The manse was dark and quiet as he made his way through the deserted halls. Lena and Zeph would no doubt be sleeping off their ordeal and the massive healing for some time, too, The last Jak had seen Astar, he was holding anxious vigil over Zeph. Rhy had been watching over Lena, too, though more surreptitiously. Gen had gone to bed around the same time Jak had, worn out from nerves and patrolling the skies, looking for Zeph and Lena to return. But she’d never been an early riser, even under the best of circumstances.
Jak would be lucky if he saw any of them all day.
Reaching the beach, he studied the deep black mirror-still water of Lake Sullivan and shivered. Balmy by comparison, yes, but hardly warm. Odd, he’d been hot up until that moment, but now he felt chilled. Well, exercise would take care of that.
Pulling his twin daggers—using the real thing would sharpen his attention—he started the opening movements of Danu’s Dance. His ribs burned, the bites and lacerations on his neck and arms pulled with hornet stings of pain, then broke open enough that blood streaked down his chest. But the familiar stances and twists of the martial dance pulled his head into a different space.
Ignoring the minor distractions, he worked his body, letting his thoughts dissolve into the bright clarity of Danu’s presence. The spring of sinew and muscle warmed him so that sweat poured down his body, the rising sun burning off the lake mist and flashing off his daggers as he spun, ducked, and wove.
Coming to the finish, he leapt into the air, somersaulting into the final spin out of habit—his forgotten ribs seizing with a lance of agony so he landed with an ungainly one-footed thud that put him on his ass. One rib audibly broke. “Fuck!” He doubled over his knees, mastering the nausea from the agonizing prod of the bone shards, his healthy sweat turning into a cold and greasy one.
“Maybe working out and exacerbating untreated injuries wasn’t the smartest decision,” said a cool voice.
Stella. Just wonderful. Turning his head, he eyed her. She looked as fresh and lovely as the winter morning. Swathed in her white fur cloak, she studied him, her eyes fulgent as mercury as she looked through him. “Unless it was your plan to puncture a lung?” she asked, raising a dark brow.
Somehow Stella had a knack for making him feel eternally fifteen, so he produced a cocky grin, gritting his back teeth against his rising gorge and the bone-shivering pain. “You know me—anything to attract the attention of a beautiful woman.”
She huffed out an exasperated sigh. “Do not get up,” she instructed when he made to rise. “You’ll only make more work for me to do.”
“You don’t have to heal me,” he said, though his voice came out weak, and he couldn’t seem to catch a good breath.
She knelt on the pebbled beach next to him, her scent enveloping him, like night-blooming flowers carried on a warm tropical breeze. Her dark hair spilled in gleaming loose waves over the white fur cloak, rosy highlights catching the morning sun. Her skin flawless, her face pale as the moon, Stella possessed a calm and shining loveliness that staggered him every time. Daughter of the most beautiful woman in the Thirteen Kingdoms, if not the entire world, she still wasn’t flashy or glamorous. Instead, and in keeping with her withdrawn nature, her beauty lay like banked coals, smoldering quietly with subtle hints of crimson and gold, like the sun catching the glints in her shadowed hair. Jak liked to think he was the only one who saw and appreciated what others failed to notice.
“Not only do I have to heal you,” Stella said with tart exasperation, breaking into his romantic reverie, “I should’ve healed you long before this. When did you get these wounds? Not last night, I think. Lie back.”
“Here?” He shivered in anticipation of lying back on the cold pebbles. He was cooling down fast in the chilly air, his sweat chill now that he’d stopped moving.
“Yes, here,” she replied firmly. “It would be dangerous for you to stand, let alone walk, you cocky idiot. If you’d been less stupid, we could’ve done this in a nice, warm bed.”
Savoring the image of Stella with him in a warm bed got him through the surprisingly difficult journey to lying down. Stella supported him, a good thing, as a black haze nearly took him under. For a moment he worried about her touching his bare skin, then realized she wore fine leather gloves. Hmm. That gave him an idea. Not that he’d ever get to do anything about it. At least turning over that fantasy in his head helped distract him from the pain that had increased by leaps at the change in position.
“This looks like a bite mark,” she remarked, prodding the shoulder wound with a gentle touch that nevertheless made him wince. “Wolf teeth, if I don’t miss my guess. Rhyian?”
“Yeah,” he gritted out through clenched teeth. He really hoped he wouldn’t puke. That wouldn’t be any way to convince Stella to see him as a man. Plus, the pain that heaving would bring… He shuddered. Get tough, he ordered himself. “Rhy and I had a bit of a scuffle yesterday afternoon.” He swallowed convulsively, which also hurt. Everything hurt all of a sudden.
“Are you nauseated?” She studied his face as she ghosted her gloved hands over his cracked ribs.
“A little,” he admitted.
“That would explain why you’ve turned green,” she commented dryly, stripping off her gloves. “Not surprising with the broken bones dumping marrow into your bloodstream. Plus, several of the bites are festering. You have a fever. Clearly you realized the ribs were cracked because you had the sense to bind them, if badly.” She worked quickly, deftly unknotting his makeshift bandages, then murmuring in dismay at the bruising. “Moranu take it, Jak! Explain to me why you didn’t tell me about these injuries yesterday?”
“I didn’t want to bother you.” Focusing on her face helped him deal with the shudders wracking his body now.
“So you decided that waiting for infection to set in, then working out so you’d completely fracture a cracked rib wouldn’t be bothering me?”
“I didn’t think about that,” he admitted.
“You never do, Jak.”
“I didn’t think it was that bad,” he added, though it was a weak defense. “Plus we had more important concerns worrying about Zeph and Lena. Then I knew you’d need to sleep off healing them. Why aren’t you sleeping now?”
“I was about to. I finally knocked Rhy and Astar out, over their objections, since the stubborn fools seemed to think they needed to keep holding vigil. On my way to bed, I spotted you out here, your ribs bandaged, working out like a crazy man who was apparently trying to kill himself.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, truly chagrined. The last thing he wanted to be was an additional burden for her.
“Yes, you will be, because this is going to hurt.”
More than her disdain? He opened his mouth to make a joke along those lines, but gasped out a mewling shriek when she laid hands on him and popped the rib back. Actual tears sprang to his eyes as she aligned the broken ends—he could swear the grinding fragments made an audible noise—before a burst of healing magic flooded the area, bringing blessed relief.
Flinging his head back, he slammed his eyes shut, hoping she wouldn’t see the moisture there, and he panted, biting back any more unmanly whimpers.