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Jelani looked at Isaiah, then Cassie. “Who was it?”
“A woman named Eliza.” She shrugged. “The people in her village called her a witch and were afraid of her until she treated someone and he survived.”
“And you saw her do this?” Isaiah hated how desperate he sounded.
“Not him, but later ones, yes.”
“How?” Jelani said. “We weren’t allowed anywhere near where humans lived by then.”
For the safety of Varu, Clan leaders had enacted a law forbidding them within a mile of human territories.
“Sona had just taken a wolf, and he was struggling with control,” Cassie said. “His Fenrir was red, and you know how they are.”
Besides being exceedingly rare, they were exceedingly feral. Varu often marked their appearance as a sign of turmoil or violent change. Their strength for leadership threatened some Alphas. But few Varu with red wolves had an interest in taking over a pack.
Cassie dropped her gaze. “I would send out my wolf so I could keep an eye on him. I was worried he might do something stupid like kill livestock.” A crime that could bring humans carrying weapons and demanding compensation. “One night he found a carcass. He’d been running for a long time and the wolf was hungry. It never occurred to him it was poisoned. When I found him, he was in horrible pain.”
“He didn’t heal?” Poisons weren’t normally effective for very long.
“No.”
“If he’d been running that long and was that new, he’d probably overtaxed himself and couldn’t,” Jelani said.
“He was a red.” Isaiah had only heard stories about their constitution, and it exceeded even a beta.
“Either way,” Cassie said, “I couldn’t move him without making him scream, and I was afraid someone would hear, so I stayed there. The woman found us around sunrise. She said her name was Eliza, and she knew how to make Sona better.”
“She’d baited the meat.” Isaiah’s wolf emerged from his shadow and sat beside him. Cassie’s wolf materialized at her feet with its head on its paws. The two Fenrir watched each other.
“I realized that later, but right then I was too scared to refuse her offer to help.” Cassie glanced at her wolf. It looked up at her before flickering out. “Eliza had a little boy living with her. He might have been five. I’m not sure. He was a Greater Alpha.”
Isaiah stood straighter. “Where did he come from?”
“Eliza said a man, who’d just married a woman, hung her for infidelity. Eliza watched her execution. After the man left with the people who helped him, Eliza retrieved her body from the tree, opened the woman’s belly, and took out the infant. She said she pretended the baby was hers, and because she lived so far away from the others, no one ever questioned it. She called him Luri.”
“She knew what he was?” Isaiah wasn’t sure what kind of answer he hoped for.
“The pregnant woman had come to her for help months before. She knew the man she was betrothed to would kill her when he found out she wasn’t a virgin on their wedding night. Eliza tried to help her abort the baby, but the herbs that worked for other women didn’t work for her. She said Luri shouldn’t have lived because his mother was barely four months along.” Human gestation periods were never predictable when they carried Varu. “He was very small but fully developed. As far as she knew, all Varu were born in pairs.”
Except for Greater Alphas. They were the most likely to pass for human children.
“But she figured it out,” Isaiah said.
Cassie nodded. “He survived his birth despite his size and didn’t get sick like normal babies. When he was older and fell and scraped his hands and knees, he healed in a day at most. Eliza said she’d done some reading, asked a few people the right questions and figured out he was most likely a Greater Alpha.
“I don’t know how she learned about the Rakta, but while I was there, a family came offering her money to make their son better. He was the only survivor of a militia hunting down a Sarvari. He’d been bitten.”
“How did she get the Rakta from Luri?” The gland rested behind the heart. It was dangerous to tap it in an adult Varu with a wolf. No one would have dared do it to a child.
“She had a silver pipet with a tube made from sheep’s gut. He lay on his stomach, and she went through his back.”
“That’s impossible. How could she have known where the heart was or how deep to go and not puncture it?”
“Apparently, Luri’s mother wasn’t the first body she’d cut open. She said the dead had a lot to teach the living. There were skulls, bones, and drawings of organs in her home.”
“She’d been dissecting the bodies,” Jelani said. “It’s amazing she didn’t get caught.”
“The man who’d been bitten?” Isaiah said.
