Chapter 4: The Healer's Hands

I did not ask Caius for permission to go, and he did not offer it.

He had the car at the front steps before I finished putting on my coat.

We drove down the mountain in the dark, and he spoke only once.

"I'll stay at the door," he said. "You're a guest, not a prisoner. If you want me gone, say so."

"Stay," I said.

I had not planned to say it, and I did not look at him.

Dane was waiting under the lodge porch light with his hands shoved in his jacket.

He had not slept.

"Thank you for coming," he said. "I didn't think you would."

"I'm not here for you."

"I know." He looked past me at the car, and at the King getting out of it. "Dad's upstairs."

The Alpha's room was at the top of the lodge, behind a door covered with the pups' crayon drawings.

I had hung half of them up myself before I left.

Orrin Brickell lay under three blankets with his head turned toward the window.

He had been a broad man once, with a laugh that rattled the cups.

Now his cheeks had fallen in, and black lines ran under the skin of his throat and arms.

Silver blight.

I knew it on sight, because I had spent a whole year learning to read it.

"Hello, Orrin," I said.

His eyes found me slowly.

"Marlo girl." His voice was a thread. "You came back."

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