Don't Touch Him! He's Not An Alpha, He's My Patient novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Own Handwriting

Freja exposes Tilly's fake healing with her own stolen notebooks and wins the key, Wylie turns out to have heard every word she said for four years, and in the Moonwell he says he's been here before.

I didn't kneel.

I looked at the key swinging on my sister's chest, and then I looked at her.

"No."

Tilly laughed, light and pretty.

"Then I guess your boyfriend dies."

Wylie's hand tightened on my wrist.

His knees were shaking.

Standing up had cost him everything he had.

I got my shoulder under his arm before he went down and walked him out of the hall with sixty people watching our backs.

On the stairs he leaned his whole weight on me.

"Proud of you," he said into my hair.

Three words in a row.

I had to stop on the landing and breathe.

I'd barely got him onto the daybed when someone knocked.

It was the oldest of the pack mothers, the one with the white braid down to her waist.

She'd taught me to swim when I was four.

"There's a boy in the infirmary," she said. "Silver burn. Your sister's been dressing it for a week, and it smells wrong."

I looked at Wylie.

"Go," he said. "I'll stay put. I'm good at it."

The infirmary was Gran's old room off the kitchen.

It still had her blue cabinet and her scrubbed pine table.

A young warrior lay on the cot with his forearm wrapped in white gauze.

He was nineteen, maybe, and gray around the mouth.

I unwound the gauze and the smell hit me.

Under a thick yellow paste, the burn had gone black at the edges and green in the middle.

"What did she put on this?"

"Her salve," the boy said. "She said it was your gran's recipe."

I scraped the paste off and smelled it.

Comfrey and lard.

Comfrey seals a wound over.

On a silver burn, it seals the silver in.

I opened the wound, flushed it with salt water, and picked the silver grit out with Gran's tweezers.

The boy cried and gripped the pack mother's hand.

A crowd had gathered at the door, pack mothers mostly, and two of the boy's friends.

I packed the burn with crushed yarrow and wild garlic and wrapped it loose.

"Comfrey seals a wound," I said. "Never on silver. Gran wrote that in red ink."

"She did," the old pack mother said. "I watched her."

Tilly pushed through the doorway with a leather satchel on her shoulder.

"What are you doing to my patient?"

"Undoing what you did."

"I followed the book exactly."

"Which book?"

She clutched the satchel.

I didn't ask.

I reached over, unbuckled it, and tipped it onto Gran's pine table.

Three notebooks slid out.

Green cloth covers, gone soft at the corners.

The top one said B.P., AGE 15 in my own fat teenage handwriting.

I opened it.

Every page was mine.

My drawings of yarrow and wolfsbane, my lists of doses, my notes copied from Gran's lessons.

On the silver page, I'd written NEVER COMFREY in red and underlined it three times.

Tilly had skipped it.

"Those were in my old room," I said. "Under the floorboard. You've been playing healer out of my homework."

One of the boy's friends said, "She told us she studied at a clinic in Spokane."

The old pack mother crossed the room.

She held out her hand to Tilly, palm up.

"The key, girl."

"Mom gave it to me."

"Your mother isn't a healer, and neither are you. Your grandmother would have skinned you for this arm."

Tilly looked around for help.

There wasn't any.

The old woman lifted the chain over Tilly's curls herself and laid the key in my hand.

It was still warm from my sister's skin.

Tilly walked out fast with her chin up.

That afternoon I sat with Wylie in the lounge while the light went gold on the lake.

His voice was coming back, a little more every hour.

"Your sister," he said, "talks the whole time she's on top of a man."

I choked on my tea.

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything."

He turned his head and looked at me.

"Four years, Freja. You talked to me every night."

My face went hot.

"You heard me?"

"Biscuit was orange. One torn ear. He slept on your feet. You think Dillon had a weak chin."

"Oh, God."

"You sing in the bath. Badly."

"Stop."

"You told me once I had nice hands." He held them up. "Do I?"

"You did when they didn't move."

The corner of his mouth lifted.

I'd never seen him smile.

He had a crooked front tooth.

I looked away first.

At moonrise I took him up the hill.

The Moonwell sat in a ring of old cedars, a round stone pool fed by a warm spring.

Gran's cottage stood dark at the edge of the trees.

The water was already silver where the half moon touched it.

I helped him out of his shirt and boots.

He stepped down the stone steps in his jeans until the water reached his waist.

I knelt on the rim and poured it over his shoulders with Gran's wooden bowl, the way she'd shown me.

He shivered.

Steam rose off his skin.

"Talk to me," he said. "Like before."

So I did.

I told him about the boy's arm, and the comfrey, and the look on Tilly's face.

Halfway through, he stopped listening.

He was staring down the hill, past the packhouse roof, at the black square of Gran's old yew maze.

The hedge garden.

His whole body had gone tight.

"Wylie?"

He didn't look away from it.

"I've been here before."

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