[PICTURED: A lone, soot-stained page suspended in glass. The panel is several feet tall and the first thing to greet you as you step out of the darkness into a room of color, light, and soaring ceilings. The panel marks the end of the first half of the exhibit, a winding, darkened tunnel. It is the centerpiece in a sprawling space overflowing with paintings of people in motion, blond-haired children frolicking in grass, polar bears asleep in snowdrifts, and lively self-portraits of the artist at work in her studio, smiling into a mirror.]
ChapterThirty-Two
It was a long,exhausting journey from the border to Minneapolis, but Josephine did her best to keep up with the battalion and make herself useful. It was that desperation to be useful that kept her from total collapse. It was better to dwell on the fear that they might suddenly find her too burdensome and leave her by the roadside than let herself drown in worry for her mate, terror at being surrounded by predators, and the complicated web of grief and fury that clung to her in the days after their escape.
Despite the mens’ protest, Josephine ran herself ragged as she nursed her mate and assisted with what few camp chores she could. After two days, it felt like all she had left was adrenaline and anxiety. Paradoxically, her industriousness appeared to make the men pay more attention to her, which in turn increased her worry.
All the men were kind to her in their own, rough ways. Though it was clear their manners were rusty — and their general disregard for clothing shocking — Josephine found herself catered to like an honored guest.
Extra portions of food were allotted to her, much of it from the rescued stores of the homestead, one soldier or another asked her every hour if she needed something, and frequent breaks were called for fear of overexerting her. Many of the men skated around her, eyes wide and mumbled apologies on their lips, while others sought her out as she attempted to help cook meals, scrub laundry, and care for her sick mate.
Several of the men protested when she immediately put her head down and got to work, citing her minor injuries and captivity. They had no such compunction with her mother, though. Evangeline was hysterical more often than she was not, but upon learning of her part in Josephine’s captivity, Lee had set her to mending every button hole, tear, and frayed hem of the battalion’s uniforms. She existed at the fringe of the camp, always guarded in case she tried to flee.
Evangeline attempted to speak to her daughter often, usually pitched at a wail, but Josephine didn’t pity her enough to indulge her. Seeing as they did not have jurisdiction over what happened in other territories, Lee said that Evangeline would be charged in the court of the Packlands for unlawful detainment of a shifter. It would be enough to see her rot in a cell for the rest of her days.
The beast would have preferred to let her mother starve to death in the dense, snow-dusted forest they cut through, but dying in a cell would have to do.
Still, the stark difference in how they treated her and Evangeline made her nervous. A part of her feared that all the special treatment would backfire. Would they grow sick of her sooner because they gave her more than her fair share? Lee, the large, dark-skinned man who apparently commanded the rowdy band of shifters, waved away her concerns when she whispered them over the evening meal.
“It’s natural,”he told her, nodding toward the two wolfish men, Rafael and Miles, who shadowed her every step. They were sitting not three feet away on an overturned log, their beaten metal plates in their laps and their eyes half-lidded as they stared into the fire. Both men had attempted to give her a portion of their meals.
“You don’t know how nice it is to be around a submissive after so long without,”Lee had continued as he swiped a corner of a chalky biscuit through what was left of his mash. “It reminds us that gentle things exist. That’s good for the soul. I’d be immensely grateful if you let them coddle you for a bit longer.”
Josephine had never been coddled in her life. She wasn’t sure she knew how to be.
But as the days of hard travel began to bleed into one another, made all the longer by her worry over her feverish mate, she began to notice how the men gathered around her, drifting closer as if pulled by a current. Faces were cleaner. Hair was combed. Even the ones who rarely spoke to her looked more at ease.
In the cell, Otto told her that packs gave all the power to submissives. She hadn’t really believed him. Now she thought she understood.
Just her presence, harried and afraid as she was, reminded the scarred men that they were people, not simply soldiers in a never-ending war. She became a symbol of the families they missed, the normalcy and peace of home. When they cared for her, they were really caring for the loved ones they missed.
By the time Otto’s fever broke and he finally regained consciousness, she had begun to settle into her role. It wasn’t easy being surrounded by so many strange, dominant men used to living rough, but they managed to find common ground.
For his part, Otto was alternately pleased and vexed to find her so well integrated into the battalion. It took him another day to regain enough strength to walk freely around the camp, and when he did, he noticed what she had: that the men flocked to her like flies to honey.
“They’re pulling at your damn apron strings,” he muttered one night as he helped her prepare dinner over the fire. His gaze, almost constantly lit with the shifter glow, flicked to Miles, who was casually leaning against the carriage, watching her with what Lee calledpuppy eyes.
It was with great relief that she concluded that her mate’s health was doing much better. For days she’d feared he wouldn’t wake at all, that perhaps the lyssa had been too much for him, but his strength returned in leaps and bounds.
Almost as soon as he was free of bed rest, he’d shifted once more, dispelling both of their fears that his shift in the barn was a fluke.
She cried again when that massive, white-furred creature pressed her into the dirt to run his nose over every inch of her. Josephine didn’t know what miracle allowed him to retain the ability to shift, but she fervently refused to question it. Every day she felt gratitude like a kick in her chest — a hard blow of feeling so intense, it knocked the wind out of her.
Otto hadn’t lost his soul. He didn’t hate her. Their future extended before them, bright and fragile. There was no long, constricting tunnel of terror anymore. It had been destroyed as surely as the homestead itself.
Even so, Ottowascertainly infected. When not lit with the glow of an imminent shift, one of his eyes was dark brown and the other a pale green. He claimed that they were once plain brown. Josephine had of course tartly informed him that brown was a lovely, rich color of infinite variations. There was nothingplainabout brown eyes, and indeed, she preferred the brown one to the green.
“Must be difficult,” Rafael had teased, “having a mate so passionate about one’s eye color, eh?”
Otto, slinging his arm around her waist to drag her against his puffed-up chest, replied, “If you thinkthat’spassionate, you should see how she is about the rest of me.”
As the days passed, he claimed other symptoms as well — a quicker temper, restlessness at night, and increased strength.
When the back left wheel of the carriage became misaligned, he had no trouble lifting the entire thing to allow Collin, Lee’s second, to hammer it back into place.
Though he put on a brave face, most likely to ease her worry, she knew he struggled in those hard days of travel. On edge from the constant threat of enemy soldiers even after they abandoned the carriage and began cutting through rougher country, he also struggled with what he called “the mating fever.”
After stopping for dinner late one night, she noticed that he was particularly tense, his shoulders stiff and his eyes down as he peeled potatoes for their stew. Josephine smoothed her suddenly sweaty hands on her skirt. The glow of the fire and the attention of the slowly gathering men made her face hot. “Am I doing something wrong?”
