missed the lock twice and turned it cleanly. “She may not open it for me.”
“She may decide I caused the sickness.”
“Then we’ll both be unwelcome.”
The Alcott house stood near the eastern edge of town, where the paved road narrowed to gravel and the trees crowded closer. A woman waited on the porch with both arms folded beneath her chest. Del recognized Mara Alcott from market days, though the woman’s face had changed since her husband took ill.
“You brought him,” Mara said.
“Elise needs a doctor,” Del replied. “Marcus is the best one available.”
Mara’s gaze moved over him. “He’s not a man.”
Marcus shifted the medical kit to his other hand. “No, but I’m still a doctor.”
The front door opened behind Mara before she could answer. A boy of perhaps twelve stood in the gap, his eyes too large in a pale face. “Mama, she’s shaking again.”
Mara turned and ran inside. Del followed, and Marcus came through last after closing the door behind them. The small parlor smelled of sweat, wet wool, and the bitter fever tea cooling beside the bed.
