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Sal rose, crossing to the fire to check on the kettle. “It was part of my service to the Order. To care for the young ones who were…donated like me.”
“They were lucky to have you,” I said. “My mother passed when I was eight.”
“I know,” Sal said.
I blinked up at her. “How?”
“I grew up hearing stories of Petit Rouge. The villages she saved, the monsters she killed—”
“The one she married,” I said, too tired to disguise the bitterness in my voice.
Sal fished the kettle from the fire with the fireplace poker and set it on the stones next to the copper tub. “So, what they say about him is true?”
“Aye,” I said. “But it’s my mother they always blamed.”
In the cosseted confines of Caisteal Abernathy, I thought my father something like a king. Mainly because the visitors to our home treated him that way. The awakening I had received after Mark and I left hadn’t just been rude. It had been brutal. However shifters within the xenophobic clan-based outpost of Scotland thought about my father, the rest of the world viewed him as the decadent, indulgent, philandering embarrassment to werewolf kind.
A traitor who mated with a woman famous for hunting among their numbers.
And I had committed the grievous sin of arriving on the planet looking exactly like her.
“I’ll help you sit up, then we’ll get you to the chair,” Sal said.
I glanced toward the end of the bed. While I had been mining my memory, she’d moved it next to the tub. The prospect of making it even that far felt like an impossibility.
“Can’t you just call Bernie or whatever his name was to magic this mess off me?” I asked, more out of desperation than anything.
“Seeing as it was probably magic that put it on you in the first place, I’m going to say no.” She stood next to the bed, the flickering candlelight making the shapes on her arms seem to dance.
“What makes you think it was magic?” I asked.
“Because if one of them had physically been in the room, you’d have scented them.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that virtually all my heightened senses took their leave of me when I slept. Which I typically did with the conviction of a corpse.
Standing over me, her foxlike features took on a rabid edge. “I find out which of those shits did this, I’ll have his heart for a hat.”
“There!” I said excitedly. “Your eyes just did the thing again!”
“It was the candle,” Sal said.
“Ballocks,” I said. “I know what you’re doing, and it’s shyte.”
Warm, strong fingers wrapped around my ankles, gently tugging my body toward the end of the bed. “What am I doing?”
“That thing what men do when they try to convince you that you didn’t see what you actually saw or what you heard isn’t what they said until you begin to think you’ve gone mad.”
She leaned over me, the pillow beneath my neck shifting as she worked her hand beneath my skull. “Let me support your head.”
Her face was closer to mine than it had been since we met outside the inn. Her lips parted on a warm breath that feathered my cheeks. “Ready?”
“Aye,” I said, not meaning it in the slightest.
Sal lifted my head and neck as tenderly as I’d watched mothers scoop their bairns from a cradle, aided only marginally by efforts.
“There we are,” she said. “Think you can stand?”
Now that at least my torso was vertical, the weight atop my head felt more manageable. “I think so,” I said.
