“Ghealach!” curses Callum. “Why isn’t he healing? He shouldn’t be bleeding this much. Where the fuck is—?”
The door opens, and Blake enters. Despite the obvious animosity Callum holds for the male, some of the tension seems to leave his shoulders.
It’s strange—the power seems to shift in the room, too. Even though Callum is the more muscular of the two males, he seems smaller, somehow, as Blake stalks forward.
“What took you so long?” says Callum.
“Magnus took a little persuading.” Blake kneels beside Callum, and Becky growls as he lifts up one of Ryan’s closed eyelids. “Make that noise at me again and I’ll rip out your tongue.”
Becky looks as if she’s about to launch herself over the cot at him, but Callum raises a blood-slicked hand.
“It’s alright, Becky,” he says. “Blake’s our healer here at Castle Madadh-allaidh.”
I distinctly recall Callum referring to the castle’s healer in a derogatory manner on the way here. Now I know why.
Blake is not what I expected of a healer. He is nothing like the fusty old men who worked for the High Priest and did little to ease my mother’s suffering.
I watch as he unbuttons the cuffs of his sleeves, then rolls them up—revealing corded forearms, and a nasty scar just beneath his elbow.
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask, thinking back to that horrible book of experiments I found in my chambers. “I thought Wolves healed quickly.”
Candles flicker in the infirmary, and the light dances across Blake’s chiseled features. “Come on, you know the answer to that, little rabbit.”
“Why should I?”
Blake clucks his tongue. “So, you’ve wandered into a den of Wolves with no idea what weakens us? That’s not very smart, is it?”
“Now’s not the time, Blake,” growls Callum.
“I expect stupidity from him,” Blake continues. “You... no. Small and fragile things cannot afford to be stupid. They’re too easy to break.”
If Callum didn’t have both his hands pressing into Ryan’s side, I think he would have broken Blake. He certainly looks like he wants to—his jawline is hard.
Yet, oddly, beneath the thinly veiled threat, it feels almost as if Blake is trying to give me a piece of advice.
His eyes are glinting as if he’s challenging me to find the answer.
I think back to that book again. There was an experiment that declared a substance that affected a wolf’s ability to heal, and, in large doses, was deadly.
Dread fills me.
“Wolfsbane,” I say.
“Good girl,” says Blake.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Wolfsbane.
The air is sucked out of the infirmary. Callum tenses, and a cry tears from Becky’s lips.
In the book I read, it didn’t seem like there was a cure.
“Can you fix him?” The plea in Callum’s voice breaks something inside me.
“Perhaps.” Blake walks over to his workstation, and selects a pipette.
He takes a sample of Ryan’s blood and holds it up to the torch flickering on the wall.