by ReGi McClain
“I don’t actually know much about it. I just found out a couple of months ago.”
Zeeb looked confused. “Didn’t your mother and father explain?”
“I don’t think Mom knew. As for my father, he took off when I was nine.”
Zeeb curled his lip in disgust. “No werewolf would ever leave his family.”
Seraph shook her head. “That’s not strictly true, but I share your disdain.” She tilted Harsha’s face. “Don?”
Don walked in from the other room, holding a can of tomatoes. “Yup?”
“Tom is sure?”
Don looked to Harsha. “You told ’em?”
Harsha nodded.
“Doc Brown’s positive.”
Her expression pained, Seraph whispered, “You’re dying, aren’t you?”
Harsha broke eye contact to gaze out the window. Moisture pricked the back of her eyelids. She brushed away tears before they fell. “My brother is dying faster. I need to find a faerie to get a cure for both of us.” She looked back to Seraph, hopeful against her will. “Unless you can help me?” She looked to Zeeb. “Or you?” Then Don. “Or you?”
Zeeb flopped back in the chair and picked up his coffee to swirl the mug and stare at it.
Don shook his head. “I’m sorry, girly.”
Tears trickled onto Seraph’s cheeks before vanishing in little puffs of steam. She draped her arms over Harsha in an awkward hug.
None of them could help her. Harsha let a few tears slide down her cheeks before pulling away and forcing a smile. “Oh, well. I never expected much to come of all this. But…” She needed to know right now how much hope she had left, if any. “Is there really a faerie somewhere?”
Seraph brightened. “We’re sure of it. I spotted her cottage and Gauri says she met her once. As soon as you’ve gained enough strength, I’ll fly you straight there.”
Harsha’s spirits lifted with the news. The cure wasn’t as close as she’d hoped, but it was closer than it had ever been before. Assuming any of this was real, of course. “I guess I better hurry up and get better, then.”
Chapter 12
After Harsha’s nap, Don gathered Seraph, Zeeb, and a steaming cup of chamomile around her for moral support before he took off the bandage to show her the wound for the first time. Five stitched gashes trailed diagonally down her calf, the lines of torn flesh pink against the purple skin surrounding the wound.
The room and her caregivers dropped away. Ashley Rice, brandishing a scalpel, chased Harsha through the woods alongside the bear. She limped away from them, dragging her injured leg, desperate to escape. She felt her hair stir with the swipe of the bear’s claw inches from her back and heard Ashley chanting in haunting monotone, “Let’s humanize that pretty face.”
A woman’s voice near her ear whispered, “It’s all right. I’m here. I’m with you now and I’ll never let a bear near you ever again. I’m so sorry I ever did. I wasn’t paying attention. It’s my fault and I’ll do anything I can to make it up to you. Harsha? Harsha, come back. It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
Trembling and sobbing, Harsha turned toward the speaker. Red hair, amber eyes.
“It’s all right now. Nothing is going to hurt you.”
“Slow breaths, girly.” She recognized that voice, too. It rumbled in the room, deep and relaxed, as though the owner had all the time in the world to say or do whatever he wanted said or done. “I’m almost finished.”
A gentle, calloused hand closed around hers. A hand she brushed when she accepted a flower, a hand that held her steady when she walked over uneven ground and caught her when she fell.
Harsha sucked in air and let it out, cheeks puffed, with deliberate slowness. She looked around at her companions. This is real. These people are real. Ashley and the bear are gone. I’m safe here.
She looked around again, and thought, Am I?
Don’s claim to be a sasquatch fit. His height, his padded hands and feet, and his copious hair all pointed to a strange origin, a series of unusual DNA quirks, if nothing else. The others looked like normal human beings. For all Harsha knew, she’d landed herself with lunatics believing themselves to be mythical creatures because they happened to run business alongside a man with an unfortunate set of genes.
Seraph pressed a cup of tea into her free hand and guided it to her lips. “Here. Drink this. It will help calm your nerves.”
Harsha sipped the tea with Seraph steadying her hand. No steam wafted off it and she wondered how long she had raced through flashbacks before returning to the real world. She stared at her wounds in morbid fascination, tracing the swollen lines with her eyes and envisioning herself being ogled by strangers who wanted to ask what had happened to her, not get her number, next time she went to the beach.
“It’s good the bear just scratched you.” Don’s words interrupted her imaginative wanderings.
“Huh?”
“Good thing that bear just scratched you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have much of a leg left.”
Harsha’s stomach flopped. She pictured herself confined to a wheelchair, trying to get around the house to help Jason without the use of her leg. “You mean, I’m not going to be able to walk again?”
Don clucked his tongue. “Now, now, girly. Don’t get yourself worked up. Like I said, it’s just a scratch. We’ll get you up to stand on it in a bit. You’ll be able to walk with help tomorrow.”
Harsha gaped at the scratch . She disagreed with Don’s prognosis. Strongly. Walking on that leg promised to be the challenge of a lifetime.
With his ministrations complete, Don gathered up the old bandages. “Seraph, do you mind incinerating these for me?”
Seraph put a hand on Harsha’s cheek. “Will you be all right if I leave the room? I’ll be right outside, and the house is solid. No bears can get in. Even if one did, Zeeb is more than a match for one, and I’m close by.”
Harsha snapped her mouth shut to give Seraph an amused, though incredulous, smile. “Zeeb is a match for a bear?”
Seraph bobbed her head. “Oh, yes. Haven’t you heard about werewolves being indestructible? Unless the bear has a gun that shoots silver bullets, Zeeb can protect you.”
“I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
Seraph nodded and left with Don.
Zeeb stayed behind, holding Harsha’s hand. He stared at her leg, his expression drawn and careworn. “I’m sorry. I let your money cloud my judgment. I’ll refund all of it and pay for any hospital bills or plastic surgery or whatever you want. I shouldn’t have allowed you on this trip, and I never once should have taken my eyes off you. I’m… so, so sorry.”
A pang of guilt stabbed her heart. The bear’s attack had hurt people besides herself. Had she died, it would have hurt Jason, too. Maybe all her attempts to find a cure had hurt someone. Hurt Jason. Remorse wormed around her belly, trying to find a permanent home. She needed to lighten the conversation, to oust both her and Zeeb’s regret, before the guilt started eating her.
“I’m glad you did take your eyes off me. It’d be creepy if you watched me all the time.”
His shoulders slumped. “What happened is inexcusable. If I turned you down like a responsible guide, this wouldn’t have happened.”
That’s not fair. To either of us. “If you’d turned me down, I would have gone back to Kauai to watch my brother die. You couldn’t know what kind of chance you were giving me, but I’m glad you did. The bear…”
Doubts crowded out her words. Lying in a hospital bed hallucinating made sense. The bear mauled her, Seraph and Zeeb scared it off, and a helicopter flew her to Anchorage. She lost blood but the doctors got it under control and put her on a massive dose of morphine. Sitting in a sasquatch’s living room holding a werewolf’s hand must be a delusion.
But it felt real. The sounds, the smells, the play between shadow and light, the warmth of Zeeb’s rough hand clasping hers, all struck her as natural and true. Deep down, she wanted it to be true. It explained all her failed a
ttempts to find a cure. She tightened her hand around Zeeb’s.
“The bear gave me the best chance of all. You wouldn’t have told me about yourselves if not for the bear. I never would have known other What did you call us? Hiders? I wouldn’t have known others existed.”
He lifted his eyes to meet hers.
“Thank you.”
A fraction of the smile returned to his eyes. They sat without speaking, his hand wrapped around hers, thinking their own thoughts, until Gauri announced lunchtime and the others returned.
Harsha grasped Seraph’s forearms and grunted with the effort of pulling herself into a standing position. A dizzy spell blackened her vision until the room disappeared and the ground shifted under her, pushed away by the throbbing in her leg. She squeezed her eyes shut, tightened her grip on Seraph, and puffed her breath in and out between her clenched teeth until the world solidified.
“That’s it, girly. Let Seraph take your weight.”
After ages of agony, Don finally said, “Go ahead and sit down.”
Harsha collapsed toward the couch. Seraph guided her so she landed with the lightness of a feather and Don eased her legs onto the soft cushions for her. Harsha picked up her cup of tea and took a sip before letting her head sink into her pillow and closing her eyes.
“Good job.” Don patted her uninjured shin. “We’ll try again after dinner.” He left.
A minute later Harsha heard the thud of an ax on a tree outside. She pressed her fingertips to her temples to quell the throbbing, which matched the thrum in her leg, and swallowed down the wave of nausea caused by the dizzy spell.
“Ugh. This is definitely it. If that faerie doesn’t have a cure for me, I’m giving up.”
“What do you mean?” Seraph handed her a fresh cup of tea.
Harsha took one small sip before summing up her long history with doctors, including the Rice Clinic. She left out the part about dancing naked on a hilltop.
“Wow.” Seraph ran her fingers along the scar on Harsha’s wrist. “That’s awful, but don’t give up. At least send your files to Ralph and Ylva.”
“Ralph and Ylva?”
“Oh, sorry. I meant Zeeb’s parents. His dad is a doctor. His mom is technically a nurse, but she knows as much as any doctor. Probably more.”
Harsha hid a cringe with a smile. If this experience failed to convince her to give up doctors forever, she needed mental help, and lots of it. Rather than saying so, she opted for what she hoped sounded like polite humor.
“I guess if they coveted me for experiments, Zeeb would’ve whisked me off by now.”
“They probably do. No one has ever run blood or DNA tests on fae. Well, not knowingly. There’s speculation the knowledge gained could lead to substantial medical breakthroughs for both hiders and humans. If you have enough fae DNA to cause you problems, you have enough to give them some leads. But the Lowells wouldn’t force anyone to be an experiment, let alone torture them for information.”
Harsha widened her smile to suppress a grimace. She had spoken facetiously, her words a crude bandage to cover her frustration over the situation. She doubted Seraph meant to reduce her to a mere research tool, but being wanted for scientific reasons caused a new wave of nausea. She let it pass before speaking, unwilling to show Seraph her distress.
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Even if the fae fixes you, you should meet them. They’re wonderful.” She brightened. “In fact, we can do that next, right after you talk to the fae. They have a few spare rooms, or you can share mine, and you can walk me through making money on the stock market online. Their property is right on a lake so we can go swimming every day. That should appeal to your merfolk side. Oh! And maybe we could visit Denali and you could meet my mother, too. You’re not expected back at work until August, right?”
The enthusiastic spiel overwhelmed Harsha. She held her smile and blinked at Seraph while she processed the deluge.
Seraph’s eyes dimmed. “I know we started with a professional relationship, but can’t we be friends now? We both love money, and we’ve spent so much time together, and our conversations are so much fun, and hiders should stick together, and…” She bit her lip and widened her eyes.
The offer of a real friendship struck Harsha as a shiny new gadget might: beautiful, desirable, but what to do with it? How to make it work? Especially after she returned home. She strove to keep her interactions with her coworkers pleasant, and during school she’d hung out with study buddies, but deep relationships outside her immediate family were rare. She was engaged for two months during college, but it ended in nothing, and her friendship with Josh grew more on the day before she left Vegas than during their two years working together. After she moved, they put no effort into deepening it. Unlike Jason, she disliked the concept of distant online relationships. She feared such a fate awaited any friendship involving people separated by three thousand miles.
She opened her mouth, ready to give a polite but dismissive response, and found she didn’t want to. She’d spent her whole life pouring herself into her family and ignoring her own loneliness. The yearning for a best friend, for any friend, rushed on her. Given her track record, she doubted her ability to maintain a relationship, but she decided to give it a try.
“Yes. Yes, we’re friends. But…” She lifted one shoulder for an apologetic shrug. “I’m not really good at… anything to do with relationships.”
Seraph laughed. “You’ve been doing fine so far. You just need to relax and open up.”
“Relax and open up. Right. I can do that. I think.”
“Here. I’ll help. You mentioned a sister a few times. Tell me about her.”
Harsha started to give Seraph a bland summary of Ami’s life.
Seraph shook her head. “Don’t tell me about her life, tell me about her . Did you get along?”
“We got along fine.”
Seraph lifted an eyebrow.
Relax and open up. All right. I can do this. “But there was this one time I got into her jewelry box and borrowed a pair of earrings her boyfriend gave her.”
She kept going. She had lost the earrings, which led to the guy breaking up with Ami. Ami’s habañero-laced revenge caused real pain at the time, but produced belly laughs now. Seraph countered with a tale of some mischief she got into as a dragonling. They went back and forth, trading childhood stories and laughing with each other until Zeeb came in a few minutes later with glasses of iced tea for everyone.
“You two sound like you’re having fun.”
Harsha’s shyness pounced and buried her under its bulk. Avoiding eye contact with the man whose hand she’d spent the morning holding, she smiled, nodded, and accepted her drink. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Zeeb moved to the easy chair and sank down.
As the seat of his pants hit the edge, Gauri poked her head through the living room door. “Zeeb, since you’re inside, would you mind helping me with something in the nursery?”
Zeeb stood back up. “Sure.”
Seraph sprang up from her place on the floor. “I’ll get it. You take a break, Zeeb.”
“Thanks, Seraph.” Zeeb sank into the easy chair.
Harsha pressed her lips together to keep the protest that wanted to burst out imprisoned. Alone with Zeeb again. Their semi-intimate talk earlier, rather than giving her more confidence, increased her feelings of unease around him. Weeks of being in constant company justified Seraph’s breach of professional distance. With Zeeb, no such foundation existed.
“How’s the leg?”
“It’s fine.”
“Do you want anything? Pillow? Candy?”
“No, thanks.”
A minute passed with neither of them saying anything.
“Seraph tells me you’ve traveled most of the states.”
Harsha lifted one shoulder. “Clinics. I don’t go sightseeing very often.”
“Right.”
Seraph and Gauri laughed in a distant room of
the house. Harsha wished Seraph would come back. The talkative redhead excelled at keeping a conversation casual and pleasant.
Yeah, but Zeeb tried. I’m the one making things awkward.
She took a deep breath and put on a smile. “So… werewolf, huh?”
One corner of Zeeb’s lips twitched into a wider smile. “Yup.”
“Were you bitten?” She wanted to smack her forehead as soon as she finished her sentence. Leave it to her to start a conversation with her foot in her mouth. He’s probably like the Yazzies, only wolfish instead of… sasquatchish.
“That’s how it usually happens, but I’m different.”
Oh, good. He’s not offended. “How so?”
“I was born a werewolf.”
“But how can that be? If people usually become werewolves because they’re bitten, doesn’t it mean it’s like an infectious disease and not an inherited trait?” Oops . “No offense.” I should shut up, now.
“None taken. It’s both. A werewolf’s bite contains a gene-mutating toxin. Once the genes are altered, they stay altered. The toxin affects every cell in the body within eight months of exposure to it, including reproductive cells. Dad and Mom are trying to develop an anti-serum. So far, they can cure cases up to two months old.”
Grateful he took her ignorance and fumbling attempts at socializing in stride, Harsha looked Zeeb over, puzzled. His stamina and strength implied good health and he gave no indication of being dangerous, even as a wolf. “Why treat it? There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you.”
“I’m different. Werewolves are pack animals and without their pack they go insane and start killing things. Except me. Both my parents were fully turned before I came along, so my cells started out with the mutation. We’re not certain why yet, but my bite isn’t infectious, I don’t need to be with my pack to be stable, and I can change at will any time there’s a moon. I fill in for Don whenever he can’t do the show. Seraph points me out mid-change. It gets a good reaction. Not a sasquatch, but my customers get their monster.”
The statement offended Harsha. Zeeb could control his genetic heritage as much as she could control hers: not at all. Being born a certain way, with a fatal condition, or a disability, or an advantage over everyone else, didn’t make anyone a monster. The way someone behaved determined that. Ashley Rice, not the man who sat across from her, was a monster.