Authors: Jody Wallace
She wasn’t a scientist. She had no idea how a wolf could become a witch or why most witches became wolves after having sex with one. She was just a former keeper, a soldier, as torn between her lover and her family as Harry was between his wife and his coven.
How could you save everyone who deserved it when there was only one of you?
Marcus read from his smart phone in response to Harry’s question—again. “Eight hours and sixteen minutes. If you want to leave today, we should begin.”
He climbed onto the bed and the white coverlet like a sacrifice. “Don’t stop as frequently to sterilize and apply pain relief. The heal-all and my constitution will prevent bacterial infection.”
“I’d rather you be anesthetized and unconscious for this,” Katie said. The tattoo machine gleamed on the bedside table like a weapon. The two types of ink had been simmered and strained. The people not getting tattoos wore protective clothing. Everything was ready—except for her nerves.
“We don’t have time to determine an inert anesthetic,” he said with a slight smile. “As for unconscious, I suspect I will be.”
“Shit.” Katie’s stomach lurched. One tiny, inch-wide brand had been so unpleasant he’d hazed out. How could she do this to him?
“I was thinking a striped pattern on my front and back.” Marcus settled himself on the bed. His jeans—had she ever seen him in jeans?—rode low on his hips. Harry, face grim, strapped him down with cloth bindings that should restrain Marcus as long as his wolf didn’t gain ascendancy.
June restacked the sterile gauze for the fourth time. She wore a set of long-sleeved coveralls, as did Katie and Harry. They expected today to be messier than yesterday, and Marcus’s blood would be tainted by high-powered cayenne. “What about the heart monitor?”
“I don’t want you intimidated by my readings,” he said. “If I seem…anemic, I have faith in you to revive me. You’re very powerful witches.”
“Revive.” Katie slumped onto the opposite bed. How could he be so nonchalant? So detached from the fact that this could kill him? And he knew it. He’d just admitted it. Revive.
“Front first.” Marcus, on his back, tested his bonds. He caught her eye. “I’ll be fine.”
She clenched her hands. Her whole body shivered like leaves in last night’s storm. It was a good thing he didn’t want an attractive tattoo design, because she was going to have the manual dexterity of a drunk.
He smiled at her. It was eerie, knowing she brought happiness to someone, instead of just death. “I trust you completely, Katie. Check my pocket if you don’t believe me. There’s no capsule.”
“All I’m saying is…” Her breath caught in a sob. She wasn’t sure if it was dread or love or happiness or a muddle of all three. “This had better be worth it.”
Her words lacked romance, but she didn’t know how to be sweet.
He chuckled. He actually laughed. The man was insane. “You’re telling me.”
Harry and June were watching, but Katie leaned down and kissed him anyway. “See you on the other side.”
Marcus closed his eyes and gripped the stress balls she’d given him, one in each hand. Humans liked them for large tattoos, and she’d had them in the kit they’d recovered from the tattoo shop. “If you require additional square inches, let’s skip the genital area, shall we?”
* * *
By the time they finished his back, Katie was weeping openly. She could barely see Marcus’s bloody, enflamed skin, the tattoo gun needling in and out of him, leaving red agony in its wake. The designs she’d fashioned were covered by blood and blisters. June had taken a turn since all that was needed during the inking was a willingness to point and shoot the tattoo machine, but she’d ended up going to the bathroom to vomit.
Even Harry was pale when Katie unplugged the machine and laid it, hands shaking, on the table.
Marcus’s blood splattered the white sheets. Her coveralls. Her gloves. It was done. Now that she’d fused it into a permabrand, he’d have to live with pain for—she didn’t even know. Ten years? Twenty? Forever?
These weren’t scars he’d be able to shift away. Doing this to him would haunt her forever too.
Her whole head pounded like the world’s worst sinus infection from the magical draining. Sweat beaded Marcus’s forehead. Pain etched his unconscious face like the cayenne etched his torso. The only complaint he’d uttered was when they’d turned him over midway through the procedure.
He’d muttered curses when his tortured front side hit the sheets but had lapsed quickly into semi-consciousness.
At least she could temporarily relieve the burn. Or try. Her hands shook so much when she tried to uncap the last spray bottle of heal-all that she couldn’t get it open.
A big hand touched her shoulder. “I got this part.”
Harry rotated her away from the devastation she’d wrought. Surprising Katie even more, June caught her in a hug. “He chose this. You told him what it would be like, and he still chose it.”
“I love him,” Katie said brokenly. Her vision filmed with tears and fatigue. “How could I do this to him?”
Behind her, the spray can emitted a continuous hiss. The heal-all in the brand would offset the damage from the cayenne—they assumed—but the burns and blisters from the application process needed a booster.
“What if it works?” June asked. “What if he can be a witch and a wolf at the same time? This has the potential to be huge. Bigger than me and Harry.”
“It also has the potential to be nothing.” Katie’s headache crept down her neck to her shoulders and arms. This might be the worst draining she’d ever experienced, and the procedure couldn’t be easily replicated. If her combat bonus weren’t active, she’d be unconscious. She’d had to take magic from June and Harry to set Marcus’s giant permabrand. The largest brand she’d done prior to today had been a quarter the size.
She didn’t even know if she’d gotten the lines straight. She couldn’t see her handiwork through the blood and blisters.
Fresh tears trickled free. She’d mutilated the man she loved.
June patted her back. “He’s already managed something nobody else has ever accomplished. Progress isn’t painless.”
Katie kind of laughed.
“He had to try. I think…I think he’d do anything for you.”
“This isn’t about me.” Katie extricated herself from June’s comforting arms and found tissues. She kept her back, carefully, to the bed where Harry fizzed through the last of the primed heal-all.
“That’s where you’re wrong. He knew if he couldn’t make something happen that you were going to leave him to rescue your family. We all knew.”
Katie’s eyes were swollen, her nose sealed shut. She’d developed a talent for emotional subterfuge with the council—and a short time with Marcus had destroyed it. “I suppose it doesn’t take a genius to figure me out.”
“You have so much loyalty and devotion inside you,” June said. “You aren’t what I expected. You wouldn’t have killed Frank, would you?”
“If it was between him and one of us? Yes.”
“There was a man in my past I would have killed too, but someone else did first. You wouldn’t kill if you had other options. I get that now.”
“Just don’t assume the other keepers are like me.” Joining the council shattered nearly everyone who’d experienced it. It would have shattered Katie, but Vern’s arrival had pulled her from the brink, and Dad and Tonya had mended her the rest of the way. That was why, no matter how much she wanted to be with Marcus, she had to help them.
If the permabrand didn’t work, she’d leave him and do what she had to do. Trade herself. Lars couldn’t possibly hurt her worse than knowing she’d let her family die or gotten Marcus killed.
June and Harry’s luggage waited by the door. They would head for Mexico as soon as they confirmed Marcus was as healed as he was going to get. The keepers weren’t their battle, and they weren’t equipped to fight it. Marcus had his science and Katie had—herself.
June added her giant pocketbook to the pile and inspected the screen of her phone. Her brows pinched together—she must not have gotten any calls. She looked up at Katie. “I’m supposed to add a layer to the cayenne before I leave.”
“Don’t.” Her tears dry, Katie began preparations for the battle ahead. She’d give Marcus one more night before they parted ways—for his safety. “He needs to heal. I’ll layer him tomorrow.”
“The protections will last on this room until morning. Get some rest.” June was out of the ingredients needed to reset the particular ward she’d put on the hotel room. She’d left Katie the recipe and others, including one for apple pie.
As if Katie knew how to bake. Tonya was the baker in her family.
“Can’t sleep yet. He’ll want to run tests.” She risked a glance at the bed. Harry had cleaned the blood off Marcus with the last of the cotton and gauze. The small bedside trash bin overflowed. She’d need to burn it before leaving, else the maid might raise an alarm.
Marcus’s flesh, still angry, was crisscrossed by jagged black-and-red lines. As clinically as possible, she inspected her handiwork. From a center of rings, the cayenne and heal-all zigzagged like starbursts or a witch lattice, which was what she’d been going for. On the front, she’d tattooed his wolf lattice. Two designs to represent the two halves Marcus claimed were inside them all.
It would never win an artistry award, but the tattoo had a certain stark beauty. Or perhaps it was Marcus who was beautiful and the brands were part of him now.
He shifted restlessly on the bed.
Goddess, she hoped this had worked the way Marcus intended. It would mean he’d done it. He’d be so happy. Not to mention, sharing these results with the elders in exchange for help with the keepers would be imminently preferable to her demise at the hands of Hiram Lars.
For the first time in days, Katie allowed herself a sliver of hope. Marcus had survived the procedure, which had been the first hurdle. Now they just needed to wake him.
June peeled off her gloves and tossed them into the trash. “Do you need help getting him to the car?”
“Just cast eyebright on him, if you don’t mind.” Katie wasn’t up to simple spells. She’d squeezed her brain into a pulp to extract every last dribble of power. “He’ll want to see you off.”
“No problem.” June dug in her purse and came up with a bottle. She cast the wakefulness spell on Marcus, her hand on his forehead and her full lips murmuring words Katie couldn’t hear. Katie stood behind her and laced her fingers together. They felt as arthritic as her dad’s hands. How he managed to keep tattooing like a champ, she didn’t know.
“I’m going to load the car.” Harry shouldered nearly all the items, including a large cooler, in one go.
“Stay alert,” Katie warned him unnecessarily. If the keepers found a person with the right DNA for Vern’s spell, it could lead them to the hotel lobby, if not the warded room.
June and Marcus would avoid any keepers downstairs some other way. Once the protections on this room vanished, though, Katie and Marcus would be exposed. Her normal wards couldn’t fend off Vern’s spell. They weren’t too different from the ones on Marcus’s Airstream when Tonya and Dad had found her…in the nick of time.
Now she wished they hadn’t found her. She wished she’d succumbed to her out-of-character urge to be with Marcus from the beginning. Love had breached her defenses and turned her into a better person—turned her from Chang Cai into Katie Zhang. First she’d loved her family. Now she loved Marcus. She loved wholly. She loved them all so much. The question was, would love give her strength? Or would having a reason to look forward to tomorrow dull her edge?
After a peek down the empty hallway, she locked the door behind Harry. June hadn’t managed to rouse Marcus. Katie returned to his bedside and cast a worried glance over the grayish tint of his skin. “Why won’t he wake?”
“I don’t know. I don’t specialize in healing. Let’s roll him over.” Carefully balling up the bloody sheets, Katie and June eased Marcus onto his back. His limbs flopped. His head lolled. “What’s his pulse?”
Katie placed two fingers against his neck. His artery throbbed rapidly, and his skin was moist with sweat. “Faster than normal.”
“I don’t mean to scare you, but I don’t like how Marcus is responding. We should have ignored him when he told us to skip the heart monitor.”
At June’s calm but firm words, a chill swept through Katie. Keepers weren’t taught a great deal about first aid. They didn’t need to know how to save lives—only how to neutralize them. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Keep monitoring his pulse.”
Katie knelt on the bed beside Marcus and rested her fingers on his jugular. The longer she timed his pulse, the less normal it seemed. His breaths puffed in and out in uneven pants.
Increasingly concerned, she lifted his eyelids. His pupils were pinpricks. “June, there’s something wrong with him.”
“Irregular pulse…we need better blood flow. Holy mother of grass, I know I’ve got ginkgo and hawthorn in here somewhere.” June upended her handbag, spilling the contents on the bed and floor in her haste. She dropped to her knees and scrambled through the clutter.
Marcus’s huffs turned to gasps.
His body twitched.
Katie’s sore fingers trembled. He was definitely not okay. He’d survived the branding. The worst should be over. Why would he be reacting this way to eyebright?
And there was nothing she could do. “Should we—is there anyone we can call? Anywhere?”
Marcus’s pulse throbbed to a stop beneath Katie’s anxious touch. His chest, his lungs, went silent.
Goddess, no.
She could barely choke out the words. “He’s not breathing.”
“Breathe for him.” June hopped to her feet, expression stern and herbs in her hands.
That, Katie could do. She tilted his head back, held his nose and filled him with air.
His chest rose and fell. Shivering, she waited five seconds and did it again. “Marcus, wake up. Please wake up.”
June tore open the herb packets. “I think he’s having a heart attack.”
Terror raked Katie like a mountain lion’s claws. This was her fault. She’d hurt him. Killed him. She loved him so much. How could this be happening?
“Try something. Anything.” Her hand hovered over the telephone. “We could call 9-1-1.” A heart attack was a heart attack. Human medicine was effective sometimes.