Time passed, I don't know how long. All I could see was blue, for miles. All I could feel was cold. But despite this, I felt safe. My mind watched with fascination as Killian's magic worked its way through my psyche, healing my physical form from the inside.
Eventually, he reached my throat and I watched as his misty magic showed me the damage that had been done. My vocal cords were shredded, like wet cheese, and the tissue surrounding my voice box was inflamed and raw. There was no doubt in my mind that without Killian's magic, I would have never spoken again. How I had even managed the small noises Reece had coaxed out of me was a mystery.
Gently, Killian smoothed my damaged throat back together until it was as good as new, then paused. For a timeless moment, his magic stared into my soul and a sharp stab of pain filled my head.
My consciousness slammed back into my physical form and I cried out as the pain chased me. My hands clutched at Killian's where they still held my face firm, clawing and desperate to make the pain stop.
Make it stop!
Even as my fingernails dug into the skin of his hands, he pulled me closer, sealing his mouth to mine and breathing his magic back into me once again. That cold mist raced straight to my head and soothed the pain, wiping it away and leaving me light-headed and dizzy.
Killian retracted his magic almost as fast as he had sent it out, but when we both returned to our corporeal forms, his lips were still on mine. Slowly, his mouth moved but not to pull away as I had expected. Instead, his lips coaxed mine apart and his tongue slipped into my mouth, reigniting the fire in my belly which had started with Reece earlier.
I sucked in a gasp, my breath catching as Killian took the kiss deeper. His hands still held my face firm and his mouth dominated me like he was staking a claim.
“Kill!” A deep voice cracked across the room like a whip, and I jerked backward out of the dark-haired man's grip.
“Sir, you're back already?” Killian responded, with his eyes still glued to mine. His voice sounded breathy and exhausted, and there were dark circles under his eyes.
“Already?” The man grunted. “Boy, you've been healing this pauvre bête for near on six hours now.”
“What?” I gasped, then flinched at the sound of my own voice. It was the first time I had really heard it, to my knowledge.
“You heard me, girl,” the man replied from his position seated in an armchair across the room from us. Killian stood from his perch on the coffee table and stretched. His arms rose up above his head and almost bumped into the lazily turning ceiling fan, and his shirt rode up to expose a chiseled expanse of abs.
“Look like Kill 'ere sorted out yer voice situation,” the man continued, and I refocused my attention on him, rather than on that delicious V just above Killian's low-slung black jeans.
The newcomer was yet another huge man, but magic and danger rolled off him in waves that I could almost see. His hair was long, brushing his thighs as he sat forward with forearms braced across his knees. His beard was as long as Donal's but Fionn's hair had a dark, bloodred shade not dissimilar to the color Reece's had gone when his glamour was dropped.
“Um, yes,” I responded, but my voice came out in a thin sort of whisper and I glanced up at Killian in panic.
“Don't stress yourself, cher,” he reassured me, sitting himself down on the couch close enough that our thighs were touching. “It's healed but just needs a bit of use to get back to normal. Right now your vocal cords are still tight from the healing.”
“That's good work, boy.” Fionn nodded to Killian. “Girl musta been in a right state for six hours o' healin'.”
“She was,” Killian murmured, and draped an arm over my shoulders to pull me in close to his side. “Where'd the boys go?”
“Sent 'em out to deal with the rougarou.” Fionn spat this word like it was a curse. It wasn't one I was familiar with, so I kept my mouth shut. “Bastards have been acting up again. Forgetting their place 'ere in the bayou.”
He stared at me for a long, quiet moment, his eyes the color of mud mixed with blood. Where did an image like that come from? It disturbed me that I had a thought like that so readily available and yet … no idea where it originated from.
“Rouga—” I coughed out, struggling to get past the feeling of words slipping from the tight, painful confines of my throat. I had the feeling these words weren't just the first ones I'd spoken since waking up in the alley … but my first words for a long, long time.
Years.
“Rougarou,” I whispered, just to hear myself talk. My voice was as smooth as broken glass in gravel. It was almost as painful to listen to as it was to speak. But to have a voice again? There wasn't a gift in the heavens or the many hells below this earth that could make up for that. “A werewolf?”
I wet my lips and then felt my entire body go stiff when Caley handed me an ice-cold can of soda. This, I remembered. But from where? And how?
I stared at the lid of the can for a long, quiet moment, the sounds of the bayou fierce and wild outside the walls. I could hear the distinct grunting of gators, the calls of night birds, and the terrified squeaks of those who were nothing but prey.
“Sort of,” Killian said, his voice kissed with the slightest hint of a French accent. Not Cajun or Creole, but Parisian. Parisian. What was Parisian? The thought had popped into my head seemingly unbidden. I didn't know what Parisian was, only that Killian had that air.
Clearly there was something wrong with my brain.
“A rougarou is a magicked wolf as opposed to a born one,” he told me, leaning back into the couch with his leather vest slung over his shoulders, his muscles smooth and hard, inked with designs similar to the markings I'd seen on Reece's unglamoured face.
“A magicked wolf,” I whispered and felt the sudden urge to sing. Something old and ancient flittered through my mind, like the long forgotten words in a crumbling book. I began to hum and the air around me shivered, like pavement on a hot day.
“Whoa, there, bebette,” the long-haired man said, leaning over and putting a hand on my knee. As soon as his fingers touched my bare leg, I felt a rush of power and a spark of fear. Whoever this man was, he was powerful. “Don't go throwin' 'round that kinda magic unless you know what yer doing, you.”
“What's your name, mon cher?” Killian asked, studying me with white-blue eyes, like an Arctic sea, an endless stretch of nothing that somehow meant everything.
“My name?” I asked, blinking heavy-lidded eyes at him. I felt … almost content, sitting here in this strange old room in the middle of a swamp. There were men on either side of me that I didn't know, and as far as I knew it, my entire world had changed.
Years of torture.
Endless pain.
And now … blissful silence. I knew then that even if these men killed me, put a knife to my throat and spilled hot red blood across the tattered floor, that it would be a better outcome than staying where I'd been.
And where had I been exactly?