Feral Heart: A Witch Hospital Romance (The Witches of White Willow Book 2)

by Angela Addams

  They settled on the blanket and Mina occupied herself with getting the food out.

  “What did you do to me back there?” She pulled off the tray cover to reveal steak and potatoes.

  “It’s an old spell, nothing special.” He nodded when she motioned to the asparagus. She loaded up the rest of his plate and topped it off with some fresh bread. “It was a panic attack though, right?”

  “Yeah, it was.” She passed him the plate then got to work on her own. “I’ve never had treatment that works that well though.”

  “I could teach you the spell,” he said between bites. “There’s a way you can rig it so that you only have to open a small cut to ignite it. With time, you wouldn’t even have to do that.”

  Mina froze, her hands shaking a bit. “You could?”

  “Yeah, sure, it’s not a hard spell.” He shrugged, seemingly unaware of the life-changing thing he’d just offered.

  She felt tears pricking her eyes, relief sweeping through her body. She quickly busied herself with the bread and butter. “Ah, thanks, that would be great actually. I don’t seem to have any control over them… The triggers are bizarre.”

  “Probably something else going on then,” Bas said, accepting a butter knife for his bread and still totally oblivious to the impact he had on her. “Something deeper that you’re not seeing.”

  “Yes.” She nodded but didn’t elaborate. He had his secrets, she had hers. He didn’t really want to get down and dirty with her psyche and she wasn’t in the mood to share her deepest fears with him either. She pointed to his plate. “The steak cooked how you like it?”

  Bas took another big bit and smiled. “Yeah, perfect.”

  Mina turned to her own food and started to eat, looking this way and that, scanning the space around them and noting details here and there.

  The sanctuary still needed work. There were rough patches. More plants could come in. Bas could build the enclosures he’d talked about. The cats were nowhere to be seen, which was a good sign. They were content exploring and the space was huge enough to keep their interest. It had been foolish for her to worry, but that was the trouble with anxiety—it didn’t have to make sense, her body’s fright-or-flight response kicked in anyway.

  She scanned the forest again. Telly, the monkey, needed a few things that were a little harder to build. Structures that went up instead of staying close to the ground. Vines that could grow indoors. And finally, a heat source that would raise the temperature in the enclosure and increase the humidity, like what happened in the Dark Forest at certain times of year.

  “You and that Croft dude. You together?”

  Mina nearly choked on the meat she was chewing. She sputtered a bit as she swallowed. “Um, no. Not at all.”

  Bas shrugged. “Saw his stuff all over your place, I just figured.”

  Yeah, that was true. Croft left his things at her place because he had no reason to go upstairs and be reminded of what he’d lost. “He’s serving a punishment down here.”

  “Sounds familiar.” Bas snorted.

  “He made a mistake, cost him his place in the surgical ward. Set him back in his training.” He’d done something stupid. Followed his heart and let a patient’s family try to resurrect their daughter. Mina never had asked him what he’d been thinking and he’d only ever given her the short version of the story. He hadn’t participated in the resurrection but he hadn’t done anything to stop it either. The family ended up bringing not only their daughter back but also the entire corpse count in the morgue. Zombies, too, mindless and roaming the halls. From what she’d heard, it was Hazel Knight who had put a stop to them. “Mother Stone assigned him to me when I arrived. This trip of his, to get the Saviors, is the first time he’s been acknowledged by the powers that be as a Healer since his punishment started. I’m happy for him, but I secretly hope I get to keep him for a while. I need the help down here and he’s good with the animals.”

  Bas grumbled something.

  “You did good work today,” she said again. “I mean, I really appreciate you getting those plants. And making sure that they all got settled.”

  “No problem. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” He finished what was on his plate then stretched out on his back, resting his head on his arms. “So, nothing going on with Croft and no boyfriend…or girlfriend, huh?”

  Mina’s cheeks burned. She snorted. “No time.”

  She gave him a once over, appreciating, once again, the flex of his muscles and the flat plane of his stomach. His shirt was tight enough to see the outline of those abs, the track pants outlining the bulge of his cock.

  Keep it to a friendship, Mina. Don’t be stupid.

  “What about you? I’ve heard things.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah, what kinds of things?”

  Her cheeks grew hotter but she didn’t look away. “You and Healer Rose. I’ve heard about that.”

  He snorted. “I bet.” And the way he said it suggested that conversation was over.

  “Oh…” So her sex life was open for conversation but his wasn’t? Now she felt embarrassed. Why had she said that?

  “What’s the plan for tomorrow?” He shifted his arm from under his head to cover his eyes.

  She felt the slap of his mood change. Her thoughts snapped back on line. Time to get back to work. Mind out of the gutter. Keep it real, Mina. She picked up his plate and scraped it clean. “Well, I’ve got some ideas…”

  “Not involving the Dark Forest, I hope.”

  She cleared her throat. “Actually…”

  15

  She couldn’t sleep…which wasn’t unusual. Some nights her whirling thoughts kept her buzzing till dawn. Her mind was still reeling from her panic attack earlier and the conversation with Bas that had followed. Too much excitement for one day.

  Rather than lying in bed all night dwelling on things, Mina decided it was better to get some work done in the sanctuary. She’d been planning the heating system for months now and was pretty sure she had the material and the spells to get it going. If she could get the humidity up just right, she could introduce the other animals in there sooner.

  It meant using some dark spells, of course—nothing too nefarious but definitely dark and definitely not something she wanted to work on with Bas around. He’d know after the fact, but she could take his snide comments once it was done, she didn’t want it compromising her concentration if he was hovering over her while she was attempting to do it.

  She slipped on a pair of loose fitting shorts and a tank top, clipped her hair up at the sides and went about gathering her tools and equipment. She needed her mother’s grimoire for this one.

  White Willow was so quiet at this time of night…even in the Dungeon, she still felt the lull of peace in the entire building. The constant buzz of magic faded to almost nothing. Even the Circle of One was on low vibration. It was past the witching hour, all the familiars were asleep in their cages, except for the cats, which she’d decided to leave in the sanctuary. They were healthy and happy, no sense in moving them back to their cages at this stage.

  She moved to the double doors of the workroom and swung them open, getting a good breeze sweeping through. It was warm out, the moon high. She closed her eyes and soaked everything in. Maybe she could set up a hammock and let the night sounds lull her to sleep.

  A shrieking noise startled her back to awareness, her eyes snapped open. The Dark Forest always looked menacing but it was far worse at night. The predators were out, hunting familiars and other magical creatures. They didn’t often venture beyond the perimeter of the forest but it was threat enough to keep her from ever sleeping outside. She sighed, wrapped her arms around herself then went back inside, bringing the doors to a close with a wave of her hand.

  She moved to the shelf that housed her mother’s grimoire. As a human witch, her grimoire was filled with folk magic and spells that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. While Bas had an unfair prejudice about human witch
es and their use of magic, he wasn’t wrong about his assessment of how they used the stuff. Humans were at times so desperate for power that they mixed and mingled different magics that really had no business melding together. Sometimes that unification, that willingness to experiment, resulted in great and powerful things. Other times it led to curses going astray and the death of innocents.

  Mina had spent her life studying both her parents’ grimoires. While her father’s was more in line with the work of a pure witch—one who had envisioned himself as a Master Healer no less, and so rooted in white magic—her mother had dabbled more into the dark world of spell casting. Mina had found the perfect spell for her temperature issues in the sanctuary; now she just needed to work it in a way that didn’t blow the whole place up. Like her own power, her mother’s spells sometimes were unreliable and a little shifty.

  It had to work though. She needed the sanctuary to be perfect for her familiars.

  Mina rubbed her eyes, feeling the weight of her exhaustion. She leaned against the counter for a minute to collect herself. If only she could sleep. She’d tried spelling herself or using sleep tonics but that always made her groggy for days afterward. She’d learned that it was better to get the energy out by working…letting her mind sort through stuff while she pushed her body to the point of collapse. Then she could sleep. Spell casting like this, using the dark stuff, always made her super lethargic.

  With a sigh, she pushed herself upright, then piled all of her tools and the spell ingredients she’d need into a leather sculpted basket that had multiple pockets and pouches to keep things separate. She slid her mother’s book into the side of the basket then with another sigh, heaved the basket up and leveraged it against her shoulder. She moved past the partially closed door of the back room. Bas had elected to sleep in there with the animals. He wanted to be close to the cats who still needed medical support and to the dog who was still sleeping away after the treatment she and Angel had administered.

  He was a good man for doing that, for staying with them. Spoke to his empathy and she found that endearing. It softened his edges and was maybe a side that most people didn’t see. Even though he’d shut her out earlier and made her feel like she’d overstepped, when he himself had gotten personal, she wasn’t angry with him. It was just another layer of the ever-complex anomaly that was Bas Frank.

  Zeus was likely in there with him. She’d spelled the cat so that he could access the sanctuary whenever he wanted, earning in and out privileges that she wouldn’t be able to grant the other cats for fear of them running to the real Dark Forest. Now that Zeus was bonded with Bas, she had no need to worry. The cat would only ever go where his master was.

  Speaking of which, Zeus popped his head out of the backroom long enough to see that it was her rustling past. He curled a lip over one fang and regarded her with regal importance.

  “Just going into the sanctuary to work,” she said to the cat. “Can’t sleep.”

  Zeus didn’t seem to care, not that she expected him to. He eyed her for a moment longer then slipped back inside.

  She adjusted the basket on her back then shuffled into the sanctuary. It was quiet…about as quiet as everything else in the building. A little unnerving. She flicked on the lights, then set them to dim so she didn’t disturb the cats. She could look into getting some bird noises or ambient sound…maybe some trickling water of a waterfall. There were spells for that, although she hadn’t found any in her mother’s book. Maybe Bas would know.

  The mechanical area was set off to the side, hidden behind columns of bushes. She and Croft had built the infrastructure, getting a little help here and there from the techs who worked at the hospital. There was a hodgepodge of magic intermingled with human technologies that kept the place running at a basic level. Sensor lights that were activated by time of day and by magical current. She could adjust the light setting with a flick of her fingers. The water that ran through the stream was recycled, cleaned, treated, and put back into the ecosystem. The temperature was computer controlled with a few enhancements thanks to some spells she’d worked.

  Now she needed to adjust the humidity, which she would attempt to replicate from the Dark Forest. She’d worked it out and if she used a bit of blue fire, she should be able to maintain a spell that would manipulate the air moisture in whatever way she wanted. The sun didn’t penetrate the Dark Forest much beyond a perpetual glow. Mina had managed to copy that at least but the temperature didn’t translate and she needed to make sure it would be comfortable for all the animals, not just the cats.

  She pulled out the ingredients and reread the notes she’d taken on mixing and bolstering the spell. She opened her mother’s grimoire for another look at the chant. Her mother’s scent wafted from the book’s pages, making Mina inhale deeply without thought. Honeysuckle, raspberry, violet. The ache she felt in her heart, a hole that had opened when her mother died, always hurt more when she used the book. Beyond her ability to whisper to the familiars, Mina didn’t have innate talents so her mother’s grimoire was an absolute necessity even if it ripped her to shreds every single time she looked inside.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, pushing down the sorrow and the tears. She didn’t have time to wallow. She wanted to get the spell done without Bas knowing. When it came to how she did magic, the fewer the questions the better. Her dad was right—Healers like Bas would never understand her heritage.

  She opened her eyes and closed her mother’s book. She knew this spell. She’d been practicing it for days. She slipped the grimoire back into her basket and set it all aside.

  Her plan was to get the blue fire burning in a small furnace she’d built and then maintain it with a cycling spell that would allow her to control it as necessary. It was a tricky bit of magic because blue fire didn’t like to be contained. But her mother had made some notes that Mina felt made a lot of sense. Layering some spells on top of the blue fire should keep it under constant control. She’d tested it out on a much smaller scale the other night and was confident she could replicate what she’d done, just bigger and with more power.

  She set out the bowl, put in the various herbs and salts then pulled her blade from its sheath. Some witches had these super special ceremonial blades for spell casting—not her though. She’d gone for practical. Just sharp steel with her initials crudely carved on the handle. She swiped the edge along her palm, opening herself up so the blood would flow. Her blood, even though it was half-breed blood, should bind the spell, amplify its effectiveness, and hopefully ensure that it would hold for months. If she was successful, she’d add the maintenance of this spell to her sanctuary grimoire, something she could pass on to anyone who might come to work there down the road.

  She angled her hand to let the blood drip, allowing quite a bit to flow into the bowl. One of the downfalls of being half-breed was that she would need more blood to make the spell work the way she wanted, but not so much that she overdid the potency. If she was all human, or all pure, she would know how much to use. Being half of both meant she wasn’t quite sure what enough looked like. So she opted for more than three quarters the recommended dose and hoped it was right.

  Her palm was already healing as the last few drops fell. She muttered a spell and swirled her finger over the bowl to mix the contents, her magic giving just enough spin to roll the herbs and salt into her blood. While it was mixing, she opened the door of the furnace and prepped the material in there. Blessed hay from the fields of Witch Valley, some hair cut from her own head, a pinch of dried ghost pepper, and a dab of sticky pulp from a wailing tree. She stuck a thick white candle in the middle and stroked the wick until a flame emerged. Every piece was ready. She double-checked everything, making sure nothing was touching yet. There was a time for melding and a time for separation.

  She sucked in a deep breath and twitched her fingers, lifting the mixture of her blood from the bowl and containing it in a bubble. She sent it into the furnace to hover just above the flame of the candle.
She noticed that the power from her blood was making the candle wobble so she reached out and dug a bit into the ground, then cupped some dirt to put around the base of the candle, cocooning it so it would stay in place.

  Something looked off. There wasn’t enough color. She frowned, leaning over to reread her list of ingredients, then glanced at the baggies she had with her. She’d forgotten the bloodbane flower.

  Fuck.

  If she left now, the spell would fall apart. She looked around. There was a flower that looked like bloodbane just behind her, a vibrant blue. “That’ll do.” She reached out and snapped two blooms off.

  The power of the spell rose around her. She reviewed the incantation once in her head, then tossed the flowers into the floating concoction and started to chant.

  “Alight with flame from witch’s blood

  Rise to consume, perpetual heat

  For warmth and life, undying fire

  Bind to—”

  A flash of white light stung her eyes, her voice seized in her throat as an explosion of flame jutted out of the furnace. She opened her mouth to scream, but the vortex of fire that swirled toward her sucked the air right out of her lungs. She lifted her arms, bracing for impact, knowing that she was about to feel a world of pain, the heat enough to singe her arms already.

  She closed her eyes and then felt a disorienting shove as something heavy landed on her shoulder, moving her whole body off kilter. She rolled onto her back then looked up to see Zeus towering over her. He was facing the furnace, his back arched, yowling loudly. Somehow he was keeping the vortex of flame away.