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saying Fergus was skewered?”
“Yes, that’s what he told me had happened, but he was lucky. If the puncture had been any deeper, he would have died instantly.”
Mary replaced the wand and turned off the machine. “What I don’t understand is how this happened. I mean, I’ve seen photographs of what you wolves wear during dominance fights, something like a pair of wrist guards and a leather loin cloth.”
“Gladiator briefs.”
“Right. I knew there was a word for it.” She felt her cheeks heat slightly. Fergus would look really good in a loin cloth. Or out of one for that matter. The man she’d met in the dreamglide was built.
That she could even think of him in those terms was a good sign he was leaving the danger zone. She still didn’t say anything to Warren, however, in case something else went wrong.
She cleared her throat. “With so few clothes, how could Sydon have had a skewer on him?”
Warren grunted, a rough wolf sound. “His wrist guards, if long enough, could have disguised hidden metal pieces. Jesus. Sydon must have done exactly that.”
Mary didn’t want to say anything, but because her sister had died as fall-out from a dominance fight, she wasn’t all that surprised at the treachery of secret skewers. It seemed in keeping with her opinion of wolves generally.
She had a deep prejudice against Savage Territory. She didn’t want any part of a culture so easily moved to violence. Now that she had a partial awareness of what she’d been doing with Fergus in the dreamglide, she also knew why she’d set up the memory blocks in the first place. If she’d allowed herself any real-time awareness of Fergus, she would have refused to engage in the affair.
She got out a bag of saline. Using another tube set-up, she hooked the needle beneath Fergus’s fur, the same way she would a dog or a cat. Hydration would help.
She checked his vitals. His blood pressure was low and heartrate too rapid, but she sensed he’d begun the long journey back. Other than cracking open his chest and suturing the wound, she didn’t have another option. She was convinced, however, that surgery would have been far worse than letting him self-heal.
“Will he live?”
She realized she’d been so intent on Fergus and consumed by her own fear for his life that she hadn’t shared enough information with the men in the room. “Yes, he’ll live.”
“Thank God.”
She finally made eye-contact with Warren, but gasped softly. She knew very little about the alpha of the Caldion Pack and hadn’t known he was partially disfigured. The left side of his head was partially bald, a few inches back from the scalp line. Though the area was heavily tattooed, she could see he’d been burned, badly. His face was scarred as well, all the way to the area around his left eye, especially on and over the socket. However, he had full use of both eyes. The same side of his face also looked as though it had been burned. The rest of his head seemed normal. He had long blond hair, very thick and straight not unlike her own. His eyes were an unusual emerald green and very beautiful.
The physician in her tried to understand what had been done to him. Some of the scars looked like a wolf had bitten him. But the rest was caused by either a fire of some kind or chemicals. “Any of that causing you pain?”
He shook his head. “It happened a few years ago.”
“Here, in Five Bridges?” He should have been able to self-heal.
“Yes. A dark witch’s spell made it permanent. Fergus pulled me to safety, otherwise the spell would have eaten through my entire body and I would have died.” His gaze drifted to the line of red connecting him to Fergus, then back to her. “I owe him my life.”
She saw in his features the extremely handsome man he’d once been. Despite the disfigurement, he exuded a similar quality as Fergus, the strength and power of the alpha wolf.
His gaze narrowed and his jaw worked. When his nostrils flared and elongated slightly, she wasn’t surprised that he shifted his gaze away from her. He even side-stepped to create distance, though he was careful to preserve the tubing.
Sniffing the air herself, she detected his mating musk, the same kind of scent all alphas released. She sensed that Warren needed to establish a boundary with her because of Fergus. By way of clarifying the situation for him, she drew close to Fergus and settled her hand gently on his wolf-shoulder. “I belong to Fergus right now.”
She watched him release a sigh of relief. “I can smell his scent on you. He’s spoken of you often, but you have to understand, until you’re bonded every unmated alpha will be attracted to you.”
She was surprised. “Because of your mating cycles?”
He shook his head slowly and met her gaze, the emerald of his eyes glowing slightly. “No, Mary, I’m afraid not. This is about you. You have alpha-mate capacity, a rare thing even in Savage Territory and something I would have never believed possible in a woman from Revel Territory. Yet here you are.”
She noted the slightly pale appearance of the skin around his eyes. “You’ve given enough blood, Warren. But Fergus should have more.” Wolf blood was one of the greatest healing agents in Savage Territory.
Because the hole in Fergus’s heart was small, he hadn’t lost a lot of blood. The surplus provided tonight was more about restoration and would go a long way to bringing Fergus back to full health within the next few hours.
A terrible chill went through her. For a brief moment, she could feel the entire landscape of Savage Territory and that the wolves would soon erupt in chaos and violence. Again.
Her gaze shot back to Fergus. She had a terrible premonition what was about to happen in his world would hinge on the decisions Fergus made over the next forty-eight hours.
