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“He was really a boy. He’d gone because he wanted to be a man.”
“But she saved him?”
“Yes.”
“Every detail Cassie. I need to know everything you saw.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “Eliza gave the victim some herbs to lower his fever, then used another pipet, smaller, and put the fresh Rakta into his tongue.”
To Jelani, Isaiah said, “How did you administer it?”
“Same way.” Jelani frowned and shook his head. “How could she know unless she saw it or someone told her?” Both of which were unlikely.
Questions Isaiah would worry about later. “How much did she give?”
“About a teaspoon,” Cassie said.
Isaiah looked at Jelani.
“That’s about what we gave.”
“She had to have done something different,” Isaiah said.
“She did.” Cassie tipped her head at Jelani. “Eliza just gave it drop by drop over the course of weeks. She said the slower, the better.”
“Why the tongue?”
Jelani was the one who answered. “The lingual artery in the tongue makes it easier to get it into the bloodstream. Shooting bite victims with an arrow defeated the purpose of trying to cure them. Once the Rakta was in them, they quit healing. Another arrow would have killed them.” Desired results in battle, but not if they wanted the recipient to live.
“He showed signs of healing at first,” Cassie said. “Each dose, it got slower and slower and she had to pack the wound with a poultice to keep it from getting infected. She said that’s how she knew it was working.”
“He didn’t Phase,” Jelani said it like a challenge.
“No. The bite healed and there was no mark from the Sarvari. Within a few days, he was up and moving around. Once he was well enough to go home, she let him but told him he had to come back every day. If he missed a dose, he’d become a cur, and it would be sudden and violent and without warning. He’d kill his family and anyone else around him.”
“How long did you stay with her?” Isaiah asked because her family had to have worried.
Cassie pushed back a ringlet that had escaped her braid. It didn’t stay in place, and she did it again. “My mother was a matriarch. She lived with a female pack. She was very fertile and could carry as many as six.”
“Damn.” The most Isaiah had ever seen born was four.
“I’m sure you can guess, she was very, very spoiled. She enjoyed making the babies with the betas, but she didn’t like caring for them, and the egg-bearers who suckled them were overtaxed, so the omegas got stuck with raising us.”
“What about a pack?” Young born to a Matriarch pack were usually taken by mixed-gender packs by the age of three.
“Sona was a red and no other pack wanted him. Since they didn’t want him, I refused to go.” As an egg-bearer, Cassie could stay with the matriarch pack when others would have had to leave with a new pack. “Neither one of us ever saw a Cana until the day we took a wolf.” Because Matriarch packs were about producing young, not guarding a Cana.
“A pack would have taken you as a leader in a heartbeat.” An egg-bearer would have been royalty, especially if she could whelp.
“Like I said, I wanted to be with my brother. He was never missed, and I was good at sneaking off. We visited Eliza every chance we got. We liked her, and she liked us. She asked us questions about our people and we told her.”
Jelani growled under his breath. “That was stupid.”
“She just wanted to learn about us. She had no desire to hurt anyone.”
“She poisoned your brother.”
“She’d been trying to poison a cur so she could study it. She saved Sona. She saved several people. She wouldn’t have done that if she’d been a bad person.”
