He purred and lowered his head to his paw. She wrapped her cold fingers around the mug of tea and stared at her patient. The witch hunter moved restlessly in his sleep, muttering words she couldn’t make out.
She hated fevers.
They reminded her of the time after Jarn. Kicked out of the only home she’d ever known, lost on the open road with only the bags she could carry and the brand on her mother’s forehead festering because they were sleeping in a tent made out of sticks and old clothes. That awful fever. Her mother surviving the fever but losing her sight.
The fever and its aftermath seemed to have made her mother’s memory of that time foggy and indistinct. Even some of the details from the trial were lost to her. Perhaps that was a blessing. Rowan remembered every second of it in horrifying, excruciating detail.
What she remembered most of all was the feeling of being helpless, absolutely powerless and alone.
Hemade her feel like that. Then and now. Like he was a storm crashing into her life without warning, leaving wreckage behind. She agreed with her mother. She didn’t think it was coincidence that had brought them together again. She just didn’t have faith that it meant anything good.
One thing was for certain. No matter how he’d ended up in her path, she wasn’t letting him destroy their lives again.
7
Casrian couldn’t move. His limbs felt impossibly heavy. There were strange sounds all around him. The relentless howling of wolves. A rattling he felt in his bones. His head felt like someone had driven a spike through his brow. There was a sharp pain in his side when he tried to move. Inside, his throat and lungs burned. He struggled to make sense of it, trying to swim to the surface of consciousness, but the darkness tugged at him, making it hard to think.
What was wrong with him?
Drawing in a deep breath that stank of sickness and damp and smoke, he struggled to open his eyes. Flickers of light danced behind his eyelids.
Perhaps there was a fire. Or perhaps the witch was burning him alive…slowly…from the inside.
The witch.
Panic knifed through him, making him fight against the lethargy weighing him down. He remembered the witch. They had been sent to the very edge of the kingdom to hunt her. A farmer near Caris had petitioned the Church for help. His well had gone dry, and some of his sheep had died unnaturaldeaths, the corpses disemboweled, nothing eaten save the heart. There were reports of strange lights in the woods. They’d come to investigate, he and the nine men under his command. Daris, brokenhearted because his sweetheart had decided she didn’t want to be married to a man who spent so much time on the road. Asher, whose wife had just delivered their first child. Kenet, always pleased to leave the city for the wilderness. They’d traveled to Caris to verify the claims and then had moved on to Sulen to find more of the same, each stop leading them deeper into the woods and closer to the border.
They’d found rot in the woods. Trees dying. Dead animals. The strange sludgelike mold that spread along the forest floor. They’d spent a week circling the edge of it to try to get a sense of the scope of the corruption and had come to the northern part of the woods where it was as yet clear. He’d thought they were safe. They’d been looking for a place to camp for the night.
And then they’d encountered that thing in the woods. A twisted, unnatural creature with the claws and teeth of a wolf but a misshapen body covered in dark, leathery skin.
He’d been hurt during the fight. He’d lost his sword in the battle, diving off Kenzi to retrieve it. He remembered blazing agony ripping through his body as claw-tipped paws tore into him. His men surging forward to chase the thing down. He remembered dragging himself through the woods toward the sound of a river. And then nothing.
He groaned, surprised he could make the sound.
His men…
It took every ounce of willpower he possessed to roll over onto his side and push away from the hard, lumpy surface he was lying on. His arm shook where it supported his weight, but it held as he finally managed to force open his eyes and look around. It took him a moment to blink away the grit.
The first thing he saw was a fire, died down to embers in a small fireplace. It was dark and hard to focus, but he thought he was inside some kind of hunter’s shed. The walls were bare wood and thin. He could hear rain pelting against the outside and feel a cold draft slipping between the cracks in the door.
He pressed back, meaning to sit up, but he was stopped by a stabbing, pulling sensation in his side.
Those claws…
That hadn’t been a nightmare then. He’d been injured. Badly.
He panted to catch his breath, waiting to move again until the sharp pain receded to a throbbing ache. Tentatively, he lifted his hand to press at the spot, his fingers meeting the weave of a rough bandage. Someone had tended to his wounds.
Asher?
His eyes slowly adjusted to the light and he took in more of the room—the cot he lay on, a chipped bowl on the table nearby, a bucket full of rags on the floor. A woman slept in a chair nearby, her body hunched down at what looked to be an uncomfortable angle.
She was pretty, with long, wavy hair and a sweetly heart-shaped face. Her eyelashes seemed impossibly long against her pale cheeks. There were freckles scattered across her nose. Her lips parted with the soft, even breath of a deep sleep.
An angel.
He blinked twice, not quite believing she was real, but the woman remained even as his vision cleared. There was a cat on her lap, staring at him with round, suspicious eyes. Intelligent eyes, like a witch’s familiar.
