The wolf snarled its displeasure but retreated. Barely.
“These look bad,” she muttered, reaching for a cloth. She dipped it in a bottle of clear liquid that smelled sharp. “This is going to sting.”
Sting was an understatement. The cloth touched my wound and fire lanced through my ribs. I growled before I could stop myself, the sound rumbling from deep in my chest.
She jerked back. “Sorry! I’m sorry, I just need to clean them or they’ll get infected.”
“Continue,” I managed through gritted teeth. “I have survived worse.”
A lie. Back home in Lytopia, these wounds would have healed within hours. Days at most. I had been in countless battles, taken injuries that should have killed me, and walked away whole because of my wolf’s healing abilities.
But here? Five days and the wounds looked barely better than when I had arrived. The bleeding had stopped, but the flesh was still angry and red. Some cuts had even reopened.
This weakness was infuriating. Seeing my mate tend to injuries that should have closed days ago, watching her see me diminished and barely functional, it grated against everything my wolf demanded I be for her.
She dabbed at another wound, and I hissed. Forced myself to stay still. To not grab her wrist and pull her closer, to not bury my face in her neck and breathe her in until the pain faded.
“Why aren’t these healing?” she asked quietly. “You’re a werewolf. Don’t you have accelerated healing or whatever?”
“In my world, yes.” I watched her hands as she worked, small and careful. “These wounds would have closed within hours of receiving them. But here...” I gestured at the injuries. “There is no magic in this place. I can feel it. Or rather, I cannot feel it. Magic is as necessary to my kind as air. Without it, I am... diminished.”
Her hands paused. “No magic?”
“None that I can sense.” I had spent five days in wolf form, searching the woods behind her dwelling, trying to find even a trace of the power that flowed through Lytopia’s very earth. Nothing. This world was empty of it. Dead. “I do not understand how you were able to summon me. Human magic should not work. Humans should not have magic at all.”
She resumed cleaning, her touch gentler now. “I don’t have magic. I’m just a regular person who found a weird book and accidentally read a spell.”
“There is nothing regular about you, little mate.”
She shot me a look. “Stop calling me that.”
“It is what you are.”
“I’m Wen. Just Wen.”
“You are my fated mate. The other half of my soul. Calling you anything less would be an insult to the bond the Moon Goddess has blessed us with.”
She made a noise that might have been frustration or disbelief. Probably both. “The Moon Goddess made a mistake.”
My wolf snarled at that. I felt fur ripple across my shoulders before I wrestled it back. “The Goddess does not make mistakes.”
“Well she did this time, because I’m human. You said it yourself. Humans can’t be mates to wolves.”
“That is what our records say, yes.” I had spent centuries reading every text in Ravenor’s libraries. History. Lore. Ancient accounts from before my grandfather’s time. Long ago, a portal had opened between our worlds. Wolves and humans met, mingled, some even stayed on the wrong side when it closed. But never in all our recorded history had a human been a fated mate to a wolf. It should not have been possible. “Yet here you are.”
She was cleaning my wounds with careful hands, close enough to touch, smelling of home and mate and everything my wolf had been howling for since the moment I reached maturity.
The Moon Goddess worked in mysterious ways. I had stopped questioning her wisdom the moment I felt the bond snap into place.
“Great,” Wen muttered. “I’m impossible. That’s just perfect.”
I caught her wrist as she reached for another cloth. Her pulse jumped under my fingers, racing. Good. She felt it too, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
“You are perfect,” I said. “Strong. Clever. Beautiful. Everything I could have wished for in a mate.”
Her cheeks flushed red. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know enough.” I released her wrist before my wolf decided to pull her closer. “I know you took in a bleeding stranger instead of calling your authorities. I know you defended your friends when they were frightened. I know you run this place of books alone, fighting to keep it alive. I know you are brave even when you are terrified.”
