“I did not speak the whole truth to Neil earlier, when you two overheard us,” she said. “He thinks we have an envoy on the way up the mountainside to exchange words with the gryphons. But I couldn’t fully trust him. I didn’t know if he was telling the truth, or if the beasts would even listen to us. We thought it was more likely they would kill an envoy for trespassing on their lands without hearing a word we had to say.”
“So nobody’s on their way there right now?” I asked.
“No.”
That filled me with the slightest relief.
“So what’s the point of all this, then?” Ramsay growled. His grip around me tightened.
The Madame examined his body again, seeing where the deep wounds had simply vanished like they were never there at all.
She spoke again. “I did think it was likely that the beasts--these gryphons--would react more positively to the pregnant omega himself, without a human envoy present. We would send him alone with the message that, in exchange for his life, the human settlement would remain untouched.”
“So you were going to sacrifice Matheson anyway?” Ramsay snarled.
The Madame didn’t react to the wolf rising up in his voice. Her hand, sitting on top of the chest, curled into a loose fist. “Yes. It wouldn’t be the first time we sacrificed a wolf’s life for our own. But before you get angry, think about this. We are only human. We have no shifter form, no strength or speed like you. Our numbers are smaller compared to both wolf and winged beast. We have nothing but our wits. We are only trying to survive. What would you do in our case?”
Ramsay’s lip was still curled into a snarl, but he said nothing.
The Madame didn’t wait for an answer to her difficult question. “Pregnant wolf, tell me. Are you truly a healer?”
“Yes,” I said firmly, gesturing to Ramsay’s bare chest. “You can see the evidence for yourself.”
She nodded. “Then I have a different proposition for you, if you’ll hear me.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Ramsay glare at her, but I was willing to listen.
“I’ll hear you,” I said.
The Madame let out a deep sigh as if in a bad memory, the first real show of emotion I’d seen from her so far.
She opened the lip of the chest to reveal two large wolf pelts.
Slow, cold horror filled me and bile rose in my throat. A whimper left my lips as I held tightly onto Ramsay. He went stiff, his muscles tensed.
The pelts were too big to be a mute wolf. They were bigger than skins belonging to just a mere animal.
They were shifter furs.
But that wasn’t even the worst of it yet.
