The Rejected Beast Bride's New Mate novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Seventy-Two Hours

I came to in an ambulance with the crossing guard holding my hand and Wilda yelling at the driver to go faster.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You're a hundred and five," said the paramedic.

"I'm a little fine."

"Shut up, honey," said Wilda, and kissed my hot forehead, and kept yelling.

The kin ward at Greyport General smelled of bleach and other women's Heats.

They put me in a room at the end with a window that didn't open.

The healer on call was a gray-haired badger-kin woman with reading glasses on a chain.

She wasn't the Hallam healer.

The bear-kin woman had made sure of that, on the phone from the ambulance, in a voice I'd never heard her use.

The healer took my blood.

She came back an hour later and didn't sit down.

"Your liver numbers are up," she said. "Your kidneys are starting. This is heat sickness, Miss Saxby. I'm certifying it."

"How long?"

She didn't pretend not to understand.

"Seventy-two hours from the collapse. Less, if it climbs."

"And if he signs the release?"

"Then the bond breaks, the suppressants work, and you're home by the weekend." She tapped her clipboard. "I've seen it a hundred times. It works in about an hour."

Orrin was in the doorway.

I didn't know how long he'd been there.

He had to duck to come in, and the nurse at my bed jumped when his wings brushed the frame.

He sat down in the plastic chair, which creaked.

He took the ice pack off my bedside tray, wrapped it in a towel, and held it out.

"Neck," he said.

I started laughing and couldn't stop, and it turned into crying, and he just held the ice where it went.

The healer faxed the certificate to the Registry at two that afternoon.

By six, Wilda was on the phone in the hall, shouting.

She came back in with her ears flat against her curls.

"Leonie," she said. "She's ordered the Registrar to hold any release. She says the certificate needs Council review."

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