Page 24 of Pack Witch
Julian took over, pulling on his own clothing before gently bundling me up in my robe like I was a doll. My body no longer hummed with power when he cradled me in his arms, and a strange blackness hazed my vision, as if I were going blind.
The bliss I’d felt on the earth became a backache, a gnawing hunger. The marrow-deep soreness was a reminder that my body was a half-century old, and when I turned my head toward his chest, my neck popped.
I sighed at my own foolishness. There would be a price to pay for using this much magic—and my newly broken-in vagina—for so long without a break. Hell, just kneeling over him on my old knees for that long…
Oh, who was I kidding? It had been worth it.
And it had worked. I needed food and sleep, and maybe to rest for a few days before we tried that again. The healing, at least.
How many tattoos did he have? Would I be able to heal him entirely, or enough? I had no wolf for him to mate with, and I’d felt his wolf’s despair when we made love.
How many times would I be allowed to feel him beneath me before he was well enough to leave me alone again?
Chapter 13
Julian
“Julian, if you and the boys would like to catch a couple of trout at the river, there’s a spot where they like to rest around this time of day,” Zinnia suggested as I carried her back toward the cabin. Her heart fluttered, and her breathing was too shallow, though I could tell she was trying to hide her weakness from me. Healing me had hurt her.
I did my best to hide what it had done to me. Then I realized what she’d said. “You eat fish?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sometimes. Fish meal is a staple ingredient for some of the medicines I make for my animal friends, and my shifter patients as well.”
“The boys will be glad to hear it.” More than glad; as they’d gone to gather wild garlic, they’d been planning what sort of funerals they’d like, as if living without meat might be fatal.
“Have they ever gone fishing before?” She held the basket filled with fruit and vegetables on her lap, popping a blackberry into her mouth, then offering me one. It was the sweetest berry I’d ever tasted, distracting me from the other sensations I was struggling with.
“I’m not sure. I met them only a few years back. They were wandering in the woods, starving. They didn’t even know how to bring down a squirrel… Sorry.”
She laughed. “Did you teach them to hunt?”
“Some of the other males did. The females did the real work, though. They taught them to cook.”
“Thefemales,” she began, but stuffed a handful of berries in her mouth, enough to choke.
I almost smiled, fairly certain I knew what she’d been about to ask. “Young women, almost all of them. Abused by their pack, even their parents. They were pups to me, who needed to heal. A few made clumsy advances, but I made sure they knew that no decent Alpha would even think of them like that.”
Zinnia swallowed her berries and muttered, “Good.”
I loved the hint of jealousy in her tone. It gave me hope.
At the door to her cabin, I lowered her to her feet to set the basket down. Her hand rose to my heart, pressing against the new place where no spell impeded the feeling of her touch.
I made sure to keep my expression placid when that hand dropped lower, moving over the remaining tattoos on my stomach, and igniting the trapped magic beneath the skin. It was all I could do not to flinch. It felt like knives flaying me from the inside.
She could’ve had real knives in her hands, and I wouldn’t have asked her to stop touching me. But the pain her soft fingertips elicited was significant.
I must not have been wholly successful at hiding how it felt, because she pushed away gently, her brows furrowed. “Julian.” No one but my mother had ever been able to fit that much censure into one word. “You said it didn’t hurt.”
I struggled to speak only the truth. “The pain is nothing compared to the ecstasy of your touch.”
She sighed and stepped away, picking up another basket, an empty one that had a trot line with a half-dozen metal hooks at the bottom. “Don’t touch me if it hurts you. Promise me.”
I would never promise that. “It was worth it.” I took the basket, dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose, then jogged away. As soon as I got behind the tree line, though, I stopped in place, breathless.
She’d healed the tattoos on my pectorals and below them completely, but the sensation of a patch of my body that felt right in the middle of so muchwrong, made the pain in the rest of me exponentially worse. In fact, the edges of the healed space felt like someone was dragging molten chains around my heart, trying to melt through the line of healing.
Everything had a price. I’d learned that long ago, though I’d never dreamed the price for my safety from the ones hunting me would be a lifetime away from my true mate. If this agony was what I had to pay to be healed and whole and have this second chance to love her the way she deserved? I’d pay it a thousand times over.
