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This wasn’t normal. This was too intense to be normal. All this, just because he was an alpha? Was this some side effect of Eli’s attraction potion?
“H-here,” I said. “This plant.”
I reached out and grabbed its stalk, and a snap of pain jolted through my hand. Blood trickled down my finger. It was an embarrassing mistake that even Othos whelplings wouldn’t have made. I should’ve seen the tiny spines, but I was distracted.
I quickly stuck my finger in my mouth.
“Are you alright?” Ari asked. “Let me see the wound.”
“I’m alright,” I said defensively.
“How should we take this?” Ari said, examining the plant.
I shifted out a claw and ran it up and down the length of the stalk to remove the spines, then plucked it from the ground.
“Here,” I said, handing it to him.
As he took it, a droplet of blood formed on my fingertip. Ari froze and stared.
“It’s fine,” I said, sucking on the wound.
He sniffed the air and then sniffed the stem of the plant. It was stained red—a bit of my blood had gotten onto it.
“Ari, what—”
He interrupted me with his palm and inhaled a long, deep whiff of the stained patch.
“Is this some kind of weird fetish?” I asked.
“Istil, quiet,” he said.
“Do you need your ears to smell? What are you doing?”
“I need to concentrate.”
I stood there, arms folded, irritated.
Ari held the stem so close to his nose it was almost touching it. He closed his eyes, and his forehead knotted into a frown. “Let me see your finger,” he said firmly.
“I don’t want you to see my finger,” I said, holding my hand protectively against my chest. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Sea dragons have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell in the water. We can smell a familiar scent in the ocean from miles away. It probably came from our ancient past as hunters. And my father developed a technique to train this sense so that we could use it in our work to detect illnesses and other things.”
“Am I sick?”
He held out his palm. “Please show me your hand.”
He pulled a square of cloth from his robe and dabbed the blood from my finger, then held it to his nose.
“Well, what is it?” I asked. “Am I sick?”
“Who else are you seeing on the island?” he asked.
I frowned. “What kind of question is that? I’m not seeinganyone. Even if I were, why would I tell you?”
“Istil,” he started to say, then stopped himself. “No, you’re right, it’s none of my business who you fuck.”
“It certainly is not,” I said, even more confused than before. “Anyway, I’m not lying. I’ve had awful luck since coming here.”
