Page 36 of Pack Witch
“Love, let me go,” I rasped, my words were almost unintelligible.
Her gaze hardened. “I will not. You made a vow. Anything I asked of you, you promised. I am asking you to stay and fight for me. For us. Stay alive, no matter how it hurts. If not for me, then for the boys. They need you.”
“Not… the boys,” I managed. If I died, I needed them to know what was in my heart. How much I loved them. “My… sons.”
From my other side, I heard the word, “Sergeant,” buried in a sob, and knew Leroy was there. Then there was the soundof bare, running feet slapping on rock and something dropping beside me, though I couldn’t move my head to see.
“Alpha,” Bo panted breathlessly. “Sergeant, I’m beggin’ ya. Don’t leave us.”
“I’ll try,” I rasped at last.
Zinnia’s eyes sparkled with dark fire, flecks of crystals buried in stone, as she placed her other hand next to the one on my chest. I didn’t have breath to speak again, or words.
The power inside her was vast, and she poured it into me with her hands, my body bowing with the force of it. My physical wounds responded, but only in the places where she had healed me before, in the garden. My organs, my heart, my forearms—the places where our lovemaking and her gentle earth magic had wrought changes before—all stopped bleeding, and hurting.
But the wounds beneath my tattoos were unreachable, even now. Even with this power.
I felt her tears land on my face and neck as she crouched over me, her eyes boring into my chest as if she could force the healing there to move beyond. “Heal,” she insisted, and there was something in her tone that was close to an Alpha’s command. I let my gaze rise past her to the sky, to the moon.
The moon. If I’d had the energy to gasp, I would have.
A silver spirit wolf ran there, circling the moon, faint on the still-blue sky. It was a wisp of moonlight, as if one of its beams had escaped its tether and was seeking something below…
My breathing stuttered.
Her wolf. It was there, in the moon, waiting for me. It called to me.
“Heal, Julian!” Zinnia commanded again, and something sharp tugged and clawed at my soul. I knew what it was: I’d made a vow to the moon to obey her, if I could. And I could heal, or at least a part of me could. Not the part of me that was the Alpha, the wolf.
ButJulian.The part of me she loved and commanded. It was possible that I could obey her, but only if?—
My thoughts went white, and a high-pitched ringing filled my ears. I’d asked him for so much, for so long. Could I…
Yes.My wolf’s assent wasn’t a word, but a gift. He lifted his head in our shared spirit and howled, calling on the moon, sending his power into my body. Giving his own magic to the task of closing wounds and erasing scars. Giving his life.
Yes, I repeated, acknowledging what this would cost me. Half of my soul, of my being.For her. For us.
With my acceptance, the tattoos on my body began to flatten, the tainted magic beneath them dissipating. Even the scars from the silver blades that had cut me flared with heat before the tight skin became smooth.
Her power, the magic of the earth and of healing, began to fill me as the physical and magical wounds I’d carried began to close.
I heard a shout—“Boys! Straighten his legs, his arms! He’s healing too fast!”—and then what felt like bolts of lightning at my arms that moved down my legs. Blackness threatened to pull me away from consciousness, but I fought it, knowing I had to be awake to do this.
To let go of the pack bonds I held and move them to another.
To give up being Alpha.
To say goodbye to my wolf.
Chapter 19
Zinnia
Irealized too late what he’d done, though I wasn’t certain I could have stopped it anyway. I was too caught up in the healing that began, all of a sudden, throughout his body. The marks that had given that odd texture to his skin began to smooth out, like he was being reshaped by some enormous hand. The wounds that hadn’t healed from my earth magic closed up as I watched, and when they began to heal over the compound fractures, I panicked. I couldn’t reach his legs, and still keep the magic going.
“Boys! Straighten his legs, his arms! He’s healing too fast!”
Leroy, used to taking directions in the garden, obeyed immediately. Bo snapped into action a split second later and went to work on the other side, both of them stone-faced as they maneuvered Julian’s bones back into alignment. I knew I could heal him again if I needed to, but that would mean re-breaking the bones, and the pain would be agonizing.
