Chapter 5: Fever

The fever lasted nine hours.

I remember it in pieces.

Birdie pressing ice to my neck and swearing in an Irish accent she didn't have.

A doctor with cold hands, saying the word "bond" like it was a diagnosis.

Benedict standing at the foot of the bed, saying in his flat voice that if the Alpha could help, the Alpha could come up.

"You'll let him in?" Birdie asked him.

"She's burning," said Benedict. "I'm not going to be the reason she keeps burning."

Then Brant was there, on the edge of the mattress, with his huge hands around my left wrist, over the mark.

Where he touched me, the fever eased.

Where he let go, it flared.

"Don't," I croaked, once, when he started to pull back. "Stay."

"I'm here, Cas."

He stayed all night.

Sometime near four in the morning, I woke up and the room had stopped spinning.

My shirt was soaked through.

The window was dark, the city lights smeared silver across the glass.

Brant was sitting beside me on the bed in his undershirt, with his back against the headboard.

He held my wrist in his lap and looked at the mark.

He looked wrecked.

"You're awake," he said.

"Mostly."

"The fever's broken. The doctor said it would, once I quit staying away from you like an idiot."

"Did she give a timeline?"

His mouth twitched.

"For that? No."

I should have taken my wrist back.

Instead I lay there and looked at him.

I looked at the scar through his eyebrow and the shadow of his beard.

The gold at the rims of his eyes wouldn't quite go out.

The book had written this man as a sunrise.

What I wanted, with the fever gone and my head clear, was to find out if his shoulders were as hard as they looked.

"You smell like pine trees," I said.

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