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If that was my yardstick, then it was a miracle I was as good as I was since I’d barely been a half-step above human when I’d last walked on the Earth. Somehow, dying had righted something inside me.
“Is there anything you can do?” I pleaded.
The woman shook her head, and any further conversation was cut off as the door swung open.
“The Alpha wishes to see you,” Xander announced. “I’ll stay with the she-wolf.” I guessed my reprieve was done.
“Then I’ll attend to my son,” the healer said in parting. My eyes went wide. She wasn’t just a pack elder, but the former Alpha female and grandmother to Xander, who now stood over me, his arms crossed in an imposing manner that I struggled to take seriously.
“Can I help you?” I said testily. He was justlookingat me.
“Not sure I trust you to be left alone, no matter what she says.”
I don’t trust anyone.I bit down on the words. I wanted to confide in someone, but I’d have to be delusional to do so with the Wind-Blood Heir.
Instead, I turned my gaze to the rest of the room, casting about for a conversation topic. “It’s not what I expected.”
It was more rustic than what we had in the Moon-Ghost village, but all I knew about the Wind-Bloods came from idle pack gossip and seeing them the one time at the full moon, gleaming in oil and bathing in moonlight.
He arched a brow at me. “Did you expect dirt floors and little huts?”
“Kinda,” I admitted, embarrassed. Wind-Bloods were fast, strong wolves, but primitive, according to Moon-Ghost sources. In contrast, the Fangs lived almost fully in human society, nearly suffocating their wolf sides. Only the Moon-Ghosts had achieved a proper balance.
By isolating ourselves and refusing to socialize with the other packs outside of the moon-matching ceremony.
In hindsight, that view was probably more than alittlebiased.
As if reading my thoughts, Xander rolled his eyes. “Just because we honor the old traditions doesn’t mean we’re savages.”
Maddox, the Moon-Ghost Alpha, had always derided them as bloodthirsty fanatics specifically. Yet, I knew with full confidence if Moon-Ghost had found a stray wolf on their lands, that wolf wouldn’t have survived the confrontation, let alone be brought back to get patched up.
I pressed a hand to my side, exploring the sensation. It went two ways: numb when I didn’t touch it and blistering, blindingly painful when I did. The movement caused the fur blanket on me to fall off my shoulder, catching Xander’s eyes.
Acutely aware of my nudity, I flushed. Shifters should be comfortable naked since the shift itself tended to destroy any clothing, but I’d missed that part of socialization growing up and was self-conscious. Xander’s gaze was proper shifter, not lingering, utterly unaffected by my exposed body. It was only a mild comfort.
“Could I possibly get some clothes?” I asked him.
“And ruin the view?” The taunt was empty of any sexual innuendo; his attention focused on my eyes. “Besides, you’d ruin my grandmother’s hard work by tearing your stitches if you tried to put anything on.”
I didn’t have the energy to mount an argument.
Xander moved across the room, dragging a chair from somewhere out of view towards me. He picked up a book and started to read, though I couldn’t look down to see just what he was looking at.
“Has it really been six months?” I asked after a few moments of silence, still trying to process.
“Since what?”
“The Choosing.” The night that had changed everything.
“Did you not have a calendar? Even us backwater Wind-Bloods have those,” he teased.
Though he clearly didn’t trust me—which was fair, since I was technically an intruder, even if it was unintentional—he wasn’t so bad. Maybe there was truth to what the pack elder had said about the wolves being on edge because I couldn’t reconcile his ruthless attack with his easy teasing and reading while he “guarded” his prisoner.
“No,” I answered. “Not where I was.”
He took that as an opportunity for an interrogation, but I had no answers to give him. I couldn’t tell him I was in Hell.
When that was a dead end, he shifted gears, asking me about Moon-Ghost. I gave some general information—I didn’t feel an overabundance of loyalty to my old pack, but I didn’t feel compelled to help Xander either. He tried to grill me for what I knew about Wind-Blood or even the Fangs, but it was clear he knew more than I did. Moon-Ghost had been more isolationist than I’d realized.
