He Rejected Me the Night I Birthed His Twins novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: What the Healer Found

Ironwood's healer finds moonbane in her blood and says her wolf is alive. Morven remembers the Sunday tea, and a voice in her head says Finally.

Torin Hawksworth put his jacket around my shoulders and did not touch me.

My eyes were gold, and I could not stop staring at them in the truck window.

Twenty-five years, and they had never been that color.

"Later," he said, as if he had heard me. "Whatever it is, it keeps. Your babies don't."

"The truck is right behind me," he said. "Can you walk that far?"

"I can walk," I said.

I took a few steps.

Then my knees went, and he caught me under the arm before I hit the road.

His hand was warm through the sleeve of my nightgown.

It was the first time anyone had held me up in four months.

"I've got you," he said. "Give me the boy. Keep the girl."

I held on tighter.

"I'm not letting go of either of them."

"Then I'll carry all three of you," he said. "Is that all right?"

I nodded.

He lifted all three of us and set us on the back seat of the truck.

Behind us the Black Fir wolves stood on the yellow line and did not cross it.

The housekeeper climbed in beside me and took my daughter so I could lie flat.

"I'll go back in the morning," she said. "They'll want to know I helped you. I'll tell them I didn't."

"They'll fire you."

"They can try."

The Ironwood infirmary was one low building with warm yellow windows and a woodstove.

A woman my mother's age met us at the door in a cardigan, took one look at my nightgown and said, "Table. Now."

She did not ask who I was.

She put my babies under a lamp and checked them with quick, careful fingers.

"Six weeks early," she said. "Four pounds, five pounds. Strong lungs. Wolf pups come out ready when they come early. Nothing wrong with either of them."

I let out a sob.

It came out ragged, and I could not stop it.

The healer let me cry for a little while, and then she pushed a mug of broth into my hand.

"Drink. You lost a lot of blood. You shouldn't be sitting upright and you know it."

I drank.

She came back to my side with a small glass tube and a needle.

"I'm going to take a little blood. Don't ask me why until I've looked."

"Why?" I asked.

"I said not to ask," she said, and she smiled, and drew it.

Torin stood by the stove with his arms folded and said nothing.

I watched him because I could not look at my own hands.

He had rust-brown hair and a short beard and a pale scar on the back of his left hand.

He did not stare at me.

He looked at the babies, then at the door, then at the babies.

The healer held the tube up to the light.

She turned it. She smelled it.

Then she put it down very carefully on the tray.

"Alpha," she said.

"What is it?"

"Moonbane."

Torin's face changed.

I did not know what it meant. "Is that dangerous?"

"It's a root," the healer said. "A wolf who eats enough of it can't shift. It puts the wolf to sleep and keeps her there. Her blood is full of it. This is not one dose. This is years of it."

"I've never shifted," I said. "I've never had a wolf."

"Girl, you have one. She's been fighting that root since you were small. Tonight, with the bond cut and the pups out of you, she finally got her head up."

My mouth went dry.

"Who would do that to me?"

"Somebody who gave it to you," the healer said gently. "In food or drink. Every few days, probably."

I thought of the thermos with the ribbon.

I thought of the tea.

Priscilla had carried it to my door every Sunday for four months, and she had said it was good for the babies.

Then I thought of how gentle she had always been with me.

I shook my head.

"It's not possible. She wouldn't."

"Who?" Torin asked.

"Nobody. I don't know," I said. "I don't know who."

It was a lie, and I told it to myself first.

He did not push.

He pulled a chair over and sat down across from me, not too close.

"You can stay here," he said. "Both of them can. Until the pups can travel and you've got your strength."

"Why?" I asked. "You don't know me. Your pack hates mine."

"My pack hates the way yours treats people."

"That's not an answer."

"All right." He rubbed his thumb along the scar on his hand. "I heard your babies cry from a mile away. I'd have walked onto that bridge for anyone."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"One winter," I said. "That's all I'll take."

"One winter."

"You won't claim me. You won't ask me for anything. I won't call you Alpha."

He almost smiled.

"No claim, then. And you can call me whatever you want."

"Torin."

"Torin is fine."

I put out my hand to shake on it.

He took it.

His hand closed around mine, and the heat of it went straight up my arm and into my chest.

I pulled back too fast.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be."

The healer put out the main light and turned the lamp down over the twins.

I lay back on the table with the broth cooling in my hand.

My daughter and my son were asleep.

My body ached from my hair to my heels.

I closed my eyes.

Then, slowly, from somewhere behind my ribs, a voice that was not mine said, quite clearly, "Finally."

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