Chapter 1
REGINA
The healer'sname is Kara.
She's been with the coven for over a decade, her magic specialized in mending flesh and bone. And right now, Kara is unwrapping the bandages from my face with the enthusiasm of someone handling radioactive waste.
"Hold still," she mutters even though I haven't moved. Haven't been able to move much at all since they dragged me out of the fucking basement.
The infection set in two days ago. Werewolf wounds don't heal clean. There's something about the cursed bacteria that gets into the tissue. Because supernatural gangrene isexactlywhat I need right now.
Fuckingthanks, universe.
Kara's been fighting it with poultices and healing spells, but even her considerable skill can only do so much. The fever is making my skin burn, my left eye is swollen shut, and the flesh around it so tight and hot it feels like it's going to split open.
The bandages peel away with a sticky sound that makes my stomach lurch. I can't see her expression from this angle, but I hear the sharp intake of breath.
"Worse than yesterday," she says, more to herself than to me.
I try to speak, but my throat is sandpaper. "How bad?"
She doesn't answer. Just reaches for fresh gauze and a jar of something that smells like rotting herbs.
"Kara. How bad is it?"
Her hands pause. When she finally looks at me, there's no sympathy in her weathered face. Just cold assessment.
"You're lucky Kyle hasn't thrown you out on the street." She resumes her work, pressing the poultice against my wounds with more force than necessary. I bite back a scream. "Going down to the basement. Touching things that don't belong to you. Do you have any idea what you've done?"
"I didn't know?—"
"You didn'tthink," she snaps. "The Council has been sniffing around our wards for weeks. If they trace that werewolf back to us, if they find out what we were planning—" She stops herself, jaw tight. "That will be on your head, Regina.Allof it."
The words burrow under my skin, joining the infection already rotting me from the inside out. She's right. I was fucking reckless. I heard the sounds of something suffering and I acted out of compassion.
And now I'm paying for it.
"I was trying to help it," I mutter.
"It was a weapon." Kara finishes wrapping the fresh bandages with brutal efficiency. "A tool for a ritual that would have benefited the entire coven. And you ruined it. For what? Some misguided sense of compassion?" She snorts as if the mere concept is pointless. "Compassion gets witches killed."
She gathers her supplies and heads for the door without a backward glance.
"Rest. I'll check on you tomorrow. If the infection hasn't spread further."
The door shuts behind her, and I'm alone with the silence and the pain and the crushing weight of my own monumental fuck up.
I shouldn't get up. Kara would probably kill me herself if she knew, and I probably shouldn't touch the bandages, either, even though it's the poultice that really matters here. But something drives me to move, some masochistic need to see how bad it is myself.
My legs shake as I push myself upright, the room tilting dangerously. I grip the bedpost until the spinning stops, then shuffle toward the small mirror mounted on the dresser.
The bandages are fresh, white gauze wrapped around my head like a mummy's shroud. My hands tremble as I reach up and begin to peel them away.
The first strip comes off easily enough. The second pulls at something, and I have to bite down on my lip to keep from screaming. By the third, I've stopped caring about the pain.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
The werewolf's claws carved a jagged starburst pattern across the left side of my face, radiating outward from my eye. The flesh is swollen, angry red and streaked with black infection, the edges of the wounds puckered and raw. My eye—what I can see of it through the swelling—is clouded over.
