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Chapter Ten
Trace
My eyes were gummed shut. Probably with the vomit I’d been spewing since I could remember. Pain seared deep into my bones, not even bothering with the muscles that had probably combusted hours, even days, ago. I’d begged Finton to leave me behind, once he’d improved from the ball of misery I’d dragged into the tent. We’d both been sick but it hit him harder first.
Images flashed through my brain, daylight and night and gritty snow blinding us both and wind blowing so hard, it made it nearly impossible to move forward. We seemed to leapfrog over each other feeling better and worse, one of us always having just enough strength to keep us on to the next stop. But the weather had not held, and then, the snow buried us. I’d had just enough awareness to recognize that but not enough to have a clue how we got from there to here. Wherever here was.
“W-water,” I choked, dry lips cracking at my attempt to speak. I had the worst taste in my mouth. Like black licorice and pine and charcoal and something bitter. Whatever this disease was, it made for some pretty horrific-tasting vomit.
“He said something!” A female voice came from not too far away. Female? Where was Finton? I fought to open my eyes, to see where I was, but they still wouldn’t really work. “Oh, you poor thing, you have all kinds of gunk in your lashes.” She was closer now, and a warm cloth swiped across my eyes. “That’s what happens when you sleep all night and all day. You’ve had your mate frantic worried about you.”
The cloth moved over my eyes again.
“Try now. Easy, you don’t want to yank those long dark lashes.” Humor tinted her voice, but I couldn’t imagine what was funny in this situation. At all. And I wanted to see this person who found my predicament to be a joke.
On the count of three. One. Two. Three.I used more strength than I would have to lift a boulder just to raise the lid of one eye. Only to be blinded by a lamp directly in front of me on some kind of table. Eye shut again.
“Trace, come on. You’ve had enough of a nap for today. Open your eyes and say hello to our new mate, Cerine.”
“I am not your mate. You’re married to each other and have just been through a great trauma. You’re probably just feeling a connection to me because I helped you to feel better.”
“And your wolf didn’t recognize us?”
Silence.
“Cerine, why are you denying what you know to be true? I am not bonding to you because you’re a healer.”
I was starting to get the impression this conversation had been going on for a while. I wanted to ask them to catch me up, but I’d had enough trouble asking for water.
Which I still didn’t get.
I cleared my throat, which wasn’t as dry as I thought it should have been but bad enough. I forced both eyes open. and took in the scene around me. While I was out of it, I’d somehow arrived or been brought to a smallish cabin where a fire blazed in both a woodstove and a fireplace both. My mate was washing dishes, and the woman was mixing herbs in a teapot. She lifted a kettle from the woodstove and poured steaming water into the pot.
From my reclined position, I watched them go about their tasks, moving about each other as smoothly as if they’d done it for years. I didn’t need my wolf whispering inside me that she was our mate. Or Finton telling me who she was. Oh, I hadn’t known her name, of course, but I recognized our connection.
Cerine, she of the beautiful name, had eyes just as beautiful. At the moment, they were flashing because Finton was insisting that she was our mate, that she belonged to us, and even in my semi-brain-dead state, I could recognize what a mistake it was to say that. As soon as he had, her back went rigid; those indigo eyes flashed in the lamplight. Our mate would never be the kind of partner who wanted her mates to be in charge of her or make her decisions. She might be ours. She was ours, but she belonged to herself. I waited for a break in their friendly—I hoped it was friendly—discussion, but when they continued without a pause, I cleared my throat and said, “For a wolf with two mates, I’m awfully thirsty.”
