Rebekka spared a glance at Caius’s mother. Pitying her at the same time she wished she could deliver a slap to turn Deidre’s attention to the child who needed her.
The neglect hadn’t just started. By Deidre’s rail-thin body and face, she hadn’t bothered to hunt or eat for weeks, if not longer.
Rebekka looked down at Caius. Aryck said, “If not for him, the others would be dead. Rubble gave way, creating a pit. They fell on an undetonated weapon. He went to their aid, first helping them to stable ground, then coming to camp. It was an amazing feat for one so young and badly injured.”
“I won’t let him die,” Rebekka promised, pouring the wash onto Caius’s legs.
Before she could use her hand to smooth it over the raw mess of exposed muscle and cartilage, Aryck’s was there, gently spreading it. This close to death or healing, there was little point in worrying about contamination.
She refilled the cup then emptied it, falling into an easy rhythm with Aryck as behind them the drums beat steadily, insistently.
The alpha joined them, taking a position next to Caius’s mother. He watched, remaining silent, his expression harsh. When they were nearly done bathing Caius’s front, he spoke directly to Rebekka, asked, “Does the wash work? Does it kill the thing eating him alive?”
A chill swept over her, the forerunner of a fear she refused to let take her, though it still revealed itself in fingers that fumbled, trembled slightly at the back of her neck as they removed the necklace.
Rebekka anticipated the icy bloom in her chest, but perhaps because she was surrounded by so many in desperate need of healing, it didn’t come when she handed the amulet to Aryck for safekeeping rather than risk it being stepped on or lost as she gave herself over to her gift.
She placed her hand on the cub’s raw torso, holding back her will to heal. The area beneath her fingers was streaked with infection, but compared to the hungry, buzzing energy coming from the cub’s back, it felt calm.
“Turn him,” she said, not wanting to tell them the wash was working until she could be sure.
Aryck and Phaedra repositioned Caius, exposing a back nearly as ravaged as his front. Rebekka placed only her fingertips on his skin.
There was no mistaking the source of the buzzing energy. Despite the lightness of her touch it felt as though she’d placed her hand in a swarm numbering in the millions.
Without her saying anything, Aryck took up the cup, dipping it in the wash and pouring it on the area around her fingers. Calm claimed the area instantly and it remained that way.
“It’s working,” she said, spreading the wash.
Caius began whimpering. His mother reacted to it, making low keening sounds until the alpha silenced her with a slap that brought her from her grief long enough to obey his command of silence.
When there was no trace of the hungry buzzing, Rebekka said, “It’s gone. I can begin now.”
Phaedra rose to her feet. “We check the others first, to make sure the things eating them are no longer present.”
Rebekka stood, appreciative of the older healer’s wisdom. The alpha accompanied them as they stopped next to each pallet and Rebekka touched the cub lying on it.
When they’d checked all of them, Rebekka turned, intending to go back to Caius. A man carrying a staff made of bones and wearing a Jaguar headdress that flowed into a furred, rosette-covered cape blocked her path.
Shaman
, she thought as black eyes bored into her as if he tried to see into the depths of her soul.
He pointed to a cub lying on a pallet near Caius. “He is closest to death.”
Rebekka accepted the shaman’s judgment. She went to the cub and knelt next to him.
Phaedra joined her. “They are all weak and heavily drugged. They won’t be able to shift to speed the healing process.”
Rebekka had expected as much. She placed her hands on the cub, closed her eyes, and brought her will to bear.
Her gift manifested in the same way it had when she healed Aryck, in a taking, as if she was nothing more than a tool, a conduit for a power that burned through her like fire, demanding a price for using it, pain that had her gasping, crying, as it felt as though her skin was being ripped from her body at the same time bones in her chest shattered.
There was no gentle guiding, no concentrated effort to eradicate infection and repair places where bone and soft tissue had been eaten away, no conscious choice to cover exposed muscle and sinew with skin and fur. But the pain lessened as those things happened. And as the pain diminished she became aware of drums beating, those in the small room seeming to echo elsewhere, in a place beyond her physical ability to hear them.
The phantom beats faded completely as the end of pain signaled the end of the healing. Exhaustion swept in. Rebekka managed to open her eyes in time to witness the joy on the faces of the cub’s parents as they pulled him in jaguar form onto their laps and held him to them in a hug.
Tears streamed down the mother’s face. The father swallowed several times and yet his voice was still clogged with emotion when he asked, “Can we take him home?”
“Yes,” Phaedra said, standing, helping Rebekka to her feet.
Even with the healer steadying her, Rebekka swayed. She had no sense of how much time had elapsed, only that her clothes clung to her, drenched in sweat.
It took tremendous effort to take up a position next to another cub. A cup was pressed into her hand. She drank the bitter stimulant, but its effects barely registered this time. When the cup was empty, Rebekka braced herself for the pain to come, then leaned forward, willing herself to somehow find enough strength to heal the remaining cubs.
Aryck forced himself to stay at Caius’s side as Rebekka was led from pallet to pallet. He kept his back to her, not wanting to see her pain, not wanting to see her exhaustion or the way her shirt clung to her, stirring possessive, protective instincts he was no longer positive belonged solely to the Jaguar.
He’d wanted to view her as a human using her gift only for the promise of wealth. He’d thought to use her physical weakness when compared to his kind to counter the Jaguar claim of mate. But those defenses had crumbled during their push to arrive in time, and disappeared completely when he’d seen what it cost her to heal. She was no less dedicated than Phaedra.
Caius’s whimpers signaled greater and greater pain. “Stay with us,” he murmured, afraid the cub’s Earth-bound souls would give up this world and join the eternal one despite Nahuatl’s chants and the beat of the pack’s drums.
Koren crouched beside Aryck, placing a hand on Caius’s forehead, as if he too felt the cub’s tenuous hold on life and was offering his strength, his will, to the boy’s. Eyelids opened, holding fear and pain, an unspoken plea for release.
“Fight the call of the ancestors,” Koren said. “The others have been healed, you will be as well.”
Rebekka joined them, so weak her eyes were barely open as Phaedra helped her take up a position next to Caius. The Jaguar soul rose in Aryck, demanding the human form act, using arms the beast didn’t have to lift Rebekka and take her to the cabin that was also Jaguar den.
When Aryck refused to act, claws raked through his chest. He ground his teeth together, that and the clenching of his hands into fists the only external sign of the battle being waged inside him.
A sharp glance from his father made him redouble his efforts to suppress the Jaguar. The Jaguar fought back when Rebekka began the healing with a soft cry of pain, her continuous trembling sending it into a frenzy.
The only escape was to stand and walk to the other side of the room. Leaving Phaedra’s home would be better. Aryck knew it, and yet he couldn’t force himself through the doorway.
He concentrated instead on the beat of the drums. Watched from a distance as inch by inch Caius was healed, his skin slowly reappearing to cover exposed muscle and bone until no trace of the destruction was left.
Rebekka collapsed and Aryck was by her side instantly, lifting her into his arms without it being a conscious decision. Phaedra motioned toward a small room. “Put her on my bed. I will make her comfortable.”
The Jaguar growled in denial, so loud in Aryck’s mind that when he felt his father’s eyes boring into him he was afraid the sound had escaped. He braced, expecting to hear a sharp mental command along with a private snarl of displeasure and warning.
Help came from an unexpected source. Nahuatl said, “I made the house behind mine ready for the healer, as the ancestors bid me to do when they showed me her face and gave me her name.”
Daivat’s house. The son made outcast.
Aryck’s sweat chilled on his skin. The threat held in the reminder of Daivat’s fate helped drive the Jaguar’s desires back, caging them in bars of ice, though it didn’t force the two Earth-bound souls into a harmonious weave.
“Take her there,” Koren said.
And come to my home immediately afterward.
“Phaedra will accompany you so she can make the healer comfortable.”
Aryck didn’t dare respond mentally for fear the Jaguar would choose that moment to issue a challenge. He gave a slight nod, accepting his father’s spoken command as well as the one sent privately.
He left with Rebekka in his arms. Phaedra joined him, carrying a basin and a soft rag.
Daivat’s home was similar to his own. One room with a large bed made of piled woven blankets and bison pelts, a place used more to experience the sensual pleasures that came with coupling in human form than to sleep in.
The Jaguar’s growl rumbled through Aryck as he placed Rebekka on the bedding. There would have been a fight for dominance had the blankets and pelts smelled of another male. But Nahuatl had seen to them. They smelled of sunshine and rye grass.
Phaedra set the basin down after filling it with water from a bucket left ready. “I’ll tend her now,” she said, her hands going to the front of Rebekka’s shirt, efficiently undoing the first several buttons.
Aryck couldn’t look away as the material of the shirt parted in a small revelation of flesh. The sight of it was enough to make his cock harden, and in his mind he continued freeing the buttons, peeling the sweat-soaked fabric away and stripping Rebekka of it completely so his hands could take over the task of bathing her, turning it from impersonal service to sensual exploration.
Phaedra glanced up then, spearing him with knowing eyes. He turned and left, as much to keep from exposing the battle he was waging with himself as to avoid her ordering him to go.
Outside a flash of red drew his eye to a cardinal taking flight. He smiled at seeing it. The bright color of its feathers reminded him of the beads on Rebekka’s necklace.
The amulet was a barely discernable weight in his pocket, yet the satisfaction that purred through him with the feel of it there was immense.
The Jaguar’s—at having something of hers while they were separated, at having a reason to return to her side as soon as possible.
The man’s—at having been entrusted with the necklace in the first place.
Aryck took the first step toward the alpha’s home. Reluctant in a way he hadn’t experienced since he was a child summoned for a misdeed.
The smell of cooking meat greeted him.
Pork
, Aryck thought, following the scent of it to the fire pit in back of the cabin.
His stomach rumbled and his mouth watered, both reminding him of how long he’d gone without food. Koren gestured to a log carved vaguely into the shape of a chair. “Sit.”
It wasn’t quite a command and yet it wasn’t an invitation either. Aryck sat as his father turned a slab of meat over on a salvaged piece of metal grate.
Grease hit the fire underneath and sizzled. Hunger pangs, a much less painful version of the Jaguar’s clawed insistence, raked through Aryck’s belly.
“The healer?” Koren asked.
Aryck tensed despite himself, silently cursed at reacting when he realized his father had been surreptitiously watching for it. “She sleeps. Phaedra bathes her.”
He put indifference into his voice, though heat throbbed through his cock as he imagined Rebekka naked on the furs, her eyes beckoning him to join her. Her body a temptation he couldn’t resist when she rolled to her hands and knees, calling him to her with a sultry glance over her shoulder.
Aryck nearly rose to pace. Would have if not for his father.
This time there was no mistaking the origin of desire. The fantasy of Rebekka wanting him to cover her wasn’t an image forced on him by the Jaguar.
Koren prodded the meat, letting the silence build between them. Aryck clenched his jaw to keep from filling the space between them with words, grateful his father intended to hold this conversation orally instead of mentally, where suppressing the Jaguar might become impossible.
Koren transferred slabs of pork to metal plates, handing one of them, along with a knife and fork, to Aryck. They ate, the silence continuing, moving into a comfortable lull until all the meat had disappeared and the plates were set aside.
“The healer is not what I expected,” Koren finally said, leaning forward and placing his forearms on his thighs in a relaxed pose, though the air between them was laced with edges. “For all her human frailty there is strength at her core.”
Aryck acknowledged the comment with a shrug, as if neither the strength nor the weakness mattered to him. By the narrowing of his father’s eyes, he knew it was the wrong gesture to make.
Koren stood, abruptly shedding the feign of casualness. He paced, as Aryck had wanted to earlier. Ten steps forward, then back again to reclaim his seat and shock Aryck by saying, “She reminds me of your mother.”
Their eyes met. His father’s expression hardened. “I understand the attraction of a female who needs a strong male to keep her safe. Your mother preferred the human form but even when she wore fur, she was no fighter. Her nature was too gentle. If she’d been pure animal instead of Were, she would never have survived to breeding age.”