Seven Rejections Later My Second Chance Mate Is an Alpha King novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Cut Fever

Morven burns in Tobin's cabin while Dane begs at the door and Hester pleads with her to say yes; the fever breaks at dawn, which it never does, and a black wolf sits at the fence.

The voice did not come back, and for a long while I thought I had made it up.

Tobin carried me the last half mile to his cabin.

He laid me on the cot by the stove and put a wet cloth on my forehead.

"Say something," he said. "Anything. Insult me."

"Your cabin smells like feet."

"There she is."

The healer came at midnight, a gray woman with a bag of dried leaves, and laid two fingers on my throat.

She took them away fast and frowned at her own hand.

"A hundred and four," she told Tobin. "Same as the last one, and climbing."

"So give her the thing for it."

"There is no thing, boy. You know what ends it."

She looked at me, and not unkindly.

"Child, one bite from him and you'd be on your feet by morning."

"I know," I said. My teeth were chattering. "I did it six times."

"Then do it a seventh."

"He cut me seven times. I'm not asking for an eighth."

The healer sighed, left a jar of willow bark on the table, and went out into the cold.

Tobin sat on the floor with his back against the cot.

"For the record," he said, "I'm not going to tell you to do it."

"For the record, thank you."

"I'm going to sit here and make horrible tea."

He did. It was horrible.

I drank all of it.

The fever came in waves after that.

I remember being too hot to lie under the blanket and too cold to lie without it.

I remember the scar on my left shoulder, where Dane's bite had been, burning and going numb by turns.

At some point Hester was there, in a kitchen chair beside the cot, wringing out cloths.

She had come in a coat over her nightgown, and her hair was down.

"There's my brave girl," she said. "There. Drink."

"Hester," I said. "Why did you say don't tell anyone it's finished?"

Her hand stopped on the cloth.

"Did I say that? I'm an old woman, I say things. Hush."

She laid the cloth across my forehead and her fingers were shaking.

"Morven, he made a mistake. He's made it seven times and he'll make it an eighth. But he needs you, sweetheart. You know he does. Just say yes to him once more."

"No."

"For me."

"No, Hester."

She sat back, and for one moment her face went blank and gray.

Then it was kind again.

"You're not thinking," she said. "It's the fever."

At three in the morning someone pounded on the cabin door.

Tobin opened it a hand's width, and the cold came in around him.

Dane stood on the step in his good coat.

He had shifted halfway, his eyes gone gold at the edges, and his breath smoked in the dark.

"I told you a week," he said, over Tobin's shoulder, to me. "I didn't think you'd go this fast."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Morven, look at you."

"I can't. You're in the way of the lamp."

"Let me in. Ten seconds. I'll bite you right here on the porch, the goddess will hear it, and you'll sleep through the night."

He was proud of the offer.

I pushed myself up on one elbow.

Tobin put a hand against the door and didn't move.

"She said no," Tobin said. "She's been saying it since the Stone. You were there."

"I'm talking to my mate."

"You cut your mate. In front of everybody. She heard you."

"Stay out of it, Ainsley."

"No," said Tobin, pleasantly, and shut the door in his face.

I heard the bolt go home.

Outside, Dane hit the wood once with the flat of his hand.

Then I heard his boots go down the steps, and I heard Hester sigh from the chair.

"He loves you," she said.

"He loves Valerie."

"He loves you better."

I did not have the strength to say what I thought of that.

I lay back down and watched the lamp swing in the ceiling.

Somewhere past four the shaking stopped.

I thought it was the end, and that the healer was right, and I was strangely not afraid.

Then my heart slowed.

The heat drained out through my feet, and when I took a breath, it went all the way down.

I lay there, blinking.

My skin was cool.

My shoulder had stopped burning.

"Tobin," I said.

He was asleep against the cot with his mouth open.

"Tobin."

He jerked awake and put the back of his hand to my forehead, and then he put it there again.

"That's wrong," he said.

"I feel fine."

"Morven. Cut fever doesn't break. It doesn't. The healer's been doing this forty years, and she told me it doesn't break without a bond."

Neither of us said anything.

Hester's chair was empty.

I hadn't heard her go.

The window over the stove had gone gray with dawn, and at the end of the yard, beyond the fence, something was sitting in the snow.

It was a wolf, black and bigger than any wolf in our pack.

It sat very still, facing the cabin, and it did not look away.

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