Casting me a sly glance, Vanessa says, “Did you know that our squeaky clean SC used to run an Underground clinic off of Carolina Street? Right next to the brewery.”
I’d heard rumors aplenty about the sovereign’s shocking marriage to a witch, but not that. “Really? I had no idea.”
“Mostly she treated Weres,” she explains, a certain fondness in her tone. “I never went to her, but I heard through the grapevine that she never asked for payment or tried to report numbers to the health board. Just healed what and who she could. I even heard that Angelique counts her as an honorary member of her pack.”
I wonder just how far up my eyebrows can go. “And now she’s using her position to help more people.”
“Looks like.”
I note her thoughtful expression as the plane begins its descent into the cottony clouds obscuring Seattle’s skyline. “You don’t seem too happy.”
“I am,” she assures me. Then she shakes her head with a small sigh. Glossy blonde hair swings, and I see several people’s heads turn to watch her. Even on a cramped plane, Vanessa shines. “I’m just worried that she hasn’t accounted for how stubborn Weres are. It’s hard to win our trust. You start sending in committees and healers and paperwork… I don’t know that it’ll be as easy to help as she thinks.”
“How would you suggest she do it, then?”
Vanessa considers the question for several moments. At last, she says, “You have to win the animal, and you can only do that one on one.”
ChapterFourteen
An excerptfrom the diaries of Josephine Wyeth generously provided by the Wyeth-Beornson family to the Fairmont Museum of Art:
April 4th, 1860-
My father’s ambition, as far as I can discern, has always been to create a more perfect being. Sometimes I wonder if he would have had the same goal if I were not so dreadfully imperfect.
Both my parents are witches. My mother comes from a distinguished, if relatively minor, Coven. My father is famed for his intellect and his sigilwork. It was merely the whims of the gods that gave their only surviving child not a flicker of magic.
He used to tell me that the experiments were to see if he could somehow fix what’s broken in me. Every serum, injection, or slice was endurable when I believed they might result in retrieving that lost part of me.
Nothing succeeded, of course.
I thought he’d given up, but this morning over breakfast he told me he’d found something new in a vampire. He said that it is a quite remarkable venom, and that he’d distilled it in the preserved brain matter of a deceased shifter. He said that he firmly believed this is the cure for my ailment, my perverse lack of ability that so shames him and my mother.
As much as I wish to have hope, I do not trust him. I do not trustanyone.A man who wanted the best for me would not shackle me, nor put bars on the windows. I know that he is cruel and that he cares for me as much as he cares for his lab animals.
Perhaps less. At least they have proven useful over the years.
ChapterFifteen
In general,Otto liked to think of himself as a man who moved with the flow of life rather than against it. He preferred to laugh rather than fight. He did not see any point in wasting the limited breaths he had on Burden’s Earth worrying over things he couldn’t change.
His brothers and sisters had always called him affable, a pleaser. Of course, like any dominant shifter, he was prone to fits of temper, but they passed as quickly as they came on. It was the shifter way to resolve hard feelings with a punch or two before moving on like the dispute never happened.
Animals were frank. They saw the world in the facts immediately discernible to them and acted according to prior experience. Shifters, though vastly more complicated than animals, tended to have a similar mindset.
They were stubborn, decisive, and lived for the moment. When they made a choice based on what they could sense, oninstinct,they were damn near immovable from that choice.
Common wisdom held that it was the animal part of a shifter that decided on a mate. It was the animal’s need that sparked the mating fever. It was the animal in control when the fuse of those instincts lit.
As someone rarely provoked to any strong feeling by his animal, Otto had always thought that was a bit of bunk — right up until he saw Josephine.
Even through the haze of drugs, the animal knew she was different. It ached to be near her. It roared at the injustice of being kept from her. Itwantedher.
The man was a bit slower to catch up, but he got there soon enough.
A part of him thought he might have dreamed his previous encounter with the winsome creature. If it wasn’t for the stolen ribbon he caressed in her absence, he might have believed it.
After at least a full day in the cell, his mind was much clearer. His memory was a bit foggy, full of patchy recollections of being washed with cold water and being measured all over, but he was certain she’d said she would be back.
