“I didn’t ask for the mark.” I never sound this petulant.
“Mmm.” Greta picks the pestle back up. “And yet here it is.”
She works the powder a while longer. I watch her hands. The knuckles are arthritic, the skin thin, liver-spotted. They move with a steadiness that has nothing to do with youth.
“Twice a day,” she says. “Morning and night. Mix it with water or tea. It’s bitter enough to strip paint on its own.”
“Greta.”
“Yes.”
“You said you’ve been in my shoes. Who was yours?”
She’s quiet for a moment. The pestle stops.
“A wolf I had every reason to refuse.” She tips the powder into a small cloth pouch and folds the top. “And my wolf chose him anyway. And I spent the first year fighting the bond so hard I nearly broke us both.”
“Did the fighting change it?”
“No.” She hands me the pouch. “It just made the pain worse.”
“I’m not in pain.”
“Not yet.”
I take the pouch. Close my hand around it. The cloth is soft. It smells like the woods she walks.
“Twice a day,” she says again. And then, without looking at me: “Come back tomorrow. We’ll talk about the rest.”
I’m almost at the door when her voice stops me. “Briar.”
I turn to her.
“It was the best thing I ever did. When I accepted him.” Her eyes soften. “Impossible male. But he was my… everything.”
I nod and leave. Easy for her to say. Her wolf didn’t pick a mate who was callous, cold-blooded, and irredeemable.
I leave the lodge with the herbs and the knowledge that willpower alone won’t do it.
I mix them into water in my room. Greta wasn’t kidding. The taste is like drinking a mulched log. I get it down in two swallows, dry-heave once, and sit with my head in my hands until it settles.
Thirty minutes in, the edge comes off.
I can stand without shaking. I can think without my thoughts bending toward him and the clearing. The want is still there — a low, constant pull, a warmth low in my belly that doesn’t cool — but I can function around it.
I go back out. The afternoon passes.
The herbs wear off at midnight.
The heat comes back like a tide — low at first, then rising, then rolling over me until I’m curled on the cot with my thighs pressed together, my teeth locked, and my body demanding the one thing I will not give it.
I brew another cup of the bitter muck and drink it standing at the basin. I curl on the cot, then wait for it to kick in. I finally manage to sleep fitfully, fighting off dreams of a man who has no place in them.
Then the lights come.
They slam into me without warning. Not a thought, not a memory — images, vivid enough to taste. A metal table. Latex gloves reaching for skin that isn’t mine. Straps tightened on wrists so thin the buckle holes don’t go small enough, and someone has punched a new hole in them. The leather chafes. Overhead, a fluorescent tube is dying, flickering on-off-on-off, and a voice says, “Don’t move. This will be quick.”
The needle goes in. I feel it — the bite of a gauge too large for the vein it’s entering. Someone is screaming, but the scream doesn’t have sound.